The Virtual Stoa

News just in of the death last night of the great American socialist Paul Sweezy, longtime editor of the Monthly Review and author of The Theory of Capitalist Development (1942).

I’ll update this post to include links to online obits, as and when these appear.

UPDATE [1/3/2004]: Marc Mulholland has reproduced Sweezy’s entry from Robert Gorman’s Biographical Dictionary of Marxism.

UPDATE [2/3/2004]: The New York Times obit has appeared.

UPDATE [3/3/2004]: Big piece in yesterday’s Il Manifesto (in Italian, obviously; for the comedy babelfish — or whatever it calls itself these days — translation click here). Notice also the links on the left-hand side under Pag.12 to more Sweezy-themed material.

UPDATE [4/3/2004]: The Guardian’s obit is here.

UPDATE [7/3/2004]: Robert Pollin reminisces in Counterpunch. And there’s a piece in the LA Times, reproduced here.

Over at his iBlog, Mike praises the iPod; Sarah, by contrast, is unmoved, and stands up for obsolete technology.

Me, I think that iPods are fab, too, though not because of anything that goes on around Haywards Heath. I suspect, also, that I’d cope just fine without it.

Uninformed Jason has been sparring with Paul “The Thinker” Richards over here. In reply to Jason’s first comment, Paul “The Thinker” Richards writes:

“The class that created the Labour Party [i.e. “the traditional working class”] no longer exists in any sizable number in Britain. This was identified twenty-plus years ago by Hobsbawm, et al.” [emphasis added]

I’m assuming that the book being referred to here is Eric Hobsbawm, The Forward March of Labour Halted? (Verso, 1981), and I’ll give a small prize to the first person who gives me a reference to a page on which something even vaguely approximating this claim can be found.

It’s quite a day for dead social democratic prime ministers (DSDPMs?): also Olof Palme, Swedish prime minister; born 30 January 1927, shot dead 28 February 1986.

Friedrich Ebert, first President of the Weimar Republic, and controversial figure on the left down to this day. Born 4 February 1871, died 25 February 1925.

Read this brand new article by Paul “The Thinker” Richards, which appears in the current issue of Progress magazine. Then ask yourself who is trying to promote “extremism, division and internecine strife” (see final para.) within the Labour Party?

Is it (a), those MPs who cast their votes in accordance with explicit manifesto promises, or (b) those Blairista commentators who denounce them as a “party within a party” for so doing, and who write specifically in order to promote the interests of the most right-leaning faction within the Labour Party?

Answers in the comments box, please.

P.S. Paul “The Thinker” Richards’ personal / business homepage is also well worth a visit.

Nadezhda Krupskaya, Bolshevik; born 26 February 1869, died 27 February 1939.

UPDATE [8pm]: Those friends of the DSW over at SIAW have useful snippets from her Memories of Lenin.

Paul “The Thinker” Richards generalises about political blogging:

The disadvantages are that there is no quality control, and some of the political debates descend quickly into trivia, nit-picking, or simply insults flying back and forth across cyberspace. Blogs allow people to insult others, call them names, and question their intelligence in ways they would never dare to face to face or in a political meeting. There are plenty of egotists and attention-seekers out there…

It’s not at all clear why the standards of “a political meeting” are relevant to an assessment of the uses and disadvantages of political blogging, nor why the fact that blogs allow some people to insult other people is necessarily a disadvantage. It surely depends on who is insulting whom, and for what reason.There are some other disadvantages, however, that we might like to note: when used unThinkingly, political blogs can facilitate hypocrisy, immodesty and the dissemination of untruths masquerading as well-known facts, for example. Nor should we forget that they can be used as a platform for spreading exceptionally nasty lies about leading politicians, an offence for which the perpetrator has, we might further observe, consistently refused to apologise to his readers.

Perhaps most tragically of all, political blogs sometimes induce people to take on inappropriate online personae, for example, by assigning names to their weblogs which will tend to render them figures of fun in the wider community of those who read and write on blogs. (There are probably other disadvantages, too, but I’ll get on with some work now instead of trying to catalogue them all.)

Does anyone take this self-important piece of political flotsam seriously?

Yes, it’s the DIY Country & Western Song Generator…

I met her at a truck stop all hunched over;
I can still recall that creepy smile she wore;
She was smellin’ kind of funny in the twilight,
and I knew that she was rotten to the core;
She asked me if I’d swear off booze forever;
She said to me she loved my one blue eye;
But who’d have thought she’d run off with her dentist;
I now can kiss my credit cards goodbye.

All songs can be sung to the tune of “Give My Love To Rose” (and, no doubt, others). This is one of the less deranged ones you can write for yourself over there. Excellent stuff. [Via Sarah].

Chris Lightfoot, of the excellent WWWitter, writes:

Apologies for the mass mail. I just wanted to see if I could get you to plug a service I’ve had a part (fairly small — most of the technical work was done by Francis Irving of Public Whip fame) in building:Downing Street Says…

– the idea is to present the briefings made by the Prime Minister’s Official Spokesman as a web log, and see if we can get an interesting dialogue going among web users. If we’re really lucky, the lobby journalists and maybe No. 10 may start reading the comments too, which might be interesting.

