"Under Construction Etc...."
(yuppy flats coming soon)
contact; doodlepaul@yahoo.co.uk (this is not a link)
Coming up/ late news: Greetings: Summer 2008: blah blah, nothing much to report. Got back-ache shifting boxes to help Freedom Bookshop in whitechapel with their new downstairs shopfront. Hobnail Review, which I was contributing a little bit to, has now ceased publication.Spring 2008: watching the world wobble, financiers worry, new housing benefit system coming in locally (Tower Hamlets, London), we're still doing some drawings and occasional articles for "HOBNAIL REVIEW" (free from: Hobnail Press, Box 208, 235 Earls Court Rd, SW5 9FE.). Autumn 2007: We have at long last put out issue number 6 of "THE WHINGER" our self-published rantzine, Free/ small donation: email us to request a physical copy in the post. Some of the articles are on this page. We launched it at the LONDON ANARCHIST BOOKFAIR 2007(this time round a cool well organised event at a new venue, within walking distance of where I live, getting bigger all the time).
I'm currently doing loads of old 35MM PHOTOGRAPHY while it still exists , loitering in the streets as a camera nerd photographing lost corners of the local area and the underbelly of the city. Some of this is for its own sake, some of this is for a part time course slowly counting points towards a part time degree.
Also look out for the new version of the ANARCHIST QUIZ BOOK from Freedom Press/ Freedom Bookshop (in Angel Alley, 84b Whitechapel High St, London, E1, UK.) illustrated with PAUL PETARD CARTOONS. We're also in the process of doing a small quantity of block-printed PETARD T-SHIRTS with various designs/ slogans.
I'll sometimes be off to the South London Radical History Group meetings in south London usually at 56a Infoshop, 56a Crampton Street, SE17, London UK. (try a google search for details?)
"Woman's Head" drawing; PAUL PETARD
MILE END, LONDON, U.K.
Photo; Paul Yelland 2004
(The following article is from "The Whinger" number 6, Autumn 2007)
There we were in the pouring rain with our broken umbrella sinking in the squelchy mud in the middle of July in Finsbury Park in London. We were held prisoner caged into Mayor Ken "uncle Joe" Livingstone's "Rise" Festival (It used to be the "Respect" anti-racism festival until rebel MP Galloway together with an assorted bunch stole the name). Here we were incorporated into the state's own official political rally "against racism". But keep your voices down about the British Labour government's aggressive active hand in current imperial war, ethnic cleansing, and plunder in Iraq and Afghanistan.
On the stage Lee overpaid-bureaucrat Jasper lectures us about how we should be ever so frightened of the BNP fringe right party and its new fake union "solidarity" with its claimed 1000 members (in reality probably much less). Meanwhile the "real" official trade unions, he tells us, like "Unison" are really protecting the workers, and we should be thankful for them.
A big heavy-weight official Trade Union like Unison with its 2 million, or whatever the figure is, state sector employees, is a bureaucratic monolithic corporation. It is itself supportively and financially tied to the Labour Party machine and thus to the Labour Government and the warfare state, the very state who are the bureaucratic and state capitalist employers of the union's members. Many of the government's own MPs and ministers are sponsored by Unison and similar rival big daddy Trade Unions. The modern big Trade Union, increasingly functioning not much differently to a bank or insurance company, now itself becomes precisely an employers' organization.
State sector employees become tied and incorporated into the state not just by the duties and demands of their particular kind of employment, but also by the institutionalized representation of their struggle with their employment. Both within their work, and in their immediate defensive struggles around the conditions of their work, they become tied into, and encouraged to identify their interests with, their entrenched bureaucratic monopoly sector against everyone and everything else.
The voices against "privatization" and "casualisation" can often be heard loudly through a megaphone. If spoken moderately these voices can sometimes even be given encouragement and official approval by self interested parts of the state. But social radical voices on the left against state-capital and bureaucracy are less common, more muffled, and need more courage to come out into the open.
