Something strange has happened to the word “radicalisation”. Schools are now officially instructed that they must police their students against being “radicalised”.
It is taken for granted that “radicalisation” means a drive to slaughter civilians in the name of imposing clerical-fascist tyranny.
For 200 years until recently, “radical” had a different meaning. The Oxford dictionary defines radical, in politics, as dating back to 1802: “One who holds the most advanced views of political reform on democratic lines, and thus belongs to the most extreme section of the Liberal party”.
The first politicians called “radicals”, in the late 18th and early 19th century, were outliers from the Whigs, people who supported civil liberties and extension of the right to vote beyond a small minority. The Liberal party, the “mainstream left” of British politics before the emergence of the Labour Party early in the 20th century, emerged in the mid 19th century as a conglomerate of Whigs and Radicals.
By the late 19th and early 20th century, the name “Radical Party” was used in many countries by bourgeois groups who wanted a modern, reforming image.
In the 1980s, “rad” became a common term of approval or praise.
Now the government uses “radical” to mean clerical-fascist terrorism against civilians. They want to ally with “moderate” Islamists, so they avoid the term “Islamist”, and the old tag, “extremist”, is too vague.
For now, no-one proposes that the ban on “radicalisation” should criminalise radical liberals or even radical socialists.
But already Shilan Ozcelik, an 18-year-old Kurdish woman from north London, is in Holloway Prison, refused bail on terrorism charges because of “having attempted to join the YPG”, the Syrian-Kurdish forces fighting Daesh (with air support from the US!)
The presentation of “radicalism” as criminal chimes in all too well with the Tories’ election claim to offer “competence not chaos” and “a plan that works”.
After five years of miserable cuts which have still left government debt soaring, and the biggest pushing-down of real wages, and with the promise to bring yet more cuts plus anti-union laws to stop resistance — after all that, they say that any radical alteration means “chaos”.
While the fall-out from one of capitalism’s greatest economic crashes continues, the Tories cite 100 profiteers, tax-evaders, and exploiters as the voice of authority which we should all respect.
The Labour leaders, intimidated, limit themselves to marginal, detailed criticisms — nothing radical.
The flipside of this, and the lack of public protest against the demonisation of “radicalism”, is widespread depoliticisation. In 2005 only 38% of 18-24 year olds voted. The percentage recovered only a little in 2010. The link is obvious between this low turn-out and the fact that the Tories’ cuts have hit the young much more than over-60s (who vote in greater numbers). Yet for 2015 there’s no chance of the young-voter turnout returning in 2015 to 1964’s 76% (almost the same, then, as the all-ages average).
Among older people who vote, too, political disillusion is rife.
There are three reasons for this. The first is that capitalist competition is faster-moving and more global. Governments need more vigour, and more push from below, to do things which may displease “the markets”. The limits of consensus politics are narrowed.
The second is the bureaucratisation of politics, and especially of the Labour Party. The Labour Party has always had many mechanisms to insulate its leaders from rank-and-file pressure, but it is worse since Blair.
I grew up in one of the safest Labour seats in the UK, with one Labour MP continuously re-elected from 1929 to 1959, and another from 1959 to 2001. Yet when I was in my mid-teens, not an epoch ago, it was taken for granted that the Labour MP would do public meetings at election time, and face loud heckling from Communist Party members.
Very few MPs do public meetings any more. Harold Wilson, Labour leader from 1963 to 1976, prided himself on his expertise at dealing with hecklers, and frequently used it. Ed Miliband rarely speaks except to pre-booked audiences, and even senior mainstream Labour MPs can’t get through his office door to talk to him. Literally everything he knows about current politics comes via, and filtered through, the large team of careerists in his office.
In 2010, only 9% of Labour MPs came from manual-worker jobs, but 20% from jobs as MPs’ aides, researchers, etc. Ed Miliband and Ed Balls have never done anything outside wonk-world other than brief spells as an academic (Miliband) or journalist (Balls).
In 1945, Robert Tressell’s socialist novel The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist was credited with winning the election for Labour. The Tories’ plan to counter its influence was a mass printing of Friedrich Hayek’s book The Road to Serfdom.
Most people read neither book. But many people voted because they had been convinced in conversation of a philosophy which the person convincing them got from one book or another.
Back in 1960 the Labour right-winger Tony Crosland, arguing for a shift in approach after Labour had lost its third general election in a row, declared: “The élan of the rank and file is less and less essential to the winning of elections. With the growing penetration of the mass media, political campaigning has become increasingly centralised, and the traditional local activities, the door-to-door canvassing and the rest [i.e. activities which involved actual political conversation] are now largely a ritual”.
It took a while, but now Crosland’s argument has been adopted widely enough to make mass politics a macabre ritual. In pre-1991 Russia there was a joke: we pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us. In mainstream politics in Britain, the voters pretend to listen, and the politicians pretend to offer ideas.
The third reason is lack of pressure from below. It is not just that Crosland’s programme took time to filter through. From the mid-60s to the early 1980s, things went in the opposite direction, towards livelier politics, because of high class struggle and a socialist radicalisation of young people.
The walling-off of politics by apparatchiks and by market pressures seems unbeatable only because it keeps people demobilised. Just as the bureaucrats in pre-1991 Russia seemed unbeatable.
