The Red Army Fraction was an armed gang operating in West Germany in the 1970s, organised around a charismatic leader (Andreas Baader) and a skilled publicist (Ulrike Meinhof). Claiming to operate in the name of a revolutionary opposition to Western imperialism, they lived outside the law and showed no mercy to their opponents - police officers in particular. Working underground, with no connections to any broader social movement, the RAF made a virtue of necessity by arguing that mass opposition to imperialism in Germany was impossible: the masses had already been bought out, and would only rally to the revolutionary cause when state repression had brought society close to Fascism. Vastly outnumbered and outgunned, most RAF members were active only briefly before being captured; the 'first generation' RAF carried out its first actions in 1970 and was suppressed in June and July 1972, with the arrest or flight of all its active members. Most of the 'first generation' members of the RAF committed suicide when in prison - Meinhof in August 1976, having been held for four years awaiting trial; Baader and three others in October 1977, after being found guilty of multiple murders and sentenced to life imprisonment. Sympathisers formed second- and even third-generation versions of the RAF, which were dedicated mainly to actions in support of the original RAF. The afterlife of the RAF ended only in 1998, when the 'third generation' RAF wound itself up.
Why study a group like this? Their membership was small; their actions weren't very numerous or very significant; their political programme was designed around the group itself (emphasising the need for violence and dismissing the possibility of mass activity); and, perhaps not surprisingly, they didn't change society in any way (except in the sense of justifying police modernisation). All in all it's a thoroughly nasty story, and arguably not a very important one.
I think it is worth studying, though, for two reasons.
Firstly, in prison the members of the first-generation RAF were treated with
several different forms of brutality (some of them superficially quite
civilised); many died in prison and some may have been murdered. This shouldn't have been necessary:
if the RAF's political programme was crazy and their criticisms were overstated (which they very largely were),
the authorities should have been able to let them speak freely; they shouldn't have had anything to worry about.
This
relates to the second point: the RAF wasn't just a gang of armed robbers. Exploiting their notoriety, they put forward well-worked out criticisms of the West German government and its involvement in Western imperialism, and gained a substantial audience for them. This shouldn't have been possible: officially, West Germany was a peaceful and prosperous country, which had put its Nazi past well behind it and had no concerns about its Communist neighbour to the East. When the RAF talked about "heightening the contradictions" within society to the point of provoking a Fascist crackdown, the goal was wildly unrealistic (not to mention irresponsible), but the contradictions were real: they were living in a free society in which Communism was banned, a democratic society in which ex-members of the SS held positions of responsibility.
In terms of the typology we looked at last week, the RAF carried out spontaneist violence which became reformist violence: they became figureheads for a section of society which felt itself to be excluded from the political system. The RAF's ultimate achievement was to bring that sense of exclusion to light and giving those people's voices some representation, in however distorted a form; it's because of this achievement that they couldn't be suppressed quickly and easily, and shouldn't now be forgotten.
Wednesday 30 October 2013
Wednesday 23 October 2013
Week 4: Organised political violence in Italy
In lieu of a blog post, here's a couple of quotes from my book (not in the MMU library, unfortunately, but if anyone's interested I may be able to dig out an electronic copy). Communists, cycles of protests, people playing with bombs - as far as extremism goes, it's all there.
One final quote, from the novel The Unseen by Nanni Balestrini. The narrator's friend has visited him in prison, where he's awaiting trial for membership of an armed group (he's not guilty, but he refuses to denounce people he regarded as his friends).
