London Socialist Historians Group
Press release February 28th
Contact Keith Flett 07803 167266
Conference Saturday 27th February
HISTORY CONFERENCE ON PARLIAMENTARY DEMOCRACY REVEALS EVEN 1917 SOVIETS USED PR (Proportional Representation)
With a General Election just months off a packed audience of socialist historians met on Saturday at the Institute of Historical Research in central London to review the history of the labour movement’s engagement with Parliamentary Democracy and wider issues of political democracy and corruption highlighted by the recent Parliamentary expenses scandal.
The London Socialist Historians Group which organised the event said that the conference brought together some of the leading authorities in the field of British political history to review the history of the demand for democratic representation from the Chartists fight against Old Corruption in the 1830s to the present day
Conference organiser Dr Keith Flett said ‘there were some really excellent papers and some rigorous discussion on issues from the EU and democracy to how far New Corruption has replaced the Old Corruption of the 1830s. Above all there was a sense of the rich heritage of the engagement of socialists with democracy all the way from Labour MPs to Soviets, which, it was revealed, were elected in 1917 by proportional representation'.
Sunday, 28 February 2010
RHS Bibliography
Access arrangements for this Bibliography unfortunately changed on January 1st 2010 and it is now a paid for resource whereas previously it was free. A number of historians are looking to see what might usefully be done about the situation. If it is has impacted on your research and you would like to get involved please e-mail us at the address on the blog
here
here
Saturday, 27 February 2010
Society for the Study of Labour History 50th Conference
Society for the Study of Labour History, 1960–2010
50th Anniversary Conference
Fifty Years of Labour History:
Past Achievements, Future Prospects
Saturday, 15 May 2010
People’s History Museum, Spinningfields, Manchester
Programme
10.00–10.30 Registration and Coffee
10.30am Welcome: Dr Alan Campbell, Chair, SSLH
Dr Nick Mansfield, Director, People’s History Museum
10.45am
Celebrating Fifty Years of Labour History
Why We’re Here: The SSLH Over 50 Years Professor John McIlroy (Middlesex University)
Labour History and ‘History Proper’: Professor John Belchem (University of Liverpool)
British Labour History and the Wider World: Professor Neville Kirk (Manchester Metropolitan)
12.15pm
Labour Archives: Past, Present, Future
Janette Martin (University of Leeds)
Stefan Dickers (Bishopsgate Institute, London)
12.45pm Lunch (Participants make their own arrangements)
2.00pm Future Agendas
(1): National Labour Histories
Scotland - Dr Bill Knox (University of St Andrews)
Wales - Dr Neil Evans (University of Cardiff)
Ireland - Dr Emmet O’Connor (University of Ulster)
3.00 Coffee
3.15 Future Agendas
(2): Approaches to Class, Gender and Ethnicity
Panel discussion:
Dr Selina Todd (University of Manchester)
Dr Hester Barron (University of Sussex)
Professor Don MacRaild (Northumbria University)
4.15 Summing up and closing remarks:
Professor Keith Laybourn (University of Huddersfield)
Admission:
£5.00; free to students/unwaged.
Places are limited.
Advance registration by 1 May is strongly recommended to guarantee a place: contact Dr Charlotte Alston, SSLH Conference Secretary, Dept of Humanities, University of Northumbria, NE1 8ST;
cheques made payable to Society for the Study of Labour History.
50th Anniversary Conference
Fifty Years of Labour History:
Past Achievements, Future Prospects
Saturday, 15 May 2010
People’s History Museum, Spinningfields, Manchester
Programme
10.00–10.30 Registration and Coffee
10.30am Welcome: Dr Alan Campbell, Chair, SSLH
Dr Nick Mansfield, Director, People’s History Museum
10.45am
Celebrating Fifty Years of Labour History
Why We’re Here: The SSLH Over 50 Years Professor John McIlroy (Middlesex University)
Labour History and ‘History Proper’: Professor John Belchem (University of Liverpool)
British Labour History and the Wider World: Professor Neville Kirk (Manchester Metropolitan)
12.15pm
Labour Archives: Past, Present, Future
Janette Martin (University of Leeds)
Stefan Dickers (Bishopsgate Institute, London)
12.45pm Lunch (Participants make their own arrangements)
2.00pm Future Agendas
(1): National Labour Histories
Scotland - Dr Bill Knox (University of St Andrews)
Wales - Dr Neil Evans (University of Cardiff)
Ireland - Dr Emmet O’Connor (University of Ulster)
3.00 Coffee
3.15 Future Agendas
(2): Approaches to Class, Gender and Ethnicity
Panel discussion:
Dr Selina Todd (University of Manchester)
Dr Hester Barron (University of Sussex)
Professor Don MacRaild (Northumbria University)
4.15 Summing up and closing remarks:
Professor Keith Laybourn (University of Huddersfield)
Admission:
£5.00; free to students/unwaged.
Places are limited.
Advance registration by 1 May is strongly recommended to guarantee a place: contact Dr Charlotte Alston, SSLH Conference Secretary, Dept of Humanities, University of Northumbria, NE1 8ST;
cheques made payable to Society for the Study of Labour History.
Tuesday, 23 February 2010
The Vote What Went Wrong: Paper Abstracts
The Vote What Went Wrong: Summaries of Conference papers
Logie Barrow 'ENFRANCHISEMENT AND STUPEFACTION: vaccination and the vote'
This talk will NOT add directly to the researches of Ian Bullock and Logie Barrow for their recently paperbacked but 1996 "Democratic ideas and the British Labour movement 1880-1914". Rather, it will look at the effects of ascribing to ourselves and each other an in/ability to think. Preferring one Greek loan-word to ten short Anglo-Saxons, I have for four decades been dubbing this ascription "epistemology", but alternative suggestions remain as welcome as ever. Around the 19th century, the key areas of epistemological confrontation were education (see, centrally, the books of Brian Simon) and medicine. Within the latter, contempt between elitists and democrats was often mutual. One democratic example would be mid-century medical botanists: overwhelmingly plebeian, disproportionately Northern English and virulent about orthodox medics, seen as glorying in letters after their names and in Graeco-Latinate jargon. (Not that all the medically heterodox were democrats: some homoeopaths, for example, were as elitist as any of the orthodox).