Consider it plugged.

Massachusetts Supreme Court Orders All Citizens To Gay Marry.

“If the history of our nation has demonstrated anything, it’s that separate is never equal,” [Mass. Chief Justice Margaret H.] Marshall said. “Therefore, any measure short of dismantling conventional matrimony and mandating the immediate homosexual marriage of all residents of Massachusetts would dishonor same-sex unions. I’m confident that this measure will be seen by all right-thinking people as the only solution to our state’s, and indeed America’s, ongoing marriage controversy.”

The Gay Penguin (for America) does not, incidentally, and unlike President Bush, support a federal marriage amendment.

For the record, I should note that there is, of course, one country song about the relationship of parents and children which is wholly worthwhile, and that’s “A Boy Named Sue“. There may be others, too.

The older I get, the more country music I listen to, and the more I like what I hear, whether songs about drinkin’, lovin’, shootin’, cheatin’, drinkin’ (again), prayin’, dyin’, bein’ locked up, and so on. And if I were one to make wild generalisations, I’d say that these songs, taken together, speak to the central problems of modern life better than any other comparable group in the Anglophone corpus, and they deserve to be celebrated for that.

But country music and I part company when it comes to sentimental ballads about parents. I like my parents very much, and don’t have anything bad to say about them — but, nevertheless, mushy songs about parents leave me cold. There’s even something about songs like “To Daddy” (recorded by Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, and, no doubt, others) that makes me want to throw up, its feminist politics notwithstanding.

Well, Norm has just posted the lyrics to Ronee Blakley’s song, “Idaho Home”, from Robert Altman’s Nashville (see this page, by the way, for a comprehensive plot summary of this magnificent film). Of it he writes, “Don’t mock. Or, at least, wait until you’ve actually heard it before you mock”. And I think that’s about right: although the genre of country songs about mom and dad is wholly mockable, I think this one is actually less vomit-inducing than the others.

Two can play the “reproducing the lyrics from the Nashville soundtrack” game, and my favourite, by a long way, is this excellent Henry Gibson number. (Again: do resist the temptation to mock… It’s well worth it.)

Unpack your bags and try not to cry.
I can’t leave my wife — there’s three reasons why.
There’s Jimmy, and Kathy, and sweet Lorelei…
For the sake of the children, we must say goodbye.
For the sake of the children, we must say goodbye.’Cos Jimmy’s been wishin’ that I’d take him fishin’
His Little League pitchin’ is something to see
And Kathy’s thirteen now; she’s my little queen now,
And I’ve gotta see who her beau’s gonna be.

So unpack your bags…

But you are my true love, the one that I do love,
But I’ve got to stay with the woman I wed.
Laurie’s just walkin’, she just started talkin’,
And Daddy’s the first word that she ever said!

Et cetera.

Great song. Great film.By way of a postscript, I’d have thought, incidentally, that the Ronee Blakley song from Nashville that would interest Norm the most would be her “Rolling Stone” — see here and here.

Tommy Douglas, who is, I think, the first Dead Canadian Socialist in this series: leader of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation and the New Democratic Party, and the founding father of Medicare; born 20 October, 1904, died 24 February 1986.

Christopher Hill, Marxist historian, author of The World Turned Upside Down and other fine books, Master of Balliol College, Oxford; born 6 February 6 1912; died 24 February 2003. (Some sources say 23 February. Hmm.)

Stephen Marks emails to point Virtual Stoa readers towards this site, devoted to the songs of the Spanish Civil War. That’s La Pasionaria speaking, when you get to the front page; click on entrar and then con canciones to get to the songs.

Politicians always profess to be principled, but we tend to suspect that they are self-seeking opportunists, and experience suggests that we are usually right so to suspect. Those occasions, therefore, when politicians stand up for principles which will almost certainly work against their short-, medium- and long-run interests are very striking ones. And this is doubly true when it comes to right-wing parties, owing to the lingering suspicion that, as J. K. Galbraith once put it, conservatism might really at bottom just be “the search for a higher moral justification for selfishness”.

But this clearly isn’t always the case. As Donald Sassoon notes, for example, in a (sort of) recent essay on the fluctuating fortunes of socialism in the twentieth century, the longstanding conservative opposition to women’s suffrage across all of Europe was quite principled, as it was widely believed — and it turned out to be largely true — that women were more likely to vote for conservative, religious and traditionalist parties than for liberal, socialist or other workers’ parties. And it was the opportunist Stanley Baldwin who brought an end to years of this principled opposition by equalising the franchise in 1928, thus boosting Tory fortunes at the ballot box.

With that little bit of history in place, then, we should notice Michael Howard’s altruistic defence of the the First Past the Post electoral system in his recent speech in Burnley. “PR always magnifies the opportunities for small, extremist parties”, he declared, “as other countries have found to their cost. That is one of the reasons why I am so resolutely opposed to it”.

