Over the last 18 months we have seen a sea change in resistance and popular consciousness. The Arab Spring has put revolution back on the agenda of global politics.

In Britain, we’ve seen the occupation of Millbank and student revolt, the huge TUC March and now the massive N30 strike. 

I write as an activist who first came into radical politics in the early 2000s during the last wave of radical, anticapitalist mobilisation that put G8 summits under the siege of popular protest.

The anticapitalist and subsequent anti war mobilisations of those times were electrifying. But they did not create a new mass anticapitalist organisation that could challenge the power of the warmongers nor did they stop the wars by mass action.

Whilst the new spirit of revolt is certainly exciting for the possibilities that it opens up for radical shift to the left across Britain, it would be a missed opportunity if we simply participated in the new movements without exploring new avenues for unity, new forms of organisation, that might help us finally overcome years of decline and division.

The fear that many of us have is that without transforming the militancy and energy into a lasting political organisation we won’t realise the promise of the hour.

And the threat posed by this government and the Labour party is very real - within a couple of years the NHS will be privatised, pensions slashed, benefits dramatically reduced, structural unemployment will return to the economy and the clock on civil liberties is being turned generations.

For the radical left the challenge of this moment is enormous. 

Here are ten reasons why I believe we need to form a new anticapitalist organisation in Britain.

1. To challenge Capitalist Realism 

Mark Fisher has called it Capitalist Realism: “the widespread belief that there is no alternative to capitalism”, a logic that resides “in the institutional practices of workplaces and the media as well as... the heads of individuals”.

Even in the face of the biggest capitalist crisis for generations sometimes the most radical movements get caught in the logic of merely promoting reform or taming the system’s worst excesses. 

The world recession has opened the possibility to renew an alternative vision of the left, but it is only a possibility. Defeats can cause demoralisation and pessimism just as victories embolden and broaden horizons. Everything rests on the ability of the left to articulate not just what kind of resistance we need, but what kind of society can come after the IMF and Goldman Sachs are overthrown, and –crucially – how to connect the one to the other, to create a realistic challenge to the existing order from the protests and resistance movements of today.

2. From a culture of resistance, to a challenge to capitalism

#Occupy was a breakthrough moment. Under the barrage of government propaganda about public sector pensions and deficit spending we were losing ground in the argument against the cuts.

But #Occupy changed all that by bringing back into focus a public discussion of capitalism and the market. All the main political parties are now discussing the type of capitalism they want. 

But the challenge is to move from a ‘culture of resistance’ to a challenge to capitalism. Radical demands that once seemed farfetched – like socialising the banks under democratic ownership without compensation to the markets – can now be popularised by new political formations contesting the status quo.

3. Because politics matters

Max Weber famously defined the state as that body which held a “monopoly on the legitimate use of force”. Every single moment of the evolution of the crisis has illustrated the living contradictions involved in this statement. For all social classes and political elites, state power is fundamental to the re-organisation according to their chosen vision. But at every moment state power is also contested – we’ve seen it done routinely by markets in recent years, but in Nigeria in the last days we’ve also seen how workers can do it too. In the process they expose the capitalist class power that lies behind even the most democratic of liberal states. If we are serious about fundamentally changing society we have to think politically – about the types of authority and state power that we want, about those we don’t, and how we should organise to fight for them.

4. Link theory and practice

The New Left Project is an example of the kind of forums that have emerged in the last years that have opened up a new space of discussion amongst radical activists. We all know how essential it is to link theory and practice and we increasingly have forums where it’s being done. But we need to inject the spirit of fraternal discussions from these networks into a new, organised left wing politics.

Some of the new ideas that have emerged on NLP or openDemocracy need to take shape within the movement in a more organised and overtly political way than they have hitherto.

5. Politics needs organisation  

We need a new space for political discussion, but it needs to be orientated to action – we will not be able to transform society without organisation and politics. They both presuppose the other. 

The organisation we want has to reflect our aims – it has to be democratic, open, and orientated to action.  It should be built from below, emphasising democracy and fraternal debate. It needs to think creatively about the difference between the network and a ‘structure’. It has to find a means for mobilisation, while guaranteeing democracy. It will have to be elastic, that is, its form should be flexible and mutable but the content political and radical. It will have to adapt to changing patterns of working class life - the rise in temp workers, the urgent need to organise in dispossessed communities, the kind where the riots happened.

6. Get serious – we need to stop the cuts

Serious political organisation has to have credibility – integrity in its arguments and outlook, and seriousness in its goals. That means being frank about the enormous challenge we face – of how to stop the cuts – and of being equally determined in taking whatever action is necessary to do it. 

We are facing a fundamental restructuring of global capitalism. The post-war welfare state is finished as far as the bosses are concerned, they are just arguing over how quickly to dismantle it. In the face of such tectonic shifts the odd strike or mass protest, no matter how militant, simply isn’t going to cut it. The capitalists have put all their eggs in the baskets of cuts, cuts and privatisation.

We need to be talking about the Anti-CPE struggles in France more, a successful struggle which started with students, broadened out tot he unions and become a genuine mass social movement which brought in millions to defeat a key government policy. We need more victories like that.

7. Transform the unions and working class movement

If we want to stop the cuts we need numbers. Strategically the power of workers to hold up production and distribution is central to any kind of radical change that we want to see. 

We need the kind of social weight that, when mobilised, can bring down governments. That means the unions and working class movement, who can bring millions out on strike, mobilise entire communities, and organise mass demonstrations. But the official structures of the unions, beholden to the restrictive anti-union laws, all too often hold back the kind of action we need. 

A key task, which certainly won’t be easy but is vital nonetheless, is building the kind of grassroots movement across the unions to challenge this bureaucratic layer.

8. An anticapitalist alternative to Labour is needed

In the early 1980s when the Bennite movement was ascendant, the Labour Party was seen by millions as a beacon of radical hope against the Thatcher government.  But the defeat of the left challenge and the rise of the Third Way have, over the last two decades, swung the party irreversibly rightwards. Even the pressure of the biggest economic crisis in living memory did not lead Miliband to back the pension strikes. While he paid lip service to supporting #Occupy he hasn’t promised to reverse a single cut.

The Labour party is not going to move left. Ed Balls has even backed the Tory pay freeze in the public sector.  The one councillor in London who voted against the cuts was expelled, the Labour left is isolated and fighting a losing battle against the prevailing logic of the party which looks more to liberalism with a human face than any kind of radical perspective. The cycle of politics in the post war period, where the Labour party acted as some kind of machine of capture the social flows and breaks of radical politics has largely come to an end. An alternative is needed.

9. But the left is fragmented and isolated  

In a time of capitalist crisis the organised left should be ascendant. But it isn’t.

Despite, generally speaking, involving itself energetically in mobilising resistance, the organised left is weaker in numbers than it was ten years ago and isn't growing in a way commensurate to the crisis of capitalism. Many activists hold back from joining any of the groups. Partly because they don't appear credible, but also because it is the nature of organisations with a long history that they will often insist on a high degree of agreement to an existing body of ideas. Indeed, there has been little in the way of attempts to create forums where activists can discuss and determine the type of politics we need today.   

There is also a problem with elements of the [organised?] left behaving bureaucratically in relation to one another and the new movements. One upshot of this is the ludicrous state of affairs that leaves us without a united anti-cuts campaign and instead with a series of almost identical rivals controlled by different left organisations. This compounds division on the left and substitutes fractious contests for bureaucratic control in place of fraternal discussion of political differences. 

I believe the answer is to build democratic forums, starting locally by drawing in people active in the movements, but then co-ordinating nationally too, where debates around the kind of political organisation we need can be had out in a tolerant atmosphere that isn't simply about discussion but also turning ideas into action. 

Despite the problems, the new political situation is creating powerful pressures for unity. We have to create a new climate of fraternal political discussion – not to put aside our differences, but to clarify them, to work together and to take action.

10. Take the best of the new and old left

The global capitalist crisis also creates a new terrain upon which we can begin to break down some of the often arbitrary divisions between the old and new left. Without a doubt 2011 a key feature of 2011 was the network and occupation. Many people look at the vibrancy, participation and democracy of these movements and see them as a refreshing change to everything the ‘old left’ has to offer.

Often left organisations can go out of their way to lose friends in these movements through manoeuvres or a sheer lack of tact. But we shouldn’t forget there are positive sides to the ‘old’ left too. Yes, the organised left can certainly be dogmatic, but it can also help keep alive memories and lessons of past struggles which would otherwise be forgotten.

In any case, it must be possible for those of us active in the movement, whether we identify with the ‘new’ or ‘old’ left, or neither, to take bold new steps to unity.

It’s in your hands to build a New Left

Unless we find a way to realign the left around a radical perspective that breaks the bottle necks and captures the new mood of resistance, then we will pass through this crisis only to bear witness to new defeats. We will have failed the challenge that is being posed to us all - are we still relevant?

