The Day Women Changed The World

The Women's Day March that brought down an Empire. Petrograd 8 March 1917 (photo- WikiCommons)

Today, 8 March is International Women’s Day, when we highlight the call for greater equality for women of both chance and outcome in our still highly misogynistic world. First established in 1909 by American Socialists to commemorate a women garment workers' strike the year before, it was adopted a year later by the Second International of Socialists to advocate for women's suffrage. This year's IWD is a particularly poignant one, not only because the recent rise of Trump brings into ever sharper focus the lack of progress towards gender equality, but also because it marks a full century since an International Women’s Day that literally shook the world and changed the course of history.

One century ago this morning, crowds of women downed tools and left the textile factories of Vyborg in Petrograd, then the capital of the Russian Empire, to march on the city centre. In what, by the Old Calendar, was still an fairly cold February morning, they protested loudly for bread and peace. This came as Russia faced another long year of the war that the Czar had initiated in August 1914 and which had claimed the lives of over a million Russian soldiers – nearly all of them peasant conscripts – with a similar number captured and twice as many seriously injured or disabled.

Of all the warring nations, Russia was perhaps the least equipped for a protracted modern war. Its society was still essentially one ruled by noble landowners and worked by often impoverished peasants. Such industry as had been developed, largely by the Czarist Government itself, was concentrated in the two key cities of Petrograd and Moscow, with lesser development in the Ukrainian city of Kiev far to the south. There was a small middle class, much of it the clerks and notaries hired to run the imperial bureaucracy or managers in the small industrialised sector. Represented by liberal parties like the Kadets and Decembrists, they were in truth little but a mild irritant to the imperial government, which sponsored its own nationalist, often anti-Semitic groupings, backed up with the violent “muscle” of the extremist Black Hundreds movement, a street force that would have put Hitler to shame.

Conditions in Petrograd were appalling for the urban working class, and the Vyborg district along the side of the River Neva was in many respects the worst of all. Essentially a dormitory for the workers who produced all the material goods for the army and for the wealthy classes who lived directly opposite on the far side of the river, site of the Imperial Palace, the living standards of the masses were beyond cruel. In Vyborg, an average six people lived per room, almost three times that of their English contemporaries, and only one in four had access to running water. Nearly all, including women and children, worked exceedingly long hours and it was common for workers to sleep in slings in their actual workplaces, the better to start their next shift on time.

Sooty pollution rose like tall dark dervishes from the factory roofs, while safety arrangements barely existed. Trade unions were mostly banned or ignored, and where they survived they were usually taken over by Czarist agents – one chapter of a union folded when gradually the entire committee realised they were all secret policemen. In response, the workers looked to socialist parties to speak for them though the Duma, a semi-parliamentary body grudgingly conceded by the Czar after the failed 1905 revolution, was toothless and elected on a franchise skewed in favour of the rich – and of course completely excluded all women from voting. It had barely met since the war began and some of its own members urged the Imperial Father to abolish it.

Many supported the Social Revolutionaries, a party based on the peasant class in the countryside, from where many had migrated to seek work in the cities. But the SRs were a party without a clear cause. Mildly syndicalist in outlook, it was often more certain about what it opposed than what it supported. The SRs often collaborated with the Menshevik wing of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. Both held to Marxist theory that a bourgeois liberal phase of economic development, where a parliament of shopkeepers and factory owners would rule, was prerequisite to a subsequent transition to further revolutionary social change.

Little ideologically separated the Mensheviks from the harder-line Bolshevik wing of the RSDLP. Tactics were more the issue – while Mensheviks like Dan and Martov contemplated a reformist phase which they might embrace, the Bolsheviks’ exiled leader Lenin, while accepting such a phase was likely, preferred to emphasise the development of a party with revolutionary aims made clear from the outset.

For the workers toiling in the imperial sweatshops, there was little respite from the daily grind. The Church was firmly rooted in the Imperial Establishment, propagating the mythology of a Divinely appointed Czar, his very title appropriated from the Caesars of Rome and Byzantium to lend a Holy Essence to the Slavic throne. Some priests did work for the poor, even organising unions and protests, but, perhaps most notoriously of all, when Father Gapon led crowds of praying workers to the palace bearing aloft icons of Jesus and the Czar to protest their loyalty and ask for their Imperial Father’s succour, the reply was in the form of bullets and bayonets.

But all this was to change on the morning of 8 March 1917.

The winter of 1916 to 1917 was even colder than normal and with reverses on the battlefield adding to the sense of impending disaster, the inhabitants of Petrograd plumbed new depths of misery. Bread, a staple of the workers’ diet, rose rapidly in price and in many cases was simply not available. Hunger stalked the masses while, just across the frozen river, the nobles, landowners, factory bosses and generals continued to indulge in their usual rounds of balls, ballets and bacchanalian revelry.

Alexandra Kollontai, Bolshevik
(photo - WikiCommons)

While the socialist hierarchy did include a significant number of prominent women leaders, including Alexandra Kollontai, Inessa Armand and Konkordia Samoilova (later founding editor of Pravda), local leaderships often as not were exclusively male, reflecting the patriarchy at the heart of the existing society rather than presaging the change of any future socialist world.

Yet because of the contingencies of feeding the imperial war machine, more and more women were working in trained roles, including as supervisors and organisers, and alongside that they became involved in the unions and in politics. While men might continue to run the committees of political parties, women’s voices were starting to be heard as never before.

