ARS NOTORIA

Development, Part 2a Reactionary Petty-Bourgeois Utopia “To understand the controversies of the present day intelligently” (just to borrow a phrase from the main linked downloadable text, below) one needs to go back. Yesterday we went back to Engels’ book on “The Housing Question”, and today we go back to Lenin, in 1905. Lenin’s “Petty Bourgeois and Proletarian Socialism” is an example of the antipathy of both these writers, Engels and Lenin, towards “reactionary petty-bourgeois utopia”. Both of them opposed the liberal view of emancipation, whereby the worker’s household is re-constituted as a miniature image of the bourgeois household, and the worker's entire family is drilled and regimented in bourgeois emulation and thought-patterns. The relevance of this text is also to the concept of “development”, a word that is not used in Lenin’s article, by the way. But clearly, Lenin is looking at a situation wherein “development” in our modern, vulgar sense is very much on the age...

Development, Part 2 The Housing Question Thanks to his book, “The Condition of the Working Class in England”, Frederick Engels is among many other things considered to be the father of modern urban studies and town planning. Therefore one might approach his book “ The Housing Question ” (linked below) expecting answers to that same housing question. One might hope for instructions about what to build. One might expect sermons about “delivery”, or even model house-plans. Instead, one finds severe polemic about very fundamental issues of class struggle. Why is this? Before trying to answer that question, let us first use the opportunity provided by this example, to examine what polemic is. Engels begins the linked text with references to his opponent Mulberger, who had complained that Engels had been blunt to the point of rudeness. Engels concedes little more than sarcasm: “I am not going to quarrel with friend Mulberger about the ‘tone’ of my criticism. When one has been so l...

Vince Cable, with his coat turned. By Lucy Hall Vince Cable, MP for my constituency of Twickenham in southwest London is, or was, a local treasure. Being a Liberal Democrat, he was – until now – naturally inoffensive, and politics aside he is an indisputably charming old man. He’s moderately pleased left-wingers like me because of his seemingly progressive nature, aligning himself with the left of the Liberal party, and he always seemed to genuinely care about the people he represented.  All that has changed now of course. From the moment it was discovered he would be sitting in the cabinet of a - lets face it - Conservative government, I felt a little betrayed. When the cuts started, and t he Big Society was launched, and the Free Schools and the effective denationalisation of the NHS were proposed, I felt sick just looking at the man. I have vowed never to vote for him, or the Liberal Democrats again. Perhaps you think I’m being too harsh. He is still a nice man ...

The point about the long and painful vivisection of Yugoslavia is that it was promoted and pursued from abroad. All Serbs, any Serb hates Germany and hates the USA simply because the assumption was made that Yugoslavia was ripe for disintegration just like all the other satellite republics in the Soviet sphere. Yalta and Potsdam drew the lines. Roosevelt (then Truman) Stalin and Churchill decided that Southern Europe would fall within the capitalist sphere and Eastern Europe within the socialist sphere when in fact it was the Communist machis that were the mainstay of the Resistance in France. It was the Communists who most effectively resisted the Nazis in Italy and Yugoslavia. Southern Europe was naturally in the Socialist / Communist camp. As late as 1976 the CIA had Aldo Moro assassinated by proxy because he was getting the Communists and the Social Democrats into an Alliance. The Communists would have been in government. The point is that Yugoslavia was NOT an eastern Eu...

Tony Hall in disguise ...Quiet, you at the back, and stop shifting in your seats! I am almost 70. Settle down, listen carefully and take in some wisdom already. Let's look today at geopolitics and the Islamic world. Some of my years I spent side by side with Palestinian secular and other colleagues and Arab and Islamic experts in London, editing international news magazines, working sometimes for moneyed Emirates and Saudi bosses who at least always tolerated my pro-PLO editorials; meeting some wonderful Palestinians; talking to a few fine Israelis - and attacking and exposing the worst. A cover line we did on Menachem Begin back then was "Once a Terrorist, Always a Terrorist". With Arabs and Arabists, Muslims and Islamists, I was on friendly working terms - some of them are still in hailing distance over time. To name a few, I was honoured to work with Teddy Hodgkin, Malise Ruthven, Fathi Osman of Al Azhar University, Dilip Hiro, Helena Cobban, Ahmed Rashid, Zia...

Economic nationalism puts the willies up the intelligence and media snipers Aldo Moro was murdered when he was close to bringing the Christian Democrats and the Communists to an understanding in Italy. For many decades around the world and most crucially now, in the Euro-American war, it’s so often social democracy that is at stake, and under fire. The intelligence and media snipers, and the economic and military weapons are aimed not at the chimera of socialism or communism, but at even the mildest forms of state regulation (that swearword!), the slightest hints of economic nationalism. That’s what scares ‘em. In the crosshairs are those who try to build, sustain, defend or articulate, even for a historical moment, a project at local, national or regional level that is secular, and even mildly Keynesian. This makes for a motley mix of torch-bearers who are in the firing line, or were in their time. Spot the players, mark out the board, in today’s Great Game. In my eyes, using ...