What is referred to as "neoliberalism" isn't that much like classical liberalism, there isn't that much genuine industrial free enterprise. What is called "privatization" will nowadays tend to take the form of state monopoly corporatism gladly handing a service over in exchange for some extra private cash to private monopoly corporation while keeping things heavily bureaucratically controlled by stand-off regulatory bodies and agencies.
In a situation where there isn't full employment, sectoral trade unions will tend to "protect" their members by playing the corporatist game and help build up dams of protectionism and exclusivism around their sector, like demanding regulations restricting employment in their sector only to those with certain professional qualifications, or demanding elite privileges for their own key workers and so on, or playing the industrial patriotism card and supporting economic nationalist policies, tariffs and trade wars etc...
As we have argued before, a lot of the sloganising about "join a union" and "unionize all the workers" falls a bit flat when you realize in reality the official trade unions have always tended to exclude the majority of workers, that in practice is how they need to operate and how they work.
They periodically will do some targeted selective unionizing and recruiting, and run publicity campaigns for cleaners and catering workers and against sweatshops, when they need to and when their own positions are threatened and to bring in some more subs. But with the current balance of social forces in the economy , if the unions were to suddenly have to take on board millions more lower skilled and lower paid workers then the unions would have to make more of their money available for strike funds and share out some of what they have got more equally. Potentially threatening elitist wage differentials for example.
UK Trade Union membership:
1979; 13 million
1985; 11 million
1990; 10 million
1995; 8 million
2005; 7.5 million...
So "where has all the struggle gone in the UK?" we keep hearing comrades ask in despair. In confused terms the answer roughly might be:
1. Downwards- Semi-invisible informal struggle in the service sector, in the sweatshop economy and in the informal economy, particularly amongst new migrant workers, as well as the older labour forces.
2. Upwards- Incorporation upwards into the state, and absorbtion into its health and welfare bureaucracy with dependency as a weapon of control. Parts of the state substitute themselves for part of the struggle and represent us on our behalf. Struggle is disguised under layers of protection.
3. Sideways- Large-scale relocation of industrial production and the industrial struggle that goes with it abroad.
4. Indoors- For some time the deliberately engineered credit bubble has provided a temporary atomized safety valve to diffuse social wage pressures that might otherwise flare up as organized wage demands in peoples' jobs and workplaces, although in practice workplace wages for many have still gone up above inflation. But now with the arrival of the "credit crunch" this is all in the process of changing....
Oh yes, change it will, the house of cards is starting to topple. The UK really is one of the weak links in the imperialist chain. Individual UK householders are much more indebted than most Europeans. The UK's credit card debt of sixty billion pounds accounts for two thirds of the total credit card debt in the whole of the European Union! In early 2006 UK individuals and households owed 1,175 billion pounds, almost equivalent to the total UK Gross Domestic Product. Every adult owed on average 25,000 pounds which is more than the median annual earnings.
Upper working class, and lower middle class households and people have the appearance of being prosperous and live comfortably because they have been allowed a small bit of "conditional capital". Under Brown speculation and the deliberately engineered property bubble have driven up the prices of homeowners' houses and flats, and in the UK there is a much higher rate of home "ownership" amongst the population than in other parts of Europe.
But conditions are turning against them. Mortgage payers face heavier mortgage repayments as interest rates have risen. Like in the sub-prime bubble burst in America, they face the prospect of a housing market slump, threatening to push them into "negative equity", and possibly having their homes repossessed. "Average" workers and their households are already being driven out of London and the south-east. Meanwhile the low paid and the impoverished are forced to live in crowded inner city areas with still rising rents. (autumn 2007)
gloom and doom....(The following article is from "The Whinger" number 6, Autumn 2007)
Before anyone starts blaming "Thatcher" and "Thatcherism" for so much of the hung over current misery, let us remind ourselves that it was actually Dennis Healey and Jim Callaghan who first went cap in hand groveling to the International Monetary Fund and introduced full on monetarist policies into the UK. The Tories subsequently built on what the other lot had started.