On 12 December 1969, a bomb ... exploded in Milan, in the Banca Nazionale dell’Agricoltura in Piazza Fontana, causing 16 deaths. The initial investigation was led by the police officer in charge of monitoring the local radical Left, Luigi Calabresi; his investigation focused on a local anarchist group. While being interrogated, the anarchist Giuseppe Pinelli fell, or was pushed, from the fourth-floor window of Calabresi’s office. On the Left, Piazza Fontana was immediately (and, as it turned out, correctly) labelled a state massacre; the bombing, the death of Pinelli and the subsequent repression were widely believed to form part of the Right’s preparations for a coup
While the term ‘terrorist’ cannot entirely be avoided in discussing ['armed struggle' groups, a sharp distinction must be drawn between their actions and terrorist acts such as the Piazza Fontana bomb: indiscriminately lethal attacks on apolitical targets, calculated to produce maximum alarm. The actions of the ‘armed struggle’ groups were mainly directed against property rather than people; all violence against the person was directed against individuals, and most was non-lethal; and targets were invariably selected for political or strategic reasons, albeit with varying degrees of accuracy. Interviewed by a former member of the BR [Red Brigades] in 1997, former Minister of the Interior Francesco Cossiga went so far as to deny that the BR had been terrorists: ‘Terrorists plant bombs in cinemas. This was something else: your forms of action were precisely those of the partisan war’
in 1973 the BR would commit itself to ‘the war against fascism which is not only the fascism of [neo-fascist] black shirts but the fascism of ... Christian Democrat white shirts [and] the resistance inside the factories’ ... this formulation both subsumes contemporary anti-fascism into a broader struggle against capitalism, and validates the BR’s conception of that struggle by tying it to images of Resistance anti-fascism. ... the BR exploited the emotional appeal of the Resistance even as they reconceptualised it.
"Austerity, by definition, means restrictions on certain availabilities to which we have become accustomed . . . But we are deeply convinced that to replace certain habits of life with others that are more exacting and not extravagant, can lead not to a worsening in the quality of life, but to substantial improvement, to growth in the ‘humanity’ of life" (Communist Party leader Enrico Berlinguer recommending pay cuts, January 1977)
On 15 February [1977], Communist Party members in Rome forced entry to the university and held a meeting, which concluded by proposing a public meeting for two days later. The aim was to break the occupation ... Speaking from the back of a lorry, surrounded by union stewards, [Communist union leader] Lama was faced by an absurd and vicious parody: a dummy mounted on a set of library steps, surrounded by Metropolitan Indians and bearing a pink cardboard heart with the message ‘Nessuno Lama’ (‘Nobody loves him’). Chanting ironic slogans such as ‘More work, less pay!’ and ‘Poverty to the workers!’, the Indians pelted the stewards with water and paint. Lama exhorted his audience to save the university from the autonomist provocateurs: "We must fight and defeat fascism, reactionary temptations, subversive provocations, every form of violence and every irrational temptation. Breaking windows and smashing up university buildings ... only damages the students’ cause. The workers’ movement ... also fought against fascism by jealously defending the factories, preventing them from being destroyed". After his address the stewards counter-attacked, destroying the Indians’ dummy. The fighting escalated ... by the end of the day the autonomists had driven the Communists out and withdrawn, after which the campus was evacuated and surrounded by police
[For the Communists] what was unacceptable about the movements was that they used violence; what was unacceptable about the violence of the movements was that it was carried out by the movements. The Party’s critique of ‘violence’ and ‘intolerance’ can be understood as a form of scapegoating, loading the movements (and the Autonomists, above all) with all that was unruly and troubling about physical force tactics while associating the Party itself with ‘firmness’ and ‘discipline’.
After the peaceful demobilisation of the first cycle of contention in the early 1970s, the autonomists ... were still able to go in search of new repertoires. By 1979, the activists of the second cycle had been comprehensively excluded from the workplace, from working-class communities and from the streets; there was almost no one left standing, apart from the BR. As a result, significant numbers of activists moved on to the terrain which the BR had prepared. It was the ideological and physical exclusion of a strong movement, rather than the absorption of a movement in decline, which gave a brief period of mass support to armed struggle tactics, as well as helping the more organised armed groups to gain an extended lease of life.
