On Saturday I went up to Campsfield, the immigration prison near Oxford, for the regular demo in solidarity with detainees that has been held there every month since the place was set up in 1993. There were only fifteen demonstrators, which I’m afraid rather bears out what I’ve said below about environmentalists. It’s only once a month and it’s half an hour on the bus. Come on, guys.
Campsfield was set up fourteen years ago by the Tories – the traditional party of bigotry and inhumane opprtunism – but it is maintained by a government purporting alliegance to Labour, the traditional party of the oppressed and disadvantaged. Where is the party to which the statement that “people are suffering” was a call to action rather than a calculation of poltical advantage? A visit to Campsfield drives out of the window all notion of a “balanced” view of the good and bad things this government has done. It has done good things – that I don’t contest – but those government ministers who have decided to lock up innocent people behind razor wire for the “crime” of coming to Britain while being Black, and those who have gone along with it, are fundamentally bastards. Anyone who can tolerate Campsfield and the other detention centres throughout Britain has surrendered his or her soul to Toryism.
This, however, cannot mean a rejection of the struggle through the established labopur movement, which seems in this case to have produced such appalling results. Only the united forces of the basic organisations of the basic oppressed class in our society, that is the unions, and moreover the unions in politics, can effect “fundamental and irreversible change” in that society. One union backing some non-Labour candidates is (in the right circumstances) a legitimate tactic, but it isn’t a strategic solution. Only our united efforts to either force the bastards out of out party, or (in the last resort) start a new party in which the bastards will not be welcome, can have a significant long-term effect. Let’s face it – we’re in political for the long term. all the attempts of the Left in recent years to go for short-term “breakthrough” solutions have gone off at half-cock and come to nothing, except leaving the remains of a few Left organisations as debris along the road. Let’s not make the same mistake again – all of us or none, comrades.
This morning I slept through my alarm. By nearly four hours. Which was annoying. What was mysterious, though, was the dream I finally woke up from. I dreamt that the world was about to be destroyed by a meteorite, but was saved by John Angliss. Make of that what you will.
In real international news, I learn that Suharto, former genocidal dictator of Indonesia, has finally kicked the bucket. Suharto originally came to power with the backing of the US government, who trusted him to “deal with” the Communist Party of Indonesia, at that time the largest outside the Stalinist bloc. He did this by indiscriminately slaughtering more than 600,000 people, many of them in no way connected to the Communist Party (as if that made a difference). Hundreds of thousands more murders followed in West Papua, East Timor and Aceh. Although he was overthrown in 1998, neither he nor his grotesquely corrupt (and consequently extremely rich) family have been brought to justice. This impunity, again, involves the collusion of the Western powers.
Amazingly, today David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, sent a message of condolence to the Indonesian government – that is, the relatively democratic government that owes its existence to the revolutionary overthrow of Suharto’s dictatorship! Is Miliband joining the Boris Johnson/Oxford Union Society school of diplomacy?! “Oh dear, the chap who murdered a million of your people has died. Jolly bad luck, what?” Meanwhile, West Papua is still suffering from the remaining elements of military dictatorship in the Indonesian system and needs our practical solidarity: I can’t see it getting much from Mr. Miliband.
Lastly, I draw readers’ attention to this letter (third one down) in the Grauniad. It truly is a Lib Dem classic. A councillor of that persuasion from the Lib Dem-run Liverpool City Council objects to the report that his council is the least efficient in the country. On the contrary, he says, Liverpool has moved a long way down the council tax league table since his party took charge. Middle-class people pay less tax than they did. That’s what councils are for, isn’t it? He gives every impression of having no idea that a council’s efficiency could relate to the services it provides. Hmm, well ten years ago, according to the Lib Dems, Liverpool council had the highest council tax in the country. Then they took over, cut council tax by 3% in absolute terms in one year, and now it’s the least efficient council in the country. There’s a lesson there somewhere, isn’t there? Reminds me of Oxford where the Lib Dem administration is desperately seeking cuts to make the frayed ends of their rich-pleasing tax policy meet. Playgrounds, leisure centres, all things working-class people need and Lib Dem voters with their huge gardens and private gyms don’t. Thankfully Labour in Oxford has no intention of sticking to the previous administration’s spending plans, like, er, Gordon Brown…
Read this and then sign this petition. Now.
