The middle-class malaise that dare not speak its name

Zoe Williams in The Guardian


 

Illustration by Jasper Rietman


What is a “middle-class” expense? According to the Daily Telegraph, after considerable dialogue with its own readers, the key items in the portfolio of the bourgeoisie are as follows: school fees, dental care, health insurance, holidays, wine (fine), new cars, holidays and “cultural activities”. The price rises in all these areas have been astronomical – health insurance has gone up by 51% over the past six years, school fees by 40% – while over the same period earnings in the double-average-wage bracket have gone down by 0.8%.

Private school fees are paid by 7% of the population; private health insurance is taken out by 11%. This isn’t really the middle: the determination to retain the term middle class for those who are actually wealthy is akin to the care with which the right wing never describes its views as rightwing, preferring “commonsense”. It is a constant project to reframe what is normal in the image of what is normal for one person in 10.

But actually, on this matter, the middle classes are pretty normal. Income has stagnated across every section of society apart from the top 1% (whom the Telegraph would probably call upper middle or well-to-do). GDP per capita is lower than it was seven years ago. “That,” said the economist Joseph Stiglitz in an interview on Sunday “is not a success.”

It’s hard for the wealthy to mobilise around their declining living standards. Their options are limited. When so much of your wealth is spent avoiding the social structures on which solidarity is based – education, the health service, our crap dentistry of international renown – who do you complain to? Who are you going to stand shoulder to shoulder with? Your outrage at the world is limited in its expression to your power as a consumer. That’s why the incredibly angry, bright pink man yelling at a BT helpline is such a staple of modern British sitcoms; as a guardian angel against feelings of impotence and injustice, BT can’t really help – even if it does answer the phone.

So there’s the stain of self-interest barring entry to the language and power and solace of unity. There’s also a huge amount of shame involved in being in debt or struggling, especially against the backdrop of assumption that privilege is somehow the result of a lifetime’s sound financial decisions.

There’s a public pressure not to mention declining living standards, because that would be to insult people whose living standards have declined to the point of being unable to eat. There’s also a private pressure, since the status of the affluent is, of course, rooted in the affluence – and if one breaks ranks to say there’s actually quite a lot of anxiety involved, it makes everyone look bad.

Oh, and one other huge impediment: nobody wants you for an ally when your complaint is that health insurance has gone up three times as fast as wages. Had housing been added to the Telegraph’s basket of middle-class goods, they would have seen that, for the older homeowner with a mortgage, the rise in other prices is offset somewhat by the very low interest rates. But they would also have seen that the “middle-class” renter, or even the renter who actually is middle class, is suffering rent rises with no respect to wages, insecurity of tenancy, crummy conditions and life-changingly large proportions of income going on housing costs – very similar conditions, in other words, to everyone else.

The extent to which we are all in this wage-stagnating, price-increasing swamp together is a question of age rather than class. A middle-class person coming out of university is part of the private personal debt boom; a middle-class person under 30 is a victim of the rentier economy. When you strip out the peculiar lottery-win of being over 40 in the housing market, you can see the picture more clearly: everyone who earns, now earns less, while, by incredible coincidence, the ratio between profit and wages has tipped in the shareholders’ favour.

It is deeply ingrained in our political culture that classes must be held in opposition to one another; and a confluence of interests between the middle and the bottom is only possible when the bottom tries to emulate or join the middle (sorry, did I say tries? Of course I meant aspires).

It cuts across the spectrum – on the left, you would never want to preach allegiance between the person hit by the bedroom tax and the person who can’t afford the second holiday. On the right, you would never admit that there was any systemic connection between falling wages for the bottom decile, and falling wages for the eighth.

But considering them together would make it easier to see the patterns: wage depression never conveniently stopped at the bottom 20%, there is little brake on corporate power, and credit is allowing prices in every sphere to peel away from earnings. These trends are obscured by the rather dated political determination that “the needy” must be interested in one kind of politics, and “the aspirational” a completely different kind. Better to acknowledge the similarities in the situations we all face.

Inequality gets even more entrenched when a person of colour reaches the top

Yasmin Alibhai Brown in The Independent

Black anger is being directed against Barack Obama. Not before time. Millions of African-Americans came out to mark the historical moment of his election in 2008. They praised the Lord, and wept with disbelief and joy. The whole of Africa burst into song. His inauguration was among the most watched global events ever.

In his victory speeches, Obama invoked Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, and Martin Luther King. Real freedom  would come, he said – so too justice and unity. Today his black supporters can claim, with some justification, that he failed to deliver. Badly. Deplorably.

African-Americans are still more likely to go to prison than to university, to be victimised by police, courts and various state institutions, to be poor and ignored by Washington, to have neo-natal mortality rates twice as high as white babies, to have lower life expectancy, and so on and on.

They are out on the streets again, with brothers and sisters of other races, all across the US – in Washington, New York, Baltimore, Denver, Arizona, everywhere, now shedding tears of rage. ’Tis come to this? How and why? Because five unarmed black males have been killed this year by white police officers.

In July, Eric Garner – father of six, suspected of selling black market cigarettes – was pushed to the ground by a NYPD policeman, and held so tight that he died. A video of the incident records him saying; “I can’t breathe”. In August, Michael Brown perished after he was shot a dozen times by a Darren Wilson  in Ferguson, Missouri. Apparently the teenager had refused orders to walk on the pavement and that led to an altercation. Grand juries decided not to indict the policemen involved.

In November, in Cleveland, Ohio, Tamir Rice was killed by 26-year-old Timothy Loehmann, an officer deemed unfit for duty in 2012. Rice, a schoolboy who loved basketball, had a toy gun in his hands. His family are suing the police. The same month Akai Gurley, 28, was brought down in a darkened stairwell, by police who claim it was an “accidental discharge”. A grand jury will examine this incident.

And finally,  last Tuesday, Rumain Brisbon, who had four children,  was killed by officers in Phoenix, Arizona. Police said they thought the bottle of pills he was holding was a gun. Stevie Wonder wonders how this is possible. I wonder that he wonders.  Living on the hills of fame and fortune, it must be hard to know what is being done to your people way down below.

Seems it is even harder for the President. In February 2012, when Trayvon Martin, 17, was shot dead by a neighbourhood watch co-ordinator in Florida, Obama did at least identify with the pain of the parents and community: “If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon”. (The police officer was, needless to say, acquitted. ) Today Obama makes, makes tepid, middle-management noises about the responsibilities of law enforcers. No fire or fury in his belly any more. Like Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, he is now a caretaker of white power.

