syriza

January 24, 2015

Greece is the Word

Jack Graham election, neoliberalism, reformism, syriza 9

Yes, yes, Syriza is a bourgeois reformist party which has drifted to the right even in the last few years. I know. A Syriza victory will not bring full communism in Greece. No, true. A Syriza government will cave in and give up all over the place. The way all bourgeois reformist parties always do, even quite Lefty ones. Yes. I know.

I knows and knows and knows.

The point is that, as with all Left-wing reformist parties, it will be as strong or as weak as the movement among the working class. It will be pushed to the Left by a genuine movement on the streets and in the workplaces. Or to the Right by the absence of such a movement.

The anti-reformist gloom of writing off Syriza before it starts is, paradoxically, the gloom of the reformist. It is the gloom of those who secretly expect (or want) elected governments to do it all for them.

A Syriza victory would create a space within Austerity neoliberalism for a challenge (however partial and bourgeois and reformist and imperfect) to the prevailing, even suffocating, orthodoxy. The punishing flow of weath upwards may be slowed, just a bit, just for a change, somewhere. And, with work and struggle, this could be exploited and built upon. This would push the government further. Which would expand the space for resistance, etc etc etc.

Every victory – however partial – for the working class is to be chased and seized upon and celebrated (yes, critically celebrated, of course) because every victory for the working class, evey improvement in the position and confidence of the working class, strengthens the only force in the world that has the power, ultimately, to fundamentally change it for the better.

This isn’t a fully worked out theoretical position. There are plenty of better places you can go for that. …

November 22, 2013

1

Jack Graham 50th anniversary countdown, 60s, apartheid, dialectics, evolution, french revolution, historical materialism, history, into the dalek, liberalism, machiavelli, naomi klein, nelson mandela, production, reaganism, revolution, SF, south africa, syriza, teenagers, tool use, TV, twitterverse, unearthly child 6

What can I do but cheat?

Three moments, not in chronological order.

Barbara Wright is in a junkyard. She walks into a Police Box. She’s in a large, brightly lit control room.

This can happen on screen because of the cut. The material conditions of TV production, manifested as a splicing together of two recorded moments into the appearance of one fluid event, makes this possible. We have “discovered television”. We can put huge buildings inside small boxes. We can put Narnia inside the wardrobe; Wonderland inside the rabbit hole. The quintessential trait of British fantastic literature for kids – the eccentric relationship of impossible spaces – can be made visual.

Doctor Who‘s very nature as storytelling is utterly bound up with the limits of the material conditions of television production. So much so that living on that limit became its raison d’etre. Its development has always been inextricably connected with what can materially be done, and how it is done. And what it has done has always developed what it wants to be able to do next. As I’ve said elsewhere, ‘The Space Museum’ pushes the show onto a new track, politically speaking… and it does this partly because the aesthetics of the show – which stem from the limits and capabilities of material TV production – crunch up against an allegory about empire. This sort of thing happens several times, but the first time it happens is that cut from the junkyard to the control room. The kind of story that is told is fundamentally shaped by its material production. Later, the kinds of stories that are being told demand new developments in how stories can be told. The dialectic starts here.

This is analogous (I’ll go no further than that) to one aspect of how history itself works. The productive forces determine (in the soft sense) the ideas and relations built upon them; then they come into conflict and new ideas arise that demand new developments in the productive forces. It’s fitting to find this analogy in the clockwork of a show that puts so much stress on history. It does stress history, by the way, even when it moves away from ‘historicals’ and into SF. Its mode of SF is essentially allegorical and utopian. And that too is fitting, because of those eccentric and impossible spaces of British fantastic children’s literature upon which the show is so reliant. In the post-war era, those spaces became gateways to newly-imagined social pasts, presents and futures. Under the rubble, rabbit holes might lead to a New Jerusalem.

The Doctor picks up a sharp rock. Ian evidently suspects that the Doctor intends to do something brutally pragmatic and brain Za with it. The Doctor claims he wanted to ask Za to draw a map back to the ship.

Either way, the Doctor saw a rock and decided to use it as a tool. Given that this story is about ‘cavemen’ who are dying out because they’ve forgotten how to use their own technology, I think this is pretty big.…

November 17, 2012

People Like Us

Jack Graham benny, gods, history, lawrence miles, monarchy, new adventures, syriza, the wheel of ice, walking to babylon, working class 0

Lawrence Miles on ‘nice-but-then‘ syndrome:

Re-writing the whole world in order to prop up a specifically late-twentieth-century agenda is bad enough, but WALKING TO BABYLON sets about re-writing the whole of history. Lady Ninan is supposedly a resident of ancient Babylon, but speaks and acts like a twentieth- century post-feminist liberal, thus “proving” that “people like us” have been making the world a lovely place in which to live throughout history; despite living in a city under constant threat of foreign attack, the Lady lets Bernice, a complete stranger and obvious alien, stay in her house without any form of introduction simply on the pretext that “people like us” have to stick together; Bernice has a relationship with a (Victorian, or early Edwardian?) traveller- cum-archaeologist who, despite the Victorian era’s notoriety for male violence, bigotry and misogeny [sic] turns out to be such a “new man” that he becomes a stereotypical perfect gentleman from a Barbara Cartland novel; the two of them embark on a relationship which has every possible jagged edge systematically smoothed away by the text, almost as a demonstration of how nice, kind, polite and utterly unthreatening men can be picked up in any historical period; he’s even completely unaware of the existence of male prostitution (!) – despite being well-schooled in history and hailing from an era in which most of the major scandals of the day involved public figures being found in homosexual brothels – in order to sledgehammer home the fact that he’s so non-existant as a sexual presence that he can’t possibly cause Bernice any harm or heartache, and as all good twentieth-century liberals know that’s what good relationships are made of.

It’s not just the fact that any historical context is thrown straight out of the window. It’s the fact that it’s been done to facilitate such a false, banal, “consensus-approved” romance. The uber-politics of WALKING TO BABYLON are presented as an ideal, but to put it bluntly if I lived in an “ideal” world this sterile then I’d kill myself in a week. It’d be going too far to compare the novel to the kind of disinfected, state-endorsed culture described in books like 1984, but I’m going to anyway because that’s how it made me feel.

Yet WALKING TO BABYLON went straight to the top of the New Adventure polls when it was released, and in a sense it’s not surprising. It tells the audience exactly what that audience wants to hear. Act in the “proper” manner and you, too, can live in a lovely soft- edged universe where everybody believes in exactly the same principles, regardless of their background or century, and you might even get to have sex with – according to your preference – either (a) Bernice or (b) a pretty, blushing young man who might as well have been lobotomized for all the personality he’s got. This isn’t a romance, this is Newspeak- culture, and like all Newspeak-culture it works because it’s essentially reassuring.

– Lawrence Miles, interview, 2001.

…