Oxford’s on flood alert again – some areas near the city have actually been flooded and walls of sandbags are going up on the Botley Road. The Environment Agency advises us not to panic, but the river channel across the road from my flat is at full capacity; and besides, no-one in Britain is going to trust the Environment Agency after last summer.
I really don’t see the point of the Environment Agency. They refuse to build effective flood defences because (they say) they’re too expensive, and they insist that de-silting river channels is unnecessary. Every time it rains heavily the Thames turns brown with all the mud and other things washed down from the Cotswolds. This sinks to the bottom of the channel and builds up the bed, thus reducing the capacity of the channel and increasing the likelihood of a flood. It’s so simple you’d think even an expert could understand it – but apparently not. So what does the Environment Agency actually do? Apart, that is, from turning up whenever something bad happens and shouting “Don’t panic, Captain Mainwaring”?
In other news, a superabundance of a different kind looks likely to come to Parliament. Today’s papers report that an independent review body has recommended above-inflation pay rises for MPs for the next three years. The hypocrisy of this, when Gordon Brown is trying his utmost to limit public-sector pay rises to 2%, effectively a pay cut, is staggering. There’s not much sign of pay restraint in the corridors of power.
MPs are already paid more than £60,000 a year as basic salary, and on average claim nearly twice this in expenses. Now for an active MP the expenses at least are actually necessary – paying several caseworkers, sending out thousands of letters a month etc. is very expensive. Even some MPs who I otherwise vehemently disagree with are scrupulously honest to the point of annoying their Westminster colleagues, and must be acknowledged to spend literally every penny on representation and campaigning. But the controls over MPs’ spending are often more honoured in the bnreach than the observance, and they didn’t prevent Iain Duncan Smith, for example, from paying a big wodge to his wife. Jobs for the boys (and girls) anyone? Get a job as a Tory Parliamentary bag-carrier. The Labour equivalents are, generally speaking, not so well-paid, and I sometimes think what they need is a couple of good shop stewards and a short period of carefully targetted industrial action…!
P.S. How’s this for a shameless bit of capitalist propaganda masquerading as “news” on the MSN email sign-out page? Isn’t capitalism great, equal opportunities for all, everyone who works really hard becomes a multi-millionaire! Remember, it could be you…but it won’t be.
I see Bill Clinton has said that Barack Obama might win the Democratic nomination. Well, no shit, Sherlock – though unfortunately I think it’s more likely his wife will get it. But Bill’s remark must have made for some interesting conversation at the breakfast table. I can imagine Hillary saying (in true US soap opera fashion): “Honey, I’m prepared to put up with the odd bit of fellatio and the business with the cigar. But if you try to fuck with my political career you and I are finished, buster!”
Meanwhile back in the real world, there’s still a man up a tree just down the street. You can only admire the powers of endurance of environmental protesters. He’s been there for ten days now, in a flimsy treehouse made of cardboard and plastic sheeting, in January. He must be having a horrible time. I’d get him some food and a hot drink if his tree wasn’t surrounded by fencing and security guards, and thus impossible to get to. And he does have a point – all the Council want to do is tidy up and repave the square (badly needed) and plant some new trees, so they might as well save time and money by leaving the old ones there.
It does annoy me, though, that so much effort and dedication is wasted on what I consider marginal causes. At the height of the anti-vivisection protests, every month I caught the bus to the monthly Campsfield demo in sight of hundreds of people protesting in Broad Street in solidarity with animals in cages – and I thought that if even a fraction of them would come to protest in solidarity with people in cages we might be getting somewhere. Ditto if the man prepared to spend ten days up a tree would occupy a bit of the “detention estate” instead. Not that animals don’t deserve rights, of course they do – but priorities, guys, priorities.
Update (14/01/08): I notice the tree has been cut down. This is a pity, because entirely unnecessary, but again I hope those prepared to endure such discomfort for a tree will at least turn out to support oppressed human beings. The next demo in solidarity with imprisoned migrants will be on Saturday 26th at 12:00 at Campsfield immigration prison, Langford Lane, just North of Kidlington. Bus from Magdalen Street at 11:15.
