Last week promised an orgy for everybody who is pissed off with the system and hopes for another life beyond capitalism. Three events promised a badly needed critical food for us.
First, the new philosophical star Slavoj Zizek held a talk on violence. He spoke about system's kind of violence, not a personal one. Zizek tried to present the latest findings in his personal development of mixture of Marxism and psychoanalysis but with doubtful results.
Starting the analysis from psychoanalytical categories such as individual, essence, subconsciousness
or trauma and selling this to the audience as a revolutionary Marxist package is the best recipe to create a theoretical confusion too big even for Professor Zizek and his two hours time limits. The audience after all didn't get a single coherent line of explanation but at least the fun was good. So the first gift of the week was to see the degradation of 'Marxist' academics into an intellectual version of stand-up comedian who fights revolutionary phrases of his philosophical colleagues with his own revolutionary phrases... plus a good dose of humour before our evening tea.
Second, the Campaign for a new workers' party organised a public debate on the legacy of the dockers' movement. The event started with showing of Ken Loach's film The Flickering Flame depicting the last struggle of Liverpool dockers more than 10 years ago. The politics of this brilliant documentary was much more convincing and radical than the director's speech after the screening. Loach's message basically was that all the Left groups must unite and 'fight' together. For what goals and on what principles is secondary. The rest of the debate, beside the few accounts from the dockers' struggle itself, was pitiful. The political degradation of this kind of Leftism was brutally revealed when one of the speakers repeatedly said that the purpose of the Left and Labour movement is to protect the working class against the attacks of the capitalists. This defensive statement shows how much the self-proclaimed defenders of the working class have shifted to the right, ironically following the hated neoliberals. This dead-end dependence on the latest strategies of the capital is not different from the notorious fixation of the philosopher Zizek on the 'subject', in other words, on the liberal construct of an individual standing against the world.
And finally the third event of the last week was the debate on the past radical workers' struggles on the Merseyside. Organised in the Liverpool Social Centre and with practically no money for promotion it attracted an unusual number of people. The guest speakers were the rank-and-file workers from Lockheed and Ford's who dared to take over the control of their workplaces in the 70s. To fight back was not a matter of a 'Lefty' choice. Who decided to stay was pushed to fight back by the assembly line speed ups themselves. Men coming to Ford's from the army were shocked to find even tighter discipline and control. Beside fighting the bosses the workers and shop stewards had to fight their union officials who were repeatedly selling out their struggles. The best success was probably the 8 months' strike in 1974. Under the slogan 'Friday night is music night' they fought for a shorter working time, to stop the hated Friday night shifts. At the end of the discussion Brian Ashton read from his new fiction story 'One Hundred of a Minute – A day in life of a car worker'. Laughable moments from inside the factory mixed with feelings of simple hate against the imposed work. This event unfortunately offered no insight into the role of political organising of working class in these radical times. An experiential gap between the last generation of factory struggles and the present Generation Online was tangible in the room. Beginning to overcome this gap is not a matter of one evening, of course.
With a bit of imagination these three events in the course of one week can be seen like the three nuts for Cinderella. Small gifts revealing the situation of the traditional Leftist 'nods' in a nutshell. Three glimpses into the 'undercurrent' state of the affairs in the city full of Capital's triumphalism. Not encouraging findings perhaps... but better this than leaving them unnoticed.
Starting the analysis from psychoanalytical categories such as individual, essence, subconsciousness
or trauma and selling this to the audience as a revolutionary Marxist package is the best recipe to create a theoretical confusion too big even for Professor Zizek and his two hours time limits. The audience after all didn't get a single coherent line of explanation but at least the fun was good. So the first gift of the week was to see the degradation of 'Marxist' academics into an intellectual version of stand-up comedian who fights revolutionary phrases of his philosophical colleagues with his own revolutionary phrases... plus a good dose of humour before our evening tea.
Second, the Campaign for a new workers' party organised a public debate on the legacy of the dockers' movement. The event started with showing of Ken Loach's film The Flickering Flame depicting the last struggle of Liverpool dockers more than 10 years ago. The politics of this brilliant documentary was much more convincing and radical than the director's speech after the screening. Loach's message basically was that all the Left groups must unite and 'fight' together. For what goals and on what principles is secondary. The rest of the debate, beside the few accounts from the dockers' struggle itself, was pitiful. The political degradation of this kind of Leftism was brutally revealed when one of the speakers repeatedly said that the purpose of the Left and Labour movement is to protect the working class against the attacks of the capitalists. This defensive statement shows how much the self-proclaimed defenders of the working class have shifted to the right, ironically following the hated neoliberals. This dead-end dependence on the latest strategies of the capital is not different from the notorious fixation of the philosopher Zizek on the 'subject', in other words, on the liberal construct of an individual standing against the world.
And finally the third event of the last week was the debate on the past radical workers' struggles on the Merseyside. Organised in the Liverpool Social Centre and with practically no money for promotion it attracted an unusual number of people. The guest speakers were the rank-and-file workers from Lockheed and Ford's who dared to take over the control of their workplaces in the 70s. To fight back was not a matter of a 'Lefty' choice. Who decided to stay was pushed to fight back by the assembly line speed ups themselves. Men coming to Ford's from the army were shocked to find even tighter discipline and control. Beside fighting the bosses the workers and shop stewards had to fight their union officials who were repeatedly selling out their struggles. The best success was probably the 8 months' strike in 1974. Under the slogan 'Friday night is music night' they fought for a shorter working time, to stop the hated Friday night shifts. At the end of the discussion Brian Ashton read from his new fiction story 'One Hundred of a Minute – A day in life of a car worker'. Laughable moments from inside the factory mixed with feelings of simple hate against the imposed work. This event unfortunately offered no insight into the role of political organising of working class in these radical times. An experiential gap between the last generation of factory struggles and the present Generation Online was tangible in the room. Beginning to overcome this gap is not a matter of one evening, of course.
With a bit of imagination these three events in the course of one week can be seen like the three nuts for Cinderella. Small gifts revealing the situation of the traditional Leftist 'nods' in a nutshell. Three glimpses into the 'undercurrent' state of the affairs in the city full of Capital's triumphalism. Not encouraging findings perhaps... but better this than leaving them unnoticed.