He doesn’t tell us what the other reasons are, but I’d quite like to know what he’s thinking of, since I think that we should be more puzzled by the almost unswerving Tory defence of FPTP than we usually are. This part of the Jenkins Commission report into the possibility of an alternative voting system spells out just how badly the Tories currently do under FPTP. And while the reduction in the over-representation of Scotland will offer something of a corrective in the direction of proportionality, there’s no sign that the electoral system will generate fair outcomes any time soon, but that it will remain systematically skewed in the interests of the Labour Party.

It’s fun, of course, for thorough-going anti-Conservatives like me to contemplate an electoral system in which, as Jenkins estimated (a few years back, to be sure, when he was still alive), “the Conservatives would have required a lead of approximately 6 1/2 % to give them an equality of seats with Labour”, and still have that electoral system so ardently defended by those whom it will reliably punish.

But perhaps the Tories may just be terribly aware that their persistent inability to transform themselves into a credibly decent European centre-right civic liberal / Christian Democratic party dooms them to permanent opposition in any system of PR / coalition politics, and so they feel they lack the incentive to campaign for fairer votes.

Or, as I say, they may be significantly more principled than we generally reckon.

Rest in peace Anthony “If it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to destroy every fucking grammar school in England… and Wales … and Northern Ireland” Crosland, Labour politician and Cabinet Minister under Wilson and Callaghan. Born 29 August 1918, died 21 February 1977. Author of The Future of Socialism, 1956, a revisionist tome which, in light of the politics of the present, appears quite fundamentalist.

(Hmm. I can’t find any Crosland pages out there on the web worth linking to. Any ideas?)

Georg Büchner, playwright, propagandist, fish scientist; born 17 October 1813, died 19 February 1837.

One of the reasons I’ve been excited about the politics of gay marriage in the United States in recent months has been the fact that it has been the parts of the country I know and love best making the progressive running. Last year it was the court in Massachusetts — where I lived for most of the period 1995-2000 — that ordered the state legislature to draw up proposals to legalise gay and lesbian marriage; last weekend it was the Mayor of San Francisco — where I lived for much of 1999 — who ordered officials in City Hall to start issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

And there’s an additional reason for me to feel thrilled at what’s been happening in San Fransciso, which these two photos will serve to illustrate…

That photo was taken on 19 March 2001, and is of marriage commissioner Richard Ow officiating at my wedding to Josephine at the top of the grand staircase in San Francisco City Hall.

And this photo, left, is of the same person, Richard Ow, in the same place in City Hall, again, at the top of the steps, this time officiating at a same-sex marriage ceremony on Friday, a day that made the best kind of history that there is to make. (I found it on this page.)

Last week-end’s events have provided the faces and names and photographs to make the hitherto abstract and hypothetical concept of state-sanctioned same-sex marriage in America concrete and real for the watching world. And for me those photographs are marvellously accompanied by my own happy memories of City Hall as a terrific place to get married, and the wonderfully moving email messages I’ve read by people I know in San Francisco, who grabbed their once-in-a-lifetime chance to get their love for a partner officially recognised by the City — and a City they love, too.

And to get a sense of how busy that staircase in the top image was over the weekend, here’s a usefully-labelled snap by local photographer Zak Szymanski…

Below is another pic by Zak Szymanski of some splendid shoes — there are lots more at his authenti-city site, and it’s an excellent visual documentary record of three extraordinary days.

Is John Tavener’s music any good?

Cash family blocks haemorrhoid ad: “The family of late singer Johnny Cash has blocked an attempt by advertises to use his hit song Ring of Fire to promote haemmorrhoid-relief products…”

Hmm. Still worrying away about this one, I’m afraid. On further reflection it might very well turn out to be Die Moorsoldaten (details, including lyric in both German and English, here; sound-clip here).

On one of those occasions when the real world and the blogging world overlap ever so slightly — sitting in the pub with Stephen Marks and the other comrades after a local Labour Party branch meeting, when Marc Mulholland wanders by in search of drink and/or friends — Stephen tells me about the SovMusic site, which I hadn’t seen before, and which seems at first and second glance to be a treasure trove of sound snippets of interesting recordings.

Here’s Paul Robeson singing the Hymn of the Soviet Union. Here’s the Internationale as it was fused with the Prussian marching tradition with a new orchestration provided by the Nazi Propaganda Ministry in order to play at the Berlin Olympics, whenever the Russians won a medal (and, no doubt, was very useful after 23 August 1939). And there are thirty eight songs about Stalin…

And for those who want links to some of the better tunes recommended by the commenters at Harry’s on the best political songs ever, here’s the Internationale in Russian (and Albanian! and Czech!, and various other languages, but not Esperanto — though an Esperanto version does exist); here’s Bella Ciao, and here’s Bandiera Rossa (which, as my brother Mike points out, was usefully pressed into service as a wedding march on a fine occasion three years ago).