Time for another “cultural” post methinks. The German poet Georg Rudolf Weckherlin (1584-1653) was obviously not a socialist, but he was a revolutionary. He began his career as a bureaucrat and diplomat in Germany at the beginning of the Thirty Years’ War, a period of unprecedented slaughter in Europe. Germany at this time was not a nation-state but part of the “Holy Roman Empire” which, as Voltaire later summed it up, was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. In 1618 a local revolution in Prague was enough to throw it into chaos. Supposedly the war was about Catholicism versus Protestantism, but in fact the several hundred feudal potentates who ruled the “Holy Roman Empire” scrabbled maniacally for a little extra territory, money and advantage, changing their religion and their alleigance whenever it suited them. Whenever a magnate thought it politic to change his religion, it was an accepted principle that all his subjects would be forcibly converted, and fined, imprisoned or even burned at the stake if they refused. There was even a Latin legal term for this inhuman barbarity: “cuius regio, eius religio”.
In the process the peasants, artisans and town workers of the “Holy Roman Empire” suffered catastrophe. Thousands of refugees thronged every country road; “soldiers” indistinguishable from bandits indiscrimately murdered whole populations, or demanded protection money not to murder them; famine and epidemic saw off those who remained. Thuringia, not far from Weckherlin’s native Stuttgart, lost two-thirds of its population between 1618 and 1648; the entire population of Magdeburg, more than thirty thousand men, women and children, was massacred by a Hapsburg army. It is not surprising that Weckherlin became utterly disgusted not only with German politics, but with the feudal nobility he served.
Weckherlin had been sent by his master to London as ambassador, and at the end of his appointment in 1624 he stayed, getting various jobs in government departments. However, he sympathised with the rising bourgeoisie, and when civil war broke out in 1642 he helped to organise the new Parliamentarian administration. In 1644 he became effectively Parliament’s first foreign secretary, handling the revolutionary bourgeois regime’s relations with the other European powers. On his death in 1653 he was succeeded by the great poet of this revolution, and one of the greatest poets in the English language, John Milton.
So much for Weckherlin’s career. His Traum: von der Herzog von Buckingham is the poem by which he deserves to be remembered. The Duke of Buckingham was a notoriously corrupt, cruel and incompetent courtier of the Stuarts who was assassinated in 1625, to general relief. Weckherlin’s poem both commemorates this event and dramatises his own conversion to the bourgeois revolutionary cause. In form it is a sonnet, an almost incredibly versatile vehicle of poetic expression. In Petrarch’s and Shakespeare’s hands it expressed love, in Wordsworth’s contemplation; but never, apart form Shelley’s famous England in 1819, has the sonnet form been a vehicle for such furious political passion. Weckherlin’s poem virtually burns with contempt for the feudal masters and with desire to overthrow them once and for all.
A word on my (sadly inadequate) translation: the seventeenth century was a “classical” age of German poetry, in the strict sense that it obeyed strict formal rules and canons. The hexameter line produces an effect that is stately, deliberate and at times a bit pompous, very like the “Augustan” English poetry of the eighteenth century. I have therefore incorporated some of this idiom and violated strict correspondence of lines in order to retain the meter of the original. To do justice to the poet, I’ve put this original in too, for those who read German, who can thereby see how crap my translation is! The occasional apparently “dialect” expression is explained by the fact that literary German wasn’t fully standardised until a century after Weckherlin’s time. The religious imagery, typical of the bourgeois revolutionaries of the seventeenth century, has been rendered as faithfully as possible.
I visioned in my sleep an image like a god,
Upon a golden throne most gloriously arrayed;
And all the foolish crowd, from pleasure or from need,
Their lives and services before the idol laid.
I saw, too, how this image, God Himself to mock,
Would gather vows, and praise, and sacrifices in,
Though never sated; life at whim it gave and took,
And used for pleasure punishment, revenge and sin.
