The election of Francois Hollande and the strong showing of the left in the recent elections in Greece has led to hope that a shift away from austerity policies may become politically possible. What is your view?

Austerity policies are not only terribly unfair, they aggravate the problem they are supposed to solve by shrinking economies which only makes it harder to pay off debts. Left, progressive, and competent macroeconomists have been pointing this out to no avail for over three years. Financial markets are now clearly of the same opinion. Lenders are now raising risk premiums for all countries whose economies are being shrunk by austerity policies irrespective of whether or not their governments are “behaving,” i.e. fulfilling all austerity obligations to the letter no matter how onerous, or “misbehaving” i.e. failing to enforce every last austerity measure negotiated. Unfortunately, those in charge of the European Commission and the European Central Bank have paid no attention to those speaking out against austerity, and instead have insisted on repeated the same mistake Herbert Hoover made eighty years ago.

As the human, social, and economic toll from austerity has increased, as the futility of the measures has become more apparent, and most importantly, as anti-austerity forces have become better organized, opposition has gradually increased. Like any popular movement, the strength of the anti-austerity movement ebbs and flows, and is sometimes stronger in one place than another. But the trajectory is clear: The movement opposing austerity is in ascendancy throughout Europe, and it is becoming ever harder for those imposing austerity to “stay the course.” We have now entered the phase where some among Europe’s ruling elite are changing their rhetoric. Whether this leads to a real shift away from austerity policies remains to be seen.

The opposition to austerity takes different forms. Some punish politicians and parties associated with austerity at the polls switching their votes to formerly fringe parties who voice opposition to austerity in their electoral campaigns. Others march in the streets and go on strike in attempts to force those who govern to change course. And some react by calling for “system change” and beginning to build the new world they believe is not only possible, but increasingly necessary.  As more and more young people become openly hostile to the “ancien regime” ruling elites become increasingly frightened and waver between concessions and repression. The recent elections in Greece and France are the latest political setback for pro-austerity forces. It will take more electoral defeats, more mass mobilizations and strikes, and an ever growing threat of radical system change to bring about a shift from austerity to pro-growth policies. Victory for the anti-austerity movement is not just around the corner.

The election of Hollande has led to comparisons with the election of the far more radical Mitterand government in 1981 which quickly abandoned its leftist program in the wake of pressure from international finance. What lessons does this have for us today?

The euro zone could easily survive economically without Greece. France, on the other hand, is the second largest economy in the euro zone and a major player in EU politics. However, I think the election of Hollande in France is much less significant than the rise of left parties in the Greek election. Every center right or center left political party that has presided over forced austerity in the EU during the past three years has been voted out of office. Nicolas Sarkozy is the latest center right victim to fall to popular anger against austerity. Had the French Socialist Party been in power when the crisis hit instead of Sarkozy, I suspect it’s leader would have imposed austerity – as “regrettable but necessary” – just as Papandreou did in Greece and Zapatero did in Spain. In which case, instead of Sarkozy being shown the door by French voters it would have been the French Socialist Party that would be on its way out instead right now.

The question is what lessons Mr. Hollande has learned from the fate of his fellow socialists, Mr. Papanedreou and Mr. Zapatero? What lessons has he learned about what austerity does, and does not accomplish? For that matter, what lessons has he learned from the government of Francois Mitterand the early 1980s? I seriously doubt he has learned the lessons I think he should have. Anti-austerity rhetoric is cheap from an opposition candidate. Is there any reason to believe Mr. Hollande will walk the walk now that he is in charge after he talked the easy talk during the campaign?

As you say, the left government led by Mitterand in 1981 was far more radical than the one Mr. Hollande will lead today. Yet international financial interests that were much less powerful then than they are today quickly forced Mr. Mitterand to abandon the progressive, expansionary fiscal policies he had campaigned on. In Economic Justice and Democracy (Routledge, 2005) I had this to say about Mitterand economic policy during the recession of 1981:

The government launched strong expansionary fiscal and monetary policies to provide plenty of demand for goods and services so the private sector would produce up to the economy's full potential and employ the entire labor force. There is nothing to find fault with here. Everyone deserves an opportunity to perform socially useful work and be fairly compensated for doing so. However, there is only so much any progressive government can do about this as long as most employment opportunities are still with private employers. Mitterrand deserves praise for doing the most effective thing any government in an economy that is still capitalist can do in this regard: ignore the inevitable warnings and threats from business and financial circles and their mainstream economist lackeys preaching fiscal “responsibility” and monetary restraint, and unleash strong expansionary fiscal and monetary policy…. However, there are ultimately only three options: (1) Don't stimulate the domestic economy in the first place because you are not willing to stand the inevitable heat in your kitchen. (2) Stimulate, but back off as soon as new international investment boycotts your economy, domestic wealth takes flight, and financial markets drive interest rates on government debt through the ceiling. Or (3) stimulate, but be prepared to face the heat international capital markets will bring with strong measures restricting imports and capital flight, by substituting government investment for declines in international and private investment, and by telling creditors you will default unless they agree to rollovers and concessions. Option three is the economic equivalent in the neoliberal era of not only playing hardball with international creditors, but going to financial war if need be. As daunting as option three is, it is important to remember that the Mitterrand government in France proved that option two does not work. (pp. 121-122)

As a friendly interpreter, the American socialist Michael Harrington, concluded: “Within less than two years the Socialists were engaged in administering a regime of ‘rigor,’ otherwise known as capitalist austerity.” I would not change a word I wrote seven years ago, and can only hope Mr. Hollande does not make the mistake of thinking that moderation and timidity in response to threats from international capital are likely to win him approval from long-suffering voters, much less a positive place in history. Unfortunately, I think Mr. Hollande and his party are likely choices to make this mistake, and put up even less of a fight than Mitterand before him.

But only history will tell. The futility of austerity, and obvious political fate of all political parties who administer it, may grow more backbone where there is little to begin with. In any case, there is no reason to pre-judge the new French government since what anti-austerity forces must do in any case is the same: RAISE MORE HELL! As new political cracks appear, even in Germany, who knows which politicians will surprise us, or what may soon become possible.

How do you interpret the intransigence of the German government in its insistence on maintaining current fiscal policies?

What can one say about German politicians and the German public? The smart move is to get ahead of financial crises, rather than to react too slowly and too cautiously. Since Merkel has made this mistake repeatedly, she has forced German taxpayers to put much more at risk in bailout funds than necessary. How much of this has been over cautiousness, or penny-wise, pound-foolish ideology on her part, and how much has been driven by popular sentiment among German voters averse to “enabling” what is portrayed in the German media as lazy workers and irresponsible governments in the PIGS -- and Greece in particular -- is difficult to know.

There are some hard nose self-interests that have clearly played a big role. Since German banks are on the hook for many loans to PIGS governments and private businesses they expect their government – and make no bones about it, Merkel’s center-right government is beholden first and foremost to German banks -- to protect their interests. That means squeezing every penny out of their creditors, but not pushing them quite to the point where they default. Merkel has tried to do exactly this in negotiations over austerity conditions – squeezing every last penny – while begrudgingly providing bailouts at the last minute to avoid defaults that would rock the German banking industry. But this is always a dangerous game and Germany may now have pushed Greece, and perhaps others, too far.

With the global recession still with us, with Europe clearly slipping back into the much feared “double-dip” recession, why has Germany steadfastly refused to provide the EU with a much needed fiscal stimulus? Unlike the PIGS, the German government can borrow right now to finance a deficit at rock bottom interest rates in private capital markets. What is stopping them from using this cheap money to create much needed fiscal stimulus? A popular answer is Germany’s fear of inflation dating back to the days of the Weimer Republic in the aftermath of WWI. I think a more likely answer lies in the fact that Germany has successfully “exported” its unemployment onto the PIGS. Because the PIGS use the same currency Germany uses none of them can devalue to eliminate the large trade deficits they are running with Germany. This gives Germany large trade surpluses which has kept unemployment rates in Germany low throughout the Great Recession. Unlike the US where the electorate seems willing to tolerate high rates of unemployment, this has not traditionally been the case in Germany. Any German government that presides over high unemployment has traditionally been given a quick heave-ho. But German unemployment rates have not been high because of its large trade surpluses with other countries in the euro zone. Hence, little domestic political pressure for fiscal stimulus in Germany, despite the fact that this would do more to pull the EU out of its economic doldrums than anything else. However, the double-dip in the EU is looking more and more severe, and unemployment rates in Germany are beginning to rise. So like much else, this too may soon be changing.

The withdrawal of Greece from the eurozone is described in near apocalyptic terms by advocates of the economic status quo. What do you think the repercussions might be for both Greece and for the eurozone in general if Greece were to make an exit?

Greece has reached a political impasse in which the center right and center left political parties that have dominated Greek politics for the past forty years both had their share of the vote cut by more than half, and formerly fringe parties are clearly in the ascendancy. Moreover, the Greek economy is in a death spiral and is quickly becoming dysfunctional. Nothing short of a strong left government determined to (1) default on debt that is un-payable, (2) restore social spending, and (3) engage in public investment when private investment flees has any chance of turning things around. However, that may soon be possible.

Unless rules are suspended it now appears there must be a new election as early as June. Three things need to happen for a constitutional government of left political parties to emerge. (1) SYRIZA (16.78%) and the party of the Democratic Left (6.11%) need to increase their percentage of the vote at the expense of Pasok who fell to third place with 13.18%. That can easily happen since (a) Pasok administered unpopular austerity and still supports austerity as “necessary;” Pasok support is “soft” and based largely on patronage it can no longer deliver; (c) many voted for Pasok in the past only because they believed left parties had no realistic chance of governing. Now that SYRIZA has surpassed Pasok it is a vote for Pasok that is “wasted.” (2) Those who voted for smaller left parties -- like the Greens (2.9%) -- who failed to get the minimal 3% for any seats in Parliament need to top the 3% threshold or give their votes to one of the left parties sure to win representation. I don’t see why that should prove overly difficult in a new election. But the most difficult problem is (3) left parties must overcome historic divisions in order to form a coalition government with a viable program.

However, history may soon hand Greek leftists a lucky gift. It is possible that the major issue dividing left parties may soon become a moot point. The Communist party was against joining the euro zone in the first place, and is adamant about leaving. On the opposite extreme, the party of the Democratic Left broke from SYRIZA in 2010 largely because Democratic Left leaders insisted on a firm commitment to stay in the euro zone. SYRIZA only favors staying in the euro zone -- provided the EU reverses its pro-austerity policies. Not only is that not going to happen, a second default is virtually inevitable, which may well trigger a sequence of events including a massive bank run that will force Greece out of the euro zone even before a left government can come to power. If so, not only will the principle bone of contention on the left become a moot point, a left government would enjoy the advantage of a devaluation that would provide a huge boost to employment as Greek exports become cheaper and imports become more expensive. In such a clear “crisis” a left government could also become a government of national salvation which Greek patriots rally around.

If this happens Greece may prove to be Europe’s salvation not its ruin. Those who argue that economic and political chaos in Greece are destroying the EU are talking about a neoliberal EU that is on an unsustainable path to self-destruction. It will take quite a jolt to move the EU off its disastrous austerity path onto a path of equitable growth. If Greece provides a jolt, and shows the way to a better path, those who dream of a peaceful, egalitarian, and prosperous Europe may well have Greece to thank years from now.

Warning: “Possible” is not the same as “probable,” much less “a sure thing!” And even a jolt from Greece may not prove sufficient to turn the rest of Europe around. It may well take more jolts from other PIGS as well.

Tell us about the origins of Anticapitalist Initiative and what you hope to achieve. In particular, how do you think anti-capitalism needs to be done differently from how it is at the moment?

The origins really started last Autumn when some of us who had been involved in the students movement, and people within various socialist groups began discussing where we thought radical politics was going in Britain and internationally. Despite a huge crisis of capitalism and the destruction of the postwar social concensus - embodied in the welfare state and public sector provision - the resistance has so far been woefully unable to rise to the historic challanges. In general, the left is not growing, in fact it is fractruring even further, and there is a huge disconnect between what radical activists want to achieve and the forces that they can assemble to do that. Despite everything it is almost as if the left carries on as before. The left still sells the same papers, launches the same kind of front campaigns, the libertarians and anarchists still do their direct action mixed with alternative lifestylism, the intellectuals are still running their blogs.

So we wanted to approach the problem differently and try and take what was good about the current left and open up a space to bring it together. I wrote an article for New Left Project in February which outlined the kind of framework that I thought would be useful to go forward.

What is different about this project is that we have set out to build a genuinely plural, revolutionary organisation. We have to be more open to how we organise, be willing to incorporate new ideas and theories into our practice and find a way to really popularise anticapitalist slogans amongst not just the left but much wider layers.  Our anticapitalism has to take into account the kind of discussions that are featured on NLP about the scale of deindustrialisation, Mark Fisher's account of Capitalist Realism and Nina Power's challenge for a new women's movement. Importantly, how do Paul Mason's ideas about networked individuals give us insights into how revolutionary movements can be built today?

We want to build an organisation on the left which can build or rebuild the kind of mass radical force that we need to overthow capitalism. However we are doing this not in a period of growth of the workers movement, but of historic post 1991 ideological confusion and even decline. So repeating old formulas about how the Second International did it, or re-enacting the Bolshevik model all have to be taken with a pinch of salt. I believe that history has to inform us, not instruct us - and despite what Marx said, history tends to rhyme more than it repeats.

But the fact that so many people on the left just want to understand everything through the prism of what came before is increasingly problematic, because growing numbers of people are beginning to grapple with the problem of how the last 20 years might not be the same as the last 80 years. But this kind of analysis shows that many on the left are theoretical trapped in the past, even anarchists - once you strip out their spectacular headline grabbing stunts are essentially repeating Bakunin's festival of the oppressed.

So we want to start a process of debate and discussion amongst activists, drawing in people who are put off by sect building or want something more than just movement activities, and to really try and build something that arises out of what activists think is useful today, not just applying old models to the present.

Are you hoping to draw together people from the gamut of existing anti-capitalist politics – anarchist, autonomist, Trotskyist etc? If so, is it feasible to expect these people to work together despite the sharpness of their differences?

I think the working model is we want to draw together all those people who are serious about overcoming differences and building a credible alternative. There are sectarian headbangers within the socialist as well as the anarchist camp, and there are autonomists who consider all forms of organisation beyond the network anathema. Those people can carry on with their lives, untroubled by the new initiative. But those people who are willing to make compromises and work in a spirit of unity, despite disagreements, in order to build something that can escape the isolation of the left are more than welcome. Already we have socialists, libertarians and ex members of various groups, as well as people who never joined a group in the first place.

We are under no illusions that there are real differences on the left, and in the process of moving forward you can lose people who decide that the project has evolved away from their vision. But we want to encourage a sense of unity that in the face of historic threats and dangers we are more powerful united than divided.

Of course there are strategic differences and debates, whether to take state power or abolish it, whether the working class is still the agent of revolutionary change or that torch has passed onto others - but in the current state of the left most of these debates are arbitrary or exist primarily in the theoretical terrain.

In terms of where this initiative fits into the bigger picture. We all have to acknowledge that actually none of our particular "isms" or shibboleths have worked or drawn in mass forces. But today we are still caught in the problematic that Rosa Luxemburg identified at the turn of the 20th century - progressive activists are caught between the twin dangers of opportunism and sectarianism - striking the right path between those two is very difficult.

In my opinion we need to focus on what unites revolutionary activists in the current situation, namely activism and a desire to fundamentally alter the institutions of resistance. Resisting the dismantling of the welfare state is important, as is highlighting growing social inequality,

The institutions we need to change are the trade unions - increasingly bureaucratic formations that enforce the anti-strike laws - as well as the anti-cuts groups locally and nationally, we also need to build organisations of the unemployed because with the return of structural unemployment to the economy we have to build organs of resistance. Finally we need to start thinking strategically, most young workers are not in the public sector - they work at Tesco and Asda. Getting these people organised and into the movement is essential - the question is whether the old unions are fit for purpose or we need something new. One thing is clear that the capitalist class are adapting and evolving their economic and political strategies at a much faster rate than the left is, we are running to keep up.

Anticapitalist movements all too often suffer from a social composition that is middle class and male- and white-dominated. How do you think the demographics of the radical left can be changed?