We have seen mass struggles in Britain – the student revolt against fees and for EMA, the N30 pension strike of millions of workers – but besides not (yet) winning their immediate limited cause, they have not spontaneously generated a wider “project”, a strategy to defeat capitalist austerity nor provide a coherent vision of an alternative to the system itself.   

The limits of different sectors fighting separately on “their own” issues and “Capitalist realism” are linked. As Slavoj Zizek has provocatively put it by inverting the usual approach to the question, “It is as if recent events were staged with a calculated risk in order to demonstrate that, even at a time of shattering crisis, there is no viable alternative to capitalism.” Thus, he argues, there is “a real possibility that the main victim of the ongoing crisis will not be capitalism but the Left itself, insofar as its inability to offer a viable global alternative was again made visible to everyone.”

This should not be treated as a counsel of despair but a spur to action, there are tremendous opportunities and capitalist realism is far from insurmountable. 

It would be nice if we had time to sit and contemplate all these issues in their full consideration before we took steps down this road. But, with the movements as they are developing, in the situation we are in, we will have to build this ‘on the move’. It will require a mutual spirit of co-operation, unity and above all, a new spirit of tolerance and respect for one another.

Meetings are already been organised across the country to discuss the new project. If you want to get involved or would like to organise a meeting then email anticapitalistalternative@gmail.com.

Simon Hardy was a spokesperson for the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts (NCAFC) during the student movement of 2010-11. He is a contributor to It Started in Wisconsin: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Labor Protest (Verso 2012) and is currently the editor or Workers Power newspaper.

“Our role, and that of the British Film Institute, should be to support the sector in becoming even more dynamic and entrepreneurial, helping UK producers to make commercially successful pictures that rival the quality and impact of the best international productions.”

Cameron’s comments have been widely criticized. Firstly, they were interpreted as a barely coded attack on some of Britain’s most popular and successful art-house and low-budget filmmakers such as Ken Loach and Mike Leigh, with one unnamed Downing Street source announcing that Leigh’s career was now “over”.

Secondly, critics have been quick to point out that Cameron’s remarks betray a weak grasp of the complexities of the film business. As Ken Loach points out his obligatory BBC interview, it is impossible to accurately predict which films will be commercial successes at the development stage. If it was, then there wouldn’t be a problem.

Furthermore, the idea that Hollywood’s domination of the international markets is down to its dynamism and quality ignores the various monopolistic and uncompetitive practices upon which its commercial success is based. These include things such as control over distribution; saturation marketing and booking; and the capital power and mobility to force down costs such as tax and labour at a global level. In this context, the continuing success of filmmakers like Loach and Leigh demonstrates that, if handled correctly and given a little luck, there is a great demand for films which don’t follow the dominant commercial formats. Take Warp Films producer Mark Herbert, here discussing his biggest commercial success, Four Lions:

“It took £3m at the box office, won festivals, did brilliant business in Germany and France and is up there with big studio films in terms of DVD sales.

"Yet nobody backed that. There was no public money in that. When I was trying to raise the money, I had very experienced funders and producers saying 'Nobody will go and watch this film.'"

"For talent to get to the stage where they can pull off [making] a blockbuster, they need to support the grassroots. It's like having an elite England football team and not supporting any young players."

Commerce and culture

Cameron clearly prefers Harry Potter to This is England, which is fine. The problem is that as an argument for public funding of the cinema it draws an illegitimate distinction between ‘art’ films and ‘commercial’ films.

Industry figures, as ever, remain divided about what is frequently called the commerce-culture debate. Is film an industry much like any other? Or is it special, a cultural good that should not be subject to normal market forces? This is a common argument within cultural sectors, but it is more intense within film culture due to the high amount of capital investment filmmaking requires in comparison to other art forms such as novels, plays, paintings and so on. However, while the argument about public subsidy of the cinema is often put in these terms, the commerce-culture distinction actually mystifies the arguments around film. Simply put, there is no easy distinction between ‘art’ films and ‘commercial’ films: both are commodities and both are expressions of culture. The borders between the two sectors are porous with personnel, facilities, technical and stylistic innovations moving from one category to the other at different times.

The current debate about film policy is nothing new – it has been well rehearsed in policy reviews and newspaper columns for many years. The Review itself makes fifty six specific recommendations for future implementation. Far from a straightforward shift of funding towards “more commercial films” these seek to do a range of things from providing continuity in funding for producers, continue skills training and regional development, to encourage Broadcasters – particularly Sky and ITV – to support British films and to develop British cinema as a brand through a British Films Week (for a quick summary see here).

These are familiar aspirations. Jim Barratt has described the Review as an evolution rather than a revolution and demonstrated how the recommendations map onto those produced by New Labour back in 1998 (incidentally also commissioned by Chris Smith in his previous role as New Labour Culture Minister). How many of these recommendations are implemented within the overall context of reduced funding (see my earlier post here, for example) will remain to be seen.

So can we simply dismiss Cameron’s comments? While they have no practical value, they are revealing of the wider political context in which arguments about the cinema and other kinds of cultural production are currently taking place. In particular, these arguments are about cultural politics and the context is neoliberal commodification.

Neoliberalism and culture

By coincidence, the Film Policy Review was published during the same week that Cameron made the following statement:

"I believe that open markets and free enterprise are the best imaginable force for improving human wealth and happiness. They are the engine of progress, generating the enterprise and innovation that lifts people out of poverty and gives people opportunity.”

This particularly bare faced form of neoliberal doctrine is also central to the Conservative’s approach to culture. For example, Arch Tory screen-writer Julian Fellowes – an appointed member of the Review panel – articulates it thus:

"There has been the thinking in the past that public money should only go into films that can't get any investment anywhere else".

"When you actually analyse that it means it should only go into films that nobody could conceivably want to see and there's no logic in that - you want to make a film-friendly, audience-friendly industry.”

Just because something can’t get investment under current circumstances doesn’t mean nobody would conceivably want to go and see it. This represents the logic of the creative industries in which profitable investment is the only valid arbiter of cultural value and where market discipline should be as ruthlessly applied to painting, to poetry, to filmmaking, as it is being to schools, hospitals and welfare benefits.

At the same time, these statements show how flimsy, how constantly in need of renewal, this supposedly naturally occurring phenomenon – the market – really is. In film policy, as in other areas of culture, the invisible hand of the market has had to be repeatedly imposed, structurally and ideologically, by the state. Examples of filmmakers kicking back against the system are legion.

It has been fifteen years since New Labour introduced the overarching policy framework of the creative industries in order to restructure cultural sectors in the image of the market. Blair’s version tacked the creative industries onto other areas of public policy as an unconvincing replacement for social and economic programmes. And it was cool (for a bit). The Tory version is much more socially conservative and brutal. But still the argument needs to be remade: the creative and artistic aspirations of filmmakers and other cultural producers have to be filtered, regulated, restrained and channelled toward a narrow, predetermined set of values and practices.

All this talk of commercialism and entrepreneurialism is a feature of neoliberal discourse that has the ideological function of depoliticizing debates about culture by obviating the rationale for political opposition. Indeed, cultural politics is one thing almost entirely missing from the film policy debate. This is not to argue for a film culture based upon some mechanical ‘film with a message’ politics, but to discuss filmmaking and film watching as social practices that are embedded within class-based structures. Who gets to determine what stories are told? This is why Cameron’s call for more commercially-focused subsidy has no practical value, but it does represent the ideological role of the neoliberal state in the process of transferring cultural authority to big business at the expense of other ‘stakeholders’.

And this is also why probably the best comment on the Review was made by Stewart Lee: “British film-makers, represented as usual by Ken Loach, joined a queue of soon-to-be-silenced dissenters seeing all Tory policies as ideologically driven mind-control programmes disguised as economic rationalism.”

Jack Newsinger is a lecturer at the University of Leicester. He can be contacted at jacknewsinger[at]gmail.com

The debate, which has now simmered down, is interesting mainly for what it reveals about where liberal American discourse on Israel is currently at, and where it might be going.

First, it is another indication of Israel's long-term secular decline in popularity among US liberals generally, and American Jews in particular. The fact that the debate is even happening indicates how far the ideological terrain has shifted. Fifteen years ago mainstream columnists would not have criticised Israel, and if they did would not have used the term "Israel Firsters" to do so, and if they had would not have been defended by other mainstream commentators. Times have changed.

The initial reaction to Block's smear further illustrates the point: usual suspects aside, it went nowhere. Even Lanny Davis, Block's business partner and himself a frequent apologist for Israel's occupation, criticised it, while two other prominent Washington think tanks threatened to sever ties with him, and Block was forced to stage a partial climbdown. Glenn Greenwald is right to note that "the only reason this has become such a problem for Block is because he made the over-reaching mistake of targeting an organization that is extremely well-connected". But more significant is that an establishment liberal organisation like CAP took such a critical line on Israel in the first place.