By the end of the seventies the constant set piece industrial showdowns, culminating in the "winter of discontent", between employers and organized sectors of labour in both private and state sectors, who still had entrenched collective bargaining power, were becoming increasingly stuck and deadlocked. For the majority who were not directly involved in these collective struggles in industry, the experience was increasingly one of stagnation, service interruption in the community, and the perception of a growing "chaos".
The Grunwick's dispute, which began as a small local dispute around a photo processing laboratory in north west London was then seized on by wider organized bosses' forces and the state and turned into a laboratory exercise for designing and testing the archetypal lock out entrapment model for breaking other strikes.
Come the end of the seventies, millions of working class people were sufficiently bored and pissed off with the stagnation and atmosphere of chaos to join large numbers of the middle classes in voting for Thatcher. She promised a radical way out of the deadlock, and appealed to workers' aspirations for individual rather than collective advancement.
Part of our mistake at that time was that we still did not fully understand what the real agenda of the ruling elite had become. Many of us still thought that they just wanted us to be more patriotic, more loyal to industry, more hardworking, and to work for lower pay without teabreak in order to boost britain's industrial efficiency, productivity, and competitiveness, so they could sell more manufactured goods to the world.
What we didn't fully realize was that many of the big bosses and capitalists in the UK were already completely fed up with the whole game of continually having to argue at home over productivity with industrial workers. Whether the workers were being a little less productive or a little more productive, the whole ritual of arguing about it had become a time wasting drag for them, and they wanted to free up their capital globally. Behind the scenes their real agenda had now become to smash the majority of the industries, shut them down, reduce their immediate dependence on them, and push them abroad. Domestically they wanted to shift mainly to a service economy, and a financial bubble economy centred on the city.
Thatcher began by pushing unemployment up to over 3 million, putting down a wave of inner city revolts, staging a small patriotic flag waving war over the Falklands, and testing and improving Grunwick style strike breaking techniques in the Warrington printworks dispute.
Then came the war on the miners, an attack that had been ten years in preparation. Thatcher didn't just shut a few mines. Some mine closures had slowly been going on since the sixties and before, and the majority of mines aren't particularly healthy places anyway. What she did, out of bitterness and class hatred, was to ruin and destroy whole miners' communities, destroy their social fabric, destroy their strong rebellious spirit, and their material ability to sustain themselves. At the time this was going on I joined in local picketing at Didcot power station, participated in support demos in London, and went to the usual benefit concerts and events. But as most of the "action" was hundreds of miles away I remember having to spend most of the time at home watching the events unfold on the telly.
Two years later, with King Coal slain, my political education progressed with support for the regular picket line battles outside Murdoch's newspaper printworks at Wapping. This was a pre-arranged set up that descended from tragedy into farce.
Rather than "winning the cold war and bringing it to swift end", Maggie's love-in with Reagan deliberately prolonged the cold war with the Soviet Union by another ten years, threatening Europe with cruise missiles. It was at this point that the seeds of Al Quaeda were originally sown with the west's covert but large-scale support for islamist mercenaries bringing terrorist sabotage to undermine the secular bureaucratic state in Afghanistan, and in doing so drawing the Soviet Union into a snare.
To celebrate her demise, some people are calling for a party in Trafalgar Square London the evening that Thatcher dies (she might hang on for another ten years or more). I'm not enthusiastic about this idea myself. If Thatcher dies a natural death it means she will have effectively gone unpunished, so we will be celebrating her victory. In any case, the war crimes of Blair and Brown, with their own love-in with the sinister post-shachtmanite-trotskyist-unipolarist neocon neoimperialists, and the Bush-Cheney grab-it-while-it's-there peak oil gang, are measurably worse than anything Thatcher did. Anti-toryism and token anti-toffism in the british context too easily becomes a default cover up for the Labour state, and for the British imperial labour corporatism that helps keep it going. (Autumn 2007)
...Waffle...We are such a slacker we didn't even get to the big anti-G8 protests in Scotland that anybody who is anybody, and all the glamorous activist demo-luvvies, went to. We have been left out of half of the conversations at anarko political and social events ever since. We are of the lazy opinion that somebody somewhere in the "movement" needs to be cowardly enough to stay at home so at least somebody stays alive in the event the whole thing might get mashed in one big entrapment exercise. The old mistake of putting all your eggs in one basket etc.. And in modern warfare cowardice is often a good tactic.