Obama’s self-belief must be crashing as the accusations build up. Black congressman Charlie Rangel  is  forthright: “Having a black president has not solved the problem at all. ...the colour of one’s skin determines how lives are going to be and whether they live at all.” New York University academic Frank Roberts goes further: “We had hoped he would be Moses; he turned out to be the pharaoh. We have a lame duck president who does not have a moral conscience.” Or as an angry young black man put it: “Obama is a bummer”.

Perhaps it was foolish to expect too much from him.  He has pushed through health care reforms, but that’s it folks. Remember all that loose talk about post-racial America? It actually stopped the fight, disabled the struggle so lethally that today R&B star Alicia Keys is able to say, “We absolutely feel disregarded as human beings.”

It seems inequality gets even more firmly entrenched when a woman or person of colour gets to the very top. Margaret Thatcher didn’t do it for feminism and Theresa May won’t either. We have more MPs and peers of colour than ever before and racism is rising again. Once they get to where they want to, even those who used anti-racism to push in, go strangely quiet, seek approval rather than confrontations.

Obama’s presidency represents the perils of entryism. The rough Texan Lyndon Johnson, who pushed through civil rights legislation, did more for African-Americans than Barack Obama. Johnson didn’t give a damn for the establishment, wasn’t intimidated by white opinion. Here, Ken Livingstone pushed equality policies with courage of a kind we do not see in most black and Asian people in power. My heart cracks as I write this. The truth hurts, but can no longer be dodged or excused.

Bethlehem as you’ve never seen it before

Mary, heavily pregnant, and Joseph arrive in Bethlehem. Christ is born in a stable. The angel Gabriel had foretold this birth of the son of God, come down to save humans from temptations and themselves. The first believers followed the brightest of stars to pay homage. Bethlehem is where it all began.

It’s Christmas again. Millions of Nativity scenes are being re-enacted in infant and primary schools all over the world. Parents film these scenes, and rejoice. But do any of them know what is happening to the actual Bethlehem?

I didn’t until I saw a new film, Open Bethlehem, by a Palestinian woman, Leila Sansour. A Christian, she was born and raised there, and then, like many others, went off to the West. Her father’s death drew her back and she found her home town cowed and shattered by aggressive Israeli anti-terrorism measures.

Huge walls are being built, homes and old businesses confiscated, human rights trampled. An old man died broken-hearted after his beloved shop was bulldozed. Church leaders watch helplessly. Sansour’s poignant film is both a recovery of her own memories and a cry against the lock-up of Jesus’s birthplace.

Good people rightly condemn the persecution of Christians by hardline Muslims and Hindus. But as Israel strangles the life out of Christianity’s holiest site, nobody dares speak out. This woman has. Go to her website, join her campaign. It could be the noblest thing you do this Christmas.

Cronyism British Style - A depressingly British tale of friends in high places

From Ofsted and the BBC to the Lords, there’s a strong whiff of cronyism. When will we have the courage to challenge it?

• 
• • Zoe Williams
  • The Guardian, Monday 4 August 2014

Illustration by Andrzej Krauze

One crony is just a crony; it doesn’t – by my reckoning – become an “ism” until there are three. If the chairmanship of the BBC Trust hadn’t come up at the same time as the chiefdom of Ofsted, and if those two things weren’t playing out in the foreground of the peerage announcements to come this week, it might be OK, and the whole of public life wouldn’t look like it could all be such an embarrassing stitch-up. Unfortunately, the three events have come together. David Hoare is the new chief of Ofsted. Seb Coe is not the new head of the BBC Trust, but not for want of begging by the government, which changed the job requirement to make it more appealing to him. Karren Brady and Stuart Rose are reported to be lined up for ennoblement.

In fairness, appointments to the House of Lords are at least meant to be political, even if they shouldn’t, strictly speaking, be distributed on the basis of wealth. The other two posts, however, are supposed to be appointed impartially, with the emphasis on fitness for the post.

So what is David Hoare’s fitness? He is a trustee of AET academies, which is the largest chain, and also one of the worst – in the bottom quarter for results, both its disadvantaged and non-disadvantaged pupils achieving below-average GCSEs. Five schools in the chain had “unacceptable standards”, according to ministers earlier this year, though Ofsted’s verdict, due to be published last week, has been delayed. Not to worry. The other 72 schools may well have acceptable features. The Department for Education can’t see what all the fuss is about, since Hoare appears to be far less unpopular and less irrelevantly qualified than its other candidate, Carphone Warehouse founder (and Tory donor) David Ross.

For me, the main problem isn’t Ross’s relationship with the Conservative party, or even the alleged tax-avoiding practices of Ross and Hoare’s current or past business interests, though I must admit I’m not thrilled to see the highest ranks of public life wedged with people who don’t appear to understand the point of tax. No, worse than any of that is the assumption of the DfE that almost anybody will be better at running education than someone with experience of teaching.

The entry point for a significant post in the academies system is that you should never have set foot in a state classroom. God forbid that you should ever have stood at the front of one, and taught anything to anyone. In years to come, we will look back in wonder at this period, when government worshipped at the feet of industry so fervently that it thought its titans could do anything. But right now, we’re all trapped in the bowels of government delusion, and won’t see the light until Alan Sugar has been appointed chancellor of Cambridge University and Richard Branson is chief medical officer.

These are two sides of the same coin, whether you’re talking about politicians fawning over business leaders, or business leaders casting cash – or the pearls of their acumen – towards politicians. You’d think we’d be used to it, since New Labour was beset by rows such as these. Whether it looks like corruption or cronyism – is it actively bent, or does it merely stink? – depends a lot on whose side is doing the crony recruitment. But this is surely a rare point of convergence between the Morning Star and the Daily Mail: it doesn’t look very transparent or objective when politicians recruit their allies.

They give us breadheads, to run our institutions of oversight, but they also give us circuses: this is the only plausible explanation for the desperate bid to appoint Seb Coe as chair of the BBC Trust. He is a Tory and a national treasure, a man it is impossible to dislike, a recognisable face and acute businessman whose achievements are uncomplicated and demonstrable. He can run really fast, OK? In these turbulent times for the BBC, as its enemies mass on the borders of its charter (up for renewal in 2016) calling for its disintegration, that’s what we need at the helm, clearly. A man who can run incredibly fast.

In the hubbub around the job description having been rewritten to suit Coe, you may have missed the details of that rewrite: it was to reduce the time commitment that the head of the trust would have to make. This said it all about the process – first, that nobody making the appointment was really taking seriously how significant it was, and second, that Coe didn’t really want to do it. He has now come out and rejected it, as apparently have Patience Wheatcroft, Dame Marjorie Scardino, Sir Howard Stringer and Sarah Hogg.

