Graham Stewart

Writing to discover what I think and believe in increasingly fractured times

graham stewart

Something for the weekend: Jan 22nd 2021

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Three quotations to stir your thinking

Photo by Nathon Oski on Unsplash

Here are three quotations I copied into my notes today, each pertinent to this moment. Something to ponder over the weekend.

The first is from an article by Paul Street on Counterpunch. The subject of the article is the false assumption that the US is, in any way, a democracy. This obviously challenges the received wisdom that the US is both a shining example of democracy and that the mission of this country that believes in its own exceptionalism is to export democracy into the dark corners of the world. Any examination of the history of US foreign policy (or should that be foreign intervention) in the decades since the Second World War quickly finds that the phrase ‘export democracy’ should be read as ‘destroy democracy’.

[The US] is a capitalist country, to say the least. Capitalism and democracy, falsely and absurdly conflated with each other in American ideology, are not merely different things. They are fundamentally opposed to one another, for an ever-present democracy-cancelling tendency towards the greater concentration of wealth in fewer hands is a central characteristic of capitalism…

My second quotation comes from the latest bulletin from the Media Lens team. The bulletin has illuminating things to say on topics such as Assange, corporate media, and, of course, corporate media’s non-coverage of the B’Tselem report calling out Israel for its apartheid policies. But the piece ends with a sharp look at the climate crisis — and the part played by capitalism. (There’s a theme here.)

We have arrived at this terminal stage of capitalism because we are being held in a death-grip by a system of economics and exploitation that is coated with a veneer of ‘democracy’, ‘freedom’, ‘progress’ and other convenient ideological myths. The corporate media has sold the public those myths, perpetuating and deepening the various interlocking crises that threaten to wipe out homo sapiens, along with countless other species.

From the Media Lens bulletin January 20th 2021

On a slightly more cheerful note, here’s a quotation from Barbara Tuchman about the power books — always close to my heart. This quotation came at the end of this week’s newsletter from James Clear. In conjunction with the previous quotations, though, I think it also lets us ponder the general attack on culture that is being led by the right. Education — and the power of books — is seen now as a two-tier thing. The children of anyone but the wealthy are regarded as little more than potential fodder for the ever-widening maw of the service industry. To be able to read is one thing; to be able to read history and philosophy and to use that to form opinions and to deduce that capitalism and the rule of the oligarchs may not be the best way to guarantee a future for the planet, is definitely not to be encouraged. Tuchman’s quotation expresses exactly why the oligarchs fear books.

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are engines of change (as the poet said), windows on the world and lighthouses erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind.  Books are humanity in print.

Have a great weekend of reading and pondering.

Too many books, too little time…

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… too much guilt and not enough space

Not my real shelves: Photo by Jonathan Singer on Unsplash

Two weeks ago to the day I posted about my resolution to cut back on my book buying. No, I haven’t relapsed and ordered a bucket load of new reads. I have, however, been adding books to my basket in Amazon and Verso. That’s a bit like an alcoholic in the early days sitting in the local pub and watching people ordering drinks. So far, so good, though.

But I have decided to make a change to the rules I established on January 7th. Partly, this is because I have cut back on reading. Work and my own writing are now eating into what used to be my reading time. And, for that, I’m almost grateful. For a long time I wanted to change the ratio of writing and reading. This month has seen a dramatic swing away from reading.

At the same time, my wife and I are having increasingly frequent discussions about moving house. Where and when remain unresolved but it will happen, and it will mean moving to a smaller property, which is unlikely to have room for my books. I estimate that at least half of the ones I own now will have to go. Actually, thinking about it, let’s say two thirds.

As I’m unlikely to refrain from buying new books at all, new rules are required. I have a reading list. I’m keeping it at ten books at a time. (I don’t read them one at a time or ‘in order’ but I do stick to books on the list.) Whenever a book on the list is done, it will move to the keep or purge pile. If it moves to ‘keep’, I need to find a book for ‘purge’. That’s straightforward enough.

Then I have the choice to add a book I own to the list or to buy a new book. However, if I want to buy a book, then a total of three books have to find their way to the purge pile.

Putting so many rules around reading and buying books might sound excessive but, truthfully, I’ve got to the point that I find the weight of my collection oppressive. Things I’ve read and enjoyed, I’m happy to see and to think I will read again. There are things I’m happy to see on the shelves that I haven’t read, and I look forward to reading. But there are a lot of books I bought on a whim and which I full intended to read but which now simply sit glowering at me. I feel I ‘should’ read them but there are other books I want to read now and I know I’ll never get back to the volumes casting their passive aggression my way.

So, without getting all Marie Kondo on my shelves, I anticipate the year ahead will be a mix of pain and relief. One positive side-effect, I hope, will be no more impulse buying and no more books that arrive, fall out the box, and are put on a shelf and ignored. I can but hope.

