May Day Manifestos

May Day - International Workers' Day - is the day for working people all over the world.  In these times of Right ascendancy in so many places - America, Russia, Hungary,  Poland, Brazil, India - it is entirely salutary to mark, celebrate, remember and learn on May Day.  Leftist activism has rarely been more widespread, encompassing gender and feminist politics, green politics, migration, and the new rise of extraordinary youth activists, such as Greta Thunberg.

Here is some reading to enjoy on May Day, and every day:

From Verso, a list for further reading:

May Day Sale!

Bhaskar Sunkara is the dynamic and brilliant publisher and editor of Jacobin, new beacon of the resurgent American left:

Socialism: How We Win

Kristin Ross is one of the leading Anglophone scholars of French radicalism:

Communal Luxury: Kristin Ross

From Jacobin itself:

The historical perspective - Berlin 1929

May Day, Bloody May Day

Happy May Day! Workers of the World Are Uniting

How UIC Grad Workers Fought the Neoliberal University Model — And Won

Sex Workers’ Rights Are Workers’ Rights

Conor

Why RTE Radio 1 Is More Awful Than Ever

Five years ago, I wrote a blogpost entitled 'Why RTE Radio 1 Is So Awful'.   It has been, by a long way, the most read post on this blog, outdistancing any musings on books or inflammatory writings about Palestine.  Even the bots of the Donbass or West Virginia seem to enjoy it.  Here it is:

Why RTE Radio 1 Is So Awful

Since then, I have not stopped listening to Radio 1.  I switch back and forth between it and Newstalk106.  Both stations annoy me, but it's RTE Radio 1 which benefits from the license fee which I have not as yet paid - not possessing a TV - but which, no doubt, I soon will have to pay, just to guard against the outside possibility that I'd someday be stupid enough to want to watch 'The Late Late Show' on the smartphone I don't have.  Because Radio 1 stands as the 'radio station of record' of Ireland, in the manner of the Irish Times in the print media, I resent its dreary and often asinine character.

My irritable and scornful analysis of Radio 1 still has currency.  It probably says a lot that the station's character has not changed one iota since April 2014.  Some presenters have gone, some new ones have arrived.  None are, of themselves, worth listening to.  Some, by virtue of the extraordinarily fixed pattern of the station's schedule, acquire or have acquired 'importance'.  None of them deserve it.

For my money, the only broadcaster worth making an effort to listen to in Ireland these days is Sean Moncrieff, who presents an afternoon programme on Newstalk, Monday to Friday, between 2pm and 4pm.  Moncrieff, with a background in stand-up comedy and a training in philosophy, manages to present a programme which steers between those poles, often to striking effect.  He can be drily, or vulgarly, funny.  He clearly improvises at least part of his spiel.  He has real range in his interviews, which mostly tend towards the light, but not always.  Moncrieff can cut to the heart of a topic, be it a serious cultural matter or some scrap from popular news, with a combination of steeliness and sympathy, which leaves most of his competitors standing.  He is (of course) supported by an able and creative production team, but this does not take away from his own wit, articulacy and mental agility.  He is vastly more interesting to listen to than Ray Darcy, his rival in the same slot on RTE Radio 1, and he's vastly more interesting than most of his Newstalk colleagues - the callous Paul Williams, the breathlessly conceited Pat Kenny, the crassly philistine Ivan Yates who seems never to have advanced in his capacity for speech beyond the Terrible Twos, or the bizarrely-accented Susan Cahill, who gushes in the same way over various writers every Sunday.

But RTE Radio 1 has no one of Moncrieff's wit, insight or sure touch.   RTE Radio 1 is stale.  As a friend pointed out to me a while ago, the problem with Marian Finucane is that she is getting old, and her programme and its arrangement are getting old.  In fact they were all old when the damn progamme was created.   The whole RTE Radio 1 structure is old, and it needs a kick in the arse.  Alas, when you produce, or collude in the production of, 'star' presenters, such people then expand to fill the fetishized space that has been allotted to them.  It's beyond comprehension that RTE (or anywhere else) would pay a superannuated fogey like Ryan Tubridy nearly half a million euros per annum to do the 'work' he does.  I don't understand or see his 'talent'.  His voice is hard to bear, his wit is flat, and his morning radio programme is almost entirely without interest.

I feel sorry in summertime for Dave Fanning - a major Irish broadcaster, with substantial cultural achievements to his name in the promotion and development of rock music (even if I differ with him about U2) - who often 'stands in for Ryan', while 'Ryan' takes the long holidays written into his disgraceful contract.  Years ago, someone said that the two best Irish radio broadcasters were Fanning, and Tommy O'Brien.  They both had very distinctive voices and fields of interest and expertise.  Fanning still has these things; O'Brien, sadly, died in 1988.  Fanning who has a very distinctive radio voice, radio patter, and angle on the world, is much much better than Tubridy, but presumably has not been able to negotiate the kind of ludicrous contract with RTE that the younger and less talented man has, and so he takes gigs like this one.  

Tommy O'Brien was the kind of real original figure which RTE now almost entirely lacks.  He owned a huge collection of records of classical music, particularly grand opera, and he presented a weekly radio programme on Radio 1, always opened with his greeting 'Good evenin', listeners', in a strong south Tipp accent.  He possessed great knowledge, was passionate about his subject, but was entirely lacking in pretension.   Not everyone might agree with his taste, but his extraordinary individuality was undeniable.  Compared to him, a Tubridy is merely a buffoon, and a Cathal Murray is a soogey-moogey saccharine dummy who would make watching a game of tiddly-winks seem exciting.