And so, with their conditions ever more desperately subordinated to the endless war, women’s committees in textile factories planned for strikes and marches to mark 8 March to voice their demands to the city authorities in Petrograd. As they prepared, it became clear that their male comrades, including the Bolsheviks, didn’t want them to go. The Menshevik activist Sukhanov dismissed the optimism of some young women workers that a demonstration might start the long-awaited revolution as the immature fantasies of "silly girls." It was, the socialist officials argued, too much too soon. Support for the war was declining but had not evaporated and political strikes could be seen as unpatriotic and, hence, counter-productive. The sisters were asked to stay at work.

But the sisters didn’t listen and at dawn they left their homes and workplaces and marched round factory after factory in the Vyborg district calling on other women - and men - to strike and march with them. One Bolshevik described how the factory committee had refused to join them until women started throwing bricks through the windows to compel them to come out in a rather forced show of comradeship.

On the other side of the river, along the Nevsky Prospekt into the city centre, a smaller Women’s Day march had already started and had drawn in a cross section of bourgeois women, peasants and students. It was by all accounts good natured while loudly demanding equal voting rights for women with men.

The strikers from Vyborg tried to join this march by crossing the Liteny Bridge from Vyborg to the city centre. They were stopped by the police, who forced them back and dispersed many. But the core group of several thousand women textile workers turned down the steps from the river bank and defiantly, and bravely, marched across the ice on the frozen Neva to then climb the far side and join the women on the Nevsky Prospekt. From there, they marched together on the city Duma reiterating their chants for “bread, equality and peace.” And, emboldened, a new slogan erupted ominously from the crowds.

"Down with the Czar!"

The police continued to try to stop the marchers, but the Government made the mistake of sending some of the Cossack soldiers billeted in the capital to reinforce them. Unlike the police, who had volunteered as professional agents of the repressive Empire, most soldiers were peasant conscripts. While some clung to conservative notions of the Czar as Father of the Nation, many more were at least mildly sympathetic to the strikers.

When the police and troops moved on the crowds, women were often to be seen on the front line urging them to change sides, even dragging them across physically while berating them for not defecting sooner. The Cossacks would charge up to the women on their horses, but stop short of touching them and soon the protesters were aware that the military were wavering. By dusk, tens of thousands of women and men had occupied swathes of the city centre and the Czarist authorities had lost control of the streets. They were never to regain them.

Emboldened by the women’s initiative, the socialist parties hurried to bring more strikers out the next morning and by the following day all the capital’s factories had ceased to operate. As many as a quarter of a million men, women and children moved on the city centre, again clashing with the police while the army’s ambivalence became more and more evident.

That afternoon, again on the Nevsky Prospekt perhaps the single most crucial moment of these insurrectionary days occurred when the crowd encountered a large squadron of Cossack soldiers blocking their path. Unlike other troops, this force was drawn up ready to charge and a tense stand off followed.

It was then that a young girl moved forward on her own from the crowd towards the soldiers, who readied to shoot. But she boldly walked up to their commander and from under her cloak lifted out a bunch of red roses, a joint symbol of peace and revolution. The commander leaned forward, grinned and accepted the gift and the cheering crowd rushed forward to embrace their new soldier comrades.

By the end of the week, after the entire military garrison switched sides and hundreds of thousands of ordinary people occupied the streets, power had slipped decisively from the centuries old Imperial Order. On 15^th March, the Czar abdicated and his Ministers fled or were arrested.

Faced with the demands of the crowds, a rather bewildered group of liberal members of the near-moribund national Duma rather reluctantly established a Provisional Government working out of the right-wing of the Tauride Palace. In the left-wing of the same building, a group of socialist parties established a very fluid body of elected workers’ representatives, soon joined by soldiers as well, to speak for the masses. They sought to hold the new liberal regime to account for the three main demands of bread, land and peace. The first soviet of 1917 had been established.

Soviet Women: a challenge to the world

So International Women’s Day, one hundred years ago today, shook the world and set in train a series of events that turned the old order on its head. In time, women were to see a huge change in their position –revolutionary Russia brought equal rights in the workplace, education and in the home. The USSR pioneered paid maternity leave, workplace creches and family planning. When Trotsky was asked by some incredulous westerners if it was true Soviet women could get divorced just by asking, he responded by asking them, with mock incredulity, if it was true that in western countries women could ask for a divorce but not get one.

The Soviet Union of course was in many ways to have a poisoned history. Stalin was to rise and crush the freedoms briefly brought about by the revolutions of 1917 and he embodied in his “Red Court” the epitome of patriarchy. Lenin's strong advocacy of equal rights for women was in many ways undermined, and of course centuries of sexist thinking under the Czars had a very long reach still to be found in post-Soviet Russia, which recently decriminalised some forms of domestic abuse of women. But without the challenge to the world of Soviet Communism, there is little doubt that women and all humanity would be the worse for the lack of it.

So as we celebrate International Women’s Day, remember it as a day for socialist values; and remember the courageous women who a century ago braved the ice of the Neva to forge a new way of life for all of us, sisters and brothers together.

And remember, men - socialist men - told them not to go…

Callous Capitalism; or The Land With Three Empty Homes For Every Person Without A Home

Your brother? Your son? Your daughter? You?