But as well as simple cowardliness, I also feel quite disillusioned with these endless self indulgent protest activist circusses often playing silly games of "let's hang around where lots of police are and get ourselves arrested" and "Isn't it romantic to all lose collectively together" outside bosses conferences etc. Are they not passed their sell by date and increasingly a dead end? I'm not even convinced anymore that they are particularly much use as an excuse for an alternative conference, or networking exercise, or radical social, when compared to any other excuse.
Doesn't the "anti-capitalist" activism sometimes become a bit of a dodge from any real struggle around the conditions in your own daily life? maybe because we are not strong enough at the moment to directly openly resist our immediate bosses or our own landlords or our own cost of living or bureaucracy that oppresses us and rips us off, that we dutifully trudge along instead to an "anti-capitalist" demo and spend an occasional weekend joining the activist show. A social libertarian struggle will need to involve more than just immediatism it is true, but you need to successfully be doing some of the immediatism in the first place to meaningfully go "beyond" it, if you know what I mean. Mindless "activism" might end up diverting time and energy that could otherwise have gone into real refusal and struggle. But in any case we suspect the protest activist scene is now moving slowly into decline.
Meanwhile it ends up being concerned vicars, and british legion pensioners, and grumpy local residents, who end up fighting in the front line against something like the council tax. Less glamorous to fight against than the poll tax was perhaps, but in some ways more insidious and more in need of resistance. Maybe I should get off my arse and try and do something myself. Paul 2005
Drawing; Paul Petard
In 1872 an official return of the land in britain was made and it was fairly correct because in every parish rates were paid and strict records were kept in 5000 parishes. Since then you might have thought the state would have every householder publicly registered in an updated land registry. But since then the richest land owners and the powerful have used their power to hide and bury the facts. As much as 50 per cent of the wealthy today did not register their land, which they have held in covenants and trusts and off-shore deals, so as not to pay any tax. Not that we are sympathetic either way to the bureaucratic plundering by the state or to the monopoly of the land owners.
In 2001, as the land registry bill went through parliament the parliamentary secretary said: "The crown is the only absolutew owner of of land in England and Wales". Under the feudal structures of England and Wales's laws, freehold and leasehold are inferior and of vassal status to the crown. Only in Scotland has this been sorted out and individual bourgeois citizens own their own land. In England and Wales, even when you've finally paid off the mortgage you are still really only a lodger of mrs windsor.
Funnily enough though, the holding of unregistered land does not debar landholders from receiving subsidies from the government. Over £4bn pounds is paid to them in grants for unproductive land and the EU subsidies go to boost the tenant farmer rents to land owners by an estimated £12 - 17bn.
Land in Britain is not scarce- more than 85 per cent of the south east is still undeveloped- but planning approvals have been restricted since the second world war, new house building has been heavily restricted since the seventies. And please spare us a lot of the "greenbelt" nimby whingeing. A lot of this land is ugly big commercial farmland, carved up by tractors, polluted with chemicals, growing rapeseed for animal feed and high cholestorol vegetable oil. Some new, low impact, and preferably green houses with some real live HUMANS living in them is just what it needs to cheer it up. The state has since the 1947 town and country planning act nationalised development rights, since the seventies new house building has been slowed right down.
Now I would prefer that housing was free, and we are still inspired by the spirit of the eighties when there were an estimated 30,000 squatters in london alone. I survived a year of squatting myself later in the nineties, and despite now being over 40, feeble, depressed, and grumpy, and knowing our luck, we couldn't completely rule out going there again (with heating and clean toilet please). But even some mild liberal reform, If it happened, like giving redundant farmers some of their development rights back and a little building deregulation, would enable the construction industry to build all sorts of spacious and innovative homes in large numbers. Even small and independent builders and coops would be able to get a piece of the action and build spacious homes which they could both build and sell cheap, or lie in themselves!! Forward to decentralised utopian socialist super-cities with lots of green bits...get rid of the tanks and build the new peppercorn rent jerusalem on salisbury plain...daydream... But the entrenched monopoly landowners and the state bureaucracy are both deliberately blocking this.