Why candidates should be snatching their hats so energetically out of the ring is open to question. Former Labour culture secretary Tessa Jowell maintains they are put off by the high level of political meddling, but this seems to be an unlikely deterrent for those who agree with the meddlers. I can well imagine, however, that a candidate of any leaning might be put off by the sheer bungling frivolity, the sight of a government desperately grappling for a household name, a bit of borrowed popularity. Anyway, the shortlist is, for today at least, back to one: Nick Prettejohn, City grandee and former adviser to George Osborne. The circus said no, and we’re back to the breadhead.

The phrase “City grandee” cheered me up, however: remember Royal Mail, and remember that it could be worse. They didn’t have to just give these posts to their associates; they could have sold them.

No Second Wife Please - We're Indian Muslim women

Jyoti Punwani in the Hindu

Will the Muslim personal law make polygamy illegal?

When the Bhartiya Mahila Muslim Andolan started working on codifying Muslim personal law, they weren’t sure whether to ban polygamy, or make it conditional. Senior lawyers pointed out that despite bigamy being an offence, Hindu men continued to take a second wife. These women didn’t enjoy the status of a wife, whereas even the fourth wife of a Muslim man had that status.

But the final draft of the new ‘Muslim Marriage and Divorce Act’, released in Mumbai on June 18, makes polygamy illegal. How come? “That’s what Muslim women wanted,” says Noorjehan Safia Niaz, co-founder of the BMMA. “We played the Devil’s Advocate with them, asking them wasn’t a second wife necessary if the first couldn’t conceive, for example. Their reply always was: ‘No. No second wife. No woman should have to share her husband with another woman.’”

Of the seven years taken to arrive at this draft, two were spent talking to Muslim women, most of them poor, uneducated and living in ghettos. It was these women who were desperate for a change, urging the BMMA to “quickly change the law, get us justice.”

But the middle class, supposed to be the pioneer for reform, left Noorjehan disillusioned. A US-returned Muslim in Hyderabad baulked at the BMMA’s proposal to make 18 and 21 the minimum age of marriage for women and men respectively. “It should be 18 for both,” she suggested. Muslim male lawyers in Karnataka saw nothing wrong in a 13-year-old getting married as long as she had attained puberty. But in the bylanes of Bhopal, uneducated Muslim women suggested 21 and 25 instead. “Our daughters graduate at 21,” they pointed out.

“Middle class Muslims kept saying: ‘Don’t tamper too much with the shariat.’ They have well-off families and education to fall back on; the unjust decisions of qazis don’t affect them much,’’ explains Noorjehan. What kept the BMMA going was the response of poor women.

Consultations with these women were held across 10 states where the BMMA has been working, training paralegal workers as arbitrators and providing legal aid. Men would attend their public meetings, and a few would invariably object to their attire (“you are wearing a sari, you haven’t covered your head, you aren’t wearing a burqa — so you aren’t Muslim”), or to their lack of qualifications (“you are not aalims”). One man in Ranchi who objected vociferously to everything, later told Noorjehan, “I agree with everything you say, but if I don’t object, I can’t face my jamaat.” The BMMA took a decision not to consult the All India Personal Law Board and the religious organisations. “They have shown they don’t want change.”

The starting point of this long process was the condition of poor Muslim women, victims of the unIslamic and unjust decisions of maulanas and qazis. The Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) Application Act 1937 has no specific provisions to be followed, leaving every qazi free to rule as per their understanding of the Sharia. The Dissolution of Muslim Marriages Act 1939 lays down grounds on which a woman can approach the court, but few can afford to do so.

Because of this, reformists such as the late Asghar Ali Engineer campaigned for years for the need to codify Muslim personal Law as per Quranic injunctions, which grant women more rights than any other religion does. All Islamic countries have put in place modern personal laws. But in India, the move has always been resisted on three grounds: 1. The Sharia can’t be touched; it is divine. 2. It will be impossible to decide which of the four schools of Islamic jurisprudence should be followed in codification. 3. This will be the first step towards enacting a Uniform Civil Code (UCC).

As Engineer never tired of explaining, the Sharia is based on the Quran, it is not the Quran. In India, the Shariat Act was drafted and enacted by the British. The BMMA worked with Engineer on its draft, choosing to base it on the Quran itself. The draft contains verses from the Quran to back its provisions.  

Thus, to decide the minimum age of marriage, the Quranic injunction of ‘maturity’ of the spouses was interpreted as emotional maturity in addition to physical. “Besides, in Islam, marriage is a contract, and a contract can only be between two adults,” says Noorjehan.

The draft makes many common practices illegal, including underage marriage; unilateral, oral and instant talaq; making the woman give up her mehr (dower) and halala, the practice by which you remarry your divorced wife only after she consummates her marriage with another man and is then divorced by him. “This has no mention in the Quran, it’s become a prostitution racket in places like Lucknow,” says Noorjehan.  

Is this the right time to release this draft, given the new government’s emphasis on the UCC? “We oppose the UCC. But we also want to know, when will the right time come to get justice for women? Twenty years back, we were asked to wait as the Babri Masjid was demolished, the community was under attack. Aren’t women part of the community? Ten years back we were told the Gujarat pogrom had taken place. Can these leaders give us a guarantee that 10 years later, there will be a really secular government, and the community won’t be under attack? Secondly, who decides this hierarchy of issues? Let’s tackle all issues: discrimination, security and also women’s rights. Besides, how many of these leaders have worked on these other issues at the grassroots level? It is groups like us who have done so, tried to get the Sachar Committee recommendations implemented and also campaigned against Modi.”

Noorjehan knows it will take the efforts of many groups to get the government to accept the draft. “Let the community debate our draft first. At any rate, for us, the process was as important as the result.”

Cricket: Quotas: less black and white than ever

Affirmative action is among the most bitterly divisive issues of the age. Particularly in sport, which depends on fairness, which in turn begins with equality of opportunity

Rob Steen

October 23, 2013

 

	Whether quotas were right for Zimbabwe or not, their current side is one far more reflective of the nation's demographics © AFP  Enlarge

"The heroes of our nation, dedicated to building the foundation of cricket for generations to come." Thus does the Cricket South Africa website hail its most important employees. Scroll down and you'll find an even more important assertion: "We can't undo the past, but we can shape the future."