I say 'initial' reaction because, while MM dismissed the smears, CAP does appear to have censored its writers' criticism of Israel in the wake of the incident. This is presumably due mainly to CAP's association with the Democratic Party, which has an eye on the election and on Republican efforts to cast the Obama administration as hostile to Israel and/or Jews. But it also reflects the fact that even if criticism of Israel's occupation can no longer be credibly dismissed as 'antisemitic', "Israel Firster", with its resemblance to the charge of "dual loyalty" that has long dogged Jews, is more difficult to defend. A tactical corollary is that those commentators wishing to push back against attempts to police the discourse on Israel-Palestine ought not, perhaps, make their stand here.

Second, the debate prompts the question: is the spectre of "dual loyalty" being revived? This would be a significant development if so. Jews have historically been haunted by accusations of disloyalty, and American Jews have in the past been particularly careful to proclaim their loyalty to the US rather than Israel. Israel, in claiming to act in the name of Jews worldwide, threatened to give canards about Jewish 'dual loyalty' credibility, and as a result most American Jews for many decades distanced themselves from it. Norman Finkelstein's forthcoming book documents that before Israel became an American 'strategic asset' by crushing Nasser in 1967, most American Jewish elites – including those who advocated most vociferously for a US-Israeli alliance after '67 – were indifferent or actively hostile to it. More generally, "[fearful] of the 'dual loyalty' charge", American Jews have "drawn away from Israel whenever bilateral relations at the state level have been tenuous and drawn closer when they have overlapped".

If the current low-level grumbling among American elites about Israel's service or lack thereof to US interests escalates – and it may not – anti-Israel and anti-occupation sentiment could well be increasingly articulated in the language of 'national interests', and criticism of those who support US backing of Israel's occupation could increasingly take the form of accusations of dual loyalty or disloyalty to the US. This could in turn reinforce the abandonment of Israel by American Jews that is already underway.

--

On the substantive issue in dispute – the legitimacy of the phrase "Israel Firster" – both sides are wrong. Glenn Greenwald, MJ Rosenberg, Phil Weiss and Andrew Sullivan are correct to argue that there is nothing in principle antisemitic about accusing individuals of placing "Israel's" interests above "American" ones. Nor is it "gross" to point out that the American media's go-to guy on Israel-Palestine, Jeffrey Goldberg, served as a prison guard in the Israeli army. Amusingly, Goldberg now denies he was a prison guard, insisting that he was merely a "military policeman" and "counsellor" who took care of "the culinary, hygiene and medical needs of the prisoners". This is odd because in his memoir Goldberg explicitly says that he wasn't, whatever his formal job title, merely a counsellor:

"I was a 'prisoner counselor,' a job title that did not accurately reflect my duties in the related fields of discipline and punishment..."  [Prisoners, p. 28]

Which seems fair enough, since counsellors don't generally assist in the abuse of prisoners, as Goldberg admits he did. Goldberg's strange denial appears to have convinced Ackerman, at least, which is encouraging insofar as it suggests that people who say they like Jeffrey Goldberg have never read Jeffrey Goldberg.

More importantly, if it is the case that people increasingly perceive US policy towards Israel to be a decisively shaped by de facto agents of the Israeli state, the issue should be subject to honest and frank debate. Silencing the above-ground conversation is likely to promote the less savoury lines of discussion within it.

All that said, "Israel Firsters" rhetoric is seriously problematic:

-  It is not, contra Greenwald and Sullivan, "plainly true" that many prominent apologists for Israel are "Israel Firsters". As noted above, virtually all of these supposedly principled devotees of the Jewish state were completely silent on or else actively critical of Israel before it became a 'strategic asset' of the US establishment. As Finkelstein observes, after '67 Israel also effectively became "a 'strategic asset' of American Jews":

"[joining] the Zionist club was a prudent career move for Jewish communal leaders who could then play the role of key interlocutors between the U.S. and its strategic asset.   Israel’s alleged existential vulnerability served as a useful pretext for politically ambitious Jews to champion American military power on which Israel’s survival supposedly hinged."

Charging these "Me Firsters" with principled loyalty to Israel drastically overestimates them. The record suggests that they are, as a rule, in it squarely for themselves. This confusion is significant, for example because a more realistic appreciation of the interests driving the Israel lobby and its sympathisers would draw attention to the ways in which support for Israeli militarism benefits and speaks to elite interests in the US, rather than just in Israel.

-  The use of "Israel Firster", while not necessarily antisemitic, is not innocuous either. Accusations of "Israel Firster" do imply some ugly politics. "Israel Firster" is, after all, being opposed implicitly to "US Firster", with the tacit assumption that it is a Bad Thing to support a "foreign" state or people over one's "own". But why should that be so? If I am moved by images of famine in Somalia and decide to vote, in Britain, according to who I think would do the most to alleviate the effects and causes of that famine, am I being "dually loyal"? More to the point, if I am, is that a bad thing? It is particularly strange that liberals, who tend to take very seriously the idea that there are universal moral principles whose value transcends the claims of any particular state, would treat "dual loyalty" as a serious criticism.

I suspect Greenwald would reply that he rarely uses the term "Israel Firster", that his aim in this debate is to defend its legitimacy against accusations of antisemitism rather than to positively endorse it, and that when he does use it, it is either as a rhetorical device to highlight others' hypocrisy or as a normatively neutral description, rather than a criticism. In his case, this is generally true. But if we look at the emerging discourse more broadly, "Israel Firster" is typically used as a pejorative, which implies a set of assumptions that Sullivan, despite his dislike of the phrase, encapsulates quite well:

"[when] an American sides with a foreign government against his own president in a foreign country, what does one call that? Apart, that is, from disgusting."

The use of the term "Israel Firster" reflects a broader trend which chooses to frame opposition to Israeli policies, and US support for them, in terms of defending or protecting US "national interests", and which appears increasingly disposed to criticising apologists for Israeli occupation on the grounds that they are being disloyal to these "national interests", rather than on the grounds that they are enabling a profound injustice. I suspect that this in turn reflects an influx of liberals into the solidarity movement – in this sense the watering down and degeneration of the latter might well be a consequence of its own success – and a desire by some activists to align the movement, in an attempt to gain political influence, with those American elites who are concerned that Israel's occupation is harming US imperial interests (cf. Walt and Mearsheimer).

In either case, the strategy is dangerous. First, it relies on the gap among US elites over the wisdom of support for Israeli occupation widening, which may not happen to a sufficient degree. Second, its effect is to essentially whitewash the former. And third, it risks abandoning a principled opposition to Israel's occupation grounded in broadly appealing progressive values – it is wrong to demolish people's houses; it is wrong to torture children; it is wrong to shell schools and hospitals with white phosphorus; it is wrong to violently prevent a people from exercising self-determination in violation of international law; etc . – in favour of a critique based on parochial, unappealing and potentially quite vicious insinuations about people's – mainly Jews' – "loyalty". This isn't antisemitism. But it isn't the way to win the struggle, and nor should it be how we'd want to win it.

I’m interested in the idea you have that we could possibly live emancipated lives within a capitalist system.  I wasn’t entirely sure what you meant by that.  Do you mean that capitalism is needed to produce the technology upon which the type of emancipated, networked individual needs?

There’s one aspect of Marxism I always thought was completely disproved by the facts, and that is the idea that capitalism so dehumanizes a worker that there is nothing in the life of the worker (read today the ordinary Jo, salariat, woman in Starbucks) that pre-figures the kind of life they could lead if you got rid of exploitation and oppression.  Actually, the working class never bought that because all they ever did was construct alternative lifestyles based on solidarity, community and self-help - unbelievably complex and sophisticated societies when they had the chance in boom periods – such as the first period of globalisation in 1880-1915.

However, growing up in a cotton town, as I did, and having grandparents who lived in the Edwardian period, you could still buy the point that capitalism doesn’t give you the education, it doesn’t give you the access to knowledge, it doesn’t give you the time to do become a fully emancipated human being.  Ewan MacColl, the folk singer, described sitting in his bedroom looking down at the rainy slate roofs one after the other, and thinking it’s a dead, barren thing, the working class community.  That resonated with me.

So back then, you could still buy that aspect – the alienation idea.  But now, look now, go to a Chinese factory, yes they’re drudges, yes as they come out they look like a sort of army; but put them in an internet café and they’re off being god-knows-what – World of Warcraft dwarf, crossing-dressing whatever – they’re off living a parallel lifestyle.