The hostility of the Communists towards the armed groups and the remnants of Autonomia reached its peak in April 1979. On 7 April the Communist-aligned judge Pietro Calogero issued a warrant for the arrest of [twelve] autonomists, who were accused of involvement with the BR. According to the ‘Calogero theorem’, the BR, the smaller armed groups and the area of Autonomia made up a single subversive organisation, operating on overt and clandestine levels. Successive waves of arrests, and a series of qualifications to Calogero’s highly coloured model, followed in June, July and December 1979
For the most committed activists of the armed groups, the closure forced by Calogero seems, like the 1977 closure of engagement with the mass movements, to have prompted a renewed commitment to yet more confrontational repertoires. ... the years after 1979 saw some of the worst excesses of the ‘years of lead’, with a dwindling number of groups carrying out more violent actions.
One final quote, from the novel The Unseen by Nanni Balestrini. The narrator's friend has visited him in prison, where he's awaiting trial for membership of an armed group (he's not guilty, but he refuses to denounce people he regarded as his friends).
I said to him I ask myself sometimes now it’s all over I ask myself what did it all mean our whole story all the things we did what did we get from all the things we did he said I don’t believe it matters that it’s all over I believe what matters is that we did what we did and that we think it was the right thing to do that’s the only thing that matters I believe
Wednesday 16 October 2013
Week 3: The Left
It’s coming through a hole in the air,
from those nights in Tiananmen Square.
It’s coming from the feel
that this ain’t exactly real,
or it’s real, but it ain’t exactly there.
From the wars against disorder,
from the sirens night and day,
from the fires of the homeless,
from the ashes of the gay:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.It’s coming through a crack in the wall;
on a visionary flood of alcohol;
from the staggering account
of the Sermon on the Mount
which I don’t pretend to understand at all.
It’s coming from the silence
on the dock of the bay,
from the brave, the bold, the battered
heart of Chevrolet:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.
What's this about - how can it possibly make sense to say that democracy is coming to the U.S.A.? And what does it have to do with the history of left-wing extremism?
Glad you asked.
The word 'left' - and related words like 'radical' - started to be used in politics in the eighteenth century, the period of the French Revolution and the American declaration of independence. What these words meant, back then, had to do with being in favour of democracy: if you were on the Left, you weren't happy with monarchy, aristocracy, hierarchy, tradition and so on. If you wanted democracy you were on the Left; if you thought that somebody else wanted too much democracy, you'd say they were on the radical Left.
In the mid-nineteenth century what Marx called "the question of property" began to be at the centre of political debate. The question was not whether citizens should be politically equal (that battle was in the process of being won) but whether they should be materially equal. For Marx this was related to the question of class power, and class struggle. Perhaps foreshortening the historical process slightly, Marx envisaged the confrontation between workers and bosses (proletariat and bourgeoisie) ending in the revolutionary victory of the workers, just as the confrontation between the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy had ended in a bourgeois victory.
These are often seen as two very different political battles, but I would argue - as Ralph Miliband argued, and Alexis de Tocqueville before him - that the "question of property" was also the question of democracy: what the workers of Marx's time were demanding was, precisely, the right to manage their own work and their own livelihood, rather than being dependent on capitalists and subordinate to them. The battle of democracy had been won on one front; it shifted to another.
The record of socialism and Communism in the twentieth century was, it has to be said, mixed. On one hand, we can't deny that the defeat of the Nazi regime was very largely the achievement of Stalin's Red Army. On the other, if you had the choice you wouldn't want to be in Stalin's Red Army, or a citizen of Stalin's USSR for that matter. The total collapse of Communism as an economic and political system after 1989 told its own story: nobody believed in the system - or had done for some time - and they didn't believe in it because it didn't work. Perhaps the greatest achievement of Communism was to hold up the possibility of an alternative. For many years, governments in the West felt that they needed to make some concession to demands for workers' rights and socialised welfare, because the alternative might be an upheaval that could take their country into the Communist orbit. The rise of neo-liberalism coincides quite closely with the disappearance of the Communist bloc; I don't think it's a coincidence.