Though Heaven often ranked its stars with signs of wonder,
To punish this ungrateful thing, that dared to think
Itself a god; yet still its voice out-yelled the thunder,
Till, when its pride was at its height, upon the brink
A bolt of lightning smote the vaunting idol under,
And made of all its glory – filth, worms and stink.
And now the proper version:
Ich sah in meinem Schlaf ein Bild gleich einem Gott,
Auf einen reichen Thron ganz prächtiglich erhaben,
Auf dessen Dienst und Schutz, zugleich aus Lust und Not,
Sich die törichte Leut stets haufenweis begaben.
Ich sah, wie dieses Bild, dem wahren Gott zu Spott,
Empfing – zwar niemal satt – Gelübd, Lob, Opfergaben
Und gab auch wem es wollt das Leben und den Tod
Und pflag sich mit Rach, Straf und Bosheit zu erlaben.
Und ob der Himmel schon oftmal, des Bilds Undank
Zu strafen, seine Stern versammelte mit Wunder,
So war doch das Bilds Stimm noch lauter dann der Dunder,
Bis endlich, als sein Stolz war in dem höchsten Schwang,
Da schlug ein schneller Blitz das schöne Bild herunder,
Verkehrend seine Pracht in Kot, Würm und Gestank.
See this post from Jim Denham over on Shiraz Socialist: as much attention as possible needs to be drawn to this case and all those like it (I’ve heard of one other in exactly the same circumstances). I entirely endorse what Jim says and have nothing to add. It is the duty of everyone to fight constantly in solidarity with migrants subject to these inhuman restrictions.
Thames Valley police have done it again. There’s something about environmentalists that seems to get them all wound up, and on Wednesday they descended with their usual subtlety on an entirely peaceful protest against the cutting down of some trees to make way for part of the Westgate Centre development (the scheduled public enquiry on the part in question being yet to happen). Deborah Glass Woodin, one of the County Councillors for the area, was arrested for no apparent reason.
Now I’m not a doctrinaire environmentalist, and I believe that ultimately the interests of human beings have to come before those of other living beings (though I don’t know enough about this particular detail of the Westgate plan to be able to come to an informed judgement). However, I do believe in people’s right to protest when they are doing no harm; and I do think that randomly arresting protestors, especially the elected representatives of local people, is anti-democratic and wrong.
When I saw the story in the local paper I immediately thought of the police reaction to the protests against the building of Oxford University’s business school. This monstrosity, sponsored by and named after Wafic Said, a notorious dealer in torture equipment, replaced a historic, though disused, railway station designed by Paxton and a line of mature trees shading the main road into the city from the West. I was involved, though regrettably only occasionally, in the odd coalition of students, Swampy types and railway enthusiasts who occupied the old station. Some more committed occupiers did meticulous research and repainted part of the interior in the original 1850s coulour scheme. Over some weeks we volunteers cleaned the old place up and made the grounds presentable (in the process, by the way, getting rid of a lot of bushes and plants that were perfectly “natural”, but very inconvenient).
On the day the line of trees was due to be cut down, Oxford City Council finally came to debate the issue and instantly slapped a preservation order on them. Cllr. Mike Woodin, Deborah’s late (and much missed) partner, arrived to serve the order legally, but the police grabbed him and kept him well away from the site until the trees had been cut down. I remember thinking at the time that this shows law enforcement has to be under local democratic control. I still think that, though of course the police must also be subject to rigourously imposed and absolutely specific rules – the fact that a body has been elected doesn’t make everything it orders right, or even democratic.
Needless to say, Thames Valley Police haven’t improved since then, as their reaction to the “Speak” demonstrations against the Oxford Uni vivisection lab shows. They absolutely refuse to make any distinction between a small number of nutters who think the way to fight for animal rights is to threaten and even to harm people, and the vast majority of demonstrators. It is possible to disagree strongly with the demonstrators’ opinion and at the same time believe that they have an absolute right to make their opinions known in public. Indeed, if we do not believe this then democracy is impossible.