For example, my town had a decent library – Leigh in Lancashire in the 1960s and 1970s.  If you wanted to break out of what you were being told by school, by priests, and you went to the library, there were maybe a hundred books worth reading in it that were vaguely alternative, vaguely interesting, not this stultifying rubbish.  You had to sit and wait for that book to come back in, you had to work out what the hell it was on about; you had to work it out in your own mind because you couldn’t turn round to somebody in the library and say “what is this?”  Now you can go on Wikipedia - quite a lot of the world’s knowledge is there.  As I point out in the book, academic knowledge is leaking out of the walled garden of intellectual property – it’s out there.  And the conversation is there, you can learn amazing things – how to pick guitar like a 1950s blues man – you don’t have to literally travel to Memphis, Tennessee and find one as you would have had to in the 1970s: now you get a little clip on Youtube.  I think this instant availability of knowledge, and the ability to use social networks to challenge propaganda, does challenge that Marxist account of what human beings can be under capitalism. 

I actually think that human beings want to live this connected life – that’s where Marx was right in 1848 - they want to live a connected life, that’s their natural thing to do.  He asked the right question. But now, actually only ten, fifteen years into the information revolution we are prepared to construct leaky personas, leaky selves, we’re prepared to share quite a lot of our inner thoughts out there in a trusting social environment on the internet.  I just think that is a fascinating glimpse of what kind of life people would like to live if they could free themselves of all constraints of necessity.

Even if some individuals, because not everyone has access to the internet, could achieve emancipation within capitalism surely we’d still have the problem of inequality.  Do you think we’re prepared to sacrifice equality for this kind of connectedness?  And also, you don’t really mention equality in the book; I didn’t see it in the index.  I was wondering in terms of the social movements of the past year, do you think that’s just not on the agenda for them, and in that case, can we really talk of them as left-wing social movements?

Good question.  First of all, they don’t use the concept of equality.  I think the concept of social justice is a coming concept.  But it’s in a process of definition.  I think John Rawls’ version of it is inadequate.  It’s very unfortunate that he cornered the term because his definition of it is just a reductive, arithmetical, utilitarian, piece of logic that seems to be devoid of any empathy for human beings.  For me, social justice is about a minimum standard of things that are essential to human life and as the economy develops those things become more extensive – so a mobile phone, internet access, food, personal freedom.  And what I mean by that is: freedom from some of the things that have previously defined inequality, because we’re beginning to define the social goals through a set of individual experiences.  I think the interesting thing is the word “equality” is ebbing away. 

What do people want?  The female hairdresser in Nairobi, probably lives in a slum; what she wants is to be free of the feudal relationship of the hairdressing salon parlour, where the woman who owns it is more-or-less your slave master, she more-or-less owns you.  You’re indentured, you’re there, there’s physical violence, there’s constant verbal violence, a network of family relations can freeze you out or put you six feet under if they really wanted.  Lots of parts of the developing world are like that.  What that woman wants is personal space – economic space, freedom from sexual harassment, freedom from physical violence, obviously food, shelter, a mobile (essential).  This is a good example because it’s a real example.  Once she gets a mobile the first thing she does is say “up yours” to the madame who owns the parlour.  She begs, steals or borrows as many of the contact numbers as she can from the clients, goes off and becomes a self-employed individual person. 

These stories are being replicated millions of times over in the developing world because of the combined impact of globalisation and technological advances. Thus what a lot of what that human individual wants can actually be defined through legal rights and what you might call socially acceptable norms and practices.  Therefore, maybe the absence of demands for equality is signalling to us that basic human existence has advanced so far that it allows people to conceive of a future more perfect state in a more individual way and the focus is less on pure distribution of wealth.  Again, I’m speculating so I could be wrong.

But not everyone’s reached that level.  There are still a billion people on less than a dollar a day.  And also, this idea that technology is the key to unlocking human emancipation – I’m not sure I entirely agree with you on that.  For the reason that there’s also a negative side to it – so things like online bullying, deindividuation where people can attack others online because they disguise their identity, trolling, invasion of privacy, the inability to disappear, and new forms of coercion, control and surveillance more generally.  New technology can also reinforce already existing forms of oppression and domination.  You talk in the book about a Masai woman who said her husband checks her mobile phone to see if she’s cheating on him.  While you say, ‘technology has expanded the power and space of the individual’, I also think it has opened up new ways to control individuals.  We might have gained something, but what have we lost?

There’s two questions there.  I agree with you that the existing forces of political repression, of gender oppression - and in the developing world it’s often something between the family, patriarchy, physical coercion aspect of things - do invade this new space, they are there.  All I would argue, if you take the pure example of trolling – the classic right-wing blogger, spewing out sexist anonymous rubbish and personal attacks on people, the point is what happens is that they can do that as long as they only want to be in the equivalent of a kind of Amish online community – that is, they can seal themselves off from the rest of reality. 

Except in extreme cases, everyone who’s a victim of this trolling or online bullying, what happens is: you find that the rest of online society kind of rallies round them.  There are far more decent people than there are not decent people.  Surely that’s the only basis of any progressive project in politics – that there are more decent people than there are bastards.  Therefore, purely at the behavioural level, you could say I accept that all these negative behaviours occur online, but my observation is that, certainly within movements, the empowering aspect has been stronger than the disempowering aspect. 

However, there is another part of it.  I think the forces of reaction and the forces of repression are very, very interested in how they can use this.  In fact all governments are.  The USA has cyber-attacked Iran, China is cyber-attacking the West.  Cyber warfare’s going to be a key thing in the twenty-first century.  We think about it as a side issue in warfare but it isn’t anymore.  All warfare now is thought about as space and cyber-enabled warfare. 

What the Americans model for, when they model defending against a cyber attack, is that there’s a forest fire in California, the worst one for twenty years because of climate change, and then somebody takes down the entire Californian information system.  Because they’re modelling for it, you have to assume they’re also modelling how to inflict it on other people.  So don’t think cyber warfare is just somebody coming in and doing a denial of service attack on you; it’s going to be very serious. 

Next down are the rather crazy attempts – like the Iranian regime ordered its reactionary thuggish militia, the Basij, to set up ten thousand blogs.  I’m not aware of the content of these blogs, but one can almost predict what they are, since they can only be the Islamic equivalent of a what North Korean blog would be, which is how great is the leader, how beautiful is the religion.  This is just not going to work. 

Right-wing plebeian movements can indeed use the internet, and I think they have done so successfully.  In America, for example with the Tea Party, it’s very obvious that they’ve used it.  But I think, like the hard left when they discovered the internet, what they did was to create a bit of a closed online world. I just think the hermetic internet ends up just like all those hermetic business models in the late 90s that said, “we’re going to capture the internet and build a walled garden, into which everybody has to pay to come”: they just collapsed.

I’m still interested in the idea of whether these social movements are actually left-wing.  Because you mentioned that really what people want is more personal freedom, and an individualised space and lifestyle, and that the internet sort of facilitates that.  That seems to tie in with the libertarian and anarchist threads within these social movements, are they are product of the neoliberal era?

They’re certainly a product of the neoliberal era, but I think we also have to bear in mind that they’re a product of a reaction to the twentieth century.  The extremes humanity pushed itself to in the twentieth century, the extremes of unfreedom in the name of hierarchy, whether it be nation, class etc, those extremes are still something that, rightly, haunt us. 

These movements’ determination not to play the game of hierarchical-power-corrupting politics does self-limit it.  I mean we could use the example of the anti-globalisation movement or the student movement in the West.  But you could also look at it in Egypt.  In Egypt, those youths who led the January 25^th demos, often Western educated, very secular, very liberal, some of them leftist, as soon as they’ve got the masses on the streets and won, their next problem is, as someone said to me, “we have no Mosques, we have no Imams”.   “We go to the poor areas and we educate people.  We do voluntary work, literacy work, but on a Friday they go to the Mosque and the Iman tells them that we’re all faggots, and that we want to rip the veils from the women’s heads.  We have no Imams, that’s the problem.” 

Now, what’s the answer?  The answer traditionally to that is to form a liberal, secular, democratic, middle class party that fights for secular, Western values. But my experience is a lot of these youth are so turned off they won’t do that.  They’ve looked at their dads who were maybe oppositionists, maybe under Sadat, under Mubarak, and they know how their dad operated.  And their dad operated by getting a big fistful of dollars, going to the village and distributing the dollars and getting the votes.  In other words, the old liberal intelligentsia of North Africa and much of the developed world, does power politics as well. 

So when I went to Egypt and interviewed people, often after interviewing them about the most critical phases, they’d talk very clearly about what they were aiming for on Day X or Day Y, or the movement, then just afterwards in the aftermath of the interview they’d also say, but I’m also trying to be a DJ, or I’m also trying to be an actor.  What they weren’t also trying to be was a politician in these newly formed parties.  As a result the secular liberal left did badly in the Egyptian election.  That’s the explanation for the domination of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists, that no alternative party existed with a long history and roots among the people.

The self-limiting nature of individualism means – and this is the difficult question for this generation – are they prepared to sit back and watch while other forces who are interested in hierarchical power politics actually shape the final destiny of the crisis?