Quotas cannot undo the past: their function is to shape the future by undoing the legacy of the past. Hence the recent decision to oblige South Africa's six franchises to field at least one black African in every match (for amateur teams the requirement doubles). On the face of it, this doesn't sound terribly onerous. It's certainly a far cry from the system Kevin Pietersen insists, disingenuously, drove him to England. One fact justifies this latest condition: 22 years after readmission, Makhaya Ntini remains the sole black African to have won 30 Test caps.

Affirmative action - or, as we Brits prefer, positive discrimination - is one of the most bitterly contested issues of the age. To some it oozes pros; to others, copious cons. To some it redresses prejudice, ancient and present; to others it either ignores other socio-economic factors or simply incites another form of prejudice, usually against those unfortunate enough to be paying for the sins of their fathers. In sport, purportedly the ultimate meritocracy, affirmative action is especially divisive. It will plainly take decades, even centuries, to atone for the sins of apartheid. South African sport has sought to balance those lopsided books via selection quotas, known officially as the "target transformation" policy, a step taken to equally justified and perhaps even more turbulent effect in Zimbabwe.

The complexity of all this is captured by Fisher v University of Texas, a legal case in the USA that is threatening to reverse the 2003 landmark decision in Grutter v Bollinger. Mindful of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, the US Supreme Court was tasked with deciding whether race can be a factor in deciding university admissions. In June, the case was thrown back to a lower court, a move welcomed by proponents of affirmative action: the principle, after all, had not been reversed. Recently, however, the "race-neutral" approach has even been advocated by the Project 21 leadership network, a group of African-American conservatives.

****

By contrast, Kevin Brown, a law professor at Indiana University and author of a forthcoming book on affirmative action, believes it would be a "massive mistake" to substitute consideration of an applicant's socio-economic background for his or her race. "We seem to be forgetting why affirmative action was created in the first place. Yes, of course it's true that individuals from poor backgrounds, regardless of skin colour, face obstacles in obtaining the kind of academic success valued by higher education institutions. But blacks and Latinos are disadvantaged in American society, even when adjusting for socio-economic factors."

Education, of course, is much more important than sport. Besides, why should sport be expected to discriminate, however positively, when other branches of the cultural tree are not? It may be his greatest weakness, but try telling Woody Allen to hire more black actors. He would argue, not unreasonably, that he makes movies about the world he knows, a world of white masters and black servants / prostitutes / entertainers. Sport differs because its legitimacy depends on fairness, and fairness begins with equality of opportunity. Without such foundations, its social value vanishes.

Cricket first tiptoed down this rocky road four decades ago, when the International Wanderers, a private party comprising several eminent English and Australian players, took on multi-racial XIs in South Africa. Such ventures ended in 1976, after hundreds of schoolchildren were killed in Soweto while protesting the government's education policies.

How illuminating, then, to dip into Luke Alfred's The Art of Losing, published last year, and learn that just three members of the South African team at the 1992 World Cup had voted in the whites-only referendum that approved the continuation of President FW De Klerk's reforms (had the decision gone the other way, warrants Alfred, they would have had to return home mid-tournament). Ahead lay those trials by quota.

In 1998, encouraged by the ANC, the United Cricket Board of South Africa laid down the law: the starting XI for each international match should include at least four players of "colour". Quotas were also introduced at provincial level. Adherence was never strict.

The first major row erupted in 2002 when the national selectors chose Jacques Rudolph ahead of Justin Ontong against Australia, only to be overruled by Percy Sonn, the board president. As a consequence, Ontong, who counted Rudolph as a friend, endured one of the most fiery and unenviable of baptisms. Double-edged swords don't come much more jagged than this. Knowing you've been picked not on your merits but because what was once an unfortunate accident of birth was now an advantage must play merry hell with one's self-esteem.

A relentlessly controversial figure whose administrative career would bring him to the heights of the ICC presidency and the depths of fraud allegations and alcohol-fuelled public disgrace, Sonn was roundly criticised by the cricketing fraternity; yet even those who believed he should have been focusing his efforts on improving coaching facilities for black schoolchildren understood his motives. "No doubt Sonn," noted theGuardian, "has seen too many examples of lip-service being paid to a quota system while, behind the scenes, not much is being done to attack the roots of an historic injustice."

Reflecting the elitism of a sport showing few signs of gaining traction in a black community conspicuously more enamoured of football, South Africa's 2007 Rugby World Cup-winning XV numbered only a couple of non-white faces. In cricket, another sport dominated by the elite white schools, politicians and administrators believed reformation should be a top-down process, billed as "targeted transformation". "As long as we have an abnormal society," Norman Arendse, the CSA president at the time, emphasised in 2007, "quotas and targets are not only desirable but also a constitutional imperative."

	Why should sport be expected to discriminate, however positively, when other branches of the cultural tree are not?

This prompted some problematic arguments. When Graeme Smith wanted to omit Ntini from a critical World Cup match, he was obliged to justify himself in a lengthy one-on-one with the CSA chief executive,Gerald Majola. Many argued that dressing-room morale was being undermined. By 2010, according to Tony Irish, the South Africa Cricket Association CEO, matters had become intolerable: "The players feel that as soon as a racial number is set for selection of the team (whether or not one calls this a quota or a target) it leads to a divisive dynamic within the team, and it is also degrading to the players of colour who should be there on merit, yet are labelled a quota/target player."

Cue a letter sent to Arendse and his fellow board members in 2007 by a group of senior players led by Ashwell Prince, soon to become the national team's first coloured captain. In it, they demanded an end to "artificial" selection at the highest level. Later that year, Makhenkesi Stofile, the sports minister, scoffed at the quotas as "window dressing", signifying a shift towards the notion that victory on the field would be a more effective form of inspiration.

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In this sphere, Zimbabwe is well ahead of its big brother. It was the quota system that spurred 15 white players to mount a rebellion in 2004, led by Heath Streak. Today Streak is adamant that most of the nation's professionals, regardless of skin colour, were opposed to quotas and that his black colleagues, whose job options were far narrower, declined to revolt only because they feared the repercussions. The recent Test victory over Pakistan by a team far more reflective of the nation's demographics suggests that the angst has been worthwhile.

"Some sort of compensation or attempt at rectification is due to those non-white sportspeople who were directly or indirectly disadvantaged by apartheid." So acknowledged Dr Carl Thomen of the University of Johannesburg, in his 2008 book Is it Cricket? An Ethical Evaluation of Race Quotas in Sport. These "compensatory efforts", he nonetheless concluded, "must not come via the same principles which got us into the mess of apartheid in the first place". In writing his book, he sought "to show that the negative consequences of such policies far outweigh any good they may realistically claim to do".