Tomorrow at 12 noon in Bonn Square there will be a protest linked to the national call for action against the repressive Serious Organised Crime and Police Act. I don’t agree with the “Speak” protesters and I rarely agree with people up trees, but I’ll be going along show solidarity with them, and to defend the right to protest. After all, to paraphrase Pastor Niemoeller’s famous poem, the forces of “law and order” might come for me next.
Update (12/1/08): I went to the protest which had a good turnout and went well. It appears that the trees that were cut down on Wednesday near the Westgate Centre, which Deborah Glass Woodin was arrested for trying to protect, were the wrong trees in any case. The workers were supposed to be cutting down trees on a different side of the Westgate altogether (which is massive, so you can’t get confused) but some moron of a senior manager who can’t tell his left hand from his right sent them to the wrong place, along with the police. At today’s protest Green Councillor Nuala Young called for the manager responsible to be sacked, and though I’m neither a Green nor keen on sacking people, for once I agree!
I always think when it rains heavily that Oxford somehow wants to go back to being a mediaeval city. The street drains are invariably blocked, goodness knows what with, and big puddles of dirty water appear everywhere. The few remaining completely unnecessary cobbled streets start to ooze with mud. At such times there is definitely a hint in the atmosphere of reversion to that halcyon age when Oxford’s citizens and students spent their carefree days catching scrofula and murdering each other.
Borders is a refuge of modernity, but they don’t seem to have realised Christmas is over. Since I came back here last Sunday they’ve had the Messiah on a loop. Listening to one chorus I was oppressed by the feeling I’m sure all of us socialists still in the Labour Party have experienced at some time or other: “And the government shall be upon his shoulders…” No! No! Noooo! Go away! It’s nothing to do with me! I’ve never even met Gordon Brown…!
I’ve decided to give this blog a bit of culture by writing occasional posts about socialist literature and art. 2006 was the 150th anniversary of the death of Heinrich Heine, apart perhaps from Brecht the best-known of all German socialist writers; so it seems appropriate to start with him.
Heinrich Heine is best known today for his lyric poetry – and in the English-speaking world for one poem, Die Lorelei, so much an emblem of German culture that whole verses are quoted in basic phrase-books for English tourists. It is possible from this to come to the conclusion that Heine, though a great poet, was a bit soft. This is far from the case.
Heinrich Heine was an early convert to the socialist movement in exile in Paris just after the European revolutions of 1830, where, with the exception of one clandestine visit back to Germany, he lived for the rest of his life - indeed exile is a theme of some of his most memorable poetry. In Paris, like Marx, but a decade before him, he met his first socialist comrades, the utopians of the Saint-Simonian school. He subsequently moved beyond utopianism and became a great friend and supporter and frequent correspondent of Marx, though at one point they fell out (as Marx did with many of his comrades, deserving and undeserving of his formidable wrath). Nonetheless, Heine along with the less distinguished Georg Herwegh wrote, so to speak, the lyrics to the Revolution and has been a favourite of Marxists ever since – his song for the Silesian weavers’ uprising of 1844 was translated into English by Engels:
“Doomed be the fatherland, false name,
Where nothing thrives but disgrace and shame,
Where flowers are crushed before they unfold,
Where the worm is quickened by rot and mould -
We weave, we weave.”
A century later, Heine’s complete poems were translated into English by none other than Hal Draper (if anyone can tell me where to get a copy of this book I would be very grateful). For now, this post will have to rely on my impromptu translations from memory (apart from the above, which is Engels’) – sorry for not doing justice to the original.
Heine’s political poetry is worth a read, especially for lovers of acerbic wit. There is no greater mocker of sentimental reaction or of bourgeois pretension and pseudo-radicalism. Heine specialised in blowing big soapy bubbles and then suddenly pricking them with a pin piercingly sharpened by his own unique method. “From afar I hear with joy”, he wrote to one would-be-radical bourgeois philistine, “how everyone is full of your praises, and how you are the Mirabeau of the Lueneburg Heath” (the German equivalent of Salisbury Plain, where military exercises took place).