The key medical struggle was over compulsory smallpox-vaccination. During 1866-7, parliamentarians agonised over which narrow band of working men might be trusted to use "intelligently" a right to apply for a place on the list of electors (which was all that "the franchise" meant until 1918). But, in debates characterised by contemptuously low attendance, the same parliament sharpened vaccinal compulsion into a boomerang which was to be sped by further enfranchisements (1884, 1918 and 1928). Radical and some other historians enjoy the years 1910-14 as exhibiting a loss of ruling-class control in the criss-crossing areas of Ireland, gender and the shop floor. For almost anyone who recognised vaccination as the sole hope against smallpox, the plunging of vaccinal uptake towards 50% during those very years was a no less grave symptom. Among vaccinists themselves, this too triggered symptoms, as with their obsessive fulminations at the populace, seen as bringing down on its stupid heads a pandemic sufficiently shattering to teach it to obey its medical betters. A more "Darwinian" scenario, occasionally even articulated, had the anti-vaccinal masses smallpoxing each other into evolutionary extinction, leaving the medically obedient to inherit the earth. In the event, interwar Britain was indeed to be non-Soviet Europe's smallpox slum. But, by viral good luck (or whatever), most infections were of a relatively mild variety. Uptake of smallpox-vaccination remained below, often well below, 50% until one of the briefest clauses in the massive National Health Act of 1947 buried the old boomerang of compulsion formally. We can also view Prof Sir Almroth Wright as providing vaccinists with welcome solace: not, of course, from his being a "passionate Ulsterman" and gynaecologically gesticulating opponent of women's suffrage, but because he trumpeted that vaccinal and similar interventions would soon replace much of medicine and surgery. By 1914, many other medical researchers were beginning to distance themselves, but his trumpetings had somewhat consoled many vaccinists for political defeat.
How, then, could so many circum-2000 politicians suffer nightmares at an uptake of MMR vaccination which their post-1880s predecessors would have seen as utopian? Blair's Tory public-schoolboy character is irrelevant. Rather, from Thatcher to Blair-Brown, the Right has reverted to the 1930s by embracing the "free economy in a strong state", with the latter directed less inhibitedly than before against victims, not perpetrators. From the 1930s, much of the Left had renewed the Bellamyite-Fabian reliance on a Great State. This might be either an enhancement of the existing one, or Soviet or some hybrid; but it would always have a great role for "experts". Consistently or not, much of the Left had also fallen for demagogic versions of democratic epistemology: Lysenkoite ("peasant scientists", pictured as enhancing Soviet agriculture against sabotage from vile, bourgeois geneticists) or, later, Maoist (great leaps forward, followed by even greater proletarian cultural revolutions, etc). Leninism had, of course, been pressed into service on both sides: by elitists and demagogues. From the 1930s to the '60s, many Labour people had also swallowed I.Q.-testing as scientific and meritocratic, overlooking or forgiving its origins in eugenic neuroses about the stupid masses outbreeding the intelligent classes.
Employee, patient, hunter-gatherer and peasant versions of knowledge must constantly battle for the right to redefine themselves and against being defined from above out of existence. Elitist versions tend toward the eugenic. However, this tendency can become no more than latent within some strategic situations. Thus 2nd World War-time radicalisation plus revulsion at Nazi death-camps helped de-legitimise eugenics for a long time. Awareness of these factors was probably one reason why the 1940s Royal Commission on Population turned into the lengthiest and most voluminous waffle-shop since ... its Vaccinal predecessor of 1889-96.
Ian Bullock - 'Gulfs, fissures and cracks. Democracy and the British Left in the early 20th Century'
Nothing more divided the early C20 Left than democracy; its meaning, its importance, and the means of achieving it. Full universal suffrage and abolition of the House of Lords were common goals for most of the Left, but otherwise there was little or no agreement. In 1906 when the Fabians identified ‘a gulf which unfortunately cuts the Labour movement down the middle,’ the gulf lay between those like the Fabians or the ILP leadership who - with the important exceptions already mentioned - more or less accepted the confines of the existing “British Constitution” and those – like the SDF and supporters of the campaigning Clarion paper - who believed a much greater degree of accountability of the elected and direct involvement of citizens via the referendum and initiative was necessary to secure ‘Real Democracy’
Even among those suspicious of the latter, there were smaller, but significant ‘cracks’ between constitutional conservatives like Ramsay MacDonald and those like the MP Fred Jowett who – in Robert Blatchford’s words in the Clarion – thought parliament needed 'to be taken to pieces and rebuilt on wholly different lines.'
From 1910, with the influence of syndicalism a new fissure opened between those for whom ‘real democracy’ was workplace-based and those who remained committed to “citizens’” rather than “workers’” democracy. The influence of the former was hugely extended by the appeal of the soviet democracy of the Russian revolution. Could both be combined? By 1920 the idea that there needed to be some sort of ‘industrial’ representation of workers – in addition to representation qua citizens - informed not only guild socialism but even the normally constitutionally conservative Webbs and MacDonald.
Meanwhile as another huge gulf opened between those who saw the Bolsheviks as intent on establishing a “higher” form of democracy and those who detected another species of tyranny, fissures and cracks opened among the advocates of ‘soviet democracy’. The ‘Left Communism” of Sylvia Pankhurst and her group clashed with the ‘orthodox’ variety Some of the self-proclaimed “British Bolsheviks” of the Socialist Labour Party left to join the CP but the remainder clung to their De Leonism and denounced the idea of proletarian dictatorship as “nonsensical” in the context of Britain.
The interwar ILP at took on guild socialism in the1920s and “workers’ councils” for some time in the ‘30s, while a conception of parliamentary democracy very different from that of the Labour Right - one that owed much to Jowett – underlay the rift that led to its disaffiliation from Labour in 1932.
There was little agreement about democracy on the British Left in the early decades of the last century – but no shortage of ideas and debate. Yet the post 1917 ‘gulf’ was much wider than the one identified by the Fabians in 1906 – at least there were some issues then which those on both sides thought worth campaigning for. How did this affect the slow progress of democracy in 20th century Britain?
Owen Ashton 'W. E. Adams, Chartism and Republicanism'
A printer by trade and one of Chartism's key lieutenants, W.E. Adams (1832-1906) became well known in radical circles on both sides of the Atlantic as the editor -in -chief of Joseph Cowen's Newcastle Weekly Chronicle. Inspired by the writings of Thomas Paine and the Italian revolutionary, Guiseppi Mazzini, Adams made a signicant contribution to the tradition of English dissent and to the indigenous Republican movement of the late nineteeth century.The talk explores the range of Adams' republican values and activities, and suggests how the republican narrative which he and others upheld are still relevant to contemporary British politics.