Upon reading those sentiments a few weeks ago, I emailed the author. Surely, given the opportunities afforded the likes of Ntini and Hashim Amla, the quota system had been justified? He was not for turning. "I'm not sure that that policy was responsible [his italics] for their selection. Perhaps they were thrown in a bit earlier than otherwise, but I'm not sure you can credit the quota policies of the time with their success. The problem with quotas is that they are ethically indefensible, and they actively do damage. 'Necessity' doesn't come into it; they are evil, plain and simple."

Evil, really? How, then, do we describe apartheid? The counter-argument was summed up by my guest last weekend, John Young, a sportswriter, author and retired schoolteacher from the Western Cape and Thami Tsolekile's erstwhile agent. "Quotas were necessary precisely so that merit could be acknowledged," he reasons. "Good black players would never have been picked without them."

There's one mathematical equation we all know: wrong + wrong never = right. But sometimes being wrong for the right reasons can be preferable to being right for the wrong ones.

Choice is simply code for class

Janet Street Porter in The Independent

Social mobility tsar Alan Milburn is concerned that the gap between rich and poor is increasing. But if we want equal opportunities for all, we need to stop introducing subtle forms of social demarcation in every walk of life.

It's a particularly British obsession, this determination to create mini-castes emphasising our differences rather than celebrating our strengths. The majority of us claim to be middle class, but offer us "finest" fare over "budget" and we're hooked.

Travel is another example. Budget airlines exploit our need for social demarcation, offering us the chance not to queue – at a price. The chance not to pay for our food – at a price. The chance to choose our seat – at a price. The chance to sit at the front of economy – at a price. All things that were free a decade ago. In fact, "low-cost" air travel is not egalitarian or cheap by any stretch of the imagination.

Rail travel is the same. There's talk of a new category of travel when the East Coast line franchise is offered to private investors: a class below first called "premium economy" – so standard travel will be third class, the rolling stock equivalent of below stairs. Quite soon train operators will ask us to pay to be allowed on the platform first.

I love the new high-speed train to Kent because it's all one class. Passengers are quiet; it's clean and efficient, but it's not cheap. Anyone on a budget opts to travel on the overcrowded and slow old line.

We should realise that, in modern Britain, offering us "choice" is code for implementing a class system based on ability to pay, and (by default) offering an inferior service to the poorest. Now this trend looks likely to afflict our health service.

Michael Dixon, president of the NHS Clinical Commission and chair of the NHS Alliance, says patients could soon be charged for "extras" like comfortable beds and better food. As the NHS faces a funding gap of £30bn by the end of the decade and has to deal with an ageing population, Dr Dixon thinks users should contribute more. Hospitals raise millions through the controversial practice of charging for parking (some extort £3 an hour from visitors) and making us cough up for televisions.

Dr Dixon sees nothing wrong in a two-tier system for inpatients, claiming the wealthy already use the NHS when it suits them and pay for private treatment when they have to, and the principle should be expanded. The NHS is hopelessly overburdened with administrators and this proposal would make it worse. The quality of food varies wildly from one area to another, some trusts spending just £4.15 a day per patient, others up to £15, when the average is about £9.80.

The same differences crop up in ordering supplies: money is wasted through piecemeal and uninformed purchasing. We should all get uniformity of service throughout the NHS, no matter where we fall sick. The NHS is not a bunch of Premier League football clubs, all in competition, nor is it a gang of department stores offering rival services. NHS chief executives earn large salaries and get gold-plated pensions, but the amount they are paid varies wildly, too.

Why has the NHS become like an airline or a train operator, when it should be providing a uniform top service for a classless Britain?

On Walking - Advice for a Fifteen Year Old

  

By Girish Menon

Only the other day at the Bedford cricket festival, Om, our fifteen year old cricket playing son, asked me for advice on what he should do if he nicked the ball and the umpire failed to detect it. Apparently, another player whose father had told him to walk had failed to do so and was afraid of the consequences if his father became aware of this code violation. At the time I told Om that it was his decision and I did not have any clear position in this matter. Hence this piece aims to provide Om with the various nuances involved in this matter. Unfortunately it may not act as a commandment, 'Thou shall always walk', but it may enable him to appreciate the diverse viewpoints on this matter.

In some quarters, particularly English, the act of playing cricket, like doing ethical business, has connotations with a moral code of behaviour. Every time a batsman, the most recent being Broad, fails to walk the moralists create a crescendo of condemnation and ridicule. In my opinion this morality is as fake as Niall Ferguson's claims on 'benevolent and enlightened imperialism'. Historically, the game of cricket has been played by scoundrels and saints alike and cheating at cricket has been rife since the time of the first batting superstar W G Grace.

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Another theory suggests that the moral code for cricket was invented after World War II by English amateurs to differentiate them from the professionals who played the game for a living. This period also featured different dressing rooms for amateurs and professionals, there may also have been a third dressing room for coloured players. One could therefore surmise that 'walking' was a code of behaviour for white upper class amateurs who played the game for pleasure and did not have to bother about their livelihood.

This then raises the question should a professional cricketer walk?

Honore de Balzac once wrote, 'Behind every great fortune there is a crime'. Though I am not familiar of the context in which Balzac penned these words, I assume that he may have referred to the great wealth accumulated by the businessmen of his times. As a student and a teacher of economics I am of the conviction that at some stage in their evolution even the most ethical of businesses and governments may have done things that was not considered 'cricket'. The British during the empire building period was not ethical nor have been the Ambanis or Richard Branson.

So if I am the professional batsman, with no other tradable skill in a market economy with no welfare protection, travelling in a last chance saloon provided by a whimsical selection committee what would I do? I would definitely not walk, I'd think it was a divine intervention and try to play a career saving knock.

As you will see I am a sceptic whenever any government or business claims that it is always ethical just as much as the claims of walking by a Gilchrist or a Cowdrey.

I am more sympathetic to the Australian position that it is the umpire's job to decide if a batsman is out. Since dissent against umpiring decisions is not tolerated and there is no DRS at the lower echelons of cricket it does not make sense to walk at all. As for the old chestnut, 'It evens out in the end',  trotted out by wizened greats of the game I'd like to counter with an ancient Roman story about drowned worshippers narrated by NN Taleb in his book The Black Swan.

One Diagoras, a non believer in the gods, was shown painted tablets bearing the portraits of some worshippers who prayed, then survived a subsequent ship wreck. The implication was that praying protects you from drowning. Diagoras asked, 'Where were the pictures of those who prayed, then drowned?"

In a similar vein I wish to ask, 'Where are the batters who walked and found themselves out of the team?' The problem with the quote, 'It evens out in the end' is that it is used only by batters who survived. The views of those batters with good skills but who were not blessed with good fortune is ignored by this 'half-truth'.

