Political Watermelon

The British Labour Party, supposedly reinvigorated by the ascendancy of a new leader – Andy Burnham – who has promised to end 40 years of neoliberalism, is rapidly coming unstuck. Its National Executive Committee is set to decide whether to cease power-sharing arrangements with Green Party councillors over the latter formation’s recent ‘Zionism is Racism’ conference motion.

The point of this motion is clearly that ethno-nationalism is inherently racism. Which it is. Seeking to found a state on grounds of ethnic supremacy or exclusivity constitutes discrimination along racial lines.

The impulse to protect Jewish people from horrific and genocidal exploitation by creating a new form of state in which they are welcome is good and just. The impulse to do this by creating a form of state that colonises another’s land and objectively commits genocide against erstwhile occupants of that land in order to revamp its demographics is bad and unjust, and replicates the very racist logic that Zionism professes to be an escape from.

I do not imagine that many readers of this blog need convincing of the moral bankruptcy of the Labour Party given its rightward shift in recent years. However, the obstinacy of its position on Israel lays this bankruptcy even barer than before. Labour must believe that Zionism is unequivocally not racism – but simply a benign movement for a Jewish homeland – to react so stridently to this specific motion.

There can be but two explanations for this: one, senior party members and executives have been operating with their eyes closed for the last three (never mind 80) years, ignoring the campaign of daily slaughter and oppression visited on the Palestinian people by inspired Israeli nationalists; two, they wish simply to toe the line of an insipid and vacuous media ecosystem as blindly as can be, hoping to remain in a position to win the next election if they can dodge as much controversy as possible.

The second option here is surely closer to the truth. Many Labour Party politicians, and indeed activists and advocates, commit a cardinal failing in accepting the validity of the ‘Overton window’ – the range of policies which appear acceptable and feasible to the perceived electorate of the day – as a precondition of their ascent to power and prominence. There is simply a profound paucity of principle or lack of critical thinking – or both.

In fact, the Overton window is strongly shaped by the powers that be – and these powers that be are necessarily right wing in such an unequal society, seeking policies that advance their own interests. There is no sensible middle ground that exists independently of politics and ideology. Green Party members as well as councillors – whatever their flaws and disagreements on the issue itself – have attempted to approach a sensitive issue with principles and values including anti-racism, internationalism, and solidarity. Establishment Labour figures meanwhile prioritise not upsetting opinion-shapers who whitewash or openly promote actually-existing genocides, seeking to slot themselves into a prevailing institutional framework in the vain hope that they (re)gain power and eviscerate any effective Left opposition in the process.

There would be an easy rebuke to the above argument: address the logic. Explain why Zionism is not racism or produce evidence that Green Party members who systematically oppose and march against genocide are somehow secretly racists themselves – which is the implication of delinking from them over this specific motion.

Why does neither Andy Burnham nor any other Labour figure actually address the argument? Because they are not interested – the Labour Party is a centrist liberal formation with hints of progressivism on vanishingly few topics, and it is easier to govern from within dominant institutional frameworks and discourses than to foreground principles and a critical analysis of contemporary society.

Green Party councillors and members who support the Zionism is Racism motion for principled, internationalist and anti-racist reasons can take solace in a few facts. The anti-slavery movement was once an outsiders’ campaigning movement furiously opposed by supposed spokespersons for the majority. The anti-imperialist movements of the twentieth century were similarly once minority movements clamped down on with bitterness, bile, and blood by dominant global powers.

Opposing racism – in this case, a settler colonialism that grows more aggressive and fascistic by the day, under conditions of support and endorsement from Western political leaders – is right, just, and principled, period. So-called progressives who wish to shut down critical discussions of the hierarchical ordering of modern societies should, if they are really progressive, explain why this manifestation of colonialism is uniquely not racist. They will not, and can not, so a Labour Party under any centrist leadership will continue to prioritise pallid posturing and sloganeering over a genuine exploration and exposition of socialist principle.

A common right-wing refrain to climate change activism is that properly addressing the scale of the problem would require economic rewiring to such an extent that rich nations would stagnate while poorer ones never escaped poverty. Therefore, it is suggested, we should ride out the worst of the heatwaves and forest fires until a grand technological solution arrives.

Leaving aside the extraordinary risks involved in adopting such a position, it is simply incorrect. The argument ignores distribution. It swallows wholesale the most immovable ideological fixation of our time – growth – presuming that where we do not artificially inflate any and all sectors of the economy as avidly and relentlessly as possible, irreversible decline will follow.

In reality, it is this ideological fixation itself which has generated a potentially irreversible climate change. Where do deforestation, soil depletion, overfishing, and mass extinction come from? Intensive resource use – and where does this come from? Not population per se, since population tells us nothing about the way that land and resources are used. Intensive resource use comes from capitalism because capitalism eats up ecologies to keep driving the profit necessary for rising aggregate profits. Stagnant profits mean companies cannot meet debt obligations and go bankrupt.

Jason Hickel emphasises in Less is More (2020) how, under capitalism, global GDP needs to rise by at least 2-3% per year to maintain rising aggregate profits. In a global economy which is already voluminous, this 2-3% per year obviously corresponds to an ever-larger pool of resources.