There is no simple answer that anyone can give to solve this long term problem, but I can suggest some general points. The problem actually has two levels, women get involved in the left but rarely become leaders of it, black and minority ethnic (BME) people rarely even get involved in the left. So in this sense I think that getting more women into better positions in the movement is partly a question of how the movement organises itself, but to encourage non-white participation we have to look at what the movement actually does.

I think affirmative action is important. For instance at the first national meeting we made sure that there was a male and a female chair in each session. Also as a rule no network or organising body should be made entirely of men. And male activists have to accept that they won't get as much time in the spotlight because the organisation will be proactively promoting women activists in important roles.

I find also that women only discussion groups and caucuses are helpful, as long as the results of such meetings are incorporated into the working of the wider organisation. It is not enough to say that the women went off and had a meeting and now we get on with business, there has to be space to bring in any  discussions or actions points.

The woeful under-representation of BME people in the left is something that should be a cause for much soul searching. There are no magic answers - everyone always say "write more articles about race questions" or "do more community work in BME areas", whilst I think both these approaches are necessary I still don't think that they guarantee people joining an organisation. What else brings people in will be an undogmatic approach to the kind of political answers that they need in their daily lives and an organisation that can be shown to work effectively at winning victories.

It strikes me that people from oppressed backgrounds have to put up with a lot more shit in their lives, more than white middle class men do. White middle class men have a high tolerance for political posturing and spending endless hours debating the finer points of a slogan. People who are oppressed are interested in politics and theory but generally want to see more directly how it can help them overcome the problems that they face. This is why in some BME communities, for instance where I live in south London, the black population will overwhelmingly vote Labour - is this because they are all instinctively reformists? I don't think so, it is also because you need a political vehicle that is seen to be effective in giving you a voice and a direct connection to power. After all if you want to keep your local school open or improve a children’s community play area, then you need people with influence and power to do that.

This is how Respect managed to briefly make inroads into the Muslim community, previously unreachable by the left. It was a combination of the mass antiwar movement, a seemingly credible figure in George Galloway and a sense of unity and dynamism that launching Respect provided. Of course it turned to dust as the antiwar movement declined, Galloway discredited himself in Big Brother and the SWP split away - a collapse that for some of us outside of Respect seemed inevitable from the start. But rich lessons can be learnt both from the rise and the fall.

Where next for Anticapitalist Initiative?

We want to build local networks and groups in more places. In some areas the decline of local anticuts groups has seen many people turn to the new initiative to get involved in activity. The next step is to turn our new website and national co-ordination into a real forum for local activists to organise on a national level.

We want to organise a public event which I think we should organise with other organisations and websites. The next step is to reach out to others on the left and open a dialogue that this is a genuinely open project for people to get involved with - obviously a lot of people in already existing socialist groups are quite suspicious, and some activists just seem downright pessimistic about anything like this. But I think all of us have to face facts, if we don't get our act together and try and forge something more credible then the decade of austerity looming in front of us will lead to a strategic defeat for our entire movement. I am not saying that the ACI is the key to the whole situation, but we want to make a contribution to any possible breakthrough that the left can make.

Click here for Anticapitalist Initiative's website and here for their Facebook page. 

Bruce Springsteen has a reputation for lavishly orchestrated, radio-friendly rock. That hasn’t done him any favours with radicals, who often dismiss him as an opportunistic peddler of a romanticised folksiness. But Springsteen has always alternated his more commercial style with albums of fiercely political, musically sparse folk – and his most famous songs have rebellious content aplenty, too.

After the massive success of Born to Run (1975), Springsteen, the son of a New Jersey bus driver, entered a period of reorientation. For 1978's Darkness on the Edge of Town, he decided to pay tribute to the people suffering during the Carter-era economic slump through songs structured as first-person narratives of working-class lives. His characters, frustrated in the pursuit of their dreams by social conditions, are often angry and lost: 'Well, Daddy worked his whole life for nothing but the pain/Now he walks these empty rooms looking for something to blame…' Economic and clinical depression are never far apart.

Because he tells his characters' intensely personal stories rather than programmatically denounce the social order, Springsteen's radical oeuvre rarely provides revolutionary anthems. But together, his songs develop a devastating critique of the waste of human potential under capitalism. The protagonist of 'The River' finds his life passing him by: 'Then I got Mary pregnant, and man that was all she wrote/and for my nineteenth birthday I got a union card and a wedding coat…' These are real people with aspirations, loves and regrets, not pawns in great historical struggles.

Born in the U.S.A. was the bestselling album of 1985, but Springsteen was furious to find it appropriated by the Right. The title track, mistaken for a patriotic anthem by Ronald Reagan, attacks the Vietnam War and the treatment of veterans: its protagonist 'got in a little hometown jam/So they put a rifle in my hand/And sent me off to a foreign land/To go and kill the yellow man'. On his return to America, he finds himself homeless and at a loss 'down in the shadow of the penitentiary, out by the gas fires of the refinery' with 'nowhere to run… nowhere to go'.

In 1995, his career at a low after a string of flops, Springsteen released The Ghost of Tom Joad, an album equally starkly political and musically minimalist. Inspired by John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and Journey to Nowhere by Dale Maharidge, Springsteen sings about the new underclass of the homeless, the unemployed and migrants created by Reaganomics: 'Men walking along the railroad tracks/Going someplace and there's no going back/Highway patrol chopper's coming up over the ridge/Hot soup on a campfire under the bridge…' ('The Ghost of Tom Joad'). The songs heap bitter scorn on the wealthy responsible for industrial decline: 'Now sir you're telling me the world’s changed/Once I made you rich enough, rich enough to forget my name' ('Youngstown').

In the new millennium Springsteen turned from story songs to larger-than-life bombast and self-conscious myth-making. Even so, 2006's We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions marked a departure. A ramshackle album of folk songs recorded with an entirely new band, We Shall Overcome weaved together anti-militarist classics ('Mrs McGrath', 'Bring 'Em Home') and anthems of the Civil Rights Movement ('Eyes on the Prize'), nineteenth-century songs ('John Henry') and radical material made famous by Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. 'How Can A Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live', a Depression-era song updated as a denunciation of the Bush administration's racist neglect of New Orleans' black population, embodies the project. Springsteen was seeking not just to invoke an anti-establishment folk tradition but to create one.

That's certainly the theme of Wrecking Ball (2012). The eclecticism of Springsteen's latest album – the songs blend everything from his trademark classic rock to hip-hop – ultimately works against it: but if Wrecking Ball is more an angry cacophony than a single message, it has that in common with the times. The gospel-infused 'Shackled and Drawn' draws inspiration from the struggle between 1% and 99% the Occupy movement popularised ('Gambling man rolls the dice, working man pays the bills/It's still fat and easy up on bankers hill'), while the title track is a sports anthem doubling as a semi-shouted challenge to austerity-happy ruling classes: 'Take your best shot, let me see what you've got/Bring on your wrecking ball'. In Bruce Springsteen’s work America’s radical, popular tradition, which the Right attempted in vain to consign to the dustbin of history, is alive to inspire the search for alternatives.

Malte Ringer is a writer and activist based in Nottingham. He blogs at campuskritik.blogspot.com

Previously in the Rebel Music series:

Rebel Music #1 The Clash - Sandinista!

Rebel Music #2 George Clinton

Rebel Music #3 Atari Teenage Riot

Rebel Music #4 Robert Wyatt - Nothing Can Stop Us

Rebel Music #5 Manic Street Preachers

Rebel Music #6 Tracy Chapman

Rebel Music #7 Instrumental Interlude

Rebel Music #8 The Au Pairs

Rebel Music #9 The Band - 'King Harvest (Has Surely Come)'

Rebel Music #10 Crass

The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century —Thomas Friedman, 2005

In the first chapter of his bestseller on globalization, The World Is Flat, three-time Pulitzer Prize–winning foreign affairs columnist for the New York Times Thomas Friedman suggests that his repertoire of achievements also includes being heir to Christopher Columbus. According to Friedman, he has followed in the foot- steps of the fifteenth-century icon by making an unexpected discovery regarding the shape of the world during an encounter with “people called Indians.”

Friedman’s Indians reside in India proper, of course, not in the Caribbean, and include among their ranks CEO Nandan Nilekani of Infosys Technologies Limited in Bangalore, where Friedman has come in the early twenty-first century to investigate phenomena such as outsourcing and to exult over the globalization-era instructions he receives at the KGA Golf Club downtown: “Aim at either Microsoft or IBM.” Nilekani unwittingly plants the flat world seed in Friedman’s mind by commenting, in reference to technological advancements enabling other countries to challenge presumed American hegemony in certain business sectors: “Tom, the playing field is being leveled.”

The Columbus-like discovery process culminates with Friedman’s conversion of one of the components of Nilekani’s idiomatic expression into a more convenient synonym: “What Nandan is saying, I thought to myself, is that the playing field is being flattened ... Flattened? Flattened? I rolled that word around in my head for a while and then, in the chemical way that these things happen, it just popped out: My God, he’s telling me the world is flat!”

The viability of the new metaphor has already been called into question by Friedman’s assessment two pages prior to the flat- world discovery that the Infosys campus is in fact “a different world,” given that the rest of India is not characterized by things like a “massive resort-size swimming pool” and a “fabulous health club.”  No attention is meanwhile paid to the possibility that a normal, round earth—on which all circumferential points are equidistant from the center—might more effectively convey the notion of the global network Friedman maintains is increasingly equalizing human opportunity.

An array of disclaimers and metaphorical qualifications begins to surface around page 536, such that it ultimately appears that the book might have been more appropriately titled The World Is Sometimes Indefinitely Maybe Partially Flat—But Don’t Worry, I Know It’s Not, or perhaps The World Is Flat, Except for the Part That Is Unflat and the Twilight Zone Where Half-Flat People Live. As for his announcement that “unlike Columbus, I didn’t stop with India,” Friedman intends this as an affirmation of his continued exploration of various parts of the globe and not as an admission of his continuing tendency to err—which he does first and foremost by incorrectly attributing the discovery that the earth is round to the geographically misguided Italian voyager.

Leaving aside for the moment the blunders that plague Friedman’s writing, the comparison with Columbus is actually quite apt in other ways, as well. For instance, both characters might be accused of transmitting a similar brand of hubris, nurtured by their respective societies, according to which “the Other” is permitted existence only via the discoverer-hero himself. While Columbus is credited with enabling preexisting populations on the American continent to enter the realm of true existence by reporting them to European civilization, Friedman assumes responsibility for the earth’s inhabitants in general without literally having to encounter them.

As the world becomes ever more interconnected, Friedman appears to be under the impression that he is licensed to extrapolate observations of select demographic groups, such as Indian call center employees pleased with the opportunities provided them by U.S. corporations, and to issue pronouncements like the following on behalf of humanity: “Three United States are better than one, and five would be better than three.” Not surprisingly, Friedman does not respond favorably when elements of humanity fail to internalize the aspirations he has assigned them, resulting in anthropological revelations such as that one of the impediments to freedom in the Arab world is “the wall in the Arab mind.” Friedman explains in 2003 that “I hit my head against that wall” while conversing with Egyptian journalists who “could see nothing good coming from the U.S. ‘occupation’ of Iraq” and who are thus written off as proponents of “Saddamism.”

Friedman initially hocks the possibility of a democratizing war on Iraq as “the most important task worth doing and worth debating,” based on a variety of fluctuating reasons, such as that “install[ing] a decent, tolerant, pluralistic, multireligious government in Iraq ... would be the best answer and antidote to both Saddam and Osama.”11 However, Friedman himself reiterates that the real threat to “open, Western, liberal societies today” consists not of “the deterrables, like Saddam, but the undeterrables—the boys who did 9/11, who hate us more than they love life. It’s these human missiles of mass destruction that could really destroy our open society.” No compelling justification is ever provided for how a war against deterrables whose weapons are not the problem will solve the problem of undeterrables who are the weapons and who by definition cannot be deterred anyway. As for Friedman’s speculation in a 1997 column that “Saddam Hussein is the reason God created cruise missiles,” this is not entirely reconcilable with his suggestion in the very same article that Saddam be eliminated via “a head shot”—not generally a setting on such weaponry.

Though he never disputes the idea that war on Iraq was a “legitimate choice,” Friedman gradually downgrades his war aims to “salvag[ing] something decent” in said country, while appearing to forget for varying stretches of time that the U.S. military is also still involved in a war in Afghanistan. Given the prominence of Friedman’s perch at the New York Times, from which he is permitted to promote—and to disguise as pedagogical in nature— bellicose projects resulting in over one million Iraqi deaths to date, it is not at all far-fetched to resurrect the comparison with Columbus in order to suggest that the designated heir is also complicit in the decimation of foreign populations standing in the way of civilization’s demands.

*

The foundations of Friedman’s journalistic education consist of a tenth-grade introductory course taught by Hattie M. Steinberg at St. Louis Park High School in a suburb of Minneapolis in 1969, after which Friedman claims to have “never needed, or taken, another course in journalism.” Following a BA from Brandeis University and a Master of Philosophy degree in Modern Middle East studies from Oxford, Friedman worked briefly for United Press International and was hired by the New York Times in 1981. He served as bureau chief in both Beirut and Jerusalem in the 1980s before becoming the New York Times’ chief diplomatic correspondent in Washington, D.C., and then, in 1995, its foreign affairs columnist. He has written five bestselling books, dealing variously with the Middle East, globalization, and the clean energy quest: From Beirut to Jerusalem (1989), The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization (1999), Longitudes and Attitudes: Exploring the World After September 11 (2002), The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century (2005), and Hot, Flat and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution—And How It Can Renew America (2008).

Friedman’s writing is characterized by a reduction of complex international phenomena to simplistic rhetoric and theorems that rarely withstand the test of reality. His vacuous but much-publicized “First Law of Petropolitics”—which Friedman devises by plotting a handful of historical incidents on a napkin and which states that the price of oil is inversely related to the pace of freedom—does not even withstand the test of the very Freedom House reports that Friedman invokes as evidence in support of the alleged law. The tendency toward rampant reductionism has become such a Friedman trademark that one finds oneself wondering whether he is not intentionally parodying himself when he introduces “A Theory of Everything” to explain anti-American sentiment in the world and states his hope “that people will write in with comments or catcalls so I can continue to refine [the theory], turn it into a quick book and pay my daughter’s college tuition.”

In the case of Friedman’s musings on the Arab/Muslim world, the reduction process produces decontextualized and often patronizing or blatantly racist generalizations, such as that suicide bombing in Israel indicates a “collective madness” on the part of the Palestinians, whom Friedman has determined it is permissible to refer to collectively as “Ahmed.” Criticism of Israeli crimes is largely restricted to the issue of settlement-building; generalizations about the United States meanwhile often arrive in the form of observations along the lines of: “Is this a great country or what?” This does not mean, however, that the United States is not in perennial danger of descending into decisive non-greatness if it does not abide by Friedman’s diktats on oil dependence and other matters, such as the need to expand U.S. embassy libraries across the globe because “you’d be amazed at how many young people abroad had their first contact with America through an embassy library.”

Complementing his reductionist habit is Friedman’s insistence on imbuing trivial experiences abroad with undue or false significance, often in support of whatever “meta-story” he is peddling at the moment. The “tiny Vietnamese woman crouched on the sidewalk with her bathroom scale” in Hanoi in 1995, to whom Friedman gives a dollar to weigh himself each morning of his visit, thus becomes proof that “globalization emerges from below, from street level, from people’s very souls and from their very deepest aspirations.” The Pakistani youth wearing a jacket imprinted with the word “Titanic” on Friedman’s Emirates Air flight in 2001 becomes a sign that Pakistan is either the Titanic or the iceberg. The presence of pork chops at Friedman’s cousin Giora’s bar mitzvah in Israel prompts deep reflection: “I thought about the meaning of Giora’s pork chops for several days. They seemed to contain a larger message.”

Friedman begins The Lexus and the Olive Tree with a detailed recounting of a 1994 experience in a Tokyo hotel in which his room service request for four oranges results first in four glasses of orange juice and then in four peeled and diced oranges, all trans- ported by a Japanese serviceperson unable to correctly pronounce the word “orange.” Only after almost two pages do we learn that the point of this citrus saga, plus another one in a Hanoi hotel dining room involving tangerines, is that Friedman “would find a lot of things on my plate and outside my door that I wasn’t planning to find as I traveled the globe for the Times.”