So, Om, to help you make up your mind I think Kipling's IF says it best:

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two impostors just the same

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

And risk it on one turn of pitch and toss

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

Then, you may WALK, my son! WALK!

There is another advantage, if you can create in the public eye an 'image' of an honest and upright cricketer. Unlike ordinary mortals, you will find it easier, in your post cricket life, to garner support as a politician or as an entrepreneur. The gullible public, who make decisions based on media created images, will cling to your past image as an honest cricketer and will back you with their votes and money. Then what you do with it is really up to you. Just watch Imran Khan and his crusade for religion and morality!

The writer plays for CamKerala CC in the Cambs league.

Another Country

Many of those who govern us do not in their hearts belong here. They belong to a different culture, a different world, which knows as little of its own acts as it knows of those who suffer them

GEORGE MONBIOT

Those whom the gods love die young: are they trying to tell me something? Due to an inexplicable discontinuity in space-time, on Sunday I turned 50. I have petitioned the relevant authorities, but there’s nothing they can do.

So I will use the occasion to try to explain the alien world from which I came. To understand how and why we are now governed as we are, you need to know something of that strange place.

I was born into the third tier of the dominant class: those without land or capital, but with salaries high enough to send their children to private schools. My preparatory school, which I attended from the age of eight, was a hard place, still Victorian in tone. We boarded, and saw our parents every few weeks. We were addressed only by our surnames and caned for misdemeanours. Discipline was rigid, pastoral care almost non-existent. But it was also strangely lost.

A few decades earlier, the role of such schools was clear: they broke boys’ attachment to their families and re-attached them to the instititions – the colonial service, the government, the armed forces – through which the British ruling class projected its power. Every year they released into the world a cadre of kamikazes, young men fanatically devoted to their caste and culture.

By the time I was eight those institutions had either collapsed (in the case of colonial service), fallen into other hands (government), or were no longer a primary means by which British power was asserted (the armed forces). Such schools remained good at breaking attachments, less good at creating them.

But the old forms and the old thinking persisted. The school chaplain used to recite a prayer which began “let us now praise famous men”. Most of those he named were heroes of colonial conquest or territorial wars. Some, such as Douglas Haig and Herbert Kitchener, were by then widely regarded as war criminals. Our dormitories were named after the same people. The history we were taught revolved around topics such as Gordon of Khartoum, Stanley and Livingstone and the Black Hole of Calcutta. In geography, the maps still showed much of the globe coloured red.

My second boarding school was a kinder, more liberal place. But we remained as detached from the rest of society as Carthusian monks. The world, when we were released into it, was unrecognisable. It bore no relationship to our learning or experience. The result was cognitive dissonance: a highly uncomfortable state from which human beings will do almost anything to escape. There were two principal means. One – the more painful – was to question everything you held to be true. This process took me years: in fact it has not ended. It was, at first, highly disruptive to my peace of mind and sense of self.

The other, as US Republicans did during the Bush presidency, is to create your own reality. If the world does not fit your worldview, you either shore up your worldview with selectivity and denial, or (if you have power) you try to bend the world to fit the shape it takes in your mind. Much of the effort of conservative columnists and editors and of certain politicians and historians appears to be devoted to these tasks.

In the Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt explains that the nobles of pre-revolutionary France “did not regard themselves as representative of the nation, but as a separate ruling caste which might have much more in common with a foreign people of the same society and condition than with its compatriots.”(1) Last year the former Republican staffer Mike Lofgren wrote something very similar about the dominant classes of the US: “the rich elites of this country have far more in common with their counterparts in London, Paris, and Tokyo than with their fellow American citizens … the rich disconnect themselves from the civic life of the nation and from any concern about its well being except as a place to extract loot. Our plutocracy now lives like the British in colonial India: in the place and ruling it, but not of it.”(2)

Secession from the concerns and norms of the rest of society characterises any well-established elite. Our own ruling caste, schooled separately, brought up to believe in justifying fairytales, lives in a world of its own, from which it can project power without understanding or even noticing the consequences. A removal from the life of the rest of the nation is no barrier to the desire to dominate it. In fact it appears to be associated with a powerful sense of entitlement.

So if you have wondered how the current government can blithely engage in the wholesale transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich, how its front bench can rock with laughter as it truncates the livelihoods of the poorest people of this country, why it commits troops to ever more pointless post-colonial wars, here, I think, is part of the answer. Many of those who govern us do not in their hearts belong here. They belong to a different culture, a different world, which knows as little of its own acts as it knows of those who suffer them.

Figuring out the Modi speed machine

Vidya Subrahmaniam

The Hindu

Rural Gujarat is in distress and today more and more people seem willing to speak out against Narendra Modi. Yet even his detractors say he will win

You should go to Gujarat only if you can will yourself to dismiss the contrarian signals: Because in the land of Narendra Modi, anything that mars the big picture, which is Narendra Modi himself, can be a red herring.

So much so, even the grouch with the litany of complaints — oh yes, he exists and his tribe is growing — will say in the end that much as he wishes otherwise, nothing can stop the three-time Chief minister from winning again. Apparently, the only point of curiosity in election 2012 is whether Modi will hold his current tally of 117 of 182 Assembly seats or fall behind it and, if the latter, by how much.

The 2007 scenario

I stepped into the Modi minefield in the 2007 Assembly election when the theoretical odds seemed stacked against the Chief Minister. In September of that year, Saurashtra, accounting for 54 seats, had risen in revolt against Modi; in a spectacle quite at odds with the picture of bounty and happiness that was Gujarat in the publicity brochures, over 5 lakh farmers had gathered in Rajkot, denouncing the Chief Minister for leaving them to rot while he ministered to the business-affluent classes. “We will finish you,” the milling, surging crowds vowed, their war-cry echoing off the power corridors of Gandhinagar.

As elections neared, the underclass, their wretchedness revealed in their tattered clothing and the lines on their faces, turned up in hordes to hear Sonia Gandhi. The numbers, formed by Gujarat’s poor, Dalits, Adivasis and Muslims, seemed ranged on her side. This not counting Modi’s own not inconsiderable problems. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, whose cadre worked on the ground to deliver votes to the Bharatiya Janata Party, was deeply discomfited by the growing personality cult around Gujarat’s Chief Minister: The sangh’s once disciplined, devoted foot-soldier was now an icon who inspired hysteria and revelled in it too. An influential local RSS leader told me that Modi had crossed the line on a fundamental sangh belief: vyakti se paksh mahan, paksh se desh mahan (party is greater than person, country is greater than party). Modi as an autonomous power centre also upset sections of the administration, from ministers and bureaucrats to lower level staff, police personnel and teachers. The latter manned the election machinery and conventional wisdom had it that you didn’t win elections by alienating them.