At the moment both social housing and housing benefit are largely, an indirect subsidy to employers needing a cheap but housed workforce. But if freehold meant greater freedom , there would be much less of a state and monopoly landowner maintained housing crisis that required so much state subsidy and state intervention to try and contain it and manage it.
We recommend people read the extensive article "The Housing Question" in issue 13 of "Aufheben" magazine (despite their heavy going marxism). they can be contacted via Aufheben, c/o Brighton & Hove Unemployed Workers Centre, P.O. Box 2536, Rottingdean, BN2 6LX. We couldn't help laughing at the bit where they had to explain to some of their academic readers the methodological validity and meaning of the term "middle class". But their article gives a good historical account of the housing crisis and struggles around housing in britain since the industrial revolution. Along the way they discuss how the radical upstart english industrial bourgeoisie of the early nineteenth century chicken out by the end of the century and retreat into conservative alliance with the landed gentry, how the private rented sector in britain went into decline after the second world war and became relatively smaller compared to europe, and how the expansion of council housing in the fifties and sixties ran into crisis in the seventies.
Their article ends up pointing out how, under thatcher onwards, "For the young working class, who were once often the most militant section of the class, the sensible course has become to knuckle down, and to work hard in order to become homeowners. indeed in the last three decades owner occupation has proved a far more assured way of improving one's standard of living than collective action, particularly since the defeat of the labour movement in the 1980s." And now, "With the transition to an era of low inflation, but high house prices, the attitudes [new expanded lower middle class] induced by home ownership are likely to change...as the "property escalator" switches off, those who do manage to become house owners will face years of heavy debt with little prospect of escape.... Home ownership will no longer be such a conveyor belt into the middle classes. As such the transition to a new era in housing is likely to lead to major class realignments" Paul 2005
(Digression): ...Nor by the way is domination and despotism always centred on economic surplus extraction as its determining "motor". Petit-despotic systems can sometimes maintain themselves for long periods of time without the need for economic surplus extraction, for instance the periodic plunder and possible cannibalisation of subsistence tribes by a wandering aggressive warrior tribe. Historically it was actually domination in the first instance, in the form of tribal patriarchy, that subsequently went on to give rise to early forms of property and economics
With regard to the state, the state already had an existence long before the "modern" nation state. In late feudal through to medieval times the peasants were bit by bit dispossessed through state coercion by the late feudal state onwards. Over time, this transformed them in various specific steps into landless labourers. The state then deliberately enforced a situation of unequal exchange on the labour market. In his book "Studies in Mutualist Political Economy", Kevin A. Carson (kevin_carson@hotmail.com) goes into detail about this process and criticises the marxist version of the development of capitalism.
Marx himself vacillated on the role of coercion as a factor, sometimes passionately describing the forcible plunder involved in primitive accumulation and how it might go on to form preliminary capital. But sometimes, such as in the first chapter of Capital, he would effectively start blaming any individual commodity exchange and alienation for the subsequent development and accumulation of capital. But simple barter and exchange went on for thousands of years on different parts of the planet without always coming to heavily dominate the community or develop into a full blown "predominant" capitalist system. Many marxists, especially ultra-marxists, have an obsession with "alienation" and "alienated labour" as forms of fundamental wickedness in the world wherever they occur. But "alienation" on a simple level might just mean the simple freedom as an artisan or small farmer to use some individual space, produce something in an individualised way with your own labour, and choose to hand over (alienate; to transfer or estrange) part of your product or labour to someone else for free or barter. part of the time this may be a necessary, and indeed even a useful and beneficial component of a voluntary community. It is only in a context of widespread social domination and dispossession from means of subsistence, mainly caused by patriarchy and the history of the state in the first place, that alienations become taken over and distorted and used as a semi-generalised vehicle for imposing a mass exploitation ruling over people.