That these extensive travels have not produced a more relevant introductory anecdote to a book about globalization is curious, especially since Friedman boasts in Longitudes and Attitudes that he has “total freedom, and an almost unlimited budget, to explore,” and especially since he criticizes writers who eschew shoe-leather reporting in favor of “sitting at home in their pajamas firing off digital mortars.” It perhaps does not occur to our foreign affairs columnist that, in the era of online publications, most writers do not have access to the funds that would enable them to fire off digital mortars about the “Russian breakfast” option on the room service menu at the five-star Meliá Cohiba in Havana, or to arrive at conclusions regarding the root causes of poverty in Africa by going on safari in Botswana. It should be noted, however, that Friedman’s coverage of the Lebanese civil war and the first Palestinian Intifada—though often plagued by untruths as well—was more readily classifiable as shoe-leather reporting, perhaps because he did not define his job at the time as “tourist with an attitude.”

Friedman additionally reveals in Longitudes and Attitudes that the “only person who sees my two columns each week before they show up in the newspaper is a copy editor who edits them for grammar and spelling,” and that for the duration of his columnist career up to this point he has “never had a conversation with the publisher of The New York Times about any opinion I’ve adopted— before or after any column I’ve written.” It comes as no surprise, of course, that said publisher feels no need to reign in an employee whose last failure to toe the paper’s editorial line appears to have occurred in 1982, when Friedman’s reference to indiscriminate Israeli shelling of West Beirut as indiscriminate launches a battle ultimately resulting in a $5,000 raise and an “emotional lunch” with New York Times executive editor A. M. (Abe) Rosenthal, who “threw his arms around me in a big Abe bear hug, told me all was forgiven and then whispered in my ear: ‘Now listen, you clever little !%#@: don’t you ever do that again.’” Friedman’s confirmed immunity from most kinds of editing meanwhile explains his continued ability to churn out incoherent metaphors, the terms of which he himself tends to lose track.

Consider, for example, his pre–Iraq war advice to George W. Bush to throw his steering wheel out the window in a vehicular game of chicken with Saddam Hussein, immediately followed by the warning that “if Saddam swerves aside by accepting unconditional [weapons] inspections,” the Bush team cannot “also swerve off the road, chase [Saddam’s] car and crash into it anyway”—an option that would seem to have been obviated by removal of the Bush team’s navigational instrument. A different sort of metaphorical pile-up occurs when Friedman visits Afghanistan, and readers are bombarded with an image of Kabul as a smashed cake- like Liberia-esque Ground Zero East covered with snow, ice, and aspects of Dresden, the Beirut Green Line, and Hiroshima.

Alas, the point of this book is not to laugh at Friedman’s bungled metaphors, or the number of times he devises foreign policy prescriptions based on experiences in hotel rooms, restaurants, and airplanes. Rather, it is to demonstrate the defectiveness in form and in substance of his disjointed discourse, and in doing so offer a testament to the degenerate state of the mainstream media in the United States.

Friedman’s reporting is replete with hollow analyses (e.g., an American victory in Afghanistan is possible as long as it recognizes that “Dorothy, this ain’t Kansas”) and factual inaccuracies, ranging from the relatively trivial (Chile shares a border with Russia but Poland does not) to the sort of deliberate obfuscation of fact that is condoned by the establishment (the Palestinians were offered 95 percent of what they wanted at Camp David). Self- contradictions abound, and, two hundred pages into The World Is Flat, Friedman defines Globalization 1.0 as the era in which he was required to physically visit an airline ticket office in order to make his travel arrangements—whereas, according to the definition he provides at the start of the book, Globalization 1.0 ended around the year 1800.

As for contradictions in matters of greater geopolitical con- sequence, these include the aforementioned continuous adding and subtracting of motives for the Iraq war, which is alternately characterized as evidence of the moral clarity of the Bush admin- istration, evidence of the U.S. military’s ability to make Iraqis “Suck. On. This,” and simultaneously a neoconservative project and “the most radical-liberal revolutionary war the U.S. has ever launched”—indicating that “the left needs to get beyond its opposition to the war and start pitching in with its own ideas and moral support to try to make lemons into lemonade in Baghdad.” The supremely liberal nature of the war is especially confounding given that Friedman also defines himself as “a liberal on every issue other than this war.”

Whatever era of globalization we are currently in, it is one in which news professionals are increasingly poised to influence the outcomes of the very world events they are reporting. Friedman’s contributions are not limited to Iraq, as is clear from the following passage from veteran British reporter Robert Fisk’s The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East:

How many journalists encouraged the Israelis—by their reporting or by their willfully given, foolish advice—to undertake the brutal assaults on the Palestinians? On 31 March 2002—just three days before the assault on Jenin—Tom Friedman wrote in The New York Times that “Israel needs to deliver a military blow that clearly shows terror will not pay.” Well, thanks, Tom, I said to myself when I read this piece of lethal journalism a few days later. The Israelis certainly followed Friedman’s advice.

That Friedman discredits himself as a journalist by championing the killing of civilians has not prevented him from being hailed as a master of the trade, an objective commentator on the Middle East, and a foreign policy sage sought out by Barack Obama in times of international uncertainty (such as the 2011 Arab uprisings, when Obama is presumably pleased to discover that he himself is one of the catalysts of the very uprisings he is seeking to understand). Friedman appears as required reading on university syllabi and receives compensation in the form of $75,000 for public speaking appearances. He occupies slot No. 33 on Foreign Policy’s Top 100 Global Thinkers of 2010, accompanied by the reminder that “Friedman doesn’t just report on events; he helps shape them”— despite minor setbacks such as the disastrous fate recently met by his thoughts on the Irish economy.

Friedman’s latest incarnation as award-winning conservationist has spawned a whole new level of irony as he has endeavored to reconcile this identity with preceding ones: “The neocon strategy may have been necessary to trigger reform in Iraq and the wider Arab world, but it will not be sufficient unless it is followed up by what I call a ‘geo-green’ strategy.” Readers may question how many true “geo-greens” would advocate the tactical contamination of the earth’s soil with depleted uranium munitions. Why not introduce a doctrine of neoconservationism?

A more critical question, of course, is how a journalist whose professional qualifications include rhetorical incoherence has nonetheless ascended to an internationally recognized position as media icon. (Friedman even suggests at one point that Osama bin Laden has been perusing his column.) Hardly a fluke, Friedman’s accumulation of influence is a direct result of his service as mouthpiece for empire and capital, i.e., as resident apologist for U.S. military excess and punishing economic policies.

Naturally, Friedman is far from alone when it comes to co-opted media figures providing a veneer of independent validation to state and corporate hegemonic endeavors in which they are entirely complicit. Friedman’s exceptionalism lies simply in the extent of his symbiosis with centers of power. Let us briefly reconsider the evolution of The World Is Flat, which begins with Friedman’s hobnobbing with the Infosys CEO in Bangalore.

A favorable profile of Friedman from a 2006 edition of the Washingtonian specifies that Friedman’s flat-world theory was developed in collaboration with the vice president of corporate strategy at IBM, and that—in addition to remaining on The New York Times bestseller list for over a year—the book “jump-started a national debate over American competitiveness that was picked up in President Bush’s State of the Union address.” An article from the Financial Times website the previous year meanwhile announces Friedman’s receipt of the first annual £30,000 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award for The World Is Flat; Friedman is quoted as repaying the compliment by declaring the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs “two such classy organizations, who take business and business reporting seriously. I’m thrilled and honoured because the judges who made this award are such an esteemed group.”

Among the “esteemed” components of the “classy” Wall Street firm is executive Lloyd Blankfein, a member of the judge’s panel for Friedman’s award who, in the aftermath of the 2008 financial meltdown, reiterated his commitment to serious business by lying under oath to Congress about Goldman’s classy defrauding of clients. In an indispensable exposé for Rolling Stone, investigative journalist Matt Taibbi provides the following analogy about the firm’s self-enriching exploitation, “at the expense of society,” of the meltdown it helped to create:

Goldman, to get $1.2 billion in crap off its books, dumps a huge lot of deadly mortgages on its clients, lies about where that crap came from and claims it believes in the product even as it’s betting $2 billion against it. When its victims try to run out of the burning house, Goldman stands in the doorway, blasts them all with gaso- line before they can escape, and then has the balls to send a bill overcharging its victims for the pleasure of getting fried.

Friedman, despite criticizing U.S. investment banks in 2008 for deviating from the corporate ethics set forth in his friend Dov Seidman’s book How: Why How We Do Anything Means Everything ... in Business (and in Life), by bundling together risky mortgage bonds in order to “engineer money from money,” continues throughout 2008 and 2009 to quote Goldman Sachs executives and analysts on how the U.S. government should respond to the financial crisis—namely by throwing more billions at banks. It is not until 2010 that Friedman directly denounces Goldman as “the poster boy for banks behaving by ‘situational values’—exploiting whatever the situation, or rules that it helped to write, allowed.” Another Seidman concept, situational values are the opposite of “sustainable values” and are consistently decried by Friedman, who fails to explain how intermittent denunciation of Goldman Sachs is indicative of a sustainable value system. He meanwhile continues to campaign against entitlements and to encourage the slashing of corporate and payroll taxes, policies obviously not designed to punish the poster boy.

Aside from Blankfein, the judging panel for the 2005 FT– Goldman Sachs award also happens to include the Chairman and Chief Mentor of Infosys, star of The World Is Flat. Though £30,000 may be an insignificant sum for a character who accumulates at least seven figures of annual income on top of having married into one of the hundred wealthiest families in the United States, the award is a useful example of the potentially incestuous nature of the relationship between business and business reporting. The process of mutual aggrandizement in this case is straightforward: Friedman writes book about globalization under guidance of corporate executives, corporate executives hail book as ingenious blueprint for world, accolades propel Friedman’s fame, Friedman exploits fame to further reinforce elite power structures while occasionally attributing his project to more sentimental motivations such as those cited in The World Is Flat:

When done right and in a sustained manner, globalization has a huge potential to lift large numbers of people out of poverty. And when I see large numbers of people escaping poverty in places like India, China, or Ireland, well, yes, I get a little emotional.

As for Friedman’s genuine motivations, he regularly advertises his subscription to billionaire investor Warren Buffett’s theory that everything he has achieved in life is a result of having been born in the United States, and reiterates his duty to pass his situation on to his children. Given that the overwhelming majority of offspring produced in the United States—not to mention the world—cannot aspire to situations that involve belonging to one of the country’s hundred richest families, it goes without saying that Friedman fully endorses the perpetuation of a system of institutionalized economic inequality.

As he himself notes in The Lexus and the Olive Tree with regard to the “Darwinian brutality” of free-market capitalism: “Other systems may be able to distribute and divide income more efficiently and equitably, but none can generate income to distribute as efficiently.” Friedman’s tendency to convert victims of imposed economic systems into victims of natural selection is symptomatic of his categorical dismissal of the realities affecting the global poor (see, for example, his response to Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz’s observation in 2006 that “The number of people living in poverty in Africa in the last 20 years has doubled” with the statement: “But India matters”). Such tendencies are mean- while rendered all the more grating by Friedman’s occasional assumption of the role of capitalist victim himself, as in the following scenario from 1998:

While waiting to see if the U.N. Secretary General’s 11th-hour visit to Iraq can avert a war, I sought some diversion by catching up on the sports news. Talk about depressing. If you want to see how the other great superpower at work in the world today—the unfettered markets—is reshaping our lives and uprooting communities, turn to sports.

The superior depressiveness in this case is in part a result of adverse effects of unfettered markets on Friedman’s NBA season tickets, such as that “teams are being forced to trade away high- priced stars left and right.”

Friedman’s prophecies and directives do not all emerge from the depths of corporate libido. He is also equipped with a “brain trust,” a group of academics, experts, and rabbis with predictable views who are personal friends of Friedman and are quoted so regularly at times that one finds oneself wondering, for example, if Johns Hopkins professor Michael Mandelbaum, Middle East expert Stephen P. Cohen, and Israeli political theorist Yaron Ezrahi might not be nominated honorary New York Times columnists. Mandelbaum and Cohen also share the distinction of being Friedman’s “soul mates and constant intellectual companions,” while Cohen is graced with the additional denomination “soul brother.”

As late Palestinian American scholar Edward Said notes in his 1989 essay “The Orientalist Express: Thomas Friedman Wraps Up the Middle East”—in reference to Friedman’s blissful reductions of Arabo-Islamic peoples in From Beirut to Jerusalem—Friedman “palms off his opinions (and those of his sources) as reasonable, uncontested, secure. In fact they are minority views and have been under severe attack for several decades now.”67 Other passages from Said’s essay are useful for comprehending the triumph of the persona of Thomas Friedman on the journalistic stage:

It is not just the comic philistinism of Friedman’s ideas that I find so remarkably jejune, or his sassy and unbeguiling manner ... It is rather the special combination of disarming incoherence and unearned egoism that gives him his cockily alarming plausibility— qualities that may explain [From Beirut to Jerusalem]’s startling commercial success. It’s as if ... what scholars, poets, historians, fighters, and statesmen have done is not as important or as central as what Friedman himself thinks.

As for what happens when Friedman himself thinks that Iraqis should “Suck. On. This” as compensation for 9/11, we can only assume that haughty refrains of sexual-military domination find resonance among audiences seeking to defy feelings of individual and/or national inadequacy. It is meanwhile not clear why Friedman subsequently purports to be scandalized by the sexual- military goings-on at Abu Ghraib.

In this book, I draw primarily from Friedman’s dispatches as New York Times foreign affairs columnist (1995–present) and his five books. I draw to a lesser extent from his pre-1995 articles and from select interviews and public appearances. (Iraqis may be interested to know, however, that contemporary inciters of blood- shed have in past decades pursued more innocuous subjects, such as how “Iowa Beef Revolutionized Meat-Packing Industry.”) Section I of the book, “America,” will focus on Friedman’s view of the role of the United States on this earth. Section II, “The Arab/Muslim World,” will address Friedman’s commitment to Orientalist traditions, with a focus on his post-9/11 radicalization and the war on terror. Section III, “The Special Relationship,” will deal with Friedman’s double standards vis-à-vis Israel.

Regarding the future of the Friedman phenomenon, a television anchor from Israel’s Channel 2 informs him during a 2010 inter- view that he is an “endangered species” and poses the question: “Ten years from now, will an institution like Thomas Friedman be possible?”71 She is referring not to the possibility that by the year 2020 journalists who assign “moral clarity” to George W. Bush will no longer receive Pulitzer Prizes for “clarity of vision,” but rather to current trends away from print media.

Friedman laughs and suggests that the substance of his work will ensure his continued relevance. But you never know. After all, as Friedman himself has reasoned, it would be crazy to pay a lot of money for a belt if you already have suspenders, “especially if that belt makes it more likely your pants will fall down.”

The Imperial Messenger – Thomas Friedman At Work, by Belén Fernández, is published by Verso. New Left Project's review of the book, by David Wearing, can be found here.

You probably wouldn’t thank me for taking you there: it’s an industrial estate, of the sort we’ve all driven past. Big lorries judder past every couple of minutes. Men mill about in dirty overalls, and boots mucky enough to give a pub landlord a fit of the vapours. But here’s the thing: for an industrial estate, there’s not much actual industry going on.

There’s a business on River Road called Swift Engineering. Fifty years ago, its premises sprawled down one entire side of the road; now it’s on a tiny corner plot, and rents out the rest of the space. Thirty-one people used to work inside; now there’s four. And on the day we turned up there was only one - the manager, John Matheson. His staff are down to a three-day week. We went on a walk round the plant - which didn’t take long. What I chiefly remember was how, crammed into one room, were all these machines, worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. There simply wasn’t the business to turn them on, or to pay for the space they needed.