On the other hand, there was Modi’s incredible chemistry with the voters, visible at all his rallies. They wore Modi masks, waved his posters and roared in approval as he made off-colour jokes about Sonia and the Congress. On counting day, the arithmetic came apart. The policeman who had called up a day earlier to tell me “Hitler is losing,” was untraceable. The RSS was numb with shock, and most unbelievably, it was a near clean-sweep for Modi in dissenting Saurashtra. Like Indira Gandhi, Modi had dispensed with party and government — in his case also the sangh — and connected directly with the people. The crowds that attended the Congress chief’s rallies had no one to vote for in the Congress whose local leadership was diminished even more by Modi’s towering presence.

Returning to Gujarat five years later, I’m struck by the far wider rich-poor gulf. Ahmedabad exemplifies Shining Gujarat, with showrooms and shopping plazas to rival the best in Europe. The beautified Sabarmati Riverfront is a captivating sight that is the regime’s newest pride. Happy stories greet the visiting journalist on the mofussil stops along the super highway from the State Capital to Rajkot in Saurashtra. “Narendrabhai, Narendrabhai” chant little children as their parents gush about the rewards of having Modi as Chief Minister: uninterrupted power supply, adequate water, pucca roads, houses, strife and fear-free environment and, above all, a leader who fans the fires of Gujarati asmita (identity) . At Sangani in Chotila, Sarpanch Waghabhai Danabhai describes Modi as a God-send to Gujarat. Next door, Bharatbhai, who is unemployed, gives Modi 130 seats, up 13 from 2007, and insists that after this election, he would be unstoppable on the road to Delhi and Prime Ministership. Bharatbhai is unbothered by his own jobless state.

Off the highway into rural Saurashtra, the narrative changes gradually, yet dramatically — from striking prosperity and raging Modi-mania to poorer habitations and robust Modi-bashing. This is also Keshubhai country. The BJP veteran and now leader of the Gujarat Parivartan Party, had sided with the Congress in 2007 only for his dream to go up in smoke. His Leva Patel community preferred Modi to the Congress. Now his hope is that the GPP will tap into the anger which had no outlet then.

Indeed, in the deeper interiors the shine entirely comes off Gujarat’s magnificent bijli, paani, sadak (power, water, roads) story, told and retold by Modi, and magnified online and offline by his manic fan clubs. Patchy and potholed roads are quite the norm here. The villages here could be from impoverished Uttar Pradesh, judging by the dusty, arid landscape, rundown homes, dark, dank shops, and turbaned men sitting around in groups, their foreheads creased in anxiety over the persistent drought conditions and what that means for their cotton crop. The luckier villages here get water once in three days for 15-odd minutes, others wait up to a week or more. Modi has promised a massive irrigation project for the region but what looms large for now is acute water scarcity made worse by reduced job prospects and runaway prices of essentials.

For Premjibhai, who works as a daily wager on the cotton fields, no water means almost no money to take home. “Vikas (development)? What vikas? Can’t you see the conditions here? Modi speaks for the rich and they speak for him. I hope Keshubhai defeats Modi but it won’t happen because Modi is too clever.”

Industrialised North Gujarat has always boasted a healthy bottom line, and this is reflected in the region’s admiration for Modi. “Sautaka (hundred per cent) he will win,” is a familiar one-liner in these parts. But here too there are strong anti-Modi voices, and as in Saurashtra, he is portrayed as the rich man’s Chief Minister without a care for the poor and the marginalised. At Nugar village in Becharaji, Mehsana, Ganpatbhai, a destitute lower-caste tailor rants against Modi, “Write this down,” he shouts, charging with his fists at the Sarpanch who tries to shut him up, “the darji jaat [tailor caste] doesn’t get plots. Modi is a capitalist surrounded by rich industrialists. And the village headmen are in league with him.” As I leave, Ganpatbhai says grumpily, “I know Modi will win.”

Scary

Why is Modi’s victory treated as a given? Is it because the Congress in Gujarat is in abject surrender? Or is it because people have been conditioned not to see beyond Modi? The magic Modi works on his audience is to be seen to be believed. Modi was scheduled to address an election meeting on October 9 at 7 p.m. in Ahmedabad. He arrived at 10 p.m. to frenzied crowds asking for more — and more. An hour earlier, BJP managers had flung poll memorabilia at them: Modi masks, Modi posters, Modi gloves, Modi T-shirts, bandana, scarves and the works. If the sight of ordinary men turning in an instant into thousands of Modis, waving thousands of Modi posters, was unnerving, the music that pumped them up — relating the gatha (story) of Gujarat and Modi — was infinitely more scary, macho, muscular and intended to induce fear and admiration.

As the crowds grew restive, the organisers pressed other resources into service: high-ranking party functionaries eulogised Modi, a folk singer compared him to Shivaji, Prithviraj Chauhan and Vivekananda. But the masked men would have none of it. “Not you, not you” they cried, as a line-up of partymen competed to paint Modi in hagiographic shades. Modi finally arrived, giving the audience their paisa-wasool moment. He mocked at Sonia and Manmohan Singh, knowing that would elicit the laughs. And he thundered and rallied — “Pradhan Mantriji, don’t you dare trifle with Gujarat” — knowing that would stir the Gujarati pride, his ever-ever formula for success.

India was Indira and Indira was India. But in Gujarat today, every Gujarati is Modi. Or so you are told by Modi himself. His blog, narendramodi.in, says: “In the by lanes of Gujarat’s towns and cities, on the fields of Gujarat, on the coasts of Gujarat, people [are] taking pride in saying one thing — Hoon to Modi No Manas Chu [I am Modi’s person!]” No BJP here. Only Modi.

As in 2007, so in 2012, perhaps more so this time: Saurashtra is angry, the RSS is openly backing Keshubhai, who now has his own party — even a few seats lost in Saurashtra would be a setback for Modi — and there is disaffection within the Gujarat administration. But 58 per cent of Gujarat is urban which is Modi’s strength. The Modi speed machine overrode all obstacles in 2007. What now? Over to December 20, 2012.

Keywords: Narendra Modi, Gujarat politics, Gujarat Assembly elections

Is Marxism on the rise again?