Engels was a market absolutist, denying domination in the original development of capital. Wage labour was "purely economic" and there was "no robbery or force or state involved" in the primitive accumulation of capital (Review of the Carson book in Freedom, 22 Jan '05, 84b Whitechapel High St, E1 7QX, U.K.). The marxists' refusal to admit the statist origins of capitalism are political in origin. Engels was attempting to defeat Duhring's version of socialism. Earlier on the machiavellian politicking manoeuvring project was to trash Proudhon and also the the Ricardian socialist Hodgskin. In different ways Duhring, Proudhon, and Hodgskin all saw capital as rooted in and perpetuated by the state.
Today's so called predominant "Capitalism" was deliberately and forcibly brought into existence by a land-owning aristocracy part of which transformed itself into a capitalist class when the medieval system started breaking up. Some of the centuries of plunder by this aristocracy became the investment capital of the industrial revolution. In the united states, often regarded as the home of free enterprise, capitalist industrial development began as a result of mercantilism, slavery and the investments of landlords, who got their land from the government, who in turn stole it by force from the native people.
Carson discusses Benjamin Tucker's analysis of monopoly. Patents, tariffs, the currency monopoly, and the banking monopoly were all forms of state-sponsored parasitism that deliberately encouraged the rise of the giant corporations. Tucker's "four monopolies" have to be coupled with land-grants, specialist cheap loans for companies, and gifts of eminent domain (by which the state could steal your land for its corporate buddies) and a hundred and one other forms of state subsidy and corporate welfare.
Carson points out, "Capitalism has never been established by a free market" and "free market capitalism is an oxymoron". So a major failing of many varieties of marxism has been the failure to recognise the political causes of capital in the first place, and reduce the social and political to mere out-growths of economic forces. Marxism, as ideology, then goes on to lend itself as an apology for tyranny. For instance, it lends itself as a convenient ideology for the use of bolshevik elitism.
In this open situation of competing systems and tendencies that we are now in,capital has grown to become, not a complete totality, but instead a hugely aggressive and particularly prominent tendency among others. It is too much like closed mindedness and religious mystical paranoia to insist on seeing everything everywhere as an immediately unified totality all the time, whether a totality of "capitalism" or whatever. But if there is no instant totality, or successful universal centrality, of capital, then in reality there can be no universalising centrality of the proletariat either. By "proletariat" we mean here more than just "poor" or dispossessed, but specifically the exploited labourers within capitalist relations of production.
Because of the legacy of the romantic Debordist wing of the situationists, and maybe also because of the legacy of some of the council communists and autonomist marxists, these sub-stalinist workerist pieces of hegellian-marxian-lukacsian style mysticism, "totality of capitalism" and "centrality of the proletariat", have been dumped on us second hand. For many years we helped reproduce these dogmas without thinking, we didn't realise we were the victim of a dodgy piece of philosophy with its historic roots in mystic confusion and in bad apocalyptic religion. This centrist mysticism still tends to rule the roost in various chunks of the ultra-left and anarcho-left, but at a theoretical level can sometimes prepare the groundwork for forms of neo-stalinism.
The retreat into mysticism now gets even worse, for instance with the mysticism of the "value critics" and the Postoneites and the like (except they have even lost track of the "proletariat" and now try to centre everything on capital as the "historic subject").
Certainly there are millions and millions of workers worldwide who are exploited under capitalist production, myself included when I do periodic temp work. Certainly workers who are exploited under capitalist production need to struggle against the employers. From time to time whole communities of workers will need to struggle openly against wider economic and political forces. But unfortunately the idea that there is a universalising centrality of the proletariat is an idealistic romantic myth invented by marxism, inspiring up to a point maybe, but just a myth. The whole point about the working class and class relations in reality is to struggle against class roles and class containment and class enslavement, not to romanticise or idealise or fetishise the working class or any class role. To try and pin some mystic millenarian historic mission on to the working class is in reality to politically stitch the working class up....(still writing article)
A nice old bollard in Mile End
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