Therefore, if we are tethered to an economic system which demands economic growth at the cost of all else, we are also tethered to a ceaseless (compound) expansion of resource use, and resources, just like physical space, are limited. Even if we could roll out renewable energy quickly enough to offset much remaining fossil fuel burning, capitalism would continue relentlessly eating up the ecological resources named above to drive a profit – thus rendering ‘green growth’ an oxymoron.  

A swift way out of this quandary would be degrowth. This involves pursuing economic growth in productive, targeted arenas of the economy such as care, local food production, renewable energy infrastructure, and essential services, while reducing the size of other sectors. Some economic rewiring is needed here, but this is strictly necessary. You cannot in good conscience advocate a ceaseless and undifferentiated GDP growth for all where future generations will have to live in the parched world that results.

Peoples in the Global South benefit in a degrowth schema thanks to redistribution. Since 1990, 81% of growth in material use is due to increased consumption in rich nations. Once we degrow sectors driven by needless material acquisition, inbuilt obsolescence, and constant advertising, we take the steam out of a system of accumulation predicated on extracting raw materials from poor countries and allow these countries to develop their own economies. We also create the opportunity for true development aid between governments.

Much of the problem is simply that the notion that ceaseless GDP growth is the only route to peace and prosperity for all is so deeply rooted. Hickel uses the case study of Costa Rica in his book to refute this. Costa Rica’s life expectancy grew remarkably in the 1980s when its GDP per capita was not growing at all. How? Because it invested heavily in universal public goods. It focussed on building up not only public sanitation systems but more signally public healthcare and education systems. What matters is where resources are directed.

Costa Rica is not an obscure example but a demonstrative one. Simon Szreter has shown that the sharp rise in urban life expectancies in late-nineteenth century Britain stemmed from basic public health interventions such as separating sewage from drinking water. Raw industrial capitalism is typically seen to cause a decrease in life expectancy wherever it rears its head. Economic growth needs to be directed towards productive public ends to be worthwhile – outside of this, there should be a critical discussion of what sorts of growth are ecologically as well as socially necessary.

It is worth pointing out that UN reports, too, have found that countries can and often have seen life expectancy and health outcomes strengthen while GDP stalls or even declines. Countries such as Iran, Togo, and Venezuela achieved this due to public health measures, vaccinations, and cheaper access to global health technologies, without needing high levels of per capita wealth. Ceaseless economic growth, far from being a holy grail for human advancement, is an ideology invented and promulgated by wealthy individuals and corporations to keep their profit margins up while poor peoples stagnate. This state of affairs should and can be reversed.

On Friday (25^th September), Manchester City Football Club were found guilty of 114 out of 115 charges of breaching the financial rules of the Premier League.

For the uninitiated, Man City were bought by Sheikh Mansour, a member of the Abu Dhabi royal family, in 2008, who made his trusted ally, Khaldoon Al Mubarak, the new chairman. City then bankrolled their way to multiple Premier League titles, other domestic trophies, and – three years ago – a Champions League, the jewel of European footballing competition.

This is not without precedent in English football. In the earlier 2000s, Roman Abramovich bought Chelsea Football Club and proceeded to procure the world’s biggest talents for vast sums of money, effectively granting the club its first English top-flight titles since the 1950s.

The Premier League brought in Financial Fair Play rules from the 2013/14 season to stop ultra-wealthy men simply burning untold amounts of cash in pursuit of glory at clubs which they have no historic connection with while all other clubs, and their fans, attempt to live within their means and are left behind.   

This contrast – between traditional English football and rich playboy upstarts with far more money than sense – reached fever pitch with the ‘Super League’ proposals of 2021 whereby 12 clubs announced that they would start a new European league from scratch in August of that year. Football fans themselves mobilised to shoot down this proposal which would have seen a self-selecting group of billionaire owners achieve permanent elite status within a division that nobody outside of this group, and gleeful broadcasters hoping to reap the profits, had any say over.

The Manchester City case has been bubbling away in the background. The club – historically a mid-table side which has spent time in the lower divisions – was transformed by its purchase by an oligarch. So was Chelsea. These clubs have collectively won an audacious 13 Premier League titles in men’s football this century.

Nobody is doubting that these clubs and the teams that they have brought together have achieved great things. Nor that they might have brought more eyes to the Premier League – although English football was always prominent. The problem is flagrant cheating. Many clubs have highly wealthy owners but very few have actual oligarchs in charge who simply burn through legions of cash to win trophies – denying clubs who have grown to a large status of their own accord in the process.

This is the key point. Sporting success is sweetest when it is authentic – you know that your football club and its owners and supporters alike have really earned an accolade. Raking in billions from somebody with no connection with the club or area to simply surpass nearly all the competition and put yourself on the international stage is unacceptable and stops other clubs and fans who have earned their position in those finales from prevailing – in many cases.

Financial Fair Play was an attempt to prevent this pattern repeating itself in English football, and the Man City verdict – if it holds – is a welcome strike against the edifice of oligarchy within the recent history of the Premier League. This presumes that the verdict is married with sanctions against the club itself sufficient to deter similar behaviour from others – although Man City’s longstanding fans should not be forgotten in this process, who themselves had no say in their club being purchased and used for whatever purpose by particular owners.

Ultimately, football is a microcosm of wider society – and wider society is increasingly riven between a vast majority mired in cost-of-living crises and an ever-wealthier minority searching for outlets for their excessive riches. But since football is so popular with the masses it can prove a source of incendiary resistance to the whims and distortions of the ‘other side’ – if you’ll pardon the pun. May this moment live on.

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