The site Swift used to occupy is now split with four other firms, all of them one- or two- man bands. We met one, a man called Anthony Harris, who came to the estate thirty-five years ago to train at another firm called Arrow Pipework. The way Anthony told it, he’d just left school at 16 when his dad kicked him out of bed and took him off for an apprenticeship. Only now there’s no Arrow Pipework - and precious few other jobs or training opportunities. Anthony’s eldest son is in his mid-20s and the most he’s ever got is the odd shift at Morrisons. Instead of a career, he’s been treated for depression. This isn’t a dramatic story - it’s a tale of gradual but unyielding decline. As Anthony puts it: ‘When it comes to manufacturing, we might be the end of the line’.

Talk about the loss of industry and people will think of areas like the North East or the Midlands. Truth is, it’s happening all over - as demonstrated by River Road, just ten minutes’ drive from the banks in Canary Wharf. Sometimes something dramatic happens like a local shipyard such as Swan Hunter shutting down - and it gets on the evening news. But most of the time this process - what I think of as the de-industrial revolution - barely gets airtime.

The importance of stories

What I want to talk about here is why this de-industrial revolution is happening and what its consequences have been. And in my view, one major reason is a story.

Most people don’t regard economics as being a narrative discipline. They think it’s all about percentages, spreadsheets, regression analyses. Intellectually respectable, perhaps - but deeply, terminally stodgy. But there’s a whole other aspect of modern economics that’s driven by stories. Think about the dotcom boom - spin the right yarn back then, and you could walk away a multi-millionaire. Or the adoption of the euro by 17 different countries - each telling themselves a tale about who they were and where their future lay.

So what’s the grand narrative in Britain? What’s the big story we tell ourselves about where we’ve been and where we’re heading? One big theme shared by the people in charge of our economy is the need to embrace change. Change is a synonym for progress, the bad is invariably outweighed by the good, and the dream is just around the corner.

And when it comes to discussing the business model for the UK - how this country pays its way in the world and how its people will make a living - we’ve been hearing a similar story from ministers, economists and commentators for the past three decades. Conservative or Labour, Thatcher or Brown, on this big story the tribes are in unison. It’s a simple message, in three parts. One, the old days of heavy, dirty industry are gone for good. The future lies in working with our brains, not our hands. Two, the job of the government in economic policy is simply to get out of the way. Oh, and we need to fling open our markets to trade with other countries - because the British can take on the competition, any competition, and win.

But if economics is a marriage of narratives and numbers, then you might define an economic crisis as when the two get out of sync - when the story that a country tells about itself gets too detached from reality. Sub-prime mortgages were an ingenious way of giving the low-paid a toehold on the housing ladder - until they were shown up as a device for financial chicanery. Greece was part of the Mercedes-owning brotherhood of Europe - until Athens went for a loan and was charged a higher interest rate than you’d get on your credit card. In Britain too, there’s ample evidence after thirty years that the promised rewards of this post-industrial future just haven’t materialised. The narrative simply doesn’t fit the numbers.

But it’s more than just the maths not adding up. That vision of Britain’s metamorphosis from industrial to knowledge economy always lacked something: a good answer to the question of what would happen to the people who worked in the old, supposedly-redundant industries and the parts of the country who relied upon them. And the result has been to turn previously productive classes and regions into mere supplicants.

This is a national story - of industrial decay presented as economic modernisation, of whole swathes of the country going backward and being assured this is progress.

Three versions of the de-industrial revolution

Over the past thirty years, there’s been three main versions of the de-industrial revolution. There’s the Thatcher argument; followed by the Blair vision; and finally the Cameron update. I’ll come back to Cameron and the future towards the end, but let’s start with Thatcher.

When she took over in 1979, the world was going through its second big oil shock, inflation had shot up and the government finances were in a mess. And as far as correcting the critical weakness of British economy and industry went, the Thatcherites had a clear answer. In a word: competition. In 1974, Keith Joseph - the man Margaret Thatcher described as her closest political friend - delivered a speech, a section of which was titled ‘Growth means Change’. Joseph’s argument ran thus: British industry was ‘overmanned’ with ‘too low earnings and too little profit and too little investment’. The answer lay in shedding factory workers, which would make industry leaner and stronger and free up labour for new businesses. ‘This is growth’, Joseph said. ‘Whether the new work is in industry, commerce or services, public or private … The working population must choose between narrow illusory job security in one place propped up by public funds or the real job security based on a prosperous dynamic economy.’

Nowadays, the smart thing to say about Thatcherism is that it was heavily improvised - that Joseph and Thatcher and the rest defined their ideology only after the first term. But reading that speech, made five years before Thatcher even moved into Number 10, what jumps out is how consistent the argument was: manufacturing, and the people who worked in it, had to be hacked down to size as a matter of economic necessity.

And they presided over just that process. Indeed, they encouraged it: with scorched-earth austerity that put many companies flat out of business; with privatisations and by throwing open markets to competition; and with an economic policy increasingly geared towards a housing boom and the City of London. Nearly one in four of all manufacturing jobs disappeared within Thatcher’s first term alone.

And despite Joseph’s promises, the middle-aged engineers who were laid off didn’t go off to become software engineers - they were tossed on the scrap heap.

Compare that with Tony Blair. Because it’s with him that the argument for moving from industry to services shifts from being framed as one of dire necessity to being a vision about Britain’s place in the world. Blair, Brown, Mandelson: the architects of New Labour were convinced that the future lay in what they called the knowledge economy. Pretty soon after becoming trade secretary, Mandelson was off to Silicon Valley, declaring it his ‘inspiration’. And when dotcom fever was at its peak, Gordon Brown promised that the UK would be e-commerce capital of the world within three years. Again, the theme was simple: most of what could be manufactured could be manufactured cheaper elsewhere. The future lay in coming up with the ideas, the designs, and most of all the brands.

The great irony is that all this techno-utopianism came from men who would struggle to order a book off Amazon. Alistair Campbell tells a story about how Tony Blair got his first-ever mobile phone after stepping down as prime minister in 2007. His first text to Campbell read: ‘This is amazing, you can send words on a phone’.

Had they known a bit more about technology, Blair and Brown would surely not have found it so glamorous.  But as it was they had plenty of advisers and consultants and thinktankers to help them stay cutting edge. There were government white papers on how ideas had replaced things as the motor of economic growth - try telling that to the factory owners of Guangdong. Much breath was wasted on talk about video gaming and all the industries that would replace the old ones. Where once the British had sold cars and ships to the rest of the world, now it could flog its culture and tourism – and Lara Croft.

One of the most interesting walk-on roles in this era was played by an American academic called Richard Florida. His big thing was that the successful regions of the future would be driven by young people living in the city centre - what he called the ‘creative class’. And there was an even more elite group that he called the ‘super-creative core’. It was always a pretty flawed argument: ask Florida who was in his ‘super-creative core’ and he’d name IT support staff and all sorts of occupations that didn’t actually sound all that groovy. And the other thing that really sticks out about Florida is how he fences off creative work. You’re either a knowledge worker or a factory worker - as if the stuff done by other people didn’t require brains. Which just doesn’t stack up.

Alan Reece recently took me on a tour of one of his factories over in Walker. Now, Alan went to Cambridge, got a doctorate and lectured in agricultural engineering at Newcastle University before setting up his engineering companies. Yet in the very early days, he’d made a mistake in a design that had to be pointed out to him by a subordinate who lacked these high-flying qualifications. Well, when Alan was told about this error he pulled himself up to his full six-foot plus and towered over the oily rag bearing bad news and said, ‘Look here, my man, there can’t be a mistake. I’ve got a doctorate in engineering and this gentleman’s checked my drawing and he’s got a first-class honours’. Things got a bit heated - until finally, the Geordie worker pulls this primitive trigonometry calculator out of his overalls.

It’s covered in crap, so he has to spit on the display. But he does the calculation - and he’s right. And, as Alan says, nowadays that man would be a cert to get a first-class degree of his own. But in Florida’s taxonomy he’s a mere grunt.

Running through a lot of the knowledge economy talk is a carelessness about people that often slips into contempt. For the Labour governments from 1997 on, the choice facing workers in this entrepreneurial, innovative, young country was very simple - they either brained up, or got written off.

Blair and Brown would help youngsters with the learning part, by vastly expanding higher education; but they had little to offer the middle-aged man whose carplant had just shut down. As for the areas that had just seen their economy disappear down the plughole, they had to reinvent themselves, as new cultural centres. The smart ones launched regeneration projects, the smartest ones – like Gateshead – managed to do a good job of them.

Now what I’m not trying to paint is a picture in which industrial managers and workers are traduced by silky Westminster types. There’s a lot to be said about how rotten British bosses and investors are. One of the workers at Alan Reece’s firm told me how the previous owners used to treat employees like dirt. Every time the workforce went on strike, which was often, one of the Pearsons would buy a new Rolls Royce Silver Cloud and drive through the picket line, waving two fingers at his own staff.

No, the real charge against Blair and Brown is that, rather than focus on the problem of uncommitted and underperforming managers and shareholders, they ran off after a fantasy.

But they weren’t the only ones to promulgating the gospel of the knowledge industries: there was a whole industry devoted to it. Just flick through the publications of the local regional development agency, One North East. There’s lots of documents with titles like: Towards an E-region. But there’s just one on manufacturing. There is, however, a discussion paper called ‘The North East: Bohemian or Behemoth?’. It mentions a pensioners’ day centre on the western outskirts of Newcastle, where young and old can chat ‘on the complexities of digital art’. And there’s a scheme in Durham that helps young people ‘avoid the temptations of crime by encouraging them to take up fishing’. Worthy initiatives, no doubt, but what has this got to do with regional development? All becomes clear with the RDA’s discussion of how it can can keep ‘bright, innovative people, with transferable skills’ in the area. So that’s what it’s about: attracting the super-creatives. The leaflet, it won’t surprise you to learn, was produced for a visit to the North East by ‘creativity guru’ Richard Florida.

Just as with Blair and Brown, there’s the unmistakable sense of people who’ve had the tutorials, or been on the awaydays, but still haven’t got the hang of the terminology.

The results

Let’s review the wreckage.  When Thatcher came to power, manufacturing accounted for almost 30 per cent of Britain’s national income and employed 6.8 million people. By the time Brown left Downing Street in May 2010, it was down to just over 11 per cent of the economy and a workforce of 2.5 million. Now, for the sake of fairness let me make two caveats. First, manufacturing is partly a productivity game: the point is you get more machines in, so you employ fewer staff on a particular task - the idea being that they can do something else instead. Second, other countries have stepped back a bit from manufacturing - all those new Labour-isms about the competitive threat from China and India were not just babble. But by any standards the numbers you’ve just heard represent a collapse. As the government itself admits, no other major economy has been through our scale of deindustrialisation.

In 1979 Britain had nearly as many manufacturing workers as Germany; by the time of the financial crisis, Germany’s manufacturing workforce was two and a half times the size of ours. Other countries haven’t sought to shed their industries but have tried to protect them. The Germans and French have kept their big domestic brandnames - the Mercedes and Mieles, the Renaults and Peugeots - and with them their supply chains of smaller manufacturers and partners. In Britain there’s been no such industrial husbandry, with the result that we have few big manufacturers left - but a profusion of bitpart makers. Think about River Road and its row of one-and two-man bands. Is that a bad thing? I would say yes. Bad economically, bad industrially and terrible socially and culturally.

The economic problem with this strategy can be summed up in one word: Greece. Not my comparison, but the one that was made to me by locals last time I was up here. Hang on, I thought: Britain’s nothing like Greece! Nevertheless, I saw their point. Because the loss of manufacturing means Britain no longer pays its way in the world. Last year, we bought £97bn more in goods from other countries than we sold to them - the biggest shortfall since 1980. The traditional view of the deindustrialists in Whitehall has been that this doesn’t matter: that we could make good the gap by borrowing more and selling our assets to foreigners. But there are problems with relying on foreigners for hard cash - they can simply refuse to extend it to you. If you want proof, just ask George Papandreou.

At this point, I should come clean and say that I’ve got no great sentimental attachment to factories or even to making things. I’m not hankering after a recreation of those black and white Hovis ads. I’m not even much cop at DIY. But it’s plain that what’s replaced manufacturing hasn’t been any better - and is often considerably worse. In the North East, for example, manufacturing jobs have nearly halved since 1997 alone - one of the biggest drops anywhere in the country.

And what’s come along in its place? The simple answer is: not a lot. Drive along Wallsend, which used to be a hub of shipbuilding in Britain, and it’s now just barren. And the figures confirm this. During the period from when Tony Blair took power to now, the private sector has created fewer jobs in the North East than the number of people made redundant.

So the state has had to fill in. It’s done that in two ways: either by paying welfare, so that over one in six of all residents is on some form of out of work benefit; or by creating jobs in education, health and government. Nothing wrong with those roles, but they aren’t the shiny, creative, private-sector employment promised by Blair. If you want to see those, walk a few minutes from Newcastle train station to the site of the old Scottish and Newcastle brewery. What’s replaced it is something called Science City, which was meant to be a home for high-tech new businesses. But all you can see there right now is some fancy student accommodation and a load of barren ground. The point is that the North East is not some exceptional failure while the rest of the country surges ahead. On the contrary, it’s the norm.

The Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (Cresc), based at Manchester University, have been digging into where the new jobs came from over the past decade. What they’ve found is that in the Midlands, the North, Wales and Scotland between 1998 and 2007, the bulk of the new jobs came from the state, covering up for the weakness of the private sector. It’s only really in London and the South – where banking and its related industries are concentrated – that the private sector took on lots of new workers. We’re always told that the past decade was a massive boom. But looking back it seems less a golden age, than a plastic one. 

And that’s as true in the North East as anywhere else. Just look at the Newcastle Journal list of the 200 biggest companies in the region. Recently I looked at the top 10 for 2006, to get an idea of what the region had looked like in the boom. In the top 10, there was Nissan, which is part-Japanese and part French - owned, in fact, by formerly state-run Renault. There were three companies that do what the state used to do - a water utility and two public-transport companies. And what’s left are a couple of housebuilding firms - Bellway and Barratt’s - and at no 1, Northern Rock - which is to say the bubble economy, in miniature.

I ran this list by Andy Pike, who’s a professor at Newcastle University, and asked him who would have been on the list thirty years ago. Among the candidates he reeled off: Swan Hunter, Vickers, Parsons, Rolls Royce, Scottish and Newcastle, Northern Engineering Industry … Nearly all solid manufacturing names.  The smaller new industries that have sprung up in the North East are not especially impressive either. The region is now in with a good shout to be call centre capital of Britain, which probably isn’t a title anyone wants. You do get the odd hi-tech cottage industry - I’m thinking of something like the video games firms in Middlesbrough. That’s good quality work. But it’s small scale and never likely to employ more than a few IT graduates. Not the workers laid off by manufacturing - and probably not their kids.

And this is the story all over the country. In 2005, MG Rover shut its plant at Longbridge in the West Midlands, with the loss of 6,300 jobs. These were among some of the most skilled workers in Britain: if anyone was going to bounce back, they were. Three academics tracked what happened to three hundred of them. They interviewed them regularly for three years after the factory was shut down. It’s one of the most revealing bits of academic research into the human costs of deindustrialisation. What they found was that the Longbridge staff did bounce back - as much as they could. About 90 per cent of them went and got another job, the vast majority permanent. Quite a lot retrained and some went into the service sector. In other words, they did everything the government told them to. Only now, these tremendously skilful workers at a prestige employer - what you might call the aristocracy of labour, if you were that way inclined - were earning an average of £5,640 less every year than they had at MG Rover. And a quarter of the people interviewed admitted to suffering financial difficulties, to now living off their savings and the like. Which I think sums up how the de-industrial revolution has cut adrift an entire class. Skilled blue-collar workers may not have had university degrees but their work was technical, demanding and - thanks to the trade union representation you got in much of the old industry- well paid and with decent terms and conditions.

Think back to Anthony Harris, who I mentioned at the start of this piece. He left school at 16, got an apprenticeship and trained to a high level of skills. Now consider his son, who’s looking at routine, low paid, and often insecure work in a supermarket or the admin part of the public sector. How is that better?

The post-industrial city

And think about the cost to the places that used to be home to all this now rotting industry. Here we are in Tyneside, integral to the history of the industrial revolution, built on industrialisation. There’s Newcastle University - founded by the arms-maker William Armstrong - the local tech colleges, which used to provide training to factory staff on day release, the lit and phil, the mining and engineers institutes, the social clubs. Tristram Hunt, historian of Victorian cities, has talked about how industrial areas created cultures on the back of trade - and here is a brilliant example of that.