Owen R. Ashton
Prof Emeritus, Staffordshire University,
Stoke on Trent
Neil Davidson 'Social Neoliberalism, “Regimes of Consolidation” and the Assault on Representative Democracy, 1989-2008'
Neoliberals claim that the establishment of free market policies will automatically produce comparably beneficial effects in other areas of social life. Not only are these claims false, neoliberalism also exacerbates all the inherent evils which capitalism involves in all its incarnations. Consequently, so long as citizens are able to vote, and as long as they have political parties prepared to represent their interests, however inadequately, for which to vote, there is always the possibility that the neoliberal order might be undermined. Neoclassical solutions to this dilemma were twofold. The first was to ensure that only sympathetic politicians are in control of the state, if necessary by non-democratic means. The Chilean option is not however the preferred one, mainly because of the many inconveniences which military and still more fascist dictatorships tend to involve for bourgeoisies themselves. The recognition that formal democracy was desirable, but that substantive democracy was problematic, suggested a second solution, that economic activity should be removed as far as possible from the responsibility of politicians who might be expected to deploy it for electoral purposes. One of the key successes that neoliberalism has achieved for capital has therefore been to render inconceivable alternatives to the economic policies established by the initial regimes of reorientation–or at any rate, alternatives to their left. Debates now have the quality of a shadow play, an empty ritual in which trivial or superficial differences are emphasised in order to give an impression of real alternatives and justify the continuation of party competition. The increasing irrelevance of politics has given rise to several clear trends across the West, including increasing voter volatility and decreasing partisanship, indicating that many of those electors still involved casting their vote do so–appropriately enough–on a consumer model of political choice, where participation is informed by media-driven perceptions of which result will be to their immediate personal benefit. Unsurprisingly, the numbers prepared to carry out even this minimal level of activity are declining. Central to this shift were the “regimes of consolidation”, formally characterised by social or liberal democratic rhetoric, which were able to incorporate the rhetoric of social solidarity while maintaining and even extending the essential components of neoliberalism. This apparent supplementing of the naked laws of the market was originally marketed as a “third way” between traditional social democracy and neoliberalism, but is more accurately described as “social neo-liberalism”, since it involves not a synthesis of the two, but an adaptation of the former to the latter. Their capitulation represented the final stage in the normalisation of neoliberalism: the point at which it became accepted, not as a temporary aberration associated with the programme of a particular political party, but the framework within which politics would henceforth be conducted. It remains to be seen whether it can survive the renewed onset of economic crisis. (470 words)
Keith Flett 'The Electoral Impulse'
If I was to situate my politics in respect of electoralism in the context of the history of the British left I would have to describe myself as an anti-Parliamentary socialist. Someone whose attitude to the Labour Party was strongly conditioned by Ralph Miliband’s Parliamentary Socialism [1960] but someone who also who while not an anarchist would not see Parliamentary activity as in anyway the key to changing society. In that sense I would view participation in electoral politics as a tactical issue not one of principle, although once the decision is made to participate to be taken very seriously indeed.
However as an historian,particularly one of Chartism, I know how much effort was invested by the working class movement in winning the vote.
That would probably make me more SDF than ILP and perhaps even early Socialist League.
The impulse to electoralism has been a strong one on the British left, even if there have been other impulses,perhaps most importantly syndicalism.
It is difficult to make sense of Peterloo, William Cobbett or the near revolutionary furore around the 1832 Reform Act without understanding the focus on Parliament that radicals had.
It may have been the legacy of 1649 and the brief Commonwealth period that made radicals feel that it was worth fighting for Parliamentary representation, but the more immediate inspiration had come from the French Revolution and the foundation of the London Corresponding Society.
Ralph Miliband laid out 50 years ago in Parliamentary Socialism the attachment of the British Labour Party to the former rather than the latter word of his book’s title but Hardie or MacDonald or Henderson did not invent the electoral impulse.
Join me in my search for the origins of that impulse and see on 27th Feb what I discovered.
Mike Haynes: 'Crime & Corruption'
Crime and corruption at the top is a constant in class society. Under capitalism it has assumed new forms which have too often been seen as marginal to the system or treated as a source of political criticism of the hypocrisy at the top rather than a major consequence of the way capitalism is organised and significant in their own right. However, the level of top level crime and corruption has varied. As capitalism developed there was an attack on and an undermining of the legitimacy of forms of ‘old corruption’ linked i n part to democratisation. In more recent decades structural changes have allowed the level of crime and corruption at the top to grow again and to a degree to be legitimised, creating elements of a ‘new corruption.’ The existing forms of democratic control of those at the top have proved inadequate and to an extent been further undermined by this ‘new corruption.’
Logie Barrow 'ENFRANCHISEMENT AND STUPEFACTION: vaccination and the vote'
This talk will NOT add directly to the researches of Ian Bullock and Logie Barrow for their recently paperbacked but 1996 "Democratic ideas and the British Labour movement 1880-1914". Rather, it will look at the effects of ascribing to ourselves and each other an in/ability to think. Preferring one Greek loan-word to ten short Anglo-Saxons, I have for four decades been dubbing this ascription "epistemology", but alternative suggestions remain as welcome as ever. Around the 19th century, the key areas of epistemological confrontation were education (see, centrally, the books of Brian Simon) and medicine. Within the latter, contempt between elitists and democrats was often mutual. One democratic example would be mid-century medical botanists: overwhelmingly plebeian, disproportionately Northern English and virulent about orthodox medics, seen as glorying in letters after their names and in Graeco-Latinate jargon. (Not that all the medically heterodox were democrats: some homoeopaths, for example, were as elitist as any of the orthodox).