Why Marxism is on the rise again

Capitalism is in crisis across the globe – but what on earth is the alternative? Well, what about the musings of a certain 19th-century German philosopher? Yes, Karl Marx is going mainstream – and goodness knows where it will end

• 
• • Stuart Jeffries
  • guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 4 July 2012 20.00 BST

A public sector worker striking in east London last year. Photograph: KeystoneUSA-ZUMA / Rex Features

Class conflict once seemed so straightforward. Marx and Engels wrote in the second best-selling book of all time, The Communist Manifesto: "What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable." (The best-selling book of all time, incidentally, is the Bible – it only feels like it's 50 Shades of Grey.)

Today, 164 years after Marx and Engels wrote about grave-diggers, the truth is almost the exact opposite. The proletariat, far from burying capitalism, are keeping it on life support. Overworked, underpaid workers ostensibly liberated by the largest socialist revolution in history (China's) are driven to the brink of suicide to keep those in the west playing with their iPads. Chinese money bankrolls an otherwise bankrupt America.

The irony is scarcely wasted on leading Marxist thinkers. "The domination of capitalism globally depends today on the existence of a Chinese Communist party that gives de-localised capitalist enterprises cheap labour to lower prices and deprive workers of the rights of self-organisation," says Jacques Rancière, the French marxist thinker and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris VIII. "Happily, it is possible to hope for a world less absurd and more just than today's."

That hope, perhaps, explains another improbable truth of our economically catastrophic times – the revival in interest in Marx and Marxist thought. Sales of Das Kapital, Marx's masterpiece of political economy, have soared ever since 2008, as have those of The Communist Manifesto and the Grundrisse (or, to give it its English title, Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy). Their sales rose as British workers bailed out the banks to keep the degraded system going and the snouts of the rich firmly in their troughs while the rest of us struggle in debt, job insecurity or worse. There's even a Chinese theatre director called He Nian who capitalised on Das Kapital's renaissance to create an all-singing, all-dancing musical.

And in perhaps the most lovely reversal of the luxuriantly bearded revolutionary theorist's fortunes, Karl Marx was recently chosen from a list of 10 contenders to appear on a new issue of MasterCard by customers of German bank Sparkasse in Chemnitz. In communist East Germany from 1953 to 1990, Chemnitz was known as Karl Marx Stadt. Clearly, more than two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the former East Germany hasn't airbrushed its Marxist past. In 2008, Reuters reports, a survey of east Germans found 52% believed the free-market economy was "unsuitable" and 43% said they wanted socialism back. Karl Marx may be dead and buried in Highgate cemetery, but he's alive and well among credit-hungry Germans. Would Marx have appreciated the irony of his image being deployed on a card to get Germans deeper in debt? You'd think.

Later this week in London, several thousand people will attend Marxism 2012, a five-day festival organised by the Socialist Workers' Party. It's an annual event, but what strikes organiser Joseph Choonara is how, in recent years, many more of its attendees are young. "The revival of interest in Marxism, especially for young people comes because it provides tools for analysing capitalism, and especially capitalist crises such as the one we're in now," Choonara says.

There has been a glut of books trumpeting Marxism's relevance. English literature professor Terry Eagleton last year published a book called Why Marx Was Right. French Maoist philosopher Alain Badiou published a little red book called The Communist Hypothesis with a red star on the cover (very Mao, very now) in which he rallied the faithful to usher in the third era of the communist idea (the previous two having gone from the establishment of the French Republic in 1792 to the massacre of the Paris communards in 1871, and from 1917 to the collapse of Mao's Cultural Revolution in 1976). Isn't this all a delusion?

Aren't Marx's venerable ideas as useful to us as the hand loom would be to shoring up Apple's reputation for innovation? Isn't the dream of socialist revolution and communist society an irrelevance in 2012? After all, I suggest to Rancière, the bourgeoisie has failed to produce its own gravediggers. Rancière refuses to be downbeat: "The bourgeoisie has learned to make the exploited pay for its crisis and to use them to disarm its adversaries. But we must not reverse the idea of historical necessity and conclude that the current situation is eternal. The gravediggers are still here, in the form of workers in precarious conditions like the over-exploited workers of factories in the far east. And today's popular movements – Greece or elsewhere – also indicate that there's a new will not to let our governments and our bankers inflict their crisis on the people."

 Protestors at the Conservative conference last year. Photograph: KeystoneUSA-ZUMA / Rex Features

That, at least, is the perspective of a seventysomething Marxist professor. What about younger people of a Marxist temper? I ask Jaswinder Blackwell-Pal, a 22 year-old English and drama student at Goldsmiths College, London, who has just finished her BA course in English and Drama, why she considers Marxist thought still relevant. "The point is that younger people weren't around when Thatcher was in power or when Marxism was associated with the Soviet Union," she says. "We tend to see it more as a way of understanding what we're going through now. Think of what's happening in Egypt. When Mubarak fell it was so inspiring. It broke so many stereotypes – democracy wasn't supposed to be something that people would fight for in the Muslim world. It vindicates revolution as a process, not as an event. So there was a revolution in Egypt, and a counter-revolution and a counter-counter revolution. What we learned from it was the importance of organisation."

This, surely is the key to understanding Marxism's renaissance in the west: for younger people, it is untainted by association with Stalinist gulags. For younger people too, Francis Fukuyama's triumphalism in his 1992 book The End of History – in which capitalism seemed incontrovertible, its overthrow impossible to imagine – exercises less of a choke-hold on their imaginations than it does on those of their elders.

Blackwell-Pal will be speaking Thursday on Che Guevara and the Cuban revolution at the Marxism festival. "It's going to be the first time I'll have spoken on Marxism," she says nervously. But what's the point thinking about Guevara and Castro in this day and age? Surely violent socialist revolution is irrelevant to workers' struggles today? "Not at all!" she replies. "What's happening in Britain is quite interesting. We have a very, very weak government mired in in-fighting. I think if we can really organise we can oust them." Could Britain have its Tahrir Square, its equivalent to Castro's 26th of July Movement? Let a young woman dream. After last year's riots and today with most of Britain alienated from the rich men in its government's cabinet, only a fool would rule it out.

For a different perspective I catch up with Owen Jones, 27-year-old poster boy of the new left and author of the bestselling politics book of 2011, Chavs: the Demonisation of the Working Class. He's on the train to Brighton to address the Unite conference. "There isn't going to be a bloody revolution in Britain, but there is hope for a society by working people and for working people," he counsels.

Indeed, he says, in the 1860s the later Marx imagined such a post-capitalist society as being won by means other than violent revolution. "He did look at expanding the suffrage and other peaceful means of achieving socialist society. Today not even the Trotskyist left call for armed revolution. The radical left would say that