Be that as it may, throughout the 20th century the Communist bloc seemed to be - and claimed to be - the socialist alternative to capitalism, and it didn't look too inviting. Perhaps it was this perceived blockage to the left which led to the emergence of a third version of the Left: a Left which stressed individual freedom and creativity, which celebrated disrespect for authority and demanded the right to re-create everyday life. And this new Left - inventive, intransigent, confrontational, sometimes comical, sometimes alarming - did what the socialist Left had never achieved (at least in one country), immobilising France in a wildcat general strike and bringing it to the brink of revolution.
Perhaps more importantly, the tactics and ideas and attitude of this mid-20th-century Left - the creativity, the disrespect, the intransigence - have contributed some major innovations to the language of the mainstream Left, and they continue to do so. The Situationist approach to politics was echoed by Occupy: like the Situationists, the Occupy movement demanded the right to democratise the present moment, transforming everyday life into revolutionary festivity.
Can we fit this very different form of leftism into the same framework as the earlier ones? I htink we can. The English revolutionaries of 1649, the American revolutionaries of 1776 and the French revolutionaries of 1789 wanted political democracy, abolishing aristocratic rule. The revolutionaries of 1848, 1917, 1949 wanted economic democracy, abolishing the rule of capital.The Situationists in 1968 and Occupy in 2011-12 wanted democracy in an even more far-reaching form, abolishing all forms of unaccountable authority. It's a continuing story, and it hasn't ended yet.
Next week we'll be looking at how a similar movement played out in Italy, and - unhappily - how parts of the movement drifted into the blind alley of terrorism.
The word 'left' - and related words like 'radical' - started to be used in politics in the eighteenth century, the period of the French Revolution and the American declaration of independence. What these words meant, back then, had to do with being in favour of democracy: if you were on the Left, you weren't happy with monarchy, aristocracy, hierarchy, tradition and so on. If you wanted democracy you were on the Left; if you thought that somebody else wanted too much democracy, you'd say they were on the radical Left.
In the mid-nineteenth century what Marx called "the question of property" began to be at the centre of political debate. The question was not whether citizens should be politically equal (that battle was in the process of being won) but whether they should be materially equal. For Marx this was related to the question of class power, and class struggle. Perhaps foreshortening the historical process slightly, Marx envisaged the confrontation between workers and bosses (proletariat and bourgeoisie) ending in the revolutionary victory of the workers, just as the confrontation between the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy had ended in a bourgeois victory.
These are often seen as two very different political battles, but I would argue - as Ralph Miliband argued, and Alexis de Tocqueville before him - that the "question of property" was also the question of democracy: what the workers of Marx's time were demanding was, precisely, the right to manage their own work and their own livelihood, rather than being dependent on capitalists and subordinate to them. The battle of democracy had been won on one front; it shifted to another.
The record of socialism and Communism in the twentieth century was, it has to be said, mixed. On one hand, we can't deny that the defeat of the Nazi regime was very largely the achievement of Stalin's Red Army. On the other, if you had the choice you wouldn't want to be in Stalin's Red Army, or a citizen of Stalin's USSR for that matter. The total collapse of Communism as an economic and political system after 1989 told its own story: nobody believed in the system - or had done for some time - and they didn't believe in it because it didn't work. Perhaps the greatest achievement of Communism was to hold up the possibility of an alternative. For many years, governments in the West felt that they needed to make some concession to demands for workers' rights and socialised welfare, because the alternative might be an upheaval that could take their country into the Communist orbit. The rise of neo-liberalism coincides quite closely with the disappearance of the Communist bloc; I don't think it's a coincidence.
Be that as it may, throughout the 20th century the Communist bloc seemed to be - and claimed to be - the socialist alternative to capitalism, and it didn't look too inviting. Perhaps it was this perceived blockage to the left which led to the emergence of a third version of the Left: a Left which stressed individual freedom and creativity, which celebrated disrespect for authority and demanded the right to re-create everyday life. And this new Left - inventive, intransigent, confrontational, sometimes comical, sometimes alarming - did what the socialist Left had never achieved (at least in one country), immobilising France in a wildcat general strike and bringing it to the brink of revolution.