The key medical struggle was over compulsory smallpox-vaccination. During 1866-7, parliamentarians agonised over which narrow band of working men might be trusted to use "intelligently" a right to apply for a place on the list of electors (which was all that "the franchise" meant until 1918). But, in debates characterised by contemptuously low attendance, the same parliament sharpened vaccinal compulsion into a boomerang which was to be sped by further enfranchisements (1884, 1918 and 1928). Radical and some other historians enjoy the years 1910-14 as exhibiting a loss of ruling-class control in the criss-crossing areas of Ireland, gender and the shop floor. For almost anyone who recognised vaccination as the sole hope against smallpox, the plunging of vaccinal uptake towards 50% during those very years was a no less grave symptom. Among vaccinists themselves, this too triggered symptoms, as with their obsessive fulminations at the populace, seen as bringing down on its stupid heads a pandemic sufficiently shattering to teach it to obey its medical betters. A more "Darwinian" scenario, occasionally even articulated, had the anti-vaccinal masses smallpoxing each other into evolutionary extinction, leaving the medically obedient to inherit the earth. In the event, interwar Britain was indeed to be non-Soviet Europe's smallpox slum. But, by viral good luck (or whatever), most infections were of a relatively mild variety. Uptake of smallpox-vaccination remained below, often well below, 50% until one of the briefest clauses in the massive National Health Act of 1947 buried the old boomerang of compulsion formally. We can also view Prof Sir Almroth Wright as providing vaccinists with welcome solace: not, of course, from his being a "passionate Ulsterman" and gynaecologically gesticulating opponent of women's suffrage, but because he trumpeted that vaccinal and similar interventions would soon replace much of medicine and surgery. By 1914, many other medical researchers were beginning to distance themselves, but his trumpetings had somewhat consoled many vaccinists for political defeat.
How, then, could so many circum-2000 politicians suffer nightmares at an uptake of MMR vaccination which their post-1880s predecessors would have seen as utopian? Blair's Tory public-schoolboy character is irrelevant. Rather, from Thatcher to Blair-Brown, the Right has reverted to the 1930s by embracing the "free economy in a strong state", with the latter directed less inhibitedly than before against victims, not perpetrators. From the 1930s, much of the Left had renewed the Bellamyite-Fabian reliance on a Great State. This might be either an enhancement of the existing one, or Soviet or some hybrid; but it would always have a great role for "experts". Consistently or not, much of the Left had also fallen for demagogic versions of democratic epistemology: Lysenkoite ("peasant scientists", pictured as enhancing Soviet agriculture against sabotage from vile, bourgeois geneticists) or, later, Maoist (great leaps forward, followed by even greater proletarian cultural revolutions, etc). Leninism had, of course, been pressed into service on both sides: by elitists and demagogues. From the 1930s to the '60s, many Labour people had also swallowed I.Q.-testing as scientific and meritocratic, overlooking or forgiving its origins in eugenic neuroses about the stupid masses outbreeding the intelligent classes.
Employee, patient, hunter-gatherer and peasant versions of knowledge must constantly battle for the right to redefine themselves and against being defined from above out of existence. Elitist versions tend toward the eugenic. However, this tendency can become no more than latent within some strategic situations. Thus 2nd World War-time radicalisation plus revulsion at Nazi death-camps helped de-legitimise eugenics for a long time. Awareness of these factors was probably one reason why the 1940s Royal Commission on Population turned into the lengthiest and most voluminous waffle-shop since ... its Vaccinal predecessor of 1889-96.
Ian Bullock - 'Gulfs, fissures and cracks. Democracy and the British Left in the early 20th Century'
Nothing more divided the early C20 Left than democracy; its meaning, its importance, and the means of achieving it. Full universal suffrage and abolition of the House of Lords were common goals for most of the Left, but otherwise there was little or no agreement. In 1906 when the Fabians identified ‘a gulf which unfortunately cuts the Labour movement down the middle,’ the gulf lay between those like the Fabians or the ILP leadership who - with the important exceptions already mentioned - more or less accepted the confines of the existing “British Constitution” and those – like the SDF and supporters of the campaigning Clarion paper - who believed a much greater degree of accountability of the elected and direct involvement of citizens via the referendum and initiative was necessary to secure ‘Real Democracy’
Even among those suspicious of the latter, there were smaller, but significant ‘cracks’ between constitutional conservatives like Ramsay MacDonald and those like the MP Fred Jowett who – in Robert Blatchford’s words in the Clarion – thought parliament needed 'to be taken to pieces and rebuilt on wholly different lines.'
From 1910, with the influence of syndicalism a new fissure opened between those for whom ‘real democracy’ was workplace-based and those who remained committed to “citizens’” rather than “workers’” democracy. The influence of the former was hugely extended by the appeal of the soviet democracy of the Russian revolution. Could both be combined? By 1920 the idea that there needed to be some sort of ‘industrial’ representation of workers – in addition to representation qua citizens - informed not only guild socialism but even the normally constitutionally conservative Webbs and MacDonald.
Meanwhile as another huge gulf opened between those who saw the Bolsheviks as intent on establishing a “higher” form of democracy and those who detected another species of tyranny, fissures and cracks opened among the advocates of ‘soviet democracy’. The ‘Left Communism” of Sylvia Pankhurst and her group clashed with the ‘orthodox’ variety Some of the self-proclaimed “British Bolsheviks” of the Socialist Labour Party left to join the CP but the remainder clung to their De Leonism and denounced the idea of proletarian dictatorship as “nonsensical” in the context of Britain.
The interwar ILP at took on guild socialism in the1920s and “workers’ councils” for some time in the ‘30s, while a conception of parliamentary democracy very different from that of the Labour Right - one that owed much to Jowett – underlay the rift that led to its disaffiliation from Labour in 1932.
There was little agreement about democracy on the British Left in the early decades of the last century – but no shortage of ideas and debate. Yet the post 1917 ‘gulf’ was much wider than the one identified by the Fabians in 1906 – at least there were some issues then which those on both sides thought worth campaigning for. How did this affect the slow progress of democracy in 20th century Britain?
Owen Ashton 'W. E. Adams, Chartism and Republicanism'
A printer by trade and one of Chartism's key lieutenants, W.E. Adams (1832-1906) became well known in radical circles on both sides of the Atlantic as the editor -in -chief of Joseph Cowen's Newcastle Weekly Chronicle. Inspired by the writings of Thomas Paine and the Italian revolutionary, Guiseppi Mazzini, Adams made a signicant contribution to the tradition of English dissent and to the indigenous Republican movement of the late nineteeth century.The talk explores the range of Adams' republican values and activities, and suggests how the republican narrative which he and others upheld are still relevant to contemporary British politics.