Socialists of the nineteenth century had the works of Heine always at the back of their minds, and no wonder. His most influential work was probably not a lyric poem but the satirical “state of the nation” survey “Deutschland : Ein Wintermaerchen“ (“Germany: A Winter’s Tale”), in which every aspect of every privileged class is mercilessly attacked. This long poem was published by Marx in Vorwaerts, the paper of the German socialists, of which he was then the editor. A couple of verses spring frequently to mind. Here he sums up in four lines what was wrong with the backward-looking utopia of what Marx was later to call the “reactionary socialists”:
“What a beautiful mediaeval sight!
The knights, and the flunkey classes,
Bearing their loyalty in their hearts
And coats of arms on their arses.”
So inescapably did this verse attach itself to its theme that Marx himself couldn’t help paraphrasing it, perhaps unconsciously, in his great programmatic statement: those familiar with the Communist Manifesto will recognise the last line from the section on the “reactionary socialists”. And seeing the beginnings of the German romantic bourgeois chauvinism that the Nazis were to call “Kultur” a century later, Heine summed that up brilliantly too:
“Yes, this is German air!
My hot cheek felt its hand!
And this lump of muck in the road
Is the shit of the Fatherland!”
If, by the way, anyone has heard a better description of Griffin, Irving and their crew than “the shit of the Fatherland” I’d like to hear it!
Of course, all was not necessarily sweetness and light, even among pioneer socialists. Marx mocked Heine for his lifelong passionate interest in his Jewish identity and culture, something Marx himself had consciously distanced himself from (not, as ignorant Tories sometimes charge, in the name of anti-semitism, but of being a “citizen of the world”). Heine himself had “converted” to Protestantism in order, under the reactionary laws of his day, to be able to go to university and study under Hegel. Some Jewish commentators have considered this a betrayal, but Heine was an atheist (though he later became interested in religion) and he certainly never “betrayed” the Jewish people or culture.
In later life Heine came to be a sympathiser of Moses Hess, a great Jewish socialist and (eventually) precursor of Zionism who had introduced Engels to communism and persuaded Marx to embark on his first study of socio-economics (the “Paris Manuscripts”). Seeing and experiencing the growing tide of anti-Semitism in Germany, Hess was developing in the direction of believing racism to be the primary form of oppression, or at least one that had to be eliminated first in order for socialism to become possible. Six years after Heine’s death, he wrote the historic Rome and Jerusalem, the first book advocating a modern, secular Jewish state.
Marx’ reaction was mild by his standards, but at times a bit silly. He called Heine “Ikey” for his exaggeration of the importance of his Jewish heritage (this really would never have occurred to Marx as racially offensive; remember, he was Jewish himself). Appropriately to the subject, he satirised the poet’s new sympathies in an epigram – or tried to:
“Oh Ikey, Oh Ikey, what thought was in your mind
When you hooked up with Hess and every idiot you could find?”
In this instance at least I have no qualms about translation – in fact I venture to suggest I’ve improved on Marx’ couplet!
Despite their disagreements, Marx, Engels and Heine never lost their comradely regard for each other. Heine rightly believed that - as Hess later wrote – “Even an act of conversion cannot relieve the Jew of the enormous pressure of German anti-Semitism. The Germans hate the religion of the Jews less than they hate their race – they hate the peculiar faith of the Jews, less than their peculiar noses.” Marx, equally rightly, pointed out in his essay “On The Jewish Question” that this prejudice has been the consequence of the economic structure and political history of German society in its development over many centuries. Of course, it would the opposite of satisfaction to all three of them, following the failure of socialist revolution in Germany, to be proved most horribly right.
As a Jew and a communist, Heine was the subject of ferocious persecution even after his death in 1856. A proposal in the 1890s to put up a memorial to him in his native Duesseldorf led to anti-Semitic riots stirred up by the reactionary Junkers (the statue can be seen today in the Bronx, of all places – yet given Heine’s commitment to the working class and other oppressed groups he would surely have been pleased). Later, the Nazis insisted, absurdly, that those of Heine’s poems that were too well-known to ban – everyone had learnt them at school – should be marked “author unknown” in anthologies!
Ultimately, Heinrich Heine belongs to the working class, to all oppressed and marginalised people and to those who struggle for emancipation and socialism, now and throughout the ages. He could have wished for no finer epitaph, and would have wished for no other.