I’ve actually interviewed people who say yes.  They say it’s only the role of activists to force power into taking actions, but we never want to be in power.  There is a logic to it.  Anybody who’s seen what power did in the twentieth century… I keep quoting Stefan Zweig in the book: he committed suicide in 1942, his memoir of the switch from the world of freedom in the pre-1914 period to the world of totalitarian craziness is one of the most valuable documents because it explains what a great fall humanity subjected itself too.  Twenty years ago most leftism would have placed itself absolutely in the tradition of Marx, Lenin, Bolshevism, I think it’s even the Marxist, Leninist, Bolsheviks that are still around are engaged in a critical rethinking actually of that whole tradition, so it’s not surprising to me that whole new forms of structured leftism or even structured social democracy and secular liberalism are not yet arising.  I don’t know actually what the outcome’s going to be. 

Let me just add one thing, shocks tend to move people quite radically.  I’ve interviewed people who were Lib Dems in May 2010 and black bloc anarchists by March 26 2011.  I probably go on too much about historical parallels, but there is a moment that you can recognise and that is 1934 in France.  This was four years into the depression and the left had spent two to three years fighting each other; both left parties – socialist and communist – were tiny, absolutely minuscule.  The unions were more or less in a state of collapse, nothing was happening.  And people were content with this, because the Soviet Union existed and they consoled themselves with that. But then there was a hundreds of thousands strong fascist demo, rioting, and there was nearly a coup.  From that it takes just three years until France creates an alliance of liberal democratic politicians and the left. The detonator moment is the big fascist demo.  Why I raise it is because I think this quite happy-go-lucky generation of autonomists might actually get asked the question: “well what are you going to do about x?”  Hungary’s the one place that’s the most obvious, where you’ve got the far right on 24%, a right of centre nationalist government that’s acting, most mainstream European politicians believe, quite dangerously.

Well that’s an important question isn’t it - can horizontalizm provide an alternative form of society and would it be viable as such, or is it just a useful protest tactic?

It doesn’t want to.  What it wants to do is provide little forms of the alternative society.  I think The Coming Insurrection is the clearest exposition.  I do keep recommending people read it because it was prophetic and it is clear about what the goal of such movements can be and that is to find each other, to create little islands of the future society within the capitalist society and to live “despite” it.  That’s what they’re trying to do.  That is why they’re on a farm in France, and not in a factory in Paris. 

But you mention in the book that groups like The Invisible Collective are way to the left of majority opinion.  Do you think the majority opinion is for not a utopia – or a little bit of utopia within capitalism – but is for social justice; a better form of liberalism or social democracy?  Do you think that’s what the social movements are after?

Scratch the social movements and you find early social democracy in so many ways.  First of all, the debates inside German social democracy in the 1890s, between the right and left went like this: the left said we want power, the power will come through the ballot box but we have to be prepared to supplement it with mass action to defend the workers.  The right said, not “we don’t want strikes”, what they said was “the way is everything the final goal is nothing.”  Building the movement is more important.  It’s often been interpreted that they just didn’t want power, therefore they didn’t want to clash with the ruling elite of the Prussian Empire.  It’s not the case.  Bernstein who’s the theorist of it, makes it clear that “the movement is everything, the goal is nothing” is in fact the defence against the contamination of popular movements by power. 

And so you scratch the Occupy London Stock Exchange people and I just find a lot of Bernsteinian socialism.  It’s quite interesting.  In practice you find not very radical forms of what the early workers movement did.  I don’t mean to belittle them there, because in fact if the labour movement had carried on having flowers as it symbols instead of clenched fists, history would have been different.  I admire their determination not to get sucked into hierarchical power relationships but it does limit their project.  And as you say, in some ways they’re not even a left project.  The point here is to describe accurately, and what I mean is that I think most people in my profession don’t even know what me and you are talking about in this interview, they don’t even know, so the media and social commentary is missing the tools to understand.

It seems to me that there are lots of contradictions within these movements that some people are conscious about and some people aren’t necessarily conscious about.  And I felt there was bit of a contradiction in your book between the idea that people know more about power through reading thinkers like Foucault, Deleuze, Hardt and Negri, and Chomsky etc., and your claim that a lot of activists reject theory completely and they’re only interested in action. Do you think that they are using theory or not?  And do you think we’re missing a trick in not using it?

I think there’s just too much theory.  The twenty years of neoliberalism and post-modernism have produced way, way too much theory.  Too much to read. In the 1970s for people interested in politics, right or left, there was a bookshelf about two feet long you had to read. Now its endless.

Of course, then the problem is having the discussion with power through a series of actions that are quite inchoate, mute actions that force mute responses.  I have met some of the activists who do that and I understand why they do it, in the circumstances, but I think all things have a life-cycle.  And I’m sensing the life-cycle of simply carrying on doing that is coming to an end because of the scale of the crisis.

You suggest that if the financial crisis isn’t sorted, we could face a very bleak future.  We are perhaps like Weimar Germany on the brink, with a potential threat of nationalist movements, fragmentation and isolationism, maybe leading to war.  On the other hand, the book seems quite optimistic about the wave of protests in 2011.  Are you optimistic or pessimistic for the future?

I’m optimistic.  When I say optimistic, it’s not optimistic because a bunch of students went on the streets in 2010 or because there’s a lot of radical graffiti on the walls of Cairo.  I’m optimistic because I think - and call me a technological determinist if you want - I think technology is empowering the human being; that’s the source of the optimism.  Technology empowers the human being, it empowers them to recognize bullshit a lot earlier and quicker than my generation did at college, and it allows for more diversity of answer. 

There’ll be people reading your New Left Project who don’t like Cameron, but I think the fact that Cameron’s made a speech about the unacceptability of some of the impacts of globalisation, the fact that Mandelson today as we speak has issued a document saying that globalisation has harmed the poor and it needs to be reigned in: these things are significant. For anybody whose sat in a tent or linked arms or had pepper spray put into their faces, you can at least say they’ve played a part in changing the debate.

Paul Mason is the economics editor of the BBC’s flagship current affairs program Newsnight and appears frequently on BBC World News America. He has covered globalization and social justice stories from locations around the world, including Latin America, Africa and China. His book Live Working, Die Fighting was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award.  His latest novel, Rare Earth is out now.

The first reason for why its kicking off everywhere on your original blog was the proliferation of ‘The Graduate with no Future’.  You argue that social unrest involving this sociological type is potentially more potent than that of organized labour.  Why do you think that is?

I think at the moment, at a given juncture, it’s proved – not potentially but proved – to be more important in the sense of being more decisive, more of an actor in history. 

The blog was free-formed out of my head and it was the kind of person I was meeting constantly.  Not just the masses on demonstrations, but the individuals who were sticking out of the movement and becoming its spokespeople.  I’d also being doing talks about my last book to students.  I’d always draw a curve of expectation on the whiteboard saying this is the curve capitalism offered in the neoliberal era: become a slave to a corporation, conform, get a conformist-looking suit, there will be a dip in your earnings when you’re effectively learning to be in this corporate system but then it eventually offers you an escalating salary, any assets you’ve got escalate in price, you’ve got endless access to credit, and there’s this big remnant of the welfare state that’s going to look after everything.  What I say was that the curve inverted after Lehman, the curve now goes: college, you’re in debt, you never get out of it, you can’t get on the property ladder, assets are declining in value anyway, you can’t support yourself in retirement on a pension because the old pension schemes have gone, you’ll have to work longer.  I was sitting there watching hundreds of heads nodding, so that’s what put it into my mind. 

When I came to write the book, I was vaguely aware of various student manifestos.  But going back to the American student occupation movement of late 2009 in search of antecedents for this movement, what was really clear is that not only were they very radical in their action (occupation) and also their rhetoric, but some of the actual thinking through of the future role of the young graduate had been done.  Above all, the Communiqué from an Absent Future. 

I’d been aware of, and written about, Richard Sennett’s work on the modern workforce where he describes almost a vanguard workforce of the technological elite in the mid-90s, as having weak ties, working horizontally, weak loyalty to each other, weak loyalty to the organisation, but as a result everything’s held together with networking and I just recognised that these were the people protesting.  Sennett is very pessimistic about them.  He says they’re not great material for social change, but I recognise that human material as being almost exactly the same kind of people who were doing the protests and they were doing it in all the same ways, and my conclusion is: this is how this networked salariat revolts.

In that case do you think we’ll see more of these revolts, because surely if the curve has become inverted it’s only going to get worse?

I think it’s going to go beyond revolts. It’s going to go into political answers.  Right now, while we’re speaking, Davos is going on.  Three years ago when I wrote that the old model of capitalism is doomed, finished, people kept saying “you’re wrong”.  Now that’s the theme of Davos – there’s a search for a “new kind of capitalism”.  But actually, they’re searching in vain, because they’re rummaging in the bargain basement of the old capitalism. 