Owen R. Ashton
Prof Emeritus, Staffordshire University,
Stoke on Trent
Neil Davidson 'Social Neoliberalism, “Regimes of Consolidation” and the Assault on Representative Democracy, 1989-2008'
Neoliberals claim that the establishment of free market policies will automatically produce comparably beneficial effects in other areas of social life. Not only are these claims false, neoliberalism also exacerbates all the inherent evils which capitalism involves in all its incarnations. Consequently, so long as citizens are able to vote, and as long as they have political parties prepared to represent their interests, however inadequately, for which to vote, there is always the possibility that the neoliberal order might be undermined. Neoclassical solutions to this dilemma were twofold. The first was to ensure that only sympathetic politicians are in control of the state, if necessary by non-democratic means. The Chilean option is not however the preferred one, mainly because of the many inconveniences which military and still more fascist dictatorships tend to involve for bourgeoisies themselves. The recognition that formal democracy was desirable, but that substantive democracy was problematic, suggested a second solution, that economic activity should be removed as far as possible from the responsibility of politicians who might be expected to deploy it for electoral purposes. One of the key successes that neoliberalism has achieved for capital has therefore been to render inconceivable alternatives to the economic policies established by the initial regimes of reorientation–or at any rate, alternatives to their left. Debates now have the quality of a shadow play, an empty ritual in which trivial or superficial differences are emphasised in order to give an impression of real alternatives and justify the continuation of party competition. The increasing irrelevance of politics has given rise to several clear trends across the West, including increasing voter volatility and decreasing partisanship, indicating that many of those electors still involved casting their vote do so–appropriately enough–on a consumer model of political choice, where participation is informed by media-driven perceptions of which result will be to their immediate personal benefit. Unsurprisingly, the numbers prepared to carry out even this minimal level of activity are declining. Central to this shift were the “regimes of consolidation”, formally characterised by social or liberal democratic rhetoric, which were able to incorporate the rhetoric of social solidarity while maintaining and even extending the essential components of neoliberalism. This apparent supplementing of the naked laws of the market was originally marketed as a “third way” between traditional social democracy and neoliberalism, but is more accurately described as “social neo-liberalism”, since it involves not a synthesis of the two, but an adaptation of the former to the latter. Their capitulation represented the final stage in the normalisation of neoliberalism: the point at which it became accepted, not as a temporary aberration associated with the programme of a particular political party, but the framework within which politics would henceforth be conducted. It remains to be seen whether it can survive the renewed onset of economic crisis. (470 words)
Keith Flett 'The Electoral Impulse'
If I was to situate my politics in respect of electoralism in the context of the history of the British left I would have to describe myself as an anti-Parliamentary socialist. Someone whose attitude to the Labour Party was strongly conditioned by Ralph Miliband’s Parliamentary Socialism [1960] but someone who also who while not an anarchist would not see Parliamentary activity as in anyway the key to changing society. In that sense I would view participation in electoral politics as a tactical issue not one of principle, although once the decision is made to participate to be taken very seriously indeed.
However as an historian,particularly one of Chartism, I know how much effort was invested by the working class movement in winning the vote.
That would probably make me more SDF than ILP and perhaps even early Socialist League.
The impulse to electoralism has been a strong one on the British left, even if there have been other impulses,perhaps most importantly syndicalism.
It is difficult to make sense of Peterloo, William Cobbett or the near revolutionary furore around the 1832 Reform Act without understanding the focus on Parliament that radicals had.
It may have been the legacy of 1649 and the brief Commonwealth period that made radicals feel that it was worth fighting for Parliamentary representation, but the more immediate inspiration had come from the French Revolution and the foundation of the London Corresponding Society.
Ralph Miliband laid out 50 years ago in Parliamentary Socialism the attachment of the British Labour Party to the former rather than the latter word of his book’s title but Hardie or MacDonald or Henderson did not invent the electoral impulse.
Join me in my search for the origins of that impulse and see on 27th Feb what I discovered.
Mike Haynes: 'Crime & Corruption'
Crime and corruption at the top is a constant in class society. Under capitalism it has assumed new forms which have too often been seen as marginal to the system or treated as a source of political criticism of the hypocrisy at the top rather than a major consequence of the way capitalism is organised and significant in their own right. However, the level of top level crime and corruption has varied. As capitalism developed there was an attack on and an undermining of the legitimacy of forms of ‘old corruption’ linked i n part to democratisation. In more recent decades structural changes have allowed the level of crime and corruption at the top to grow again and to a degree to be legitimised, creating elements of a ‘new corruption.’ The existing forms of democratic control of those at the top have proved inadequate and to an extent been further undermined by this ‘new corruption.’
Sunday, 14 February 2010
LSHG Conference: The Vote: What Went Wrong?
LONDON SOCIALIST HISTORIAN'S GROUP CONFERENCE
The Vote: What Went Wrong?
Saturday 27th February
Wolfson Room,
First Floor,
Institute of Historical Research,
Senate House,
Malet St
London WC1
The recent scandal over MPs’ expenses has raised major questions about parliamentary democracy and its relationship to the labour movement and the left.
Historically the left has fought for democracy and the vote, from the Chartists to the Suffragettes to those who campaigned against the disenfranchisement of black voters in the US and Catholics in the North of Ireland in the 1960s.
There has been, for at least a half-century in the UK, a link between social democracy and corruption, but the same has applied elsewhere, for example in Italy. Has the attempt to democratise parliamentary institutions led simply to a replication of the Old Corrupt practices of the past?
Finally, the conference will examine alternative strategies for democracy on the left, not least the soviets and workers’ councils that have appeared at moments in the last 140 years or so, from the Paris Commune onwards.
The conference will take place in the Wolfson Room on the first floor. Presentations will last for 30 minutes followed by discussion and response. The timetable is as follows:
Conference Programme
9.30am Opening remarks and LSHG matters
9.45-11.30
Logie Barrow, 'Enfranchisement and Stupefaction: vaccination and the vote'
Keith Flett, 'The origins of the electoral impulse in the British working class'
11.30-11.45 Break
12.00-13.45
Owen Ashton, 'W E Adams, Chartism and Republicanism'
Ian Bullock, 'Gulfs, fissures and cracks. Democracy and the British Left in the early 20th Century'
13.45-14.15 Lunch
14.15-15.45
Neil Davidson, 'Social Neoliberalism, “Regimes of Consolidation” and the Assault on Representative Democracy, 1989-2008'
Mike Haynes, 'Capitalism, crime and corruption – from the ‘old’ to the ‘new’ corruption?'