Tubridy's 'talent', as I say, is lost on me.  I don't see what he brings to his programmes that a smart young journalist, well trained in radio and with an able production team, could not do for a tenth of the cost.  RTE tells us that if it doesn't pay bloated marionettes like Tubridy or Finucane or Miriam 'Genewwwwoyyynely' O'Callaghan or Joe Duffy commensurately bloated pay packets, it will 'lose' them.  Well and good.   Fine.  So be it - lose the lot of them, and give us radio with some content, and less of the faux charisma which is the real content of so much of the drivel we are asked to listen to.

The same vapidity pertains to programme content, as ever.  Now that we are moving towards the summer season, the 10pm slot on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays on Radio 1 is vulnerable to even more dross than usual. We have had in recent times a gamut of female journalists anchoring 'The Late Debate' - the typically useless RTE magazine with a few talking heads.  We now have repeats on three successive nights of 50 years of 'Sunday Miscellany'.  'Sunday Miscellany' is a vintage programme, but it is hardly the kind of totem of Western civilization which RTE plainly thinks it is.  It does not warrant repeats - five decades of middlebrow ruminations do not bear much repetition.  And, to add insult to injury, we are always told we are being 'given another chance' to listen to these programmes, as if we are unregenerate brats who are resistant to the dreary nostrums of our elders and betters and now are being given one last chance to simper properly and suck it all up.   If this is what RTE thinks of its listeners, then it really is on its last legs.

Conor

Capitalism and the state - a memory of reading Poulantzas on Achill, Summer 2006

2006 was a very tricky year.  In the spring, I lost my job as a college lecturer in unusually painful and troubling circumstances.   During the summer, I applied for many jobs and got no interviews.  At the very end of the summer, I was lucky enough to get an interview and I was offered a contract position.   In December, just after I had gone to New York on a holiday, my mother, Lavinia, died suddenly, and I had to turn on my heel and fly home. 

In the summer, though I was deeply worried about my employment situation and I was considering a move into journalism - the abandonment of my academic career, at the age of 41 - I was lucky enough to have a two week residency at the Heinrich Boll memorial cottage, on Achill Island in Co. Mayo.  Located on the edge of the village of Dugort and under the great breaking wave that Slievemore mountain seems to be from that easterly angle, the cottage (actually maybe two cottages knocked together,  or greatly extended from its original configuration) was purchased by Boll in the 1950s.  To him, as most clearly shown in his Irisches Tagebuch, Ireland in the 1950s was a rural Arcadia.   Given Boll's status as a German survivor of the most terrible war, this view of Ireland is hardly surprising.  But though Ireland began to change at the end of the 1950s, Boll kept on visiting Achill, until age made travel difficult for him.  In the 1980s, the house fell in desuetude and became dormant.  But in the 1990s, a combination of local Achill artists and civic activists, and the  Boll family, came together to revive and refurbish the house and make it into the beautiful artist's residence which it is now: a fitting memorial to a very fine writer.    

My remit was to write about Edward Said.  I doubt very much if Said had ever heard of Achill, let alone visited it (though he did visit Sligo, for the Yeats Summer School), but my application for a residency was accepted anyway.  I was lucky.   I got two weeks in July, and of the most magnificent weather.  I travelled down to Dugort with my car full of my collection of Saidiana, and with the most ambitious writing plans.  But of course I was distracted into other things: walking the magnificent expanse of Keel beach, barefoot as I do it every time, my feet becoming youthful and pink again in the chilly Atlantic; climbing Croaghaun at the island's western extremity to stand on the brink of its summit, where it drops 2200 feet to the gray ocean in a gigantic hooded wall which even now few people ever see; eating wonderful meals at Bervie, the jewel of Achill hotels, run by old and dear friends (find it at http://www.bervieachill.com/).  When not doing these things I read.  I read The Magic Mountain, sometimes reading it very late into the night, when my city-boy's timidity in the face of the almost animate blackness of the rural dark left me unable to sleep.  And I read Nicos Poulantzas's last book, State, Power, Socialism.  Poulantzas was a brilliant Greek Marxist political philosopher, influenced by but not limited to Louis Althusser, who brought a rigour to Marxist discussion of the nature of the state which it had mostly lacked - the old man himself not having given the institution of the state much thought.  Poulantzas famously debated the nature of the state with his great English interlocutor, Ralph Miliband, in the pages of the New Left Review.  This tussle, which represented a discussion of the state analagous to EP Thompson's quarrel with Althusser regarding theorizing the historical process, was one of the great Marxist arguments of the Seventies.  I enjoyed State, Power, Socialism in my own, partly Saidian, way because it addressed the spatial or geographical nature of the state institution - for a state to be a state, it must have a territory, which it turns into a jurisdiction.   It creates this juridical and political space in a wide variety of ways - demarcating borders, creating citizenship, developing a national education system, building infrastructure.  I found the whole argument deeply compelling.

I had a wonderful stay at the Boll cottage.  Needless to say, I wrote very little.   In retrospect, my sadness is that I did not invite my mother down to stay with me for a few days of the residency.  One of her many gifts to me was and is my love of Achill, which was started when I was about five years old and continues with me now.   I little thought that I'd never again see the island partly through her eyes.  Catching sight of my copy of State, Power, Socialism on the shelf now consequently brings a wash of complicated, overdetermined memories.

Here is Michael McCarthy reasserting Poulantzas's importance and value for us now:

Seven Theses on the Capitalist Democratic State

Conor