And I’m sure you want to know the ten books on my list at present. Fair enough, but here they are, anyway:
• The Case for a Job Guarantee by Pavlina R. Tcherneva — published by Polity
• Several Short Sentences about Writing by Verlyn Klinkenborg — published by Vintage
• Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott — published by Anchor (definitely a ‘keep’)
• Debt by David Graeber — published by Melville House
• The Deficit Myth by Stephanie Kelton — published by John Murray
• The Lonely City by Olivia Laing — published by Canongate
• Politics and Letters by Raymond Williams — published by Verso
• Fascism by David Renton — published by Pluto
• The Penguin Book of Oulipo edited by Philip Terry — published by Penguin
• Knife of Dreams by Robert Jordan — published by Orbit

Trump is just Biden his time

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A bad pun for the end of the world

Photo by Claudio Schwarz | @purzlbaum on Unsplash

There is relief, of course, that Trump has gone. After Trump, it’s hard to conceive of any president that would actually be worse in all ways presidential — outwardly at least. On the other hand, it’s very easy to conceive of many presidents that would offer more hope for real change than Joe Biden.

When your best feature is that you’re not your predecessor, it’s a good indication that expectations are low. And Biden’s cabinet picks so far appear to indicate that he’s not about to raise expectations any time soon.

The Democrats, after sabotaging Sanders in successive campaigns, have once again managed to select their Wall Street candidate. Like Labour in the UK, they seem to think that creeping to the right but calling themselves centrists is the way to gather the trust of a generation of working class voters they have sold out to neoliberal unregulated free market capitalism.

It’s not. An unconscionably large number of voters chose Trump. Again, in spite of all the evidence of both his venality and ignorance. That is a warning. It’s not a sign of an epidemic of stupidity. It is a sign of a generation who feels unheard and misunderstood.

If many of those fall under the banner of white supremacy this, also, is the result of the double whammy of seeing living standards fall and the propaganda of the right giving them easy targets to blame. The Democrats have fuelled this by promoting global trade agreements that shipped manufacturing jobs overseas, refusing calls for democratising wealth and health, and by demonising, criminalising, and disenfranchising a generation of black men in the name of the war on drugs.

If Biden follows the Obama playbook, there is every chance that Trump — or a smarter version of what ex-England rugby player Brian Moore calls the Mango Mussolini — will surface and run for president in 2024. With every chance of success. And next time, they won’t wait for an election to come around before any incitement to insurrection. There’s a good chance that the first 100 days of the next Trump will be the last we see of America’s so-called democracy.

Just some cheerful thoughts to end the day of Biden’s inauguration. We can only hope that Biden may channel policies more like those of previous vice-president Henry Wallace than those of the more recent vice-president Joe Biden.

Is anyone still surprised by the sheer nastiness of the Tory Party?

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Millions to their friends, cuts for the needy: it’s a catchy slogan

Photo by Shane Rounce on Unsplash

That the Tories are even considering reducing Universal Credit at this time is, perhaps, not shocking. They are Tories, after all. That they are not pushing through pay rises for nurses at a time when not only are health worker hours and commitment stretched beyond imagining is probably par for the course for Tories. This Tory government has now led us to the highest death rate, if not in the world, then at least in Europe. With, I might add, no apology, no acceptance of blame, and certainly no sign of contrition.

And this evening, Tories voted down a move to keep the NHS off the table in future trade deals. You know, the NHS we were clapping for only recently. The reward for valiant service to the nation is for the nation’s leaders to consider you worthy to be sold off to private enterprise. Nice touch, Tories.

I’m not in cheerful mood, as you can tell.

Thinking on these things, I dug out this quotation from my notebook, taken from Astra Taylor’s quite superb book Democracy May Not Exist, But We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone.

“The idea of liberal democracy posits free subjects rationally deliberating and deciding what is best for them. Yet a motivated subset of self-interested elites has dedicated itself to sabotaging broad understanding and deliberation, knowing that there’s money to be made fr4om incomprehension, bewilderment, and strife.”

One of the ways that the ‘self-interested elites’ sabotage the abilities of the majority of us to engage in rational discussion is to undermine education while at the same time ensuring that we are never presented with the full picture. We are shown the world in 2-D, projected against a flat screen in which the world ‘out there’, populated by the people and things that are said will threaten us. There’s no room for nuance, for subtlety. As Taylor goes on to say in the book,

“Today’s purveyors of ignorance are part of a deep tradition, though they are subtler than their predecessors. The ruling class has never been particularly keen on the prospect of ordinary people becoming educated and governing themselves.”