 In the days when capitalism truly is dead and buried, in the annals of the Great Collapse in the UK, this last week may well be marked as a seminal moment in our history. As with most seminal moments, of course, no one notices at the time and it is left to the historians to mark them, and even invent them. But perhaps Monday 6th February will be remembered as the day that the arch-champions of capitalism and the representatives of our ruling elite let their mask slip, however unintentionally, with a frankly startling admission of the failure of our market economy, the system they have fought so hard to impose on everything that moves and nearly everything that doesn't.

Communities Secretary Sajid Javid MP

Launching the Tory Government's latest White Paper on housing, Communities Secretary Sajid Javid MP told the Commons that, "Our housing market is broken. We have to build more, of the right homes in the right places, and we have to start right now.”

Javid went on to detail the litany of disaster most of us are more than familiar with - average house prices are now 7.5 times average annual salaries; mortgages frequently swallow up over half of household income; fewer and fewer young people can get affordable rented property never mind snatch hopelessly at the cruel  illusion of home ownership. The result is stay-at-home offspring remaining in the family home into their late twenties and early thirties, jobs away from home being unaffordable because of the inability to rent and the formation of new household by young couples frequently delayed or even frustrated.

Buy-to-let sector: source of rocketing homelessness?

Javid declared that Britain needs to increase annual housebuilding completions from 190,000 units in 2016 to 275,000  as soon as possible. The white paper, strikingly if laughably titled "Fixing Our Broken Housing Market" then comes up with a rag-tag mix of banning letting agency fees, "incentivising" smaller construction companies, reducing the time that developers can leave construction unstarted after planning permission is granted and, perhaps most incredibly of all, "forcing" councils to start building council housing again.

For those too young to remember, much of our housing crisis was brought on very predictably by the Thatcher Government's determination to destroy council housing. First of all came the tax-payer subsidised "right to buy", whereby hundreds of thousands of council tenants were deceived into home ownership that sooner or later saw most of the sold stock resold into the hands of private rental agencies.

Next came the effective blocking on councils from building new council housing or even using the receipts from sales to maintain the stock that remained - for years, several billions pounds sat frozen in bank accounts. Housing associations, originally small community enterprises providing cheap, niche accommodation to vulnerable groups, were effectively taken over, forced to expand with central-government provided Housing Corporation money and then driven to become in effect large faceless companies far removed from their original purpose.

Then finally came the coup de gras: large scale transfer of remaining council housing to large scale housing companies, notionally not-for-profit but, as government funds were reduced and housing groups grew ever larger, functioning more and more like big private landlords. In some places, housing trusts were created by effectively hiving off and privatising the local council housing department as an ALMO (arms-length-management-organisation), which was great news for the bank balances of some transferring senior staff, but not so good at all for the lower paid staff, eventually shorn of their council terms and conditions, and most of all of little use to tenants and their communities.

Chuck into the mix the deregulation of the private rental sector - last year, the Tories passed a law that removed any requirement for private landlords to ensure their properties are fit for habitation - and the advent of previously banned buy-to-let mortgages, now almost one in five of new loan approvals, and the stage was indeed set for housing apocalypse.

Bullion blocks in the sky - empty new flats in London

With much new build now not even lived in - just pop into central London or the edge of Cambridge to see the thousands of "investment properties" owned like so many vintage wine bottles by the global elite, sitting empty, their owners preferring to avoid the hassle of rental while they wait for their assets to appreciate in value. Buy to let has very often become buy-to-leave (empty).
Unsurprisingly, this callous disregard of the real needs of real people has meant more human beings chasing fewer properties actually available to rent or buy, inflating prices massively. It is a process that the state even subsidises, exempting these often large scale property investors from full council taxes.

And so, Britain's 700,000 empty properties are no surprise, but no less an obscenity because of it. With official homelessness figures soaring and migrants the appalling and false scapegoat for the greed-is-good mentality that infects our developers and our elite, Javid's admission of market failure, while disarmingly honest, is nevertheless not exactly news. And his white paper leaves almost none of the real problems tackled - no action on empty homes, nothing to end the scandal of tax-advantaged buy-to-let loans or to break up the now huge housing corporations that dominate the "affordable" housing sector. People on even above average incomes will remain mired in debt, genuinely struggling the keep roofs over their heads and those of their families.

And, of course, more and more no longer have roofs over their heads; 250,000 people - a quarter of a million - in England alone are homeless and many really, truly have nowhere to go and are sleeping rough as a result.

Last week, in Cambridge, the city that is growing fastest of all in the UK, where cranes and construction hoarding are ceaselessly painting a new skyline as more and more investment properties are built and snapped up by the rich, I spoke to a man camping in a shop doorway on a freezing cold night. I recognised him as Tony from the previous summer when I had spoken to him in the same doorway on a better evening. As we sipped coffee and chatted, he told me he had been homeless for three years now and had nowhere to go that night. There was an emergency shelter but because he had turned up 10 minutes after 11pm curfew the previous week they had turned him away into a freezing, rainy night. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he had sworn at them and so was barred for a month.

He is one of many. Like Chris, whom I encountered, shaking from cold this afternoon in Leeds, or a street away last month John, who was curled up in a blanket outside HMV, his wispy beard, bedraggled hair and sunken cheeks giving the appearance of a dying Jesus, discarded on the edge of the crowds doing their shopping.

And so too with the many others who have silently come back onto previously empty streets over the last four or five years. If you look, you will see them, the young couple crying on the steps of an empty bank in New Street in Birmingham, both not long out of care, with no money and no food. Or Brian huddled on the ground in the rain under his umbrella with his dog on a Sunderland street; or the young man on a back stairwell in Edinburgh, thrown out when his mother was evicted and
apologising to everyone he shyly asked for a few coins to help him.