I think there is a big inflection point underway in capitalism – it’s growth moving to the South, growth moving to Asia, Asia and the South are creating a depressive pull on wages and incomes on the West.  The West simply has to decide whether it wants a form of capitalism whose narrative is “your life can get better”.  If it does, it’s got to do something about this fundamental imbalance in the model.  What I think it’s going to lead to is politicians eventually deciding on a more state-ised form of capitalism.  But then within it – because Nazi Germany was a state-ised form of capitalism and Rooseveltian America was – there’s always a struggle over the social justice element of it.  You could say the struggles over social justice will shape the form that new form of capitalism takes.

You argue that the age of capitalist realism is over.  But is this really true?  Governments are still pressing ahead with their austerity policies, and now we’re having debates about “responsible capitalism” – this is the new buzz word.  So the discourse is still couched in terms of capitalism – just a slightly different form of it.  I thought this was a classic illustration of Marx’s failure to see that capitalism is immensely successful at adapting to new challenges.  Instead of these social movements breaking capitalism apart, it’s finding new ways to reinvent itself.

Yes but that’s not such a bad thing.  Let’s take the argument in parts.  I think the essential point that Mark Fisher makes is valid, that under twenty years of neoliberalism the left rationalised its own inability to change the world by constructing all kinds of rationalisations for the permanence of a neoliberal form of capitalism.  That’s effectively what The Matrix is, it’s what a lot of Zizek is about, it’s what post-modernism is, it’s what the post-modernist art forms are - they’re surface critiques of a capitalism that can never change.  My premise is, economically neoliberalism is finished.  So it doesn’t surprise me to see suddenly the falling away of the ideology. 

When I use the word “left” here, I mean everything from the middle of liberalism leftwards, because all of these things are influenced by the world-view of the changeability and malleability of capitalism itself.  The left is a continuum, albeit with very different parts and emphasises.  In that sense when I use the word “left”, the left was suddenly bereft of its key premise, which was that neoliberalism would always exist.  That’s where I think the intellectual upsurge has come from.  You then say, oh but all people are discussing is replacing one kind of capitalism with another.  I think at the moment that’s because the tools of discourse are quite limited.

As the crisis deepens, I’m afraid (I use the word in all its senses) that it will deepen, what you do get are people saying “we’re anti-globalisation”.  The last person I interviewed who said, “I’m an anti-capitalist, anti-globalist” was the leader of the far-right Jobbik party in Hungary.  Though they're right-wing racists, their critique of capitalism is not that different actually to left social democracy, or stalinism, or parts of the anti-globalisation movement.  I think the next thing that’s going to happen is that a debate’s going to start about what a post-capitalist society looks like.  Even using the word “post-capitalist” is interesting, because what is it?  Protesters are not using the word socialist.

If you go back to Marxism – you say Marx’s failure to anticipate capitalism’s ability to morph – well Marx is not the whole of Marxism, is he?  I’m a big fan of Kondratiev, and Kondratiev got shot for saying there is no final crisis of capitalism.  But before that he managed to elaborate this – he refused to call it a theory, he called it a series of stylised facts – that describe the way in which fifty-year cycles of capitalism have led to morphing of the model.  I think very definitely there’s a Kondratiev moment where neoliberal capitalism is morphing in a big way, towards something quite different from the model we saw in the 1990s and 2000s.  Then if you go back to Marx, what Marx said was that if you’re going to transit to something better then you have to start from the most advanced form of what there is.  My book is full of speculative attempts to imagine, unashamedly, and I say what if you imagined the transition to that something better beginning from things like Google, open-source software, Wikipedia, Wikileaks, cooperatively designed companies, non-profits, slum co-ops, what if you imagine starting from that? 

Do you think what we need then is another Marx?  Another left-wing genius economist who will give us a model of a post-capitalist economy, is that what we’re really lacking?

The funny thing is that Marx almost never played that role in the emergent labour movement of the late nineteenth century.  I think the essential role Marx played for the labour movement at that time was to say: begin the march to utopia from the advanced positions of capitalism.  People who throw around when you do interviews, “but capitalism’s the most advanced form of society we’ve ever created” and I answer “yes, a) you can find that written in the first line of The Communist Manifesto, and b) so was feudalism in the year 1345.”  Nothing is permanent. 

There are some interesting debates that dominated official economics in the 20s and 30s, between the right and left about what you do with the state and how useful a tool the state is towards advancing material wealth.  This was the debate between Hayek, von Mises, Keynes, Schumpeter and Kondratiev (who was part of that circle, albeit never allowed to physically leave the Soviet Union).  Hayek’s strongest point is something you’ll actually find echoed in Trotsky, which is that a completely state-ised society run by a bureaucracy with inadequate access to information will lead to a new form of slavery. 

So why I bring this up is that if you’re going to comb through the history of economics and the encounter between right and left, it’s not Marx and his critics in the 1870s and 80s that’s relevant: I think it is in fact, Hayek, Schumpeter, Mises, Keynes, Kondratiev that is well-worth a revisit.  In fact somebody should do a project of re-looking at their debates because we are, come what may, moving towards a capitalism that is going to have to adopt state-ised methods.  Because its finance system is busted, it’s completely busted, and we don’t even really understand how badly busted.  The European sovereign debt market is gone for a generation.  It doesn’t matter whether Greece goes bust or not, it’s just that the model is gone.  And the banking system is on life support. 

What you have to find – and I think this is something both the right and the left have to find – they have to start looking for anyway, is what is the germ of the new model in the anti-crisis measures of today.

Paul Mason is the economics editor of the BBC’s flagship current affairs program Newsnight and appears frequently on BBC World News America. He has covered globalization and social justice stories from locations around the world, including Latin America, Africa and China. His book Live Working, Die Fighting was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award.  His latest novel, Rare Earth is out now.

Part Two will follow on Thursday 2nd February.

Part 1

Part 2

For more on Finkelstein, see my interviews with him on NLP: 'How to End the Israel-Palestine Conflict' | 'God helps those who help themselves': Parts 1 & 2

What is the scale of the US military presence in Okinawa?

Although Okinawa comprises only 0.6% of the Japan land mass, 74% of the U.S. military bases found in Japan are located in Okinawa Prefecture (a total base area of 233 km2).  20% of land (231 km2) on Okinawa Island alone is occupied by U.S. military bases.  In addition, airspace and a vast ocean area are available for U.S. Forces training.

After the reversion of Okinawa to Japan in 1972, approximately one thirtieth of U.S. military bases were transferred to the Japanese Self Defense Forces.  This resulted in stationing about 6,000 military personnel to defend the U.S. military bases and take part in joint operations.

The main force of the U.S. military is the Marine Corps, the so-called “front-line troops”, which occupies some 76% of all military bases in Okinawa, while the Air Force takes up about 9%.  The approximate number of U.S. personnel is 16,000 in the Marine Corps, 7,000 in the Air Force, 4,000 in the Navy and Army combined, and about 23,000 civilian employees and dependents.

Could you provide a bit of history on the US military presence on the islands?

In April 1945, as Lt. Gen. Simon Buckner Jr. landed on Okinawa, commanding a large army of 180,000 troops, he stated that it was desirable for the U.S. to have exclusive control over Okinawa as a protectorate or by other suitable means.  In his view, Okinawa was needed because it lay on the route towards China and could also be a buffer against Russian expansionism.

In April 1952, when Japan recovered its full sovereignty with the Peace Treaty, the U.S.–Japan Security Treaty was also concluded, and this ensured America’s right to place bases throughout Japan.  However, since it aroused anti-U.S. sentiment among the Japanese public, both the U.S. and Japanese administrations agreed to withdraw American land combat troops from mainland Japan and to revise the Security Treaty.  Hence, though the number of U.S. bases located on the mainland was reduced to a quarter of what it was at the time of the revision of the treaty, those troops deployed on the mainland, such as marines, were relocated to Okinawa, doubly increasing the U.S. military presence there.

Seizing the opportunity of Okinawa’s reversion to Japan in 1972, the Japanese government attempted to consolidate the U.S. bases in Japan and further reduced bases on the mainland to one-third.  On Okinawa, however, few bases were closed and this led to the situation that now exists on the island. 

What is the environmental effect of the US presence on Okinawa?

Military bases have affected Okinawa in numerous ways.  The most visible is the destruction of the natural environment.  There are various types of military facilities in the prefecture: military exercise areas, firing ranges, airfields, military seaports, military storage sites, and communication facilities.  Of these, firing ranges are where the destruction of the natural environment is most visible from beyond the perimeter fences.  Typical examples of practices that negatively affect the natural environment include bombing practice using ground targets and firing practice using distant targets.  In 1995-1996, over 1500 bullets containing depleted uranium were fired in the training areas of Tori Shima (Bird Island).  It was evident that the depleted uranium ammunition continued to contaminate the soil of the island and the surrounding seawater.  This information was disclosed and reported only one year later.  Bullets containing depleted uranium are high technology ammunition and were widely used during the Persian Gulf War.  Many suspect that the sudden increase in child cancers and leukemia in Iraq after the war was due to radioactivity from depleted uranium.  Radioactivity from depleted uranium is also suspected of being responsible for the mysterious illness among Gulf War veterans called Gulf War Syndrome.