Perhaps more importantly, the tactics and ideas and attitude of this mid-20th-century Left - the creativity, the disrespect, the intransigence - have contributed some major innovations to the language of the mainstream Left, and they continue to do so. The Situationist approach to politics was echoed by Occupy: like the Situationists, the Occupy movement demanded the right to democratise the present moment, transforming everyday life into revolutionary festivity.
Can we fit this very different form of leftism into the same framework as the earlier ones? I htink we can. The English revolutionaries of 1649, the American revolutionaries of 1776 and the French revolutionaries of 1789 wanted political democracy, abolishing aristocratic rule. The revolutionaries of 1848, 1917, 1949 wanted economic democracy, abolishing the rule of capital.The Situationists in 1968 and Occupy in 2011-12 wanted democracy in an even more far-reaching form, abolishing all forms of unaccountable authority. It's a continuing story, and it hasn't ended yet.
Next week we'll be looking at how a similar movement played out in Italy, and - unhappily - how parts of the movement drifted into the blind alley of terrorism.
Play us out, Leonard:
From the church where the outcasts can hidefrom the Masque where the blood is dignified
like the fingers on your handlike an hourglass of sand
we can separate but not divide.
And I know your baby’s missingbut we sighted her today,
she was cleaning her machine-gun,she was waving her beret:Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.
Wednesday 9 October 2013
Week 2: Extremism - threat or source of innovation?
In this lecture I introduced the idea of the 'protest cycle', and a range of other concepts from the sociology of social movements. Briefly:
Secondly, in the penultimate phase only some of the new frames and tactics get adopted: some are rejected - and labelled as unacceptably extreme, violent etc. As Charles Tilly said, before strike action was legal in the USA it took a far wider range of forms than it did after it was legalised: legalising strikes meant legalising a certain way of taking strike action, and criminalising all the rest.
Thirdly, this isn't the only way a protest cycle can end; it can also end with all of the movement's frames and tactics being rejected, and the movement being repressed out of existence. In this situation, as I've argued, disappointed activists are far more likely to resort to violence than if the cycle had ended well. Moreover, in this situation everything the social movement had to offer has effectively been dismissed and labelled as 'extreme'. In hindsight, this creates the impression that the social movement genuinely was unacceptably extreme, and that its new tactics and frames never could have been adopted. Negative closure to a protest cycle both makes violence more likely and gives future historians a job of archaeology, digging out the more hopeful possibilities from beneath the dismissive labels that were applied to them.
This model of the relationship between protest cycles and violence isn't universally shared; some argue that activist minorities start using violent tactics because the success of a protest cycle has left them with nothing to do - or else that they do it just because they like using violent tactics. However, it is testable, to some extent: if violence is a response to system closure, opening the political system up a bit should lead to less violence.
Here's a recent news story which seems relevant:
Meet the new boss (Obsolete)
What do you think? Should the Quilliam foundation be blamed for giving a veneer of respectability to the English Defence League's Islamophobic ideas? Or should they be praised for bringing Robinson into the political mainstream and thus making violent anti-Muslim protest less likely? (Or both?)
- a social movement (a diffuse group united by a cultural identity, opposition to the status quo and autonomy from the political sphere)
- forms in response to system blockage, i.e. being unable to get what they want through legitimate political routes
- it uses new and innovative tactics (in the seminar you came up with the idea of a mass 'smoke-in' to protest against cannabis being illegal)
- and puts forward new and modified frames (ways of 'framing' issues so as to make the movement's position more persuasive; an example would be comparing the dangers of using cannabis with those of using alcohol)
- and keeps pushing (while the political mainstream pushes back) until
- some of the new frames and tactics gets adopted;
- the movement then subsides
Secondly, in the penultimate phase only some of the new frames and tactics get adopted: some are rejected - and labelled as unacceptably extreme, violent etc. As Charles Tilly said, before strike action was legal in the USA it took a far wider range of forms than it did after it was legalised: legalising strikes meant legalising a certain way of taking strike action, and criminalising all the rest.