But as Hunt goes on to say: ‘Today it is the other way around. Instead of culture springing from the inner workings of our cities, we see it as a way to make our cities work’. Cue people like Richard Florida. Cue Manhattan style loft conversions and regeneration blandscapes designed to make cities look like anywhere else - expressly so they can pull in people from anywhere else. And cue excitable tourism marketing offices talking about how South Shore Road, just outside the Sage in Gateshead, is the ‘hippest street in Britain’ - as apparently voted on the internet.

What Newcastle and other cities have been offered by de-industrialisation doesn’t build on any of their traditions. To go back to Hunt’s point, these are areas whose entire culture is a productive one; they are rooted in making things and selling them. What Thatcher and especially Blair effectively asked them to do was to change their cultures to being consumerist - to buying things instead, often on tick.

So you get a giant shopping centre like Liverpool One describing itself as the largest urban regeneration project in Europe. You get American economists arguing that free trade may have reduced salaries for blue-collar workers in the West - but they can now buy cheaper Chinese imports. In other words, you may have lost your factory workshop - but at least you’ve got a pound shop.

If you’re employed in the service sector - or more to the point are a politician who reckons services are Britain’s future - there might seem nothing wrong with all of that. But the net result is to undermine whatever economic or political clout the old industrial regions and classes had, by making them dependent on central government for jobs and welfare. What the de-industrial revolution has left us with is whole swathes of the country that have been turned into supplicants of Westminster.

David Cameron has talked about rebalancing the economy, the March of the Makers. And it’s difficult to disagree with the argument that the Tories put about - that Britain’s economy is lopsided, dependent on the City and the housing bubble. But I don’t see the policies to match the talk. Like many in Westminster, Cameron senses something is up, but isn’t sure exactly what - let alone what to do about it. Instead, we get the same prescription as under Thatcher - that if you cut back on public spending, private spending will inevitably grow. We get the disastrous decision to give train contracts to German factories rather than to workers in Derby. We even get the heir to Blair talking in New Labourish terms about ‘the high-growth, highly-innovative companies of the future’ and paying tribute to - who else? - Richard Florida. When it comes to manufacturing, Cameron sounds much more radical than he is.

Suggestions

I had thought of ending this talk with a laundry list of possible initiatives. Like directing the banks that the taxpayers now own to lend more and more cheaply to businesses operating outside London and the South East. Like commissioning more big infrastructure north of the Watford Gap. Cutting taxes for companies that produce more and employ more people in this country. I’d also suggest kicking away the Westminster adherence to ever freer trade. We could start by insisting that more public-sector commissioning is from British manufacturers. Why should the NHS get its wheelchairs or pacemakers from American firms? But this isn’t the right forum for policy wonkery. So let me end with one last pitch. After all I’ve said, some of you may still be wondering why I’ve picked out industrial estates as the spot where Britain’s got it wrong, rather than its banks or its Jobcentres.

The answer is because manufacturing is the place where those two debates cross. If you’re worried about financial recklessness, and raging inequality, then you want a more mixed economy. If you’re worried about jobs then manufacturing is about the best source I can think of for volume employment with decent wages.

Other debates are also haunted by the spectre of what we’ve done to our industrial areas. Politicians blah on about localism with barely a thought about how to restore the independence of our local economies. Pundits bemoan the loss of community spirit without mentioning that we’ve put a wrecking ball through many communities.

Let me leave you with another mental exercise, this one in two parts. First, forget Thatcher and Blair and think back to Anthony Harris. What justification can you offer him and his son, and the millions like them, who’ve seen their worlds torn apart over the past three decades? And what do you think the consequences will be if we can’t find a replacement for what they’ve lost.

This article is from issue 50 of the journal Soundings and is available online exclusively at NLP.

This is an edited version of a lecture given for BBC Radio 3 at the Sage, Gateshead on 6 November 2011.

Aditya Chakrabortty is economics leader writer for The Guardian.

Why, in the midst of a historically severe depression caused by a crisis in the least regulated part of the private sector, is the political class of the global north prioritising an assault on the free-market bogeyman of “big government”? Why, after a decade of military disasters in Western Asia, are so many prominent voices advocating a military response to the non-existence of “weapons of mass destruction” in Iran? One answer is that the material interests of class and state power are reinforced by an intellectual culture which advocates policies that serve those interests, irrespective of “externalities” such as the costs to the non-powerful. Power and wealth use the louder voice they can afford to drown out dissent and hardwire a set of assumptions, a conventional wisdom, a conceptual framework into the political discourse, which will tend to produce the same answers irrespective of the question, or the facts. It follows then, for those of us who choose to challenge power, that undermining, critiquing and disrupting that conventional wisdom is a vital task – a prerequisite to persuading the general public that another world is possible.

Few single voices play a greater role in propagating the dogmas of neoliberalism than Thomas Friedman, three-time Pulitzer Prize winner and leading columnist on international affairs for the world’s leading English-language newspaper, the New York Times. In his articles and books, Friedman articulates a world view firmly grounded in the core assumptions of the dominant ideology. Corporate-dominated capitalism is seen as a progressive force for the general good, Western civilisation is taken to be obviously superior, and Western military power is viewed as a benign actor, securing and extending the reach of that civilisation. What Edward Said described as the “comic philistinism of Friedman’s ideas” is unavoidable. But so too, unfortunately, is their reach and significance. In engaging with Friedman’s body of work, and subjecting it to forensic critical analysis, Belén Fernández has produced a book that is sometimes entertaining, sometimes horrifying in what it exposes, always readable, always thought-provoking, and of clear political importance.

*****

At one level, Fernández’s job is made easy by Friedman himself, whose writing style borders on the self-satirising. His penchant for cringe-inducing, quasi-corporate-speak reflects a lack of both substance and coherence, roughly forcing the world into clunky and simplistic concepts. “Two hundred pages into The World Is Flat”, Fernández notes, “Friedman defines Globalization 1.0 as the era in which he was required to physically visit an airline ticket office in order to make his travel arrangements – whereas, according to the definition he provides at the start of the book, Globalization 1.0 ended around the year 1800”.

Friedman’s critics are unavoidably drawn to his difficulties with logical consistency, and his illiterate use of imagery and metaphors. In his brilliant review of Friedman’s book, “The World is Flat”, Matt Taibbi quotes the following passage:

“The walls had fallen down and the Windows had opened, making the world much flatter than it had ever been--but the age of seamless global communication had not yet dawned.”

Taibbi comments as follows:

“How the fuck do you open a window in a fallen wall? More to the point, why would you open a window in a fallen wall? Or did the walls somehow fall in such a way that they left the windows floating in place to be opened? Four hundred and 73 pages of this, folks. Is there no God?”

Fernández produces a fresh example of Friedmanesque nonsense along these lines every two or three pages, which focus on the laughably absurd also serves to emphasise by contrast the altogether less amusing aspects of his output.

Friedman is incoherent. Friedman is also wrong, often catastrophically, as in his proud declaration of 2005: “it is obvious to me that the Irish-British [economic] model is the way of the future”. Friedman the visionary also treats us to his “Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention” which holds that “no two countries that both had McDonald’s had fought a war against each other since each got its own McDonald’s”. Israel’s bombing of Lebanon in 2006 did little to reinforce the “theory”, and nor did the war between NATO and Serbia over Kosovo in 1999, which Friedman then attempts to dismiss as “not even a real war” despite having said at the time that “like it or not, we are at war with the Serbian nation”.

Friedman is incoherent, Friedman is wrong, and Friedman is prejudiced, holding some truths to be simply self-evident with blithe, unrepentant disregard for the facts. He proudly admits that “I wrote a column supporting the Caribbean Free Trade initiative [sic]. I didn’t even know what was in it. I just knew two words: free trade”. To be strictly accurate, Friedman didn’t know what was in it, what the “Central American Free Trade Agreement” was called, or even what geographical region it applied to.

Occasionally, one is almost moved to pity by the spectacle of a grown man perpetually baffled that the world does not conform to his preconceived ideas. In Brussels in 1999, he is confronted with the sight of “a Russian journalist, circling the Coke machine, under the CNN screen, speaking Russian into a cell phone, in NATO headquarters, while Kosovo burned – my mind couldn’t contain all the contradictions”. Later, the discovery in Kuwait City of the female owner of an internet café reduces the New York Times’ leading columnist to a quivering wreck:

“Look, I’m a little confused. Do the math for me. You are wearing an Islamic head covering, you are obviously a religious person, but you were educated in an American university and now you are bringing the Internet to Kuwait. I don’t quite see how it all adds up”.

It is when the bigotry in Friedman’s lazy thinking becomes unavoidable that the smile falls from the readers face, as when Fernández quotes his statement that “to be a French educated Arab intellectual is the worst combination possible for understanding globalization. It is like being twice handicapped”. The sinister side to Thomas Friedman is never far from the surface, and nothing brings it so comprehensively to the fore as the sight of his beloved Western militaries engaged in armed conflict.

Friedman speaks of war, from safe distances, with flippant displays of machismo (“give war a chance”), accompanied by repeated advocacy of tactics that – in aim and effect – are tantamount to state terrorism. In 1999, he recommends that Serbia be subjected to “sustained”, “unreasonable” and “less than surgical bombing” to prevent the people of Belgrade from going on “Sunday merry-go-round rides, while their fellow Serbs are ‘cleansing’ Kosovo”. The message to the Serbs was this: “Every week you ravage Kosovo is another decade we will set your country back by pulverising you. You want 1950? We can do 1950? You want 1389? We can do 1389 too”. The aim was to create “a new Serbian ethic that understands how to live in 21st century Europe”, which exalted state is apparently characterised by holding an entire people responsible for the crimes of their government, and then punishing them with enough “less than surgical bombing” to send their country back six centuries. Presumably Friedman had worked himself up into such a state of excitement at this point that he was unable to reflect on whether this mentality distinguished him, in any real moral sense, from the likes of Slobodan Milosevic.

On Israel’s 2006 war on Lebanon, Friedman says that in order to effect “the education of Hezbollah….the only long-term source of deterrence was to exact enough pain on the civilians – the families and employers of militants – to restrain Hezbollah in the future”. This was essentially a reflection of Israel’s own intentions. At the time, retired Israeli army Col. Gal Luft described the goal of the campaign as to "create a rift between the Lebanese population and Hezbollah supporters", the message being "If you want your air conditioning to work and if you want to be able to fly to Paris for shopping, you must pull your head out of the sand and take action toward shutting down Hezbollah-land".  Of course, Israel did much worse to Lebanese civilians during that summer than switch off their air-conditioning and prevent them from going shopping. All with the apparent intention of communicating a political message through the medium of “less than surgical” violence.

*****

In a similar vein, Friedman announces on a US talk show in 2003 that the reason for the invasion of Iraq was the need to burst a “terrorism bubble” that had emerged in “that part of the world”:

“We needed to go over there, basically, um, and….take out a very big stick, um, right in the heart of, of that world… What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house from Basra to Baghdad, um, and basically saying: “Which part of this sentence don’t you understand? You don’t think, you know, we care about our open society; you think this bubble fantasy, we’re just gonna let it grow? Well. Suck. On. This”

The presence of “girl” American troops presumably appears as a signifier of enlightenment in the Friedman universe, even as he advocates the collective punishment of Iraqi men, women and children (“house to house”). Again, it is not those actually responsible for the crime of 9/11 so much as their entire demographic group (defined loosely to the point of absurdity) that is to be held responsible. For Friedman, the US “coulda hit Saudi Arabia. It was part of the bubble. Coulda hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could. That’s the real truth”. In principle, any Muslim country seems to suffice for house-to-house, gender-balanced US state-terrorism, with a Shia family in Basra qualifying as punishable for the crimes of a handful of Wahhabi fanatics, mostly from Saudi Arabia, on the grounds that they inhabit the same “bubble fantasy” (a phrase born of a tragic lack of self-awareness).

It’s worth pausing for a moment to note the resemblance between the sexualised humiliation of “suck on this” and the horrific images from the American torture chamber of Abu Ghraib. And while Friedman was doubtless as sickened by that episode as anyone else, his slanderous essentialising of whole ethnic and religious groups, his “othering” of them, his casual indulgence in violent revenge fantasies, and his sustained, high-profile, macho warmongering can hardly have served as counterveiling forces, decreasing the chance that such horrors might occur sooner or later. This is what is at stake when you play a leading role in forming the political discourse of the age.

Friedman uses the demographic make-up of the US armed forces rank-and-file to illustrate his view of American militarism as essentially a force for progress . The presence of women is invoked, despite the high-prevalence of unreported sexual assaults in the military suggesting that its status as an agent of women’s liberation is perhaps not all that it could be. And the multi-ethnic character of US troops is repeatedly referenced, despite the glaringly obvious fact that multicultural Thomas Friedman himself harbours a not-entirely-enlightened view of Arabs and Muslims.

*****

Friedman puts the Iraqi public’s failure to appreciate the benefits of foreign occupation down to “the wall in the Arab mind”. As Fernández notes, “the Orientalist tendency to anchor Oriental subjects in antiquity, where they remain in perpetual need of civilisation by the West and its militaries, is viewable time and again in Friedman’s discourse”. Arabs and Muslims are “backward”. Iraqis “hate each other more than they love their own kids”. Shortly after the invasion of 2003, he opines that “it would be idiotic to even ask Iraqis here how they felt about politics. They are in a pre-political, primordial state of nature”.

For the American missionaries, the noble mission of raising the savages out of the swamp is not without its dangers. “While we would like an Iraqi national movement – building Shiites, Kurds and Sunnis – to coalesce, we don’t want it coalescing in opposition to us”. Evidently then there is a limit to which even this staunch advocate of enlightened Western values will support democracy, the limit being whether the liberated people then bow before the might of western power.

All of this would be of limited relevance were Friedman an isolated figure, rather than the ugly face of ideas and assumptions which have a much wider currency. His complaint that American occupying forces in Iraq “are baby-sitting a civil war” is a direct echo of Barack Obama’s promise during the 2007 presidential election campaign that “we're not going to babysit a civil war”, as though the bloodbath engulfing the country was attributable to the infantilism of its people and not to the effects of it being violently invaded by a foreign power. Elsewhere, Friedman’s likening of the US occupation of Afghanistan to the adoption of a “special needs baby” bears more than a passing resemblance to Donald Rumsfeld’s description of Washington’s role in teaching Iraqis how to run their own country:

“Getting Iraq straightened out was like teaching a kid to ride a bike: 'They're learning, and you're running down the street holding on to the back of the seat. You know that if you take your hand off they could fall, so you take a finger off and then two fingers, and pretty soon you're just barely touching it. You can't know when you're running down the street how many steps you're going to have to take. We can't know that, but we're off to a good start.”

The flip side of this casual racism is of course the chauvinistic view of the nature of Western civilisation; the paternal figure to the Iraqi and Afghan infants. For Friedman, “without a strong America holding the world together, and doing the right thing more often than not, the world really would be a Hobbesian jungle”, a faith in the benevolence of Western power which is shared right across the spectrum of mainstream intellectual opinion. 

*****

Given that Friedman becomes enthused to a state of unreasoning arousal by physical displays of Western power, it should come as no surprise that, notwithstanding the pretence of his claimed liberal democratic values, he also finds himself drawn to certain autocratic rulers. "Frankly, I have a soft spot for Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah, who is a man of decency & moderation", admits our champion of modernity, in reference to the man who is now monarch of one of the most viciously repressive regimes in the world. Elsewhere, Friedman describes Bahrain as a “progressive state” with a “progressive king” and an “innovative Crown Prince” who he has “known and liked for many years”. The fact that these forces of innovation and progressive governance have spent the last year violently crushing a peaceful and broad-based pro-democracy movement, with the assistance of the Saudi autocrats for whom Friedman has a “soft spot”, should not be allowed to confuse the issue. The real test of modernity, for Friedman, is whether an autocrat maintains friendly relations with the West. In the case of those who do, any undesirable details can be put down to their being held back by “an entrenched Arab mind-set [on the part of their compatriots], born of years of colonialism and humiliation that insists that upholding Arab dignity and nationalism by defying the West is more important than freedom, democracy and modernization”.