In Camp Hansen, one of the U.S. Marine Corps bases where live firing practice is routinely carried out at an intense level, exercises have caused forest fires.  When it rains hard in the training area, a considerable amount of red soil is washed down mountain slopes that have been bombarded over many years by live shells and explosives.  The water saturated with red soil turns into muddy streams that eventually run into the sea, turning it a deep red color, and damaging and destroying sea creatures such as corals.

In contrast to military training zones, communication facilities are quiet areas and it is hard to discern their effects on the environment.  It is the case, however, that hazardous materials containing polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and mercury are used for maintaining communication equipment and that they contaminate the soil and underground water.  In 1995, the land on which Onna Communication and Training Center had been located was found, on its return to Japan, to be polluted by highly concentrated PCBs and mercury.  The news immediately spread and became a serious problem.

There was also one widely reported incident involving water pollution on Kadena Air Base.  Water in a well near the base started burning.  It was assumed that hazardous materials contained in jet fuel and detergent for polishing jet planes and engines were responsible.  Cleaning up the land, soil and water contaminated by hazardous materials used on military bases has also become a serious problem in the USA.

Under the Status of Forces Agreement, what level of influence does the Japanese government have over the US bases?

Provisions for management and cost sharing of the U.S. bases in Japan, and judicial treatment of military personnel are stated in the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) based on the U.S.–Japan Security Treaties. 

Incidents involving murders, rapes, injuries and thefts are frequent.  There have been as many as 5,600 criminal charges brought against U.S. military personnel during 39 years since Okinawa reverted to Japan in 1972.  Among them, 560 cases were the worst cases such as murders, rapes and burglaries.  When Okinawa was under U.S. military occupation, Okinawans did not have any right to sue or arrest suspects if they were American soldiers.  After Okinawa was returned to Japan, American authorities possessed the right to hold trials if the case occurred on duty and the Japanese side possessed the right if the incidents occurred off duty.  However, when a crime or accident occurs, it is a military officer who decides whether the criminal is on or off duty.  If the officer signs an official duty sheet, there is nothing the Japanese side can do.  Furthermore, the Japanese authorities do not have the right to investigate within the area of the U.S. bases.  Therefore, if suspects stray inside the base, the Japanese police cannot arrest them.

What is the general view of the US presence among the population of Okinawa and Japan more generally? Has the active opposition had any significant achievements?

In September 1995, three American soldiers raped an elementary schoolgirl.  This incident incensed Okinawan people.  A similar incident occurred in 1955 when a six-year-old girl was raped and killed, followed by other incidents in which junior and senior high school students were victimized.  Even though protests followed each time these incidents occurred, they never seem to stop.  Such incidents often do not get reported since victims tend to keep silent.  In the case of the 1995 rape incident, it took great courage on the part of the girl and her family to go public.  They were determined, however, that nobody should become the victim of such an incident again.  Their action shook the hearts of Okinawan people and triggered the third massive popular protest movement against American military bases in the history of Okinawa in the post World War II period.  The first had been the all-island protest movement in the 1950s, and the second the movements for the reversion of Okinawa in the 1960s.

The movement was also influenced by two other circumstances.  The first was the procedure for renewing the land lease contract for American military bases was currently underway.  The second was that it was becoming apparent that the U.S.-Japan military alliance was being strengthened through redefining the ongoing U.S.-Japan Security Treaty.

The demands of Okinawans converged on “realigning, reducing and eliminating military bases”, and re-examining the SOFA, which gives the American military and its personnel special privileges over Japanese nationals and other foreigners.  The “Action plan for returning land under military use to its owners” was a blueprint that the prefectural government came up with in January 1996 to restructure, reduce and eliminate the bases in response to demands by Okinawan people.  The Action program was a modest and realistic plan to remove the bases gradually in three stages by the year 2015.

Meanwhile, the Japanese government became concerned about the growing strength of the protest movement, sympathy shown for it by people in mainland Japan, and the interest of journalists in its progress.  Faring that such a situation might threaten the structure of the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty, it set up SACO (Special Action Committee on Facilities and Areas in Okinawa) to examine ways to deal with Okinawan demands.  SACO made an interim report in April 1996 and a final report in December 1996.  It promised total or partial return of bases which had been specified in the Action program.  However, there were stipulations in the report that major bases such as Futenma Air Staion or Naha military port would be transferred within the prefecture.  According to the SACO report, the total area of American military bases in Okinawa will be reduced by 20%, but this could mean that the large old bases that were built right after the war will simply be transformed into compact bases equipped with the latest technology.

Under the U.S.-Japan agreement, environmental impact assessment (EIA) procedure is now ongoing for the project that plans relocation of Futenma Air Staion to Henoko-Nago site in the northern part of Okinawa Island.  According to the recent opinion poll, 84% of Okinawan people are against the idea of relocation within the prefecture.  The governor and the assembly of Okinawa prefecture as well as the mayor and the assembly of Nago city are all against this idea.  Nevertheless Noda administration rushes recklessly under the pressure of Obama administration.  On November 28, 2011, when asked about the timing of the final EIA report delivery, the director of Okinawa Defense Bureau responded explicitly comparing its delivery to rape.   When about to commit rape, he said, you do not announce it to your victim in advance.  He had to resign over this impertinent remark.  As for the recent progress of Okinawan people’s movement including the protest against this “delivery”, please see Gavan McCormack's “Japan Focus”.

Alex Doherty is a co-editor of New Left Project.

Anyone who experienced first-hand the student occupations and protests at the back end of 2010 will find themselves – upon reading the chapter on that subject in Paul Mason’s new book, 'Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere' – transported straight back into the strange intensity of that particular moment. The hope that wider opposition to austerity might be galvanised by these actions, the dread of what Britain would become if the government had its way (on tuition fees, EMA and everything else), the energy that swept the NUS leadership aside and drew thousands of hitherto politically inactive young people into the fight against the marketisation of universities. All of this is conveyed, not just by Mason’s account of the basic facts, but by the immediacy of his writing style. This is a book with a global and historic perspective, offering an analysis of commensurate substance and scale.  But it is narrated quite unpretentiously by an observant and informed commentator at your side, taking you on a tour through the various large cracks appearing in the edifice of globalised capitalism, introducing you to the people pushed to the brink by the financial crash and its aftermath, listening to their experiences, their plans for resistance, and trying to bring all this together into a coherent narrative that makes some sense of the upheaval of recent months.

Mason’s thesis, crudely summarised, is essentially this: at the same time as the global crisis placed severe additional pressures on people whose economic situation was precarious even in the boom years, a series of technological advances was bringing forth new tools and techniques capable of empowering those affected to respond in dramatic ways, for which the status quo was unprepared. From the cheap mobile phones used by the Masai in Kenya to the social media available from Western Europe to the Middle East and North Africa, rapid changes were happening to the way in which human beings related to each other, communicated, socialised and organised politically. A greater quantity of information was available, easier to access, and could be transmitted to more people at greater speed. In addition, these new communications channels bypassed hierarchical structures and narratives, widening the possibilities for disobedience of thought and action. From Tehran to Cairo, Athens and London, activists benefitted from increased ability to transmit their message, organise actions, and draw in people from outside their immediate circle who were themselves ready to be radicalised by the worsening of their own material conditions. This adds up to a “perfect storm” where a failing political and economic order meets a new kind of social force, and where the combined effect may prove to be far reaching, even revolutionary.

There are times when Mason seems to stray into over-claiming on behalf of his thesis, for example when he says that:

“The revolts, then, are the result of a technological revolution driven by the deployment of digital communications at work, in social life, and now in forms of protest. It is not necessary to be a techno-determinist to see this”.

Literally, the first of these sentences is techno-deterministic: “the revolts…are the result of a technological revolution”. If the economic system were delivering social justice and the means of individual and collective fulfilment, then there would be no need or desire for revolt, irrespective of the tools available. What is true, and what is strongly supported by the broader evidence and argument presented in the book, is that these revolts may not have happened in way that they did, to the extent that they did, or with the effects that we have seen, were the catalyst of social media and other new technology not in play within the causal mix.

Narrow techno-determinism would not be a reasonable charge. Mason speaks of “the economic causes of discontent”, that context is clear taking the book as a whole, and is dealt with in some detail. The limits of what can be claimed on behalf of technological change are fairly acknowledged: for example, the fact that internet use remains far out of reach for most of humanity. Perhaps it is a reasonable interpretation to say that Mason sees those able to use these technologies, and the effects on their socio-political relations, as a key active agent rather than an overarching cause of broader change.