All of them are there - many of them terribly young, and all with the same desperate stories, the utterly unwarranted shame in their voices, their pale, paper-thin sunken cheeks and their sad, sad eyes. Bedding down on concrete pavements on the streets of the fifth richest country on planet Earth. And the second most unequal in the western world - a country where there are nearly three empty homes for every homeless person.

It's not just Javid's housing market that has failed. It is our whole, corrupt capitalist economy and the twisted society it has forged on its own fantasies where freedom is money and money is freedom. This week, its custodians have finally admitted that the edifice is crumbling. When the whole rotting structure comes tumbling down, as it soon will, we must be ready to build anew - not just buildings and economic systems, but lives, homes and dreams too.

Trump's Cardinal

Unlikely recount changes notwithstanding, Donald Trump will take office as President of the United

Steve Bannon in 2010

States at the end of January. In the days since the election, his team has been taking shape almost as chaotically as his ducking and diving on some of his policy announcements during the campaign. His narcissism is unbound as he poses in front of his golden elevator and sits on the thone-like chairs that adorn his Trump Tower apartment and many people seem genuinely afraid of where his narrow, uninformed world view and his sheer temperament ("Why do we have nuclear weapons if we can't use them?") might take our planet.

But behind the bluster and bigotry, we shouldn't think the emerging narrative will be chaos. For Trump is neither a fool nor does he stand alone. He represents a strain of thinking, not founded on the people who voted for his cod- "movement" but rather on the small group of rightwing populists who use a valid anti-liberal establishment narrative to push extreme capitalist solutions. These are the people who bemoan the ineffectiveness of welfare and who promote the idea that it needs to be abolished rather than revolutionised. They talk of crony capitalism while advocating for the outsourcing of government to private corporations.

A key figure in this is Steve K Bannon. Originally the TV Director of the successful Seinfeld show, Bannon became the chair of the rightwing Breitbart "news" organisation and Trump's election campaign CEO. He has now been named Chief Strategist for the Trump Presidency. His intellectual rigour and planning strengths will be deployed on behalf of and through one of the most ill-prepared Presidents in history and will be all the stronger because of it. Bannon will almost certainly be the deciding influence in how the next four or, as he had claimed, forty years of American policy and politics are shaped.

There have been some rather hysterical and amateurish attempts to trash him as anti-Semitic in parts of the media, although his revisionist take on Islamic history has been largely ignored - but in truth the threat from Bannon is at once more explicit and more subtle. For his is a logical philosophy, individualistic, radical and utterly stone-hearted, and one that chattering, compromised liberals are singularly unsuited to challenge.

The video below shows Bannon speaking in 2011 to a small group of fellow right radicals. His tone is measured, informed and all the more terrifying because of it. He regrets the challenge of the Occupy Movement as targeting, in his view, the wrong culprits of what he rightly characterises as America's fourth existential crisis and harps back to Lincoln's limited cannon of Shakespeare, Plutarch and the King James Bible as "all you needed" in simpler times. But crisis brings opportunity and "We will be different on each side (of the crisis)," he warns hopefully.

Yet he is not some uniquely evil individual. He is simply playing his part in the defence of and extension of the real elite he and Trump represent: the elite beyond the public establishment; the disciples of Ayn Rand and the Breitbartists who are now set to manipulate the narrative in the French elections in an attempt to install the neo-fascist FN candidate Marine Le Pen into office next year.

The outlook is chilling, but it is not illogical and it is riding the curve of history. However perplexing to liberals, it will be defeated neither by apocalyptic indignation, nor with hand-wringing, gut-wrenching appeals to restore the failed status quo nor through the machinations of mechanistic legalism. Court cases and constitutional pleadings will hasten rather than halt what has begun. As Bannon himself has remarked, "The liberals don't know what is going on."

Only a far more robust, collectivist response will have any chance of countering the radical right - for, unlike the vacillating showman Trump, Bannon is driven by conviction and belief. His agenda, his revolution, will only be defeated by those whose own convictions and beliefs run as deeply and radically as his do, but course in a very, very different direction. Radical rightism can only be met by radical leftism. There is no compromise, no common ground and those who seek it in some soggy centre condemn society to the predations of Bannon, Trump and their backers, and betray a future that could yet be better for all.

Nigel Farage Goes to Washington

President-Elect of the USA, Donald Trump, has tweeted that he thinks his friend and fellow-traveller, UKIP acting leader Nigel Farage, should be UK Ambassador to Washington. They have certainly admired each other from afar for sometime, with Trump promising his victory would be like "Brexit-plus-plus" and Farage excusing Trump's references to groping women as just how men talk. Apparently.

It seems highly unlikely, and Downing Street has already ruled out any use of Nigel and Donald's special relationship to shore up the tattered pseudo-special relationship between the US and Britain.

Yet, it might somehow be so very apposite an illustration it might be of our twisted, corrupted politics if it were indeed to happen.

The Free Trade Delusion

Since the UK Brexit referendum result and Trump's win in the US Presidential election, the liberal polity on both sides of the Atlantic have been wringing their hands and pronouncing on the surprise (to them) of both results. The cause, they have repeatedly declared, was the anger and ignorance of the "left behind", the detritus of society they hadn't noticed from the confines of their comfy, evidence-based neoliberal bubble until the ingrates turned up and spoilt their party.

Liberal democracy, of course, is about little more than the unwashed turning up every four or five years to confirm the Great and Good's right to rule via very flawed ballot box processes. Democracy should validate the status quo, maybe with a little nudge leftwards here and rightwards there, especially under the mind-numbing post-ideological consensus in place since the fall of the Communist bloc.

So, when the electorate goes off-script, we soon see just how thin-skinned liberalism truly is: the voters were misled, didn't know what they were voting for, are bigotted racists/sexists/homophobes, etc. They have voted against their own interests as well as wider society because of their moronic stupidity and so in Britain we should rerun the Euroreferendum, or find some variant that will ultimately let us stay in the EU, while in the USA, liberals are fantastically speculating about California seceding or joining up with Canada.

Yes, Trump will do nothing to help most of the people who, disillusioned with the US capitalist system, voted for him in response to his divide and conquer tactics of blaming foreigners and migrants for their lost jobs and deep poverty. And Brexit may well mean that British workers lose some of the meagre employment protections conferred by the EU. But neither a Clinton Presidency nor a so-called soft Brexit would do anything to resolve the deep-seated inequality and accompanying alienation that has led us to this pass.

At the heart of western economics in the post-war era and codified in the institutions created by the 1944 Bretton Woods conference, the rich nations have pursued an aggressive commitment to so-called free trade and movement of capital. As globalisation has take grip over the last two and a half decades, this ideology, often called neoliberalism, has been applied as the orthodox economics across virtually all the planet. The G20 summit in 2009 explicitly stated that it remained committed to these principles and to rooting out all forms of protectionism wherever these are found. Indeed, in recognition of this dubious aspiration, many free trade agreements, including the recently passed CETA between Canada and Europe, have included Investor-States Dispute Settlement mechanisms. Under this, multinationals could sue national governments and their taxpayers for any measures that reduce or deny them profits, from health and safety rules or environmental legislation through to any refusal to privatise public services.

Proponents of free trade repeatedly argue that its advantages can be seen by a rise in wealth around the world and claim that removal of trade barriers, quotas and tariffs creates a virtuous circle of economic growth and prosperity. The International Monetary Fund has put this central to its rescue packages to developing nations when they have needed financial assistance - in return for loans, they have had to remove any protections on or subsidies to domestic industries. This has been done while ignoring the fact that the rich economies all have long histories of protectionism when they were growing their own early industrial infrastructure. Indeed, many rich nations still run a range of protectionist measures - and trade blocs such as the European Union do a fine job of keeping any manufactured goods from poorer states out of their domestic markets, but they of course are far less likely to be in thrall to the IMF or World Bank.

Yet even within rich states, free trade has had massively damaging effects, especially where the ideology has been adopted as part of an international trading system such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (and more recently the Trans-Pacific Partnership Treaty aggressively pursued by the Obama administration) and within the European single market. Removal of trade barriers and tariffs certainly makes international trade more profitable for companies and being able to relocate their manufacturing and service bases to poorer areas with a lower paid workforce makes their products cheaper (and their profit margins bigger).

However, this has come at a huge cost to the workforces laid off in developed economies as part of  corporates' pursuit of competitive advantage via cheap labour abroad, while in developing states it has favoured big business at the cost of the destruction of small scale local enterprises. As a self-employed textile trader in Lima told the BBC World Service this week, "They talk about Peru growing, but it is just the rich growing richer." Economists such as Paul Krugman cite the obsession with trade liberalisation as central to this.

The deceit of rightwing populists like Trump and UKIP of course is to blame foreigners and migrants, attacking one of the symptoms rather than the true cause - something these buddies of big business will never honestly do - and very much designed to buttress rather than challenge the elite. At most, they are "Opposition by Appointment to the Establishment" -  a tool to neuter the anger of the public and incorporate it into the continuing narrative of a hierarchical, globalised economics. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has railed at Trump and UKIP's Nigel Farage as voicing nothing more than "the fake anti-elitism of rich white men".  Like in the old Czarist Empire, pogroms will come long before any genuine reforms.

All the more reason then for the Left to articulate genuine change, to advance a vision of a very different world and the economics needed to achieve it. And yet, on this, quite the opposite seems to be happening.

While Labour's Chancellor John McDonnell called Brexit an opportunity for Britain rather than a threat this week, he neither developed what  opportunities he foresees, nor was he speaking to the prevailing mood among British socialists and progressives. Corbyn himself has set continued access to the European single market as a priority for Brexit negotiations, and Green co-leader Caroline Lucas echoed this sentiment when she attacked McDonnell for apparently giving succour to hard Brexiteers.

Yet, rather than blindly clinging to some sort of soft Brexit which continues to focus on free trade arrangements, isn't this precisely the time for greens and socialists to challenge the status quo? Why would we want to cling onto a single market, removing as it does the ability of a democratic government to protect its industries and the well-being of its people where and when it chooses? Why cling to something that removes the revenue from tariffs on imports, reduces the public purse and bans the ability to subsidise enterprises which may be commercially unprofitable but socially or environmentally beneficial? How can we build a fairer, sustainable world on a template carved out to enable the very worst of capitalism?

Given the racism that has accompanied both Trump and Brexit, there is clearly a need to counter the nationalism and xenophobia of their faux revolts. But we can have freedom of movement and culture without embracing free trade: indeed, perhaps ending free trade would be the best way to ensure continuing cultural diversity around the world, given multnationals' drive to commodify and homogenise the entire planet.

Lucas and Corbyn have both said they accept the UK is leaving the EU. Yet, while the silent secrecy from the Tory Bexiteers is clearly frustrating and undemocratic, their insistence on making such a totemic issue of access to the single market is baffling and a major strategic error. For if there was ever a time to be forging a path to a more sustainable world founded on a fairer, co-operative and localised economics, it is now. That inevitably means a rejection of free trade and embracing instead economic intervention by the state, new forms of community and mutual ownership, regulation and, yes, protectionism.

The vast majority in our rampantly unequal societies across our troubled planet face ever greater difficulties to make ends meet and live their lives as they might have hoped in a world of great abundance. If the Left does not rise to the challenge to show how we can create a different paradigm and instead leaps to knee-jerk reactions to populists' lies, only tragedy awaits us. To quote Gramsci, writing of a similar age of chaos in the 1920s, "The old world is dying, but the new one struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters."

The Eternal Dark Heart of Empire

"Pygmy hunter-gatherers in Cameroon have been beaten, tortured and forced off their ancestral lands to clear vast tracts of forest for a trophy-hunting company owned by the banker Benjamin de Rothschild, activsts claimed yesterday. At least three forest camps have been burnt to the ground by guards, according to survivors, while Baka pygmies caught hunting bush animals to eat said they were tortured by police guarding the forest on behalf of game hunters." (The Times, 3/11/16)

It must be noted that the Rothschilds strenuously deny any involvement in the incidents and insist they have good relations with the Baka; but according to Survival International there seems evidence that they happened, whoever was responsible.

For much of Africa, such occurrences are nothing new and indeed the happenings in Cameroon pale in comparison with the imperialist destruction of the Continent that has been airbrushed from western histories, which increasingly recast the Age of Empires as a time of progress and glory as opposed to the squalid exploitation that, in the end, is common to all empires of whatever origin.

Joseph Conrad's best known novel is the comparatively short "Heart of Darkness", published in 1902 and originally serialised in Blackwood's Magazine. Telling the tale of a steamboat captain, Charles Marlow, sailing upriver in an unnamed European colony, whose purpose is to reach a trading station run by a  well-regarded Company Agent by the name of Kurtz, it documents in chilling and graphic narrative the appalling conditions of the indigenous people: chained together as they carry great loads, reduced to bipedal beasts of burden, left to die under trees and by track sides. And, when the clearly psychopathic Kurtz is finally encountered, his hut is decorated by the decapitated skulls of Africans mounted on stakes. Filmed most powerfully as "Apocalypse Now" and transposed to the Vietnamese conflict, what many don't realise is that it is, in fact, founded on the truth.

Conrad, born in Poland as Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski spent several months as a steamboat captain in the Congo in 1889 and Marlow is in fact the author himself. What he encountered was enough for him to quit his job and return to his adopted England to write and campaign against the growing horrors of imperialism throughout the colonial world, but especially in the Congo. In this, he worked closely with the great Irish campaigner Roger Casement and the largely forgotten but perhaps most effective human rights campaigner in history, Edmund Morel. Like Conrad, Morel had originally worked on Congo trade, but left his job when he realised that serious abuses were taking place and it was to campaigning against them that he was to devote much of his life.

Their real-life stories and those of many others, not least the previously silent African voices of the Congo basin, are assembled and recounted in Adam Hochschild's powerful history, "King Leopold's Ghost", originally published in 1998 after years of painstaking and often blocked research. It is essential reading for anyone concerned with the dynamics of imperialism, especially that of a commercial type - for, unlike every other European colony, the Congo was not held in the name of a country, but the personal property of Leopold, King of Belgium, who acquired his private fiefdom nearly eighty times the size of his native country via subterfuge, deceit, propaganda and immense, bloody violence.

Hochschild traces the rise of the ironically titled "Congo Free State" from its pre-colonial days when the verdant rainforest basin was home to millions of Africans organised into several states, some of them highly sophisticated with advanced systems of justice, semi-democratic consultative assemblies and an high level of material culture. Their way of life was much attuned to respecting and living within the environmental capacity of what, along with the Amazon basin, has been described as one of the lungs of the world. The only things the indigenous societies lacked were the guile and powerful weaponry of the Europeans.

As France, Britain, Portugal and latterly newly-unified Germany began the imperialist "Scramble for Africa" in the 1870s and 1880s, Hochschild examines how the vain and arrogant Leopold felt Belgium was far too small for a man of his ambition. Under cover of Christian philanthropy, he hired the narcissistic explorer Henry Morton Stanley to open up the one area of Africa at that point unclaimed by any colonial powers: the great basin of the Congo river, which cuts across central Africa from its mouth on the Atlantic coast through to just south of the headwaters of the Nile.

Supposedly carrying the "white man's burden" of improving the lot of the primitive native races and freeing them from the tyranny of Arab slave traders from the eastern coast, Stanley tore a path through the rainforest, his expedition consisting of African porters and several hundred well-armed mercenary troops. He slaughtered thousands who got in their way or did not hand over their food stocks on demand, torched scores of villages and forced African kings and chiefs to acknowledge Leopold's pseudo-charity, the International Association of the Congo, as their overlord. Stanley travelled through the area several times and is remembered in the region today as a white-hatted harbinger of death. But back in London, where he published several tomes on his liberation of the lesser races, even today he is celebrated as the man who found fellow colonialist entrepreneur Dr David Livingstone. He was knighted in 1899 as a member of the Order of the Bath (if he ever took one, the water must have run deep red) and served as a Liberal Unionist MP for Lambeth North before dying in 1904.

Victims of Leopold's "civilising mission".

After Stanley established Leopold's presence in the area, the King, who never travelled to the territory himself, used mercenaries and free booting "entrepreneurs" to open up the area, first to slaughter hundreds of thousands of elephants for ivory and later tap forest trees for rubber. Local men were impressed into brutal service, sometimes by violence, sometimes by the kidnapping of their wives and children, often by both means. Failure to meet quotas often led to the rape and mutilation, or worse, of the hostages. The colonial police, the Force Publique, was renowned for its brutality and its liberal use of a whip called the chicotte claimed the lives of many of their victims, men, women and children. Leopold even established state orphanages run by Catholic clergy for the children of his victims - the boys were raised to be soldiers in the FP; the girls to be servants and in a handful of cases to join the nuns.

The casual nature of the brutality was endemic: Conrad's Kurtz character was based potentially on several officials of the Free State, the most likely being Leon Rom, who edged his lawn with the severed heads of Africans. Paradoxically, Rom also busied himself sending home his landscape paintings of the rainforest, collecting butterflies and publishing a book on African customs. Another inspiration for Kurtz may have been Guillaume Van Kerckoven, who paid the equivalent of half a shilling for each African head brought to him during a military operation.

As well as body-breaking forced labour on ivory and rubber collection and on constructing dams and railways, Africans were indentured simply to serve the bloated white colonials who arrived in the area. Hothschild recovered one Free State official's diary of a journey where African porters hauled his luggage over inhospitable territory: "A file of poor devils, chained by the neck, carried my trunks and boxes... There were about a hundred of them, trembling and fearful of the overseer, who strolled by whirling a whip. For each stocky and broad-backed fellow, how many were skeletons dried up like mummies, their skin worn out... seamed with deep scars, covered with suppurating wounds... No matter! They were all up for the job."

Nsala of Wala with the remains of his butchered 5 year old daughter, her hand and foot.

To portay this as a great civilising mission, Leopold permitted various Christian missions to be established. Most were content to go along with the "necessary" violence and validate the propaganda of the chicotte being necessary to rouse "lazy" natives to work. Initially at any rate, his efforts paid off with humanitarian awards showered on Leopold. Even Mark Twain was moved to write in defence of the King's great works.

But some opened their eyes and began to challenge. Notably, the first two incomers to do so were African Americans. George Washington Williams, a remarkable man who fought in the civil war, studied law, served in the Ohio state legislature and became an author, all before the age of thirty. In his historical work, he became one of the first to use the oral history and memories of ordinary people to find the truth of the past, and it was with this mindset that he travelled to the Congo. There, Willaims soon realised that the Free State was far from the philanthropic paradise portrayed by Leopold and his associates and began to write on the abuses to a disbelieving public back in the USA and Europe.

He was followed by a fellow African American, the Rev William Sheppard, who was sponsored by the Presbyterian church to work in the Congo. He similarly, began to expose the brutality of the regime, leading to Leopold having him arrested and put on trial - though he was ultimately acquitted. Other dissidents, like Hezekiah Andrew Shamu, were less fortunate - executed, murdered or hounded to death by the Free State.

Edmund Morel

But, no matter how powerful their testimony, black voices were little heard in 19th century Europe or America and it was not until the British activist Edmund Morel came along that the campaign against the Congo became the true cause celebre of the liberals and socialists of Europe.  After realising that the ships he was auditing carried troops and weapons to the Congo but returned empty, Morel quit his job for a shipping firm, founded the Congo Reform Association and began an international campaign to highlight and end the abuse. At great loss and some risk to himself and his family, he almost single-handedly built a coalition that in 1908 forced Leopold to surrender his private state to the Belgian Government, which was at least slightly more accountable for its actions. The King was of course handsomely compensated for his losses. By this time, however, as many as ten million Congolese Africans had died from the brutality of the free state or the starvation and diseases that followed in its wake - around half of the entire population; a genocide unsurpassed even in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany.

Hochschild highlights the inconsistency of many of those liberals who campaigned vigorously again the horrors of Leopold's Congo but turned a blind eye to similar, if less blatant, abuses by other colonial powers (Stanley's violence was neither the worst nor an isolated example of contemporary practice). He challenges the narrative of "improvement" that imperial powers allegedly brought to the so-called Dark Continent - the narrative not of truth, but of the victors. This, as he explores, is at least in part because few African voices from the time have been recorded. He was himself able to recover a few second hand, but the thousands of records he unearthed for this erudite and well-written piece of work are nearly exclusively those of white imperialists or paternalistic if sometimes sympathetic missionaries and visitors.

This is a striking contrast to what could be almost be a companion volume - Dee Brown's "Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee", an account of the final destruction of the Native Americans which does draw on scores of first hand accounts set down by survivors at the turn of the 20th century. It too portrays richly diverse cultures deceived and violently destroyed by descendants of European settlers whose concept of the white man's burden was couched in the equally arrogant and racist notion of their god-given "Manifest Destiny" to overcome indigenous peoples. A combination of imperialist historians and Hollywood populism subsequently crafted a very similar narrative to the Victorian tale of philanthropic imperialism kindly bringing civilisation to ingrates. (Notably, in his lengthy genocidal career, Stanley, as well as serving on both sides in the American Civil War, briefly worked as a journalist in frontier country to assist the US Cavalry with its anti-Native American

Henry Morton Stanley

propaganda.)

And it is in this spirit, as much of the rich world reinvents its history to look back ever more nostalgically at empire, that "King Leopold's Ghost" should be read as a warning of the here and now as much as an account of the past. The overt imperialism of European powers ruling African and other states is of course long gone. But, in our globalised, neoliberal world, the truth is that private corporations are buying up huge swathes of poorer Latin American, African and Asian countries.

Perhaps even more thoroughly than the Victorians' great Scramble, the Rothschild hunting estates in Cameroon are far from an isolated example: in a new African land grab, European, American and Chinese "investors" now own massive estates with the blessing and naked power of the political elites of the host states. Local people are excluded, alienated from their lands and rights removed and force used to ensure it stays that way. As resource scarcity gathers pace, including food and water supplies, this neocolonial pattern is set to spread ever further and its pathology is ultimately unlikely to deviate fundamentally from the template of exploitation set by Leopold and his contemporaries.

The phrase "those who do not learn from history are destined to relive it" may be well overused, but is often true nevertheless. First of all, however, history has to be written and set straight. In this remarkable dissection of privatised imperialism, Adam Hochschild does a great service not only to the past and the millions slaughtered in the forgotten holocaust in Leopold's sadistic state; he reminds us too that no imperialism, of whatever type or origin, is ever benign.

Taking Libertarians - America's Other Choices

As the US Presidential election draws ever closer, while Hillary Clinton remains favourite to win, neither she nor her rival Donald Trump draw much enthusiasm from anyone outside the minorities that form their base. Clinton is even more distrusted than at any time in her career following the FBI's not yet finished investigation into her private email account and her opaque responses to the inevitable questions about her judgement. Meanwhile, Trump's sociopathic-like egotism and rampant racism make him arguably more divisive than any major candidate in the last century, worse even than the Republican extremist Barry Goldwater in 1964 (whom Hillary Clinton enthusiastically campaigned for in her student days).

Little surprise then, though woefully undereported, has been the emergence of a large third party vote. Around one in five of those planning to go to the polls in November are signalling support outside of the traditional Republican-Democrat duopoly. Unlike the quixotic campaigns of Ross Perot in the 1990s, or the fantastic voyage of John Anderson way back in 1980, the notable thing is that the challenge is coming from candidates of well-established and growing political parties fielding candidates at all governmental levels and so suggesting that there may now be a lasting trend towards change.

There is a plethora of third party candidates and independents, but the two that matter are the rightwing Libertarians' Governor Gary Johnson and left's Dr Jill Stein of the Green Party, both of whom are standing for a second time. Their platforms are genuinely insurgent challenges to the Establishment - while there is a significant crossover on issues such as net freedom, soft drugs, immigration and abortion, the two are far apart in areas such as government regulation of the economy, tax policy, health provision, protecting the environment and providing state education. Both stand for campaign finance reform and an avowedly non-interventionist foreign/military policy.

The media has only reluctantly started to recognise the rise of Johnson and Stein - the former New Mexico Governor is frequently polling in double digits nationwide, while the Green has topped 6% of the national vote in some polls and is set to win many times her 0.4% 2012 score. Organisationally both parties are better placed and funded than before, with Johnson on the ballot in every state and electors able to vote for Stein everywhere bar four states that have managed to bar the Greens from running (The US is far more adept at limiting choice than even Putin's Russia).

Stein has grabbed some headlines this week after an arrest warrant was issued for her and her running mate, Amaju Baraka, after they were filmed spray-painting mechanical diggers at the site of a planned oil pipeline project across sacred land in the Standing Rock Sioux tribal reservation. The Green Party campaign has built on the Sanders' campaign success within the Democrat primaries, arguing that with the demise of the democratic socialist Senator's challenge to Clinton, the real option for a genuine revolution in US politics is to be found on the left, in the Stein-Baraka fold rather than the ruthlessly establishmentarian Democratic Party.

Indeed, Baraka has suggested that, unlike Sanders, when the Greens talk about revolutionary change, they mean it. Like most European Greens, they have a strongly progressive programme for social justice alongside and intertwined with environmental sustainability, and have formally adopted ecosocialism as their philosophical basis.

More prosaically, Libertarian Johnson has gained unwelcome attention after fumbling over a question in an MSNBC interview about the siege of the Syrian city of Aleppo.

"What's Aleppo?" he asked in response the the question, "What would you do about Aleppo?"
This has been used to suggest he is an isolationist, ignorant of the wider world and so unqualified to be President. Yet, if you watch the whole discussion, Johnson quickly realised what the question was about and gave a perfectly articulate, well-informed response about a diplomatic solution working with Russia, ending support for the FSA and avoiding interventionist wars in the future.

Johnson later said that when the question was asked he was thinking of an acronym rather than the name Aleppo. A big crime to get confused? Not when his Republican opponent avowedly wants to bomb the Middle East to oblivion, while the Democrat one already is.

It is highly unlikely either Johnson nor Stein will meet the 15% score required to win a place in the TV debates with Trump and Clinton - if either or both took part, it would undoubtedly shift both the quality and tenor of the argument immensely and be a huge step in busting the race open. Yet in any case, the third parties' rise at a time when the traditional parties are collapsing on themselves is a welcome reminder that, even in a large, neoliberal superpower, with all the forces of Big Money and Big Brother ranged against true democracy, no Establishment is forever.