While it may be objectively true that Arab democrats in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Palestine and elsewhere have had to defy Western-backed tyranny precisely in order to gain their freedom, this does not trump the higher truth of the Friedman universe, confirmed to him when watching a “stunning interview” on Al Jazeera with an Arab American psychiatrist, who confirms that “a clash between civilisation and backwardness, between the civilised and the primitive, between barbarity and rationality” is occurring between the West and the Arab/Muslim world. Therefore, it appears, any Arab tyrant who sides with the West is a representative of rationality and forward-thinking, by definition, residing with us on the side of the angels.

*****

All this impressive physical might exists to buttress what perhaps really matters to Friedman: Anglo-American capitalism. As he famously put it, “McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the US Air Force F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the US Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps”. As in international affairs, so in economics, the basic Friedman value system holds: those with power are to be genuflected before, while those in their way are to be regarded with contempt.

Therefore, after the free-market model crashes and burns in the autumn of 2008, Friedman leaps with absolute predictability onto the austerity bandwagon, targeting “baby boomers” who “must accept deep cuts to their benefits and pensions today so their kids can have jobs and not be saddled with debt tomorrow”. As Fernández notes, this ignores the fact that “90 per cent of US public debt results from past military spending”, which does not discourage the millionaire war-enthusiast from lecturing the less fortunate of his generation, who had hitherto relied on meagre forms of social security, that “the Tooth Fairy, she be dead”. Friedman takes time off from his regular praising of transnational corporate CEOs, to helpfully explain the facts of life to British pensioners:

“In Britain, everyone over 60 gets an annual allowance to pay heating bills and can ride any local bus for free. That’s really sweet- if you can afford it. But Britain, where 25 percent of the government’s budget is now borrowed, can’t anymore”.

Elsewhere he proposes that the US adopt the system used in Singapore where “top bureaucrats and cabinet ministers have their pay linked to top private sector wages, so most make well over $1 million a year”. Filling the bank accounts of these particular baby boomers is, for Friedman, a sign of “taking governing seriously”, just as removing assistance for bus travel and heating bills from the considerably less well off is also a test of seriousness.

One doubts that Friedman is consciously using the inter-generational injustice narrative as a rhetorical sleight of hand to ensure that the 1% of which he is a member and spokesman is held harmless while the crisis it caused is paid for by the 99%. While this is clearly the effect, one doubts that he has the wit to execute such an intellectual manoeuvre deliberately. Rather, it is likely to be no more than a natural product of his unexamined, shrivelled world-view wherein social assistance to provide the basics of life for those who need them is seen as an outrageous extravagance, while the ever-greater enrichment of those who already wallow in obscene wealth is positively-advocated as a mark of “seriousness”.

*****

In a powerful conclusion, Fernández draws a contrast between Friedman’s chosen approach to journalism and the work of those who write, not from the point of view of Israeli generals, Arab autocrats and Western CEOs, but from the perspective of those ordinary people affected by the actions of power. Journalists like Amira Hass, Gideon Levy, Amy Goodman, Sherine Tadros, Dahr Jamail and Nir Rosen who risk their physical safety in the field and opprobrium in the mainstream for bringing moral integrity and a critical eye to their reporting and commentary. For example, in respect of Iraq, where Rosen acknowledges and details the fact that “an occupation is a systematic and constant imposition of violence on an entire country…..[constant] arresting, beating, killing, humiliating and terrorising”, Friedman manages to convince himself, and use his platform to inform the world, that while “we left some shameful legacies here of torture and Abu Ghraib, we also left a million acts of kindness and a profound example of how much people of different backgrounds can accomplish when they work together”. If the effective function of the dominant discourse is to provide a justificatory narrative for the exercise of raw state, military and economic power, then Friedman is a leading proponent of that same, dangerous mythology. But as Fernández points out, to play this role is to make a choice, where many other less celebrated and less well-remunerated writers choose a far more honourable alternative.

The amount of Friedman’s writing that Fernández has evidently read – the sheer volume of butt-clenchingly awful prose and hear-tearingly twisted logic that she has endured in her research – means at least that she will never have to prove herself to the global left in any other way. She brings to the task a delicious, dry wit, and a gift for perceptively and efficiently dismantling a bad argument. Her voice is a cool and authoritative one, and – from Friedman’s point of view - is all the more devastating for that. She is correct when she says that his position as one the world’s leading pundits is “testament to the degenerate state of the mainstream media”, and right to characterise him as a “mouthpiece for empire and capital” and “resident apologist for US military excess and punishing economic policies”. If the prevailing ideology is a conceptual cage, constraining our ability to understand the world and to find ways to alleviate its worst injustices, then reading this book feels like a small but significant experience in intellectual liberation, for which we have its author to thank.

David Wearing is undertaking postgraduate research on British foreign policy in the Middle East and North Africa at the School of Public Policy, University College London. He is a co-editor of New Left Project.

Summary

Sarah Ditum opened the debate with a critique of Dines’ influential book, Pornland.  She argued that Dines’ approach is flawed because she lacks a clear definition of pornography.  Moreover, Dines’ argument that pornography shapes the attitudes of men towards women in a misogynistic way is not founded on strong empirical evidence.  She accuses Dines of “essentialism” about sex, arguing that Dines has a view of what “natural” sex is compared to the type of sexuality portrayed in pornography which she considers inauthentic and mass-produced; when there is in fact a great diversity of pornographic material.  Finally, Ditum claims that Dines completely ignores the fact that there are women producers and consumers of porn.

Dines responded that she is guilty as charged in terms of not adopting a formal definition of pornography or engaging with niche varieties of porn.  Her reason for this is that she believes these two issues to be irrelevant to her project.  Dines is taking a macro approach to assessing the impact of pornography.  Therefore she took the majority variety of porn – gonzo – and made her arguments based on that.  Moreover, there is plenty of empirical evidence to back up her claims that porn is harmful to women.  She cites a recent academic study which found that in the top-fifty most rented porn movies, ‘90% of scenes contained at least one aggressive act.’  Dines refuted the claim that her approach is essentialist because she recognizes the fact that sexuality is shaped by culture, which is precisely the reason for fighting against violent pornography.  Dines concludes that the pro-porn position is a position of privilege, and that feminists have lost sight of their radical roots.  She writes, ‘what is there not to love about a “feminist” who fights for the rights of men to jerk off to porn?’

Ditum responded that actually in this instance, she will defend the right of men to masturbate to whatever they want.  She writes:

they have a right to jerk off to whatever materials they find arousing, so long as those materials are produced without coercion or deception.  If exposure to pornography were demonstrated to be a cause of harm to the psyche of the viewer, then it would be necessary to weigh up the public goods of a right to free speech and a right to a private life (in which an individual may make or consume pornography), against the public ill – if that ill could be proven. But it has not been proven.

Ditum argues further that Dines misinterprets the evidence that has been gathered on the effects of porn and uses it in a disingenuous and hyperbolic way.  And how do we know that gonzo porn is in the majority if we have no definition of porn?  Until we have a functional definition of porn and substantiated evidence that it is harmful, freedom of speech must be defended.

Dines concluded with a short post arguing that this debate demonstrates that feminism is like ‘a marriage gone sour.’  Ultimately liberal and radical/Marxist feminists will never agree, because while liberal feminists are interested in individual rights such as free speech, radical and Marxist feminists are interested in structural forces.  This profound philosophical difference means that the debate is intractable.

Philosophical Differences

I agree with Dines that the debate, as framed by these two authors, is intractable.  The two authors represent fundamentally different philosophical traditions.  On the one hand, Ditum’s perspective represents liberalism, which is based on a series of rights that are inalienable.  She claims that Dines’ call for a ban on pornography represents ‘an implicit attack on two rights (the right to a private life and the right to free speech) that are correctly held to be key human rights.’  Therefore, according to Ditum, it must be rejected outright, otherwise the consequences will be ‘horrible.’  For liberals, freedom constitutes non-interference with individuals.  If individuals choose to make or consume pornography, that is their choice and the government should not intervene.  Government intervention is an attack on individual freedom.

Dines, on the other hand, takes a radical feminist view inspired by Marxist political economy.  From this perspective, freedom of speech is not sacrosanct.  If the choices of uncoordinated individuals result in harmful structural outcomes, such as an excessive wealth gap or the subordination and domination of women, then the state ought to intervene to try to address that imbalance.  So when Ditum argues that porn is permissible so long as it is produced ‘without coercion or deception’, a radical or Marxist feminist will find this unpersuasive because it only considers the individuals involved, rather than the collective impact of the porn industry on the lives of women as a whole and how that contributes to the domination of women as a group.  From this perspective, freedom is not constituted by non-interference with individuals, but democratic political institutions can be harnessed to secure the conditions for the freedom of all people by equalizing power relations, which may mean the restriction of certain types of speech or behaviour.

So the liberal individualist perspective that individuals have a right to freedom of speech or expression, conflicts with the radical feminist and Marxist perspective that focuses on structures of power.  Ultimately, as long as these authors hold fast to their philosophical convictions, they cannot and will not agree.  Indeed this is the debate that split feminism apart in the 1980s, and from which it has never fully recovered.

The Liberal Critique of Radical Feminism

What was fascinating about this debate was that many of NLP’s readers sided with Sarah Ditum’s position – the liberal position.  This was surprising, because as a website for leftist debate, it demonstrated how entrenched liberal concepts such as individual rights, free speech and consent are even among persons who consider themselves of the left.  In this section, I want to explain why the Ditum’s liberal critiques of Dine’s radical feminist position are not as persuasive as they first appear.

1. The Definition Debate

Ditum argues that Dines only focuses on one type of porn – gonzo porn – meaning that she is basing her arguments on an inadequate definition of what porn is.  Porn is much more diverse, with various strands, not all of them degrading to women; in fact some porn is actually created by women, there is also gay porn and many niche varieties. 

It seems to me, however, that Dines can concede that there are different types of porn and still focus on the majority type of porn that people consume.  When carrying out an academic study of what people today are experiencing in terms of porn and its wider effects on society, it is essential to look at the majority strain of porn, at least in the first instance.  This is because that will tell you something important about what is happening on a meta-level; individualized experiences of porn are not really pertinent to the argument. 

Consider this point in relation to other feminist concerns.  Whenever feminists discuss issues like domestic violence and rape, which in over 90% of cases affect women, people always comment, “these issues affect men too and you’re not talking about it, therefore your argument’s wrong”.  But feminists are well aware that these issues affect men too; the problem is that in the vast majority of cases they affect women, so the question is why?  Why are women affected by these issues so much more than men?  In the case of Dines studying gonzo porn the question is, why is this type of porn, which is so humiliating and degrading to women, the most-watched type of porn?  What does this tell us?  And in what ways is this harmful?  These seem to me valid questions. 

But Ditum argues further, how do we know gonzo porn is the majority type of porn unless we have defined exactly what porn is.  She writes:

Dines is dismissive of my references to non-gonzo forms of pornography, claiming that gonzo is the overwhelming market leader. But how do we know? Are we counting every winsome, semi-dressed self portrait on the internet as pornographic? Do “pornified” pop videos – seen by millions more than any throat-fucking video will ever be – count? Dines has to say whether these things are pornographic or not. If they are, then her assertion that gonzo is the preeminent mode of porn simply cannot stand. And if they aren’t, why not? After all, all these things are perfectly valid and likely things for someone to have a wank over.

This argument does not stand up to scrutiny, however.  The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) uses the following definition:  ‘An image is pornographic if it is of such a nature that it must reasonably be assumed to have been produced solely or principally for the purpose of sexual arousal.’  An individual may be able to ‘have a wank’ over pop videos, self-portraits or anything else for that matter, but it does not make it pornographic material.  It is pornographic only if it is designed ‘solely or principally for the purpose of sexual arousal.’ 

Now, Dines may not have used this definition herself, but it does seem fairly self-evident that pornography is a specific type of material produced for the purposes of sexual arousal.  And Dines’ failure to explicitly say this is not a problem as since I’ve pointed out, there is nothing disingenuous in focusing on the majority type of porn when looking at the issue from a macro perspective.  Moreover, Ditum’s point about definition is a diversion.  If Dines had used a more considered definition of porn, no doubt Ditum would have found ways of critiquing that.  Really this is simply skirting around the core issue of the debate – to what extent porn ought to be regulated.  And I think, in fact, that there is common ground to be found on this issue, as I argue below.

Before coming to that, however, a final comment on the definition issue.  If Ditum wants to have an expansive definition of porn, including the many diverse niche varieties, some of which are not exploitative of women and are made by and enjoyed by women; she also has to accept that there are minority types of porn that are even more degrading to women than gonzo porn.  If you want to assess non-majority strands of pornography this means taking into account all of these strands in their infinite variety, not just the ones that suit your argument.  We may find that the niche varieties of pornography that are not harmful to women are a minority within a minority. 

2. The Need for Evidence

Ditum also argues against Dines that she has not gathered sufficient empirical evidence to prove that pornography is objectively harmful.  Dines says that this is not the case, that she has gathered a multitude of evidence as demonstrated in Pornland.  Since I haven’t read Pornland, I’m not going to comment either way on that.  Instead, I want to make a different point – that you don’t need empirical evidence to make normative arguments.

Radical feminist arguments against pornography include the claim that women are objectified and viewed through heterosexual male eyes (the male gaze), reducing women to mere sex objects that exist for men’s pleasure and this encourages women to see themselves through male eyes.  Portrayals of violence against women and rape in pornography normalize this behaviour for the viewers.  The crux of all of this is that it reinforces male domination of women – patriarchy – reducing the chances of women achieving equal status and freedom to men.  Porn is about power. 

Ditum clearly wants empirical evidence to back up these claims.  But these are normative arguments.  Arguing that women ought to be equal to men is not something that is empirically falsifiable and can be quantified by gathering statistics.  You either believe it or you don’t.  The further radical feminist claims that pornography exacerbates the objectification of women is a philosophical argument.  We can hash out the claim in theory, but it is not something that can be tested using empirical methods.  Power cannot be measured.  It is a relation, not a thing.

Ditum might then claim that the argument is no good.  If it cannot be proved empirically, we shouldn’t believe it.  But of course, she holds fast to normative arguments herself.  The idea that freedom constitutes non-interference is a normative argument; it is not empirically falsifiable.  Human rights may be legal prescriptions, but they do not exist as objects that we can reach out and touch.  Dines may have been gathering empirical evidence to shore up her philosophical convictions, but even if she hasn’t fulfilled this sufficiently in Ditum’s eyes, it doesn’t mean the philosophical ideas are null and void.  The normative philosophical position can still be defended in its own terms.  What Ditum needs to do is prove it is logically incoherent, which she hasn’t done.

Treating philosophical theories like scientific ones is a misinterpretation of the practice; or at the least a very narrow interpretation of what philosophy can do.  So when Dines and other radical feminists suggest that porn is harmful to women they are putting forward a philosophical argument that can be tested via logical argumentation, not necessarily requiring empirical evidence.  There are different theories as to what constitutes “harm”, and different theories about the kind of harm that porn does to society.  I’m not sure why Ditum is so utterly insistent that Dines solve these difficult philosophical problems in two short articles.

Just to note, the radical feminist position has nothing to do with being puritanical about sex, it is about exposing the underlying gendered power relations that are perpetuated by the porn industry.

In sum, while we are on philosophical and methodological terrain, Ditum’s arguments against Dines are not persuasive.  But my aim in responding to this debate is not to exclusively defend one author over another, and I have not done nearly enough here to defend one philosophical position over another.  Instead I have a more modest aim – to suggest the possibility of common ground.

Current Regulation of Pornography

One of the core issues that both authors have avoided in this debate is the legal status of porn.  Ditum accuses Dines of not having a clear and coherent definition of porn; but as I have pointed out, this is not problematic if what we are interested in is what the majority of people are seeing that is called “porn”.  It becomes a problem, however, if we want to discuss the legal status of porn, and the issue of whether or not porn ought to be banned or regulated.  I think Ditum’s real concern is that if “porn” is banned, this means that non-abusive types of porn will be banned, which is not only a free-speech issue, but means that some women – those who make and enjoy porn – will be missing out.