Thirdly, this isn't the only way a protest cycle can end; it can also end with all of the movement's frames and tactics being rejected, and the movement being repressed out of existence. In this situation, as I've argued, disappointed activists are far more likely to resort to violence than if the cycle had ended well. Moreover, in this situation everything the social movement had to offer has effectively been dismissed and labelled as 'extreme'. In hindsight, this creates the impression that the social movement genuinely was unacceptably extreme, and that its new tactics and frames never could have been adopted. Negative closure to a protest cycle both makes violence more likely and gives future historians a job of archaeology, digging out the more hopeful possibilities from beneath the dismissive labels that were applied to them.
This model of the relationship between protest cycles and violence isn't universally shared; some argue that activist minorities start using violent tactics because the success of a protest cycle has left them with nothing to do - or else that they do it just because they like using violent tactics. However, it is testable, to some extent: if violence is a response to system closure, opening the political system up a bit should lead to less violence.
Here's a recent news story which seems relevant:
EDL leader Tommy Robinson quits group (BBC News)
English Defence League leader and founder Tommy Robinson has left the group, saying he has concerns over the "dangers of far-right extremism". ... Mr Robinson said it was still his aim to "counter Islamist ideology", although "not with violence but with better, democratic ideas".and a blog post commenting on it, with some interesting links:
...
The EDL, formed in 2009, has organised marches and demonstrations in several cities across the UK, which have seen sometimes violent confrontations with anti-fascism campaigners. Mr Robinson's co-leader, Kevin Carroll, has also opted to leave. Their decision follows discussions with the Quilliam group, which describes itself as a "counter-extremism think tank".
Meet the new boss (Obsolete)
When the Quilliam Foundation offers to reinvent you as an completely legitimate political commentator, why on earth wouldn't you take them up on it? ... Quilliam will ignore all the evidence that makes clear you're still a thug who's read a few far-right blogs and books ... and instead present you as someone who merely needs "encouraging" in your "critique of Islamism". Who wouldn't sign up when a government-funded think-tank simply decides to forget that you deliberately conflated Islamic extremism and Islam in general on innumerable occasions?
What do you think? Should the Quilliam foundation be blamed for giving a veneer of respectability to the English Defence League's Islamophobic ideas? Or should they be praised for bringing Robinson into the political mainstream and thus making violent anti-Muslim protest less likely? (Or both?)
Wednesday 2 October 2013
Week 1: Ideologies and extremes
First off, I'd like to thank everyone who turned up and took part in the teaching session on Tuesday. Let me know if you've got any comments on the teaching style, e.g. the use of a single session with short lectures alternating with exercises.
Ideology was the main topic of the lecture. As you will have seen, it's a complicated concept with a lot of different, and partly overlapping, interpretations. I think the key features of ideology are:
The other main business of the session was to do some thinking about 'left' and 'right'. On this subject I have an apology to make, to the people in the back couple of rows in particular. I came up with those names on bits of paper, and I'd like to apologise for some of the selections - I went a bit far into Politics Geek territory. For anyone who's interested, here are all forty names, with the odd note:
Adolf Hitler
Gregor Strasser - also a Nazi; an early ally of Hitler, who had him killed for being (a) a potential rival and (b) too left-wing (as Nazis go)
Benito Mussolini
General Agosto Pinochet - Chilean dictator, who took power in a military coup in 1973. Margaret Thatcher was an admirer and a personal friend.
General Franco - Spanish Falangist (quasi-Fascist) dictator from 1939 to his death in 1975.
Margaret Thatcher
Ian Paisley - prominent and highly vocal leader of Northern Ireland's Protestant community; strongly anti-Catholic and quite right-wing in other areas.