Still, it is important to emphasise the real limits to this, as may be illustrated by one small example. Mason says that “social media killed” the News of the World by overwhelming it with decentralised attacks on its reputation following the hacking revelations last summer. The “network defeats the hierarchy” of Murdoch’s News Corp. But of course, this isn’t the whole story. It is insufficient to acknowledge the Guardian’s role in bringing the allegations to light, as Mason does. To claim that “social media killed it” relies upon a counter-factual that would be very difficult to prove: namely that the paper would have survived had social media not existed to make use of the allegations. We might easily speculate that other forms and tools of protest could have achieved the same result, given the gravity of what the paper was accused of. The more plausible counter-factual is that the allegations would not have come to light in the first instance without the Guardian operating within its old media structure, with the capacity to employ skilled journalists, provide them with the resources to pursue the story, and with the legal and institutional backing to see the job through in the face of powerful opposition.

This is not to be complacent about the nature of the corporate media, far more a pillar of the establishment than the progressive democratic force it purports to be. Rather, it is to note that, for the time being at least, new media does not quite have the wherewithal to stand up by itself. So when I tweet something that is picked up on and re-tweeted widely, it will usually contain an original remark or observation of my own, plus a link to a story or article from an established media source. I have the autonomy to communicate an idea that is critical of power, and to get that idea transmitted to an amount of people that, ten years ago, I would have had no means to reach on my own. But this is often backed up by a piece of journalism, cited as supporting evidence, that I do not have the means to produce by myself or even with others. At least not in the same way. Until sustainable models are developed for independent media, that landscape will continue to be dominated by corporate structures with their own class commitments and associated political biases. Hence the perverse focus on questions of public spending in today’s political discourse. We are still a long way from undermining the hierarchical agenda-setting power of the ruling class, which has successfully, at least for now, turned a crisis of the free market into a crisis of the public sector, in spite of insurgent activity coming from outside of the mainstream.

For these reasons, it seems a touch unfair of Mason to cast Noam Chomsky as member of a supposedly defeatist pre-2008 left, for expressing doubts about the transformative power of the internet. Anyone familiar with Chomsky’s writing is aware of one constantly recurring theme: the exhortation to recognise that the future is not written, and to engage in organised political activity to challenge power. This is not negated because Chomsky fails to share Mason’s specific view of how change might be brought about. More broadly, the picture Mason presents of a global left that, until the financial crash, had given up the search or the struggle for alternatives to the Washington consensus is a rather surprising one. Every meeting of the global elite for over a decade – be it on trade, aid, climate change or anything else - has been met with major protests against economic injustice, rallied around the common slogan “another world is possible”. This movement comes together annually at the World Social Forum to discuss how an alternative form of globalisation could be brought about, which meetings are regularly attended by heads of state from the various shades of left-wing governments across Latin America. The rise of such governments, in reaction to the failures of the Washington consensus, and with the effect of largely ejecting the United States from its claimed backyard, shows that the development of alternatives to neoliberal capitalism is the business of states in the global south, as well as activists and protest groups worldwide. These are things that Mason is both aware of and has paid serious attention to in the past.  Surely, to the extent that neoliberalism became a hegemonic consensus, it was the capitulation to its key assumptions by the global centre-left – from the New Democrats to New Labour and the German SPD – that really made this possible. 

Again, while Mason rightly focuses on what is new and different in regard to our own historical moment, the novelty can be over-stated. In terms of anti-neoliberal movements, a great deal of what Mason describes is strikingly reminiscent of trends identified by Naomi Klein in Fences & Windows, published in 2002. There we can see non-hierarchical forms of activism taking shape, networked through electronic media, organised in a highly autonomous, consensual way, light on ideology, but tied together by a broad, post-Marxist “common-sense” about the evident injustices of global capitalism.

To return to Chomsky, his increasing appeal at that time was probably due to a certain alignment between his intellectual approach and that of many of the global justice activists. Rather than a grand, abstract, dialectical theory of historical change, what were deployed instead were some basic common principles and a critique. The point of the global economy should be to serve the general population in a sustainable way, with people free to exercise democratic agency and autonomy within the system in order to live fulfilling lives, free from want and insecurity. The reality was that economic change was driven by concentrations of power to serve their own interests in a way that was largely indifferent to the fate of the majority and whose effects were exploitative, undemocratic and unsustainable. Therefore, political action should be aimed at identifying, undermining and eventually dismantling those concentrations of power – through improvised, ad hoc methods that embody the movement’s democratic principles – and to see where that process eventually leads.

Hence, the demands now made by defenders of the unravelling status quo that protestors bring forth their readymade alternative to global capitalism are largely beside the point. It is recognised that the present and its historical context cannot simply be erased and replaced overnight. The point is to identify what is wrong, and then deal with it piece by piece until you end up somewhere radically different.

In many ways, therefore, the Occupy movement and its various incarnations echo the forms of the preceding decade’s global justice movement, albeit upgraded by advances in technology, galvanised by the economic crisis, and expanded in proportion to the increasing amount of people reached both by the system’s iniquities and by the social media available to the activists. This is not to deny that a seminal shift has taken place, but to identify its roots, and to emphasise that what is new remains attached to those roots, and to other social realities.

By rights, this book ought not to work. Over the course of a short 200 pages Mason zooms in on the fine personal details and out to a satellite’s view of how major historic forces and trends are playing out in a variety of contemporary situations, and in comparison to various precedents from the story of capitalism so far. His wide-angle lens takes in an enthralling array of ideas from sociology, culture, economics and more. He reports from Athens, from the Philippines, and from Obama’s America as he traces the footsteps of the sharecroppers depicted in Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, now trodden by former members of the US middle-class. He covers events that are all still happening, including some that have barely begun. It should be incoherent, and in the hands of many other writers it probably would have been. In fact, it is synthesised effortlessly both as narrative and as analysis. It works because Mason has clearly given serious, original thought to what he is observing and what it means, because he has the resources of knowledge to place it all in context, and crucially, because he has a natural gift for conveying his ideas in plain language that is enjoyable and stimulating to read. There is much here to reflect upon, to discuss and to debate. Anyone involved or interested in the current upheavals will find this book an essential resource, and eagerly await the next instalment.

David Wearing is researching Britain's response to the Arab uprisings for a PhD in Political Science at the School of Public Policy, University College London. He is a co-editor of New Left Project.

If you're interested in any or all of these questions, you're in luck.

This Thursday, 2 Feb at the Southbank Centre in London, Verso, in association with New Left Project, will launch Paul Mason's new book on contemporary popular movements, Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere.

Paul, the author of Meltdown and the best thing about BBC Newsnight, spent much of the past two years reporting from Spain, Greece, Wisconsin, London and elsewhere on the surge in popular protest as the effects of the financial crisis, and of the bailouts and austerity measures that followed, made themselves felt. Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere brings that remarkable reportage together and interprets the geographically disparate struggles as locally variant, but in crucial respects similar, responses to a common crisis: the collapse of the pre-2007 model of economic globalisation. If you're interested in thinking further about last year's really quite remarkable developments - the speed at which Occupy spread and its success in changing the political agenda, for example, was surely unprecedented in recent history - this is an excellent place to start.

On Thursday we'll stage two panels, one on Paul's book and the other on the Arab revolts, featuring Paul Mason, Ewa Jasiewicz, Mark Fisher, Dan Hancox, and other assorted luminaries:

Panel  1, 7-8.15pm:

An evening with Paul Mason and guests will start in the Purcell Room with a conversation between Paul, economist Costas Lapavitsas, journalist and union organiser Ewa Jasiewicz and author and theorist Mark Fisher. Katharine Viner, deputy editor of the Guardian, will be chairing this discussion.

This part of the evening has sold out but can be screened into the foyer where Part 2 will take place.

Panel 2, 8.30-9.30pm: 

The second session will involve two conversations, one focusing on protest and the other on the Arab Spring and women. 

Talking about protest will be journalist Dan Hancox, author of Kettled Youth, writer James Butler and Mark Fisher. Chaired by writer and campaigner Eleanor Mae O'Hagan.

Meanwhile Paul Mason will be in conversation with academic Emma Dowling and journalist Rachel Shabi. Chaired by Bidisha, author of the forthcoming Beyond the Wall: Writing a Path Through Palestine

Note that the second panel is free, and while tickets for the first panel have sold out, you'll be able to watch it live via video link for free in the foyer next door. 

To accompany the launch we'll also be running a series of articles and interviews here on NLP that respond to Paul's book, or which expand on some of the issues it raises. We'll kick off this week with a review of the book by NLP co-editor David Wearing and an in-depth interview with Paul himself. So keep your eyes peeled, and follow us on twitter and Facebook for updates. 

Hope to see you Thursday.

A new film documents the courageous resistance, in the face of often brutal repression, of the villagers of Nabi Saleh.