The free speech point, however, is moot.  Porn is already regulated. The possession of images depicting paedophilia, bestiality and “extreme pornography” is illegal.  In 2008 it became illegal to, ‘possess pornographic images that depict acts which threaten a person's life, acts which result in or are likely to result in serious injury to a person's anus, breasts or genitals, bestiality or necrophilia.’ The law banning the possession of extreme pornography was prompted by the case of Graham Coutts, who was found guilty of the sexual assault and murder by asphyxiation of Jane Longhurst, and who was found to have 699 violent pornographic images on his computer. The pragmatic purpose of this legislation is to prevent harm and protect the vulnerable who are unable to consent to what is being done to them (children, animals, dead people), and to prevent the use of porn as an excuse for murder or other forms of violence against persons. It also incorporates and gives effect to long-standing criminal law presumption that, generally speaking, even capable adults cannot consent to actual bodily harm for which there is no public interest case to be made. Presumably feminists who defend free speech do not object to these legal constraints, because they are founded on the concept of lawful consent.

There is also a normative foundation to legal prohibitions on certain types of pornography regarding public morality, however.  The Obscene Publications Acts of 1959 and 1964 make the publication or distribution of certain types of material illegal.  The material 'must be taken as a whole and have a tendency to deprave and corrupt (e.g. make morally bad) a significant proportion of those likely to see it.'  Now this is where we get into more difficult territory from a liberal perspective, because how can the government determine what is “obscene”?  From a liberal perspective, consenting adults should be able to engage in whatever activities they want behind closed doors.  The government should not be given the authority to decide what depraves or corrupts a rational adult individual; interfering with consenting adults’ private behaviour in the name of public morality is an infringement of civil liberties.  And as the CPS itself admits, what was considered obscene in 1959 has changed in the present day, so for example, consensual anal sex involving men or women no longer fits into that category.

So from a liberal perspective it is possible to argue that the government has no place determining what consensual sexual activity between adults is moral or not.  But surely from a liberal perspective, it is justifiable for the government to intervene in cases of harm to others.  If we conceive of morality in terms of causing no harm to others, then the government does have a role in safeguarding morality, even from a liberal perspective. 

Material portraying the following activities is outlawed by the current version of the obscene publications act:

• sexual act with an animal
• realistic portrayals of rape
• sadomasochistic material which goes beyond trifling and transient infliction of injury
• torture with instruments
• bondage (especially where gags are used with no apparent means of withdrawing consent)
• dismemberment or graphic mutilation
• activities involving perversion or degradation (such as drinking urine, urination or vomiting on to the body, or excretion or use of excreta)
• fisting

These activities in reality cause harm to others, and viewing these forms of material legitimates the idea of causing harm to others for the purposes of sexual stimulation, as well as creating a market for the commission of acts that harm others for the purposes of sexual stimulation of the viewing public.  For that reason, I think even liberal feminists can agree that they ought to be banned.     

Towards Common Ground on the Issue of Rape

I have suggested that from a liberal perspective some regulation of pornography is justifiable.  The problem is to what extent do we want to regulate the consensual behaviour of adults that does not cause physical harm.  If adult individuals have consented to participate in pornography and other adults are consensually watching it, then from the liberal perspective of individual freedom as non-interference, the law shouldn’t get involved.  As I’ve pointed out, certain types of pornographic material are already illegal and can be justified as being illegal even from a liberal perspective; the question is whether or not the scope of illegality ought to be extended.  To what extent we think porn ought to be regulated is where Ditum's insistence on a definition becomes relevant.  For the purposes of regulation, we need a careful and considered definition of what we are addressing.  And it is at this point that I think we can find some common ground among feminists.

Now a radical or Marxist feminist may intervene at this point and say that all porn is degrading to women.  Moreover, many women end up in pornography due to economic coercion – they have no other choice.  An obvious point to make is that we need to sort out our economic circumstances so that no women feel forced into having to work in pornography just to get by.  However, there is no reason why we cannot work towards an economically more progressive society and simultaneously look for plausible immediate policy solutions to the regulation of pornography.  In the meantime, while we are waiting for an economically more equitable society, it seems plausible that we need to categorize porn more clearly in order to protect those who are exploited by this industry and to mitigate its most pernicious effects.

Again, I think the practice of pornography regulation can be instructive.  The British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) is tasked with classifying all ‘video works’ that are available on data storage devices, e.g. DVDS, tapes etc.  It has a category of R18 (‘Restricted 18’) to classify hardcore pornography.   You can read a list of the activities that are not acceptable by BBFC standards even for an R18 film here.

In 2006, the BBFC rejected one R18 film in its entirety, “Struggle in Bondage”.  The reasoning is as follows:

The work consisted of a series of sequences depicting women bound and gagged, writhing and struggling against their restraints. The struggling and whimpering of the women appears calculated to suggest that they have been bound against their will and it is clear from the manner of presentation that the work is intended to stimulate sexual arousal in the viewer. Because of the lack of obvious consent, and in line with the Board’s policies on sexual violence, the work was rejected as cuts would not have left a viable work.

And so we can see here, that the problem is the combination of pornography (material designed to sexually arouse the viewer) with violence as intended to sexually arouse the viewer.  The problem is not depicting rape or violence against women per se, there may be reasons for doing so for artistic purposes, or campaigning purposes or for other reasons.  The problem is when sexual violence or violence against women is used with the specific purpose of sexually arousing the viewer.  This combination of violence against women with sex to stimulate the viewer is where I think as a feminist you have got to take issue, as the BBFC have done in this ruling. 

Feminists may disagree over their philosophical foundations – be it liberalism, Marxism or other political theories.  But they surely all agree that women deserve, and are entitled to, equal respect.  The regular depiction of rape and other forms of violence against women in pornography are a cause of concern in this regard.

Changing the Law

The depiction of rape is already illegal according to the Obscene Publications Act.  But it is my contention that it ought to be included in the category of “Extreme Pornography”.  This is because it is not possible to prosecute those who produce “obscene” material outside of the UK under the Obscene Publications Act.  Those responsible for the distribution and retailing of the material can be prosecuted, but if the material is produced in the UK, those who produced it or distributed it in the first instance are the persons liable for prosecution.  Under the Extreme Pornography Act, anyone possessing extreme pornographic material can be prosecuted and imprisoned for up to three years.  This is a much stronger deterrent, therefore, making it less likely that people would keep this sort of material in their possession.

The current definition of extreme pornography is 'images that depict acts which threaten a person's life, acts which result in or are likely to result in serious injury to a person's anus, breasts or genitals, bestiality or necrophilia.'  So not rape.  As feminists, can we not agree that the law on “extreme pornography” ought to be expanded so that this does not just constitute harm to the breasts, anus or genitals but also depictions of rape?  Can we not agree that pornography that depicts rape ought to be included in the category of “extreme pornography” and banned on that basis?  This seems to me to be a way to exclude hardcore pornography which depicts rape from mass consumption, whilst preserving the niche varieties of pornography that pro-porn campaigners want to defend on the grounds of free speech. 

Two problems.  The first is what if a woman participating in a pornographic video consents to portray a rape.  Then, from a liberal perspective, it seems to be acceptable, as the individuals involved have consented.  I’m not sure how this can be a feminist argument however.  Does anyone have a right to watch the portrayal of a woman being raped in order to achieve sexual arousal?  Perhaps a right-wing libertarian or anarchist who believes that the state has no business regulating anything would think so, but I can’t see how anyone who calls themselves a “feminist” could think so.  Whether or not the individual woman in the film has consented is not the point; it is the portrayal of non-consent as legitimate and as something that can sexually arouse that is problematic. 

The second problem with such a policy solution is obviously enforceability.  There must be computers all over the country with porn videos depicting rape and other forms of violence against women.  How can all of these people be caught and prosecuted?  Enforceability is a problem facing any law, however.  Part of the point of making something unlawful is to say as a society we think it is wrong.  So if we take a stand and say brutalising women for the sexual enjoyment of pornography viewers is unlawful, we are taking a principled stand, not necessarily assuming that every participant in this practice will be caught.

This kind of pragmatic solution may not be very satisfactory to those who hold very firm philosophical convictions regarding pornography.  But I simply wish to suggest that it highlights the possibility of common ground.  There is undoubtedly a wider debate to be had about whether or not porn is right or wrong in its entirety.  As I have argued, however, one’s answer to this question this will depend on a person’s philosophical starting point, and so presents an intractable debate.  And since porn is now so ubiquitous in the internet age, there is an urgent need to find some real-world solutions to the problem.  As feminists, surely we can all agree that depictions of rape as erotically arousing are impermissible.  To argue that depictions of rape are permissible under the rubric of free speech seems to me that you have hung up your feminist hat and abandoned it.  I don’t see what can be “feminist” about that kind of argument; it is straightforwardly libertarian argument with no feminist component.  To be clear, I am not arguing that pursuing a ban on porn that portrays rape will solve the porn debate in toto.  What I am suggesting is that it is potentially a practicable policy solution that liberal, radical and Marxist feminists can agree upon.  And it seems achievable in practice.  For too long, feminists have engaged in endless mud-slinging over these issues.  It is time to set aside our differences and look for the common ground.

In January 2011 more than 600 (mostly young) people packed into a central London venue to hear speakers ranging from Tariq Ali to Hanan Chehata discuss ‘What is Imperialism?’ My friend Jody McIntyre, who also spoke, later explained why he had helped organise the event. It was “to bring together young people from all sections of society, to discuss and educate ourselves on one of humanity’s biggest enemies: Imperialism.”

One of the great successes of the event was that it engaged young people with a concept that the traditional left has had little success in communicating to a wider audience.

Late last year Jody and I travelled to Venezuela, a country that has been the repeated victim of US imperialism since Hugo Chavez assumed the presidency in 1999.

11 of April 2012 marked 10 years since a US government-backed coup briefly removed Hugo Chavez from power. Chavez was kidnapped from the presidential palace and flown to an island off the mainland where he was kept hostage by forces loyal to the new dictatorship. Less than two days later, through a combination of mass street demonstrations calling for his return and army officers loyal to the constitution the coup was overturned and Chavez was reinstated as president.

These dramatic events were captured in the incredible documentary ‘The Revolution Will Not be Televised’ made by Irish filmmakers who were in the presidential palace when Chavez was kidnapped. 

As we celebrate the 10th anniversary of this notable victory for people power it’s also worth remembering how key members of the west's political and media class reacted to the coup at the time. So-called ‘liberal’ media outlets from the BBC to The Guardian and members of the then Labour government were happy to grossly misreport, even celebrate, yet another US-supported assault on democracy in Latin America. Imperialism always needs accomplices.

And this is what the spokesperson of the IMF, imperialism’s chief economic arm, had to say on Friday 12 April, just hours after Chávez had been kidnapped from the presidential palace.

"We stand ready to assist the new administration in whatever manner they find suitable."

Imperialism always has “technocrats” happy to carry out orders.

Since then the US has been unrelenting in its pursuit to isolate the Chavez government with the ultimate aim of removing Chavez from power. US academic William Robinson has neatly explained US imperialism’s strategy for Venezuela:

“I think the US is pursuing a more sophisticated strategy of intervention that we could call a war of attrition. We have seen this strategy in other countries, such as in Nicaragua in the 1980s, or even Chile under Allende. It is what in CIA lexicon is known as destabilization, and in the Pentagon's language is called political warfare - which does not mean there is not a military component. This is a counterrevolutionary strategy that combines military threats and hostilities with psychological operations, disinformation campaigns, black propaganda, economic sabotage, diplomatic pressures, the mobilization of political opposition forces inside the country, carrying out provocations and sparking violent confrontations in the cities, manipulation of disaffected sectors and the exploitation of legitimate grievances among the population. The strategy is deft at taking advantage of the revolution's own mistakes and limitations, such as corruption, clientalism, and opportunism, which we must acknowledge are serious problems in Venezuela. It is also deft at aggravating and manipulating material problems, such as shortages, price inflation, and so forth. The goal is to destroy the revolution by making it unworkable, by exhausting the population's will to continue to struggle to forge a new society, and in this way to undermine the revolution's mass social base. “

But as Venezuelans have already shown, US imperialism is up against a formidable opponent. Jody and I visited Venezuela to make a film about the country’s Hip Hop Revolucion (HHR) movement, an inspiring collective of musical revolutionaries. Founded in 2003 to bring together like-minded young people from across Venezuela, HHR has organised several international revolutionary hip-hop festivals in the country, and created 31 hip-hop schools across the country, which teenagers attend in conjunction with their normal day-to-day schooling.

HHR told us that normally those attending the hip-hop schools learn hip-hop skills for four days a week and have one day a week of political discussion. However, in some schools those attending had decided they preferred the ratio the other way round. Once participants have ‘graduated’ from the course, they are encouraged to become tutors to the next batch of attendees. Most graduates come from low-income backgrounds, and many go on to establish schools in their local areas.

Our trip to Venezuela also coincided with the inauguration and first ever conference of CELAC, the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States. Thirty-three presidents from all of the countries of the Americas (except the US and Canada) were in Caracas for the event. CELAC’s importance in creating a future regional bloc to counter US imperialism cannot be overstated.  

This was understood by Jamil, a member of HHR. “CELAC is the most important development in the last 200 years’, he told us. “We respect Chávez because he understands our struggle, but we are always looking to be self-critical in order to keep our revolution moving in the right direction.”

‘I’m a revolutionary from my heart. Chavez fucks around and flips on us, we’re gonna flip on him. And that’s what I think he expects from us. You know what I mean? That’s why he is so serious with his proposals and with what he does. He has the confidence that he won’t flip on the people. And he understands that capitalism is crumbling. And this is our time, this is our moment, you know, for Latin America, for Venezuela and for us.’

As Seumas Milne, another speaker at the London event on imperialism said: “Our job is to oppose and expose imperialism, and to fight for an alternative to the economic order that drives it.”

In Venezuela and Latin America this is already happening and the Hip Hop Revolucion collective are on the frontline of that struggle.

Support the ‘Hip Hop Revolucion’ documentary: http://www.alborada.net/hhr-donate

The space for a socialist alternative lies with social movements like Occupy and, within the democratic system, with left parties like the Front de Gauche, the Latin American left of Chavez and Morales et al and parties like Die Linke in Germany.

But while the ideas and analysis of socialism are strong as ever there are issues of agency and organisation. The left has long relied on the industrial working class but this group has shrunk and new groups at a disadvantage have sprung up - the precariat, the insecure middle classes, the graduate with no future, politically alienated youth, and immigrants. Democratic socialism needs to appeal to a constituency that is diverse and includes such groups, alongside the industrial working class. A wider base will also help the democratic left to incorporate issues it needs to pay more attention to, and I will come back to that.

Mélenchon’s showing also tells us something about party. Social democracy used to offer a compromise between socialism and capitalism. But that has been abandoned by new social democrats at the expense of the socialist side. It has been complicit in dismantling the compromise it helped secure. Now it offers not just incorporation into capitalism but neoliberalism, and even austerity, with a human face. On the other hand there is no foreseeable chance for the international insurrection that revolutionary parties support. Popular uprisings have come from spontaneous movements organised through social media, libertarian in approach, in some cases as anti-authoritarian as anti-capitalist, rather than via revolutions through organised workers parties. For socialists these exciting movements are one alternative. Another is parties like Le Gauche, to the left of social democracy but within the parliamentary system. They are still socialist while new social democracy has abandoned its aim of pools of socialism within capitalism. They operate inside parliamentary politics so have a chance of an impact in the here and now, pushing the political agenda to the left, through their role in parliaments, or even the possibility of governing in coalitions.

But there are issues the left does not pay enough attention to and the French election highlighted these too. The Green party did poorly and ecology did not feature much in the campaign. Yet we have an ecological crisis greater than the financial crisis in the implications it has for the future of humanity. Socialists need to bring this to the centre of the political debate and incorporate it into their political approach, or adapt their ideology to fit the issue. This may mean changes to commitments to growth, productivism and industry that socialists and social democrats have held dear to because of their loyalty to the industrial working class. 

Socialists have also seen work as a solution, to unemployment, economic hardship and social inclusion. They have aimed to change work through social ownership to end exploitation and alienation and enact workers control. But the French have put a priority on freedom from work too, from the post-Marxist philosopher André Gorz to the Socialist Party’s securing of a shorter working week. Even collectively controlled work will be experienced as imposed. Freedom from compulsion should be as much an aim for the left as better work. This does not mean days of watching day time TV, although it could do. It will often mean work, but creative, self-chosen and self-directed work, for fulfilment rather than as a wage slave. A basic income for all is the foundation for a society which values free work alongside paid labour.