David Cameron
George Osborne
Winston Churchill
General Charles de Gaulle - like Churchill, a great anti-Fascist war leader who was also well over on the Right of domestic (in this case French) politics
Angela Merkel - leader of main German right-wing Christian party, and of Germany
Aldo Moro - leader of main Italian right-wing Christian party in the 1970s; kidnapped and assassinated by the Red Brigades (more about this later in the unit)
Vince Cable
Nick Clegg
Tony Blair
David Miliband - Ed's more Blairite, and hence more right-wing, brother
Gordon Brown
Neil Kinnock - leader of the Labour Party from 1983 to 1992
Justin Welby (Archbishop Of Canterbury)
Jorge Mario Bergoglio (Pope Francis) - two new religious leaders, both sounding remarkably left-wing at the moment
Ed Miliband
Michael Foot - leader of the Labour Party from 1979 to 1983
Clement Attlee - UK Prime Minister from 1945 to 1951; oversaw the building of the NHS and the welfare state
Martin McGuinness - former Chief of Staff of the IRA; now Northern Ireland's deputy First Minister. Quite moderate politically, if you set aside the whole IRA thing.
Nelson Mandela - suspected Communist guerrilla turned elder statesman
Palmiro Togliatti - leader of the Italian Communist Party from 1927 until his death in 1964
Ralph Miliband - Ed's Marxist father, recently the subject of an extensive profile in the Daily Mail
Alexander Dubcek - reformist leader of Communist Czechoslovakia, who came to power in 1968 and was deposed in 1969
Mikhail Gorbachev - reformist leader of the Communist USSR, who came to power in 1985 and was deposed in 1991, after which the USSR dissolved
Antonio Gramsci - Italian Communist intellectual who did much of his best work in a Fascist prison
Leonid Brezhnev - leader of the USSR from 1964 until his death in 1982
Chairman Mao Zedong - leader of Communist China from 1949 until his death in 1976
Paul Foot - Trotskyist writer, nephew of Michael
Karl Marx
These 35 are listed more or less from Right to Left. The other five names are a bit harder to locate:
Mikhail Bakunin
Buenaventura Durruti - both Bakunin and Durruti were anarchists (in nineteenth-century Russia and twentieth-century Spain respectively). Does that make them very, very left-wing, or are anarchists neither left nor right? More on this later.
Kim Jong Un - the North Korean dictator is hard to locate on any sort of political spectrum; you could equally plausibly locate him on the extreme Left and the extreme Right.
Osama Bin Laden - is a global Islamic caliphate, to be brought about by unremitting war on democratic and secular nations, a right-wing demand?
Emmeline Pankhurst - leader of the Suffragettes, who campaigned for allowing adult women to vote in elections. They - and this demand - were seen as quite radical at the time.
Ideology was the main topic of the lecture. As you will have seen, it's a complicated concept with a lot of different, and partly overlapping, interpretations. I think the key features of ideology are:
- An ideology is a system of ideas. "Marriage is a good thing" plus "People should pay less tax" doesn't make an ideology. "Marriage is a good thing" plus "We should bring back grammar schools" plus "The country is changing too quickly" is an ideology - a set of interconnected ideas with a central theme, in this case the theme of how much better things were in the old days.
- An ideology explains how things are. Ideologies aren't just a set of linked ideas. If you believe that politics, education and TV have all changed a lot in the last decade, that's not necessarily an ideological belief; it may just be an observation. An ideological belief relates different ideas back to an idea about how the world is: politics, education and TV have all changed because of increasing commercialisation / the growing influence of PC liberals / etc.
- An ideology positions you. If you're on the Left, you're not on the Right, and vice versa. If you see yourself as definitely Left or Right, you probably won't agree with people who maintain that they're neither Left nor Right.