And because there is another quotation in my notebook close to those from Taylor that is perhaps a neat summary of how I’m feeling at the moment, I’ll share that, too. This is from Erik Olin Wright’s How to be an Anticapitalist in the 21st Century — something more and more of will need to be are we to survive as a species.

“Anticapitalism is possible not simply as a moral stance towards the harms and injustices in the world in which we live, but as practical stance towards building an alternative for greater human flourishing.”

Amen to that.

When outsiders and their money drive policy and choose staff…

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…. you don’t have a political party; you have a company department

Photo by Jude Beck on Unsplash

I may have left the Labour Party but it continues to fascinate — a bit like watching a driverless train heading quickly towards the buffers at a deserted station.

What has become clear over the last few days is that the party’s funds seem to be in parlous shape. This has forced Sir Keith Strimmer to abandon any struggle to manage the optics around bowing to the wishes of prospective donors.

To be fair to the man, he can afford the gamble at the moment because the media are occupied with other matters and they already know that Labour under the garden gnome is not going to be a party that threatens the status quo. No attacks on inequality, poverty, and militarism are on the cards.

But with the exodus of many thousands of left-wing members of Labour both at the election of Starmer as leader and then after, when his purge of socialists began, money is now increasingly tight at Labour H.Q. Luckily, a Labour Party now shorn of left-wing policies can go cap in hand to some of the old centrist donors. These are the rich with consciences, the equivalent of the Victorian philanthropists who saved fallen women or set up foundations for foundlings and orphans.

The trouble with being dependent on donors to pay for a party’s infrastructure is that sometimes the donors want reassurances. Centrists don’t want to slip Labour a few million now and suddenly find they’ve sponsored a party that wants to make real change. To actually improve the lives of the majority.

And so we get outcomes that stink, no matter how they’re perfumed with press releases and briefings. One such outcome is the sudden resignation of the leader of Scottish Labour — or, more accurately, after Starmer’s intervention Labour’s Scottish branch. Richard Leonard has long been on the receiving end of attacks from right-wing party colleagues, no doubt briefed from down south about the best ways to undermine a leader.

But a call with prospective donors followed by an indication — at the very least — from Starmer that Leonard should go in order to secure funding in not a good look. But, as I said at the top, Starmer is gambling that looks are not important, especially now. And especially when money is needed to counter the loss in party subscriptions.

There are elections to the Scottish Assembly in May. It’s not the best time to switch leadership, especially when the likely winner of any race is probably on the right of the party and someone leaning more stridently towards unionism. Two of the political positions that more or less led to the destruction of Labour in Scotland in 2015. But still, if the wealthy are prepared to back those positions and keep the party running despite election results, the voters can go hang.

Are we losing trust in The Intercept?

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Greenwald and Poitras both gone…. Not a good look

Snowden, Poitras, and Greenwald were the recipients of the 2014 Carl von Ossietzky medal. Photo: Michael F. Mehnert, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

What it does it say when the co-founders of an organisation both leave within months of each other and both write damning accounts of why they are no longer at the organisation?

I first came across the names of Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras because of their part in the breaking of the Edward Snowden files. Poitras also made the Oscar-winning film Citizenfour about Snowden and the release of the files and Greenwald won a Pulitzer for his reporting on the Snowden story and later released a book-length version of the events and how they related to the burgeoning surveillance culture, called No Place to Hide.

Around the time that the book came out, Poitras, Greenwald, and Jeremy Scahill started publishing on The Intercept, part of First Look Media. This was primarily meant to be a safe space for quality independent journalism. And, by inference, a safe space for whistleblowers.

Given my interest in Snowden and the work of both Poitras and Greenwald up to that point I started reading The Intercept. Not long afterwards, I set up a monthly debit to support the site. I stopped paying at the end of last year after Greenwald left. Greenwald accused The Intercept of censorship of a story involving Joe Biden’s son. The Intercept hot back that Greenwald’s story simply didn’t stand up. I suspect the truth lies somewhere in the middle — how centrist of me — but it wasn’t a good look for The Intercept.

I had also heard that Poitras had left but it is only today that I have read her open letter from January 14th in which she accuses The Intercept of firing her for her outspoken reaction to the company’s internal review regarding the Reality Winner case.

Even if what Poitras says is mistaken — and that is unlikely, given both her qualities as a journalist and her knowledge of security protocols — that fact that The Intercept failed Winner to the extent that a whistleblower ended up with a shocking and unjustifiable prison sentence is an indictment of a company that was set up on the back of some of the most significant and painstaking efforts to protect sources and information.

From the outside, it looks like The Intercept not only made some bad errors originally but they are compounding them by obfuscation and an inability to accept blame.

There are still good stories from time to time on the site but, somehow, the gloss is gone. It is as if The Intercept is simply becoming mainstream and seeking to appease money and power where once they challenged it.