The far right did well in France and it campaigns against immigration. Unfortunately new social democracy has also adopted anti-immigration rhetoric, and indeed François Hollande is the latest to jump onto this bandwagon . It is as if only the hard-up from your own country matter. Those from other lands are treated with hostility even though they are equally human and just as much part of the poor. The Marxist left has been better at internationalism and recognising the unity of the dispossessed regardless of national boundaries. Social democrats appeal to anti-immigration sentiment because they think it engages with the insecurity of the white working class, because of a perceived failure of multiculturalism, and to draw votes from the far right. But endorsing anti-immigration is as likely to assist the far right as take support from them and every vote gained from fascism is one lost from liberals or greens. Anti-immigrant arguments do not stand up anyway. Immigrants do jobs natives cannot or do not want to do, they pay tax, support public services, boost economic growth and are often escaping hardship or persecution. There is an economic and moral argument for supporting immigration rather than beefing up hostility to outsiders and racism. The left should use social democratic arguments about the need for public housing and strong trade unions rather than blaming migration for accommodation shortages and low wages.

The French election shows that parties outside new social democracy are where socialism can be pursued democratically. Such parties need to ally with the social movements of our time, from Occupy to students and others, because it is from social movements that the best and most imaginative ideas come, and ideas that relate to the young, about development, health, environment, gender equality, rights on the basis of sexuality and ethnicity and, indeed, rights for workers from the movements that led to workers parties. Democratic socialism needs to appeal to the diverse dispossessed in modern societies and incorporate issues highlighted in French politics: the marginalisation of ecological concerns, fulfilment outside the compulsion of work, and the rights and benefits of immigrants. This means a shift away from new social democracy and from too tight a focus on worker and productivist concerns and bases, while maintaining a continuing emphasis on the economic and egalitarian politics that gained the Front de Gauche one in ten votes in the first round of the Presidential election. In the immediate term it means democratic socialist campaigns for investment and growth, fairer and greener taxes, social goals over liberal economics, the free movement of people and, maybe, a basic income for all, for security and freedom.

Luke Martell is Professor of Political Sociology at the University of Sussex, and is writing a book on the future of social democracy.

Part 1 of the interview, which examined Israel's discriminatory practices towards its Palestinian citizens and how they relate to its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, can be read here.

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In the book you illuminate the various mechanisms by which the Israeli state discriminates against its Palestinian citizens. How has this discrimination changed over time? There seems to be a broadly-held sense that now is a particularly bad period in terms of racist legislation being proposed in the Knesset, and an atmosphere of hostility towards and intimidation of Israeli human rights organisations. Does the level of repression against Palestinian citizens of Israel tend to rise and fall in over time, and if so, what factors does it generally reflect or respond to?

This is really interesting, because it starts to speak to some much bigger issues. I will try to give a shot answer to it. In the 1950s, the small number of Palestinians who managed to stay inside Israel were in a state of shock: their leadership had been shattered, they'd been separated from their relatives, etc. Moreover there was still a pretty hard military regime in place that was actively pursuing internal colonisation strategies, punishing villages according to whether they were nationalist or not, and so on. In this situation there was very limited breathing space for resistance, because people had to concentrate on survival.

Moving forward, the territorial reunification of all of mandate Palestine, with the Israeli occupation from 1967, was a pretty big change. The 'Israeli Arab' identity that Israel had been trying to create was now challenged by the fact that, suddenly, Palestinians inside Israel were physically reunited with Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, many of whom were connected by family ties. Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza had, unlike those inside Israel, been shaped by external developments, notably the establishment of the PLO. So that's another key development.

In the mid-1970s there was the dissent leading up to Land Day, when six people were killed protesting land confiscation by the state. In this period resistance was very much focused on trying to assert civil rights. It was framed as Palestinians inside Israel saying, 'we're Israeli citizens and we want to not be subjected any longer to these discriminatory practices'.

To jump forwards massively, the Oslo period in the 1990s was a potential moment for improvement. It wasn't just about offering concessions in the occupied territories, it was also supposed to be a period in which the state would adopt a more conciliatory approach towards the Palestinian minority. But this all took a negative turn in 2000, when 13 people were killed by state forces in the context of solidarity protests with the second intifada.

Now, although most people have focused blame for the recent spate of racist bills on the government of Prime Minister Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Lieberman, actually some of the key ones go back well before that, to Olmert's presidency and Sharon's before his. So 2000 is another useful marker.

Then came the Arab community documents: the calls that came out in 2007 from a few key Israeli Palestinian organisations that explicitly called for Israel to be a state for all its citizens rather than a Jewish state.

So you can see how Palestinians in Israel have moved from calls for, 'we want, as individuals, to be not discriminated against', towards demands for collective rights, and more recently beyond that, to the point where many are challenging Israel's very identity as a Jewish state. So that's the kind of trajectory we've seen. So you can see some of the recent attacks on Palestinian citizens—the racist bills, and so on—as in part a reflection of this increasing radicalisation, although the relationship between the two isn't as simple as straightforward cause-reaction.

It is also important to look at the targeting of Israel's Palestinian minority in relation to the bigger picture. The borders of the state aren't going to expand any more. Israel has reached a maximum point of expansion: it withdrew from Gaza, and in the West Bank, while individual settlements may slightly grow, there isn't going to be another massive land confiscation. Effectively, the boundaries of the Palestinian reservations in the West Bank are established. In this context of the territorial expansion hitting a ceiling, the focus has shifted back to internal concerns and anxieties in the pre-'67 borders. A lot of the Israeli discourse promoting Judaisation in the Negev and the Galilee now, for instance, portrays the presence of Palestinians there as akin to a military threat, like they're taking over state land that must be defended. So I don't think legislative attacks on Palestinians inside Israel can be separated from the bigger picture in terms of how the conflict is changing. And leaders like Ameer Makhoul and Knesset members like Haneen Zoabi are targets because they're making links with Palestinians in the occupied territories and abroad— precisely the links that Israel has tried to prevent from forming.

If one were to confront an Israeli liberal with the basic question of, how can you justify Israel being a specifically Jewish state given the discrimination this entails, what's the typical response?

I can't speak in generalities, but I can talk about the kind of responses I've had, from Jewish liberal Zionists outside of Israel too. If you're positioning the idea of a Jewish state as an obstacle to equality for Palestinians, then you are likely thinking about some kind of one-state solution as an alternative. Not necessarily, but that might be the direction you're going in. Arguments you hear against this are things like: the need for security, not in the narrow sense (counter-terrorism, etc.) but in the more fundamental sense of the need for collective Jewish security, echoing very early Zionist ideas that Israel would serve as the place where Jews would be safe to express themselves culturally, religiously, and so on. Or it will be said that a secular-democratic state sounds nice, but is unrealistic. That argument can go in a problematic direction, and can almost have a kind of racist element to it, suggesting that Arabs are not capable of living peaceably in a secular democratic context, and that they would ultimately just seek to dominate and run out the Jews (or something like that). Alternatively some will try to deny that discrimination is a problem at all, contesting that there even is a contradiction between Israel's 'Jewish' and 'democratic' commitments. They'll point to the High Court, to the democratic structure of the legislature, examples of legal victories that Palestinians citizens have won, and all that sort of thing, to argue that actually there is recourse within the system to change without having to alter the structure itself.

Let's look at the strategic implications of all this for Palestinian solidarity activists. In the book you argue that we need a 'reimagining' of 'the Jewish and Palestinian presence in Palestine/Israel', towards a 'future based on a genuine co-existence of equals, rather than ethno-religious supremacy and segregation'. Do you  argue, then, that solidarity activists should shift their advocacy away from being specifically anti-occupation and supportive of a two-state settlement, towards a one-state solution?

Yes. Look now at who advocates for a two-state solution. Who uses that framework as a future solution? Tony Blair, George Bush... Netanyahu's kind of an exception, because he's still not happy with this, but [former leader of Israel's centrist opposition party Kadima] Tzipi Livni for example — if Livni was Prime Minister, that's what she would be saying. And all the key pro-Israel advocacy groups, particularly in the UK and Western Europe, that's what they all say. (Again, AIPAC is kind of the exception here, because it's dominated by the Right.) The meaning of the two-state solution is not what it might have meant in 1968, the year after the occupation began. A call for a two-state solution in 1968 is different to calling for it now. By which I mean, OK, one could argue for a two-state solution—and I mean a genuine one: a real sovereign state, total evacuation to the '67 lines—and putting aside the issue of the refugees and Palestinian citizens inside Israel for a moment, you could argue that it would produce a realistic entity, a viable prospect. But I'm saying that's not something that is going to happen. I don't think it's possible to establish that kind of genuinely independent Palestinian entity without, putting it bluntly, dismantling the Zionist framework entirely. Because it won't allow that possibility to happen.

Why not?

Well take Jerusalem. It's even a Basic Law that a united Jerusalem is the capital of Israel.

OK, to ask the question differently: do you think it can't happen because of practical infeasibility, or a lack of political will on the part of Israel planners, politicians, etc.?

I'd say both. There are many ways to answer this. The Palestinian political leadership's decision to push for a two-state solution was a political pragmatic choice based on decision-making that I think was flawed. Part of their whole strategy for 20 years has been this idea that it could persuade America to pressure Israel to grant enough concessions, which I don't think is a viable model, or a model based on a particularly good analysis of the relationship.

I don't think it's particularly practical to partition Palestine-Israel, either. Partition has been the name of the game for so long, but when you look at it, even just from an environmental point of view—water resources, the way communities have relationships between each other—you're looking at a territory which is a cohesive whole. Attempts to divide it are genuinely practically difficult, and also come down to shaping the territory on quite an unpleasant ethnic basis. And that's what I mean about a shift in solidarity advocacy. When people talk about the two-state solution, it's around the framework of 'two states for two peoples', which is how for example the family separation law was justified by a Kadima member of the Knesset. The MK said, this law affirms the principle of separation between the peoples, and is of a piece with 'two states for two peoples'. So, apart being objectionable in principle—it's based on ethnic separation—what does 'two states for two peoples' mean for the 20% of Israelis who are Palestinian, and for the Palestinian refugees?

With regards to advocacy, I understand the argument that the framework of international law is an important tool for advocacy. It's not a vacuous argument. But I don't think it's everything, because international law is not fixed. Moreover the simple message of 'equality' is also powerful and easy to get for the average person. I think the idea of basic democratic equality is just as easy, or easier, to get and push advocacy-wise as an argument based on the framework of international law and the idea of separation. That's what I find when I talk to people. (Not that you just pick one or the other, of course).

Another important point is that you can't divorce external advocacy from the Palestinian national program, which of course at this point does not call for a one-state solution. That's not irrelevant, because if you've got a dynamic Palestinian program and strategy that is also calling for equality and a one-state solution, that changes the game. Then, one-state solidarity advocacy would be echoing, or would have a more complimentary relationship with, Palestinian national politics. But I think the Palestinian scene is currently in a transition phase.

For the past three or four decades activists have tried to persuade people to take action in their own countries to change their government's policies towards the conflict, and they haven't got very far. And that's just with advocating a relatively limited solution, the two-state settlement. Increasingly, though, activists have been able to appeal to both an international consensus of official government positions on the conflict—

But we know those governments don't respect those official positions in practice.

Sure, but in terms of persuasive, authoritative sources that can be appealed to by activists as part—

But those governments are not going to be persuaded in the way that I think you're talking about. Western governments are not going to be persuaded that way: 'oh, you've mounted such an effective argument, that we will now change our policy'.

No, sure. I'm talking about persuading people. When you're trying to persuade people, you've got—not that I want to portray it as a war between us and them—but you've got certain weapons at your disposal. Resources you can draw on, when you're trying to construct a persuasive case addressed to people—

Sure, and that's what I mean when I refer to a broader framework of equality and freedom and democracy.

Well, hang on, let's come back to that. So, you've got the 2004 International Court of Justice advisory opinion, which lent authoritative legal weight to Palestinian claims on all of the issues at the heart of the case against the occupation, and which classified the West Bank and Gaza—though not Israel itself—as occupied Palestinian territory. And then you have people, especially after the 2006 Lebanon war and the 2008-9 Gaza massacre, being increasingly exposed to, and hence opposed to, the realities of Israel's conduct in the occupied territories through human rights reports. You have all this confluence of authoritative, official condemnation of Israeli policy grounded in the mainstream interpretations of international law, and focused on the occupation specifically. Even with all of that behind us, it still isn't an easy task to get people on our side and active.

So, having loaded the question in this way: don't you think that to try and go beyond a two-state settlement and argue for a solution that lacks—indeed flies in the face of—this broad official consensus, is unrealistic? Does that really stand a better chance of persuading people to act? And relatedly: I think it's true that ideas of 'equality' and 'freedom' and so on have powerful resonance with people, but at some point, they will ask 'equality of what, and where, and for whom?' And, especially given how loudly the other side will be trying to counter our arguments, they will ask, eventually, 'by "equality" do you mean the end of Israel as a Jewish state?' Is that something that people will be as ready to agree to as a two-state settlement?

There is no denying that support for a one-state solution is a minority position. There is no denying, in fact, despite the fact that you're loading the question to support a particular argument, most of what you just said. A lot of the key elements of what you're saying are factual realities, in terms of the consensus positions, the body of law, and so on. But I guess I would want my starting position, before looking at the question of advocacy, to be: what is the best end goal? For me, that means decolonisation, and a state in which Jews and Palestinians are sharing one country with equality. And, of course, plenty of people who support a two-state solution, maybe for the kinds of reasons you've just argued, would even agree that that is potentially the best end goal, even if they don't agree, for a variety of reasons, that that's what we should be advocating.

I would say that if that is the end goal—because of what it means for the refugees' right to return, and so on—how are we going to get there? Given that the task is monumental, I want to be trying to change and shape the discourse towards the end goal, and I don't want to be pushing something that I don't think can happen, even if it might present strategic advantages, as you've outlined.

Public opinion is obviously something that can be changed. The anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa lasted for a significant period of time before there was any international legal consensus that what was going on there was criminal, and before there was broad international opposition to it. Before there was that kind of framework, resistance was based on a basic opposition to injustice and inequality.

The realisation of the impossibility of creating a genuine two-state solution—which, obviously, is a key element of my argument—is creeping in to mainstream discourse. The reason something like J Street exists is to argue for saving Jewish privilege in most of historic Palestine through a two-state solution. That's basically what it exists to do: to save Zionism through a two-state solution, similar to Livni's position. And people like William Hague and others will regularly talk about this being the last chance for a two-state settlement, and all that kind of thing. 'We have to make it happen now, because what will come after will be much, much worse'. So we are, I think, entering a very key period of change in how people are looking at this. The penny is dropping.

I think another element that is important is the growing dissent within the Jewish community towards Zionism itself, or towards policies that are shaped on Jewish privilege in Palestine. That kind of discourse won't only grow but will also be an important part of shaping a changing conversation. I think the conversation is more open to change than maybe the position you advocate in the question assumes. Take human rights groups, for instance: they're not really operating in the context of any political solution, they're mainly just identifying particular abuses that occur. True, they reference international law, which in turn kind of operates within the framework of a two-state solution. But for example, this year Amnesty is having a focus on Palestinian citizens of Israel, and Human Rights Watch too has called out, in very stark terms, what it has described as racial discrimination inside Israel. So I think that whole body of stuff is not necessarily supportive of one particular solution over another. I would emphasise a rights-based approach.

Going back to how I started this answer off: you begin with your desired end goal, and you also want an analysis of the situation that is based on why the problem actually exists—that is, which gets to the root of the problem. And if you understand the root of the problem as the creation of a political Jewish state in a land where there is a non-Jewish majority, then you can't but want to go back to the root as a means of moving forward to something better. And I think that's why an approach that frames itself around international law, and a two-state solution, is problematic.

Jamie Stern-Weiner writes about the Israel-Palestine conflict, and co-edits New Left Project.

Front image: crop from poster promoting the first Land Day protest in 1976. Via the Palestine Poster Project