- A more controversial point: ideologies always have to do with power. For Marxists, the ideology of the ruling class expresses the dominance of that class in the medium of ideas. Not everyone will agree with this analysis - but, even from a non-Marxist point of view, ideology is always about who is in power and who ought to be in power, who has too much power (e.g. "PC liberals") and who doesn't have enough (e.g. "ordinary decent people").
The other main business of the session was to do some thinking about 'left' and 'right'. On this subject I have an apology to make, to the people in the back couple of rows in particular. I came up with those names on bits of paper, and I'd like to apologise for some of the selections - I went a bit far into Politics Geek territory. For anyone who's interested, here are all forty names, with the odd note:
Adolf Hitler
Gregor Strasser - also a Nazi; an early ally of Hitler, who had him killed for being (a) a potential rival and (b) too left-wing (as Nazis go)
Benito Mussolini
General Agosto Pinochet - Chilean dictator, who took power in a military coup in 1973. Margaret Thatcher was an admirer and a personal friend.
General Franco - Spanish Falangist (quasi-Fascist) dictator from 1939 to his death in 1975.
Margaret Thatcher
Ian Paisley - prominent and highly vocal leader of Northern Ireland's Protestant community; strongly anti-Catholic and quite right-wing in other areas.
David Cameron
George Osborne
Winston Churchill
General Charles de Gaulle - like Churchill, a great anti-Fascist war leader who was also well over on the Right of domestic (in this case French) politics
Angela Merkel - leader of main German right-wing Christian party, and of Germany
Aldo Moro - leader of main Italian right-wing Christian party in the 1970s; kidnapped and assassinated by the Red Brigades (more about this later in the unit)
Vince Cable
Nick Clegg
Tony Blair
David Miliband - Ed's more Blairite, and hence more right-wing, brother
Gordon Brown
Neil Kinnock - leader of the Labour Party from 1983 to 1992
Justin Welby (Archbishop Of Canterbury)
Jorge Mario Bergoglio (Pope Francis) - two new religious leaders, both sounding remarkably left-wing at the moment
Ed Miliband
Michael Foot - leader of the Labour Party from 1979 to 1983
Clement Attlee - UK Prime Minister from 1945 to 1951; oversaw the building of the NHS and the welfare state
Martin McGuinness - former Chief of Staff of the IRA; now Northern Ireland's deputy First Minister. Quite moderate politically, if you set aside the whole IRA thing.
Nelson Mandela - suspected Communist guerrilla turned elder statesman
Palmiro Togliatti - leader of the Italian Communist Party from 1927 until his death in 1964
Ralph Miliband - Ed's Marxist father, recently the subject of an extensive profile in the Daily Mail
Alexander Dubcek - reformist leader of Communist Czechoslovakia, who came to power in 1968 and was deposed in 1969
Mikhail Gorbachev - reformist leader of the Communist USSR, who came to power in 1985 and was deposed in 1991, after which the USSR dissolved
Antonio Gramsci - Italian Communist intellectual who did much of his best work in a Fascist prison
Leonid Brezhnev - leader of the USSR from 1964 until his death in 1982
Chairman Mao Zedong - leader of Communist China from 1949 until his death in 1976
Paul Foot - Trotskyist writer, nephew of Michael
Karl Marx
These 35 are listed more or less from Right to Left. The other five names are a bit harder to locate:
Mikhail Bakunin
Buenaventura Durruti - both Bakunin and Durruti were anarchists (in nineteenth-century Russia and twentieth-century Spain respectively). Does that make them very, very left-wing, or are anarchists neither left nor right? More on this later.
Kim Jong Un - the North Korean dictator is hard to locate on any sort of political spectrum; you could equally plausibly locate him on the extreme Left and the extreme Right.
Osama Bin Laden - is a global Islamic caliphate, to be brought about by unremitting war on democratic and secular nations, a right-wing demand?
Emmeline Pankhurst - leader of the Suffragettes, who campaigned for allowing adult women to vote in elections. They - and this demand - were seen as quite radical at the time.
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