15.50-16.20 Closing Plenary
ADVANCE REGISTRATION IS ENCOURAGED
Send cash or cheque [made payable to Keith Flett] for £10 [£5 concessions] to
LSHG, 38 Mitchley Rd, London N17 9HG Email: keith1917@btinternet.com
The Vote: What Went Wrong?
Saturday 27th February
Wolfson Room,
First Floor,
Institute of Historical Research,
Senate House,
Malet St
London WC1
The recent scandal over MPs’ expenses has raised major questions about parliamentary democracy and its relationship to the labour movement and the left.
Historically the left has fought for democracy and the vote, from the Chartists to the Suffragettes to those who campaigned against the disenfranchisement of black voters in the US and Catholics in the North of Ireland in the 1960s.
There has been, for at least a half-century in the UK, a link between social democracy and corruption, but the same has applied elsewhere, for example in Italy. Has the attempt to democratise parliamentary institutions led simply to a replication of the Old Corrupt practices of the past?
Finally, the conference will examine alternative strategies for democracy on the left, not least the soviets and workers’ councils that have appeared at moments in the last 140 years or so, from the Paris Commune onwards.
The conference will take place in the Wolfson Room on the first floor. Presentations will last for 30 minutes followed by discussion and response. The timetable is as follows:
Conference Programme
9.30am Opening remarks and LSHG matters
9.45-11.30
Logie Barrow, 'Enfranchisement and Stupefaction: vaccination and the vote'
Keith Flett, 'The origins of the electoral impulse in the British working class'
11.30-11.45 Break
12.00-13.45
Owen Ashton, 'W E Adams, Chartism and Republicanism'
Ian Bullock, 'Gulfs, fissures and cracks. Democracy and the British Left in the early 20th Century'
13.45-14.15 Lunch
14.15-15.45
Neil Davidson, 'Social Neoliberalism, “Regimes of Consolidation” and the Assault on Representative Democracy, 1989-2008'
Mike Haynes, 'Capitalism, crime and corruption – from the ‘old’ to the ‘new’ corruption?'
15.50-16.20 Closing Plenary
ADVANCE REGISTRATION IS ENCOURAGED
Send cash or cheque [made payable to Keith Flett] for £10 [£5 concessions] to
LSHG, 38 Mitchley Rd, London N17 9HG Email: keith1917@btinternet.com
Sunday, 7 February 2010
What went wrong with Parliamentary democracy?
London Socialist Historians Group
Press release 7th February
Contact Keith Flett 07803 167266
AFTER MPs EXPENSES SCANDAL HISTORIANS TO DISCUSS WHAT WENT WRONG WITH PARLIAMENTARY DEMOCRACY
The London Socialist Historians Group, organisers of the socialist history seminar at the Institute of Historical Research in central London, is to look at the historical antecedents of the current Parliamentary expenses scandal and ask what went wrong with the system of Parliamentary democracy that millions of working people fought to get representation in.
The conference which will hear from a range of scholars expert in the field of labour and working class history is on Saturday 27th February at the IHR, Malet St London WC1. It is open to all and a small voluntary contribution is asked for to cover costs.
Conference organiser Dr Keith Flett said ‘the Parliamentary system is currently in some disrepute but it is worth recalling that working people fought to get access to it but at the same time some had alternative visions of a democratic society or felt that a Parliamentary route to socialism was always likely to be fraught with difficulty'.
LONDON SOCIALIST HISTORIAN'S GROUP CONFERENCE
The Vote: What Went Wrong?
Saturday 27th February
Wolfson Room,
First Floor,
Institute of Historical Research,
Senate House,
Malet St
London WC1
The recent scandal over MPs’ expenses has raised major questions about parliamentary democracy and its relationship to the labour movement and the left.
Historically the left has fought for democracy and the vote, from the Chartists to the Suffragettes to those who campaigned against the disenfranchisement of black voters in the US and Catholics in the North of Ireland in the 1960s.
There has been, for at least a half-century in the UK, a link between social democracy and corruption, but the same has applied elsewhere, for example in Italy. Has the attempt to democratise parliamentary institutions led simply to a replication of the Old Corrupt practices of the past?
Finally, the conference will examine alternative strategies for democracy on the left, not least the soviets and workers’ councils that have appeared at moments in the last 140 years or so, from the Paris Commune onwards.
The conference will take place in the Wolfson Room on the first floor. Presentations will last for 30 minutes followed by discussion and response. The timetable is as follows:
9.30am Opening remarks and LSHG matters
9.45-11.30
Logie Barrow, 'Enfranchisement and Stupefaction: vaccination and the vote'
Keith Flett, 'The origins of the electoral impulse in the British working class'
11.30-11.45 Break
12.00-13.45
Owen Ashton, 'W E Adams, Chartism and Republicanism'
Ian Bullock, 'Gulfs, fissures and cracks. Democracy and the British Left in the early 20th Century'
13.45-14.15 Lunch
14.15-15.45
Neil Davidson, 'Social Neoliberalism, “Regimes of Consolidation” and the Assault on Representative Democracy, 1989-2008'
Mike Haynes, 'Capitalism, crime and corruption – from the ‘old’ to the ‘new’ corruption?'
15.50-16.20 Closing Plenary
ADVANCE REGISTRATION IS ENCOURAGED
Send cash or cheque [made payable to Keith Flett] for £10 [£5 concessions] to
LSHG, 38 Mitchley Rd, London N17 9HG Email: keith1917@btinternet.com Phone: 07803 167266
Press release 7th February
Contact Keith Flett 07803 167266
AFTER MPs EXPENSES SCANDAL HISTORIANS TO DISCUSS WHAT WENT WRONG WITH PARLIAMENTARY DEMOCRACY
The London Socialist Historians Group, organisers of the socialist history seminar at the Institute of Historical Research in central London, is to look at the historical antecedents of the current Parliamentary expenses scandal and ask what went wrong with the system of Parliamentary democracy that millions of working people fought to get representation in.
The conference which will hear from a range of scholars expert in the field of labour and working class history is on Saturday 27th February at the IHR, Malet St London WC1. It is open to all and a small voluntary contribution is asked for to cover costs.
Conference organiser Dr Keith Flett said ‘the Parliamentary system is currently in some disrepute but it is worth recalling that working people fought to get access to it but at the same time some had alternative visions of a democratic society or felt that a Parliamentary route to socialism was always likely to be fraught with difficulty'.
LONDON SOCIALIST HISTORIAN'S GROUP CONFERENCE
The Vote: What Went Wrong?
Saturday 27th February
Wolfson Room,
First Floor,
Institute of Historical Research,
Senate House,
Malet St
London WC1
The recent scandal over MPs’ expenses has raised major questions about parliamentary democracy and its relationship to the labour movement and the left.
Historically the left has fought for democracy and the vote, from the Chartists to the Suffragettes to those who campaigned against the disenfranchisement of black voters in the US and Catholics in the North of Ireland in the 1960s.
There has been, for at least a half-century in the UK, a link between social democracy and corruption, but the same has applied elsewhere, for example in Italy. Has the attempt to democratise parliamentary institutions led simply to a replication of the Old Corrupt practices of the past?
Finally, the conference will examine alternative strategies for democracy on the left, not least the soviets and workers’ councils that have appeared at moments in the last 140 years or so, from the Paris Commune onwards.
The conference will take place in the Wolfson Room on the first floor. Presentations will last for 30 minutes followed by discussion and response. The timetable is as follows:
9.30am Opening remarks and LSHG matters
9.45-11.30
Logie Barrow, 'Enfranchisement and Stupefaction: vaccination and the vote'
Keith Flett, 'The origins of the electoral impulse in the British working class'
11.30-11.45 Break
12.00-13.45
Owen Ashton, 'W E Adams, Chartism and Republicanism'
Ian Bullock, 'Gulfs, fissures and cracks. Democracy and the British Left in the early 20th Century'
13.45-14.15 Lunch
14.15-15.45
Neil Davidson, 'Social Neoliberalism, “Regimes of Consolidation” and the Assault on Representative Democracy, 1989-2008'
Mike Haynes, 'Capitalism, crime and corruption – from the ‘old’ to the ‘new’ corruption?'
15.50-16.20 Closing Plenary
ADVANCE REGISTRATION IS ENCOURAGED
Send cash or cheque [made payable to Keith Flett] for £10 [£5 concessions] to
LSHG, 38 Mitchley Rd, London N17 9HG Email: keith1917@btinternet.com Phone: 07803 167266
Saturday, 6 February 2010
Conference on the Great Miners Strike
Digging the Seam: the Miners Strike of 1984/5
25th-27th March 2010, University of Leeds.
Registration is now open for this conference, which is aimed at both HE scholars and the public, with keynote speakers representing different approaches to the ‘re-telling’ of the strike:
David Peace (author of GB84)
Julian Petley (Brunel)
Simon Popple (Leeds)
Patrick Russell and Ros Cranston (BFI)
Yvette Vanson (documentary maker) and Michael Mansfield.
Poet Ian McMillan, and the world premiere of Songs at the Year’s End with music by Hugh Nankivell.
Exhibition, performance, screenings, testimony and academic papers. With contributions from: John Hyatt (MMU, the Three Johns); Richard Crangle (Exeter), Rosemary Preece (National Coal Mining Museum for England), Sue Owen (Sheffield), Michael Bailey (Leeds Met), Patricia Holland (Bournemouth); Granville Williams; Dave Rogers (Banner Theatre); Ian Beasley (photographer) and others.
The conference looks at mainstream and alternative representations of the strike at the time, and subsequently, across the broad range of cultural expression such as the press, TV, film, performance, photography and music and song. Plus, 25 years on, how both archive study and new creative work lead us into new insights and perspectives. The conference is organised into four strands – Memory, Legacy, Media and Popular Culture, and Witness – to help compare and contrast the personal and the objective study, the artefact and the heritage industry, cultural memory and the creative.
For more information, and to register: Online registration
Or contact Dr. Eleri Pound at ics-conferences@leeds.ac.uk or on 0113 343 5805.
Organised at the University of Leeds by the Louis Le Prince Centre and the Media Industries Research Centre at the Institute of Communications Studies; with support from the School of Performance and Cultural Industries, the School of Music, Leeds International Film Festival, Opera North, and the DARE partnership.
Accommodation
We have negotiated reduced rates with Weetwood Hall hotel, quote Digging the Seam when you book for the conference rate of £70 bed & breakfast. Other hotel recommendations can be found on this page: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/visitors/where_to_stay.htm
25th-27th March 2010, University of Leeds.
Registration is now open for this conference, which is aimed at both HE scholars and the public, with keynote speakers representing different approaches to the ‘re-telling’ of the strike:
David Peace (author of GB84)
Julian Petley (Brunel)
Simon Popple (Leeds)
Patrick Russell and Ros Cranston (BFI)
Yvette Vanson (documentary maker) and Michael Mansfield.
Poet Ian McMillan, and the world premiere of Songs at the Year’s End with music by Hugh Nankivell.
Exhibition, performance, screenings, testimony and academic papers. With contributions from: John Hyatt (MMU, the Three Johns); Richard Crangle (Exeter), Rosemary Preece (National Coal Mining Museum for England), Sue Owen (Sheffield), Michael Bailey (Leeds Met), Patricia Holland (Bournemouth); Granville Williams; Dave Rogers (Banner Theatre); Ian Beasley (photographer) and others.
The conference looks at mainstream and alternative representations of the strike at the time, and subsequently, across the broad range of cultural expression such as the press, TV, film, performance, photography and music and song. Plus, 25 years on, how both archive study and new creative work lead us into new insights and perspectives. The conference is organised into four strands – Memory, Legacy, Media and Popular Culture, and Witness – to help compare and contrast the personal and the objective study, the artefact and the heritage industry, cultural memory and the creative.
For more information, and to register: Online registration
Or contact Dr. Eleri Pound at ics-conferences@leeds.ac.uk or on 0113 343 5805.
Organised at the University of Leeds by the Louis Le Prince Centre and the Media Industries Research Centre at the Institute of Communications Studies; with support from the School of Performance and Cultural Industries, the School of Music, Leeds International Film Festival, Opera North, and the DARE partnership.
Accommodation
We have negotiated reduced rates with Weetwood Hall hotel, quote Digging the Seam when you book for the conference rate of £70 bed & breakfast. Other hotel recommendations can be found on this page: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/visitors/where_to_stay.htm
Thursday, 4 February 2010
CFP: Social Movements conference
SOCIAL MOVEMENTS CONFERENCE - FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS
abstracts due by Monday 22nd February 2010
From 1995 to 2009, Manchester Metropolitan University hosted a series of very successful annual international conferences on 'ALTERNATIVE FUTURES and POPULAR PROTEST'. We're very happy to announce that the Fifteenth AF&PP Conference will be held, between Monday 29th March and Wednesday 31st March 2010.
The Conference rubric remains as in previous years. The aim is to explore the dynamics of popular movements, along with the ideas which animate their activists and supporters and which contribute to shaping their fate. Reflecting the inherent cross-disciplinary nature of the issues, previous participants (from over 50 countries) have come from such specialisms as sociology, politics, cultural studies, social psychology, economics, history and geography. The Manchester conferences have also been notable for discovering a fruitful and friendly meeting ground between activism and academia.
CALL FOR PAPERS
We invite offers of papers relevant to the conference themes. Papers should address such matters as:
* contemporary and historical social movements and popular protests
* social movement theory
* utopias and experiments
* ideologies of collective action
* etc.
To offer a paper, please contact either of the conference convenors with a brief abstract:
EITHER Colin Barker, Dept. of Sociology
OR Mike Tyldesley, Dept. of Politics and Philosophy
Manchester Metropolitan University
Geoffrey Manton Building, Rosamond Street West
Manchester M15 6LL, England
email: c.barker@mmu.ac.uk
email: m.tyldesley@mmu.ac.uk
(Wherever possible, please use email, especially as Colin Barker is now a retired gent. Surface mail and faxes should only be addressed to Mike Tyldesley)
abstracts due by Monday 22nd February 2010
From 1995 to 2009, Manchester Metropolitan University hosted a series of very successful annual international conferences on 'ALTERNATIVE FUTURES and POPULAR PROTEST'. We're very happy to announce that the Fifteenth AF&PP Conference will be held, between Monday 29th March and Wednesday 31st March 2010.
The Conference rubric remains as in previous years. The aim is to explore the dynamics of popular movements, along with the ideas which animate their activists and supporters and which contribute to shaping their fate. Reflecting the inherent cross-disciplinary nature of the issues, previous participants (from over 50 countries) have come from such specialisms as sociology, politics, cultural studies, social psychology, economics, history and geography. The Manchester conferences have also been notable for discovering a fruitful and friendly meeting ground between activism and academia.
CALL FOR PAPERS
We invite offers of papers relevant to the conference themes. Papers should address such matters as:
* contemporary and historical social movements and popular protests
* social movement theory
* utopias and experiments
* ideologies of collective action
* etc.
To offer a paper, please contact either of the conference convenors with a brief abstract:
EITHER Colin Barker, Dept. of Sociology
OR Mike Tyldesley, Dept. of Politics and Philosophy
Manchester Metropolitan University
Geoffrey Manton Building, Rosamond Street West
Manchester M15 6LL, England
email: c.barker@mmu.ac.uk
email: m.tyldesley@mmu.ac.uk
(Wherever possible, please use email, especially as Colin Barker is now a retired gent. Surface mail and faxes should only be addressed to Mike Tyldesley)
Chartist Conference
Dear colleagues,
As you may already know, the next Chartist conference will take place in Paris at The Sorbonne, on 2-4 July 2010.
http://education.newport.ac.uk/displayPage.aspx?object_id=12971&type=PAG
http://www.paris-sorbonne.fr/fr/spip.php?article11287
At this stage, the programme includes :
- Malcolm Chase (University of Leeds), “What next for Chartist Studies?”
- Greg Varco (Columbia University, New York) : “Outworkers of the citadel of corruption”: The Chartist press reports the Empire
- Eugenio Biagini (Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge) : “Chartism, Reynolds's Newspaper and the enduring relevance of Chartism, 1848-1906”
- Michael Sanders (University of Manchester): Chartist Hymn Books Lost and Found: the case of the “National Chartist Hymn Book”
-Joan Allen (University of Newcastle): “George Julian Harney and the Democratic Review”
- Benoît Agnès (Université Paris1- Panthéon Sorbonne) : « Une singularité chartiste ? Les mobilisations pétitionnaires britanniques et françaises pour la démocratie, 1838-1848. »
On Sunday monring 4th July, French historian of the 1848 revolution Louis Hincker will guide an outdoor tour on the traces of revolutionary Paris.
- Hotels : reduced fares have been negotiated in two hotels located close to the conference centre http://education.newport.ac.uk/displayPage.aspx?object_id=12987&type=PAG
It is recommended to book quite early.
- There are no registration fees. But there is a booking form :
http://education.newport.ac.uk/displayPage.aspx?object_id=12990&type=PAG
Owen Ashton, Joan and Richard Allen, Malcolm Chase and myself look forward to seeing all in Paris,
With best wishes,
Fabrice Bensimon
As you may already know, the next Chartist conference will take place in Paris at The Sorbonne, on 2-4 July 2010.
http://education.newport.ac.uk/displayPage.aspx?object_id=12971&type=PAG
http://www.paris-sorbonne.fr/fr/spip.php?article11287
At this stage, the programme includes :
- Malcolm Chase (University of Leeds), “What next for Chartist Studies?”
- Greg Varco (Columbia University, New York) : “Outworkers of the citadel of corruption”: The Chartist press reports the Empire
- Eugenio Biagini (Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge) : “Chartism, Reynolds's Newspaper and the enduring relevance of Chartism, 1848-1906”
- Michael Sanders (University of Manchester): Chartist Hymn Books Lost and Found: the case of the “National Chartist Hymn Book”
-Joan Allen (University of Newcastle): “George Julian Harney and the Democratic Review”
- Benoît Agnès (Université Paris1- Panthéon Sorbonne) : « Une singularité chartiste ? Les mobilisations pétitionnaires britanniques et françaises pour la démocratie, 1838-1848. »
On Sunday monring 4th July, French historian of the 1848 revolution Louis Hincker will guide an outdoor tour on the traces of revolutionary Paris.
- Hotels : reduced fares have been negotiated in two hotels located close to the conference centre http://education.newport.ac.uk/displayPage.aspx?object_id=12987&type=PAG
It is recommended to book quite early.
- There are no registration fees. But there is a booking form :
http://education.newport.ac.uk/displayPage.aspx?object_id=12990&type=PAG
Owen Ashton, Joan and Richard Allen, Malcolm Chase and myself look forward to seeing all in Paris,
With best wishes,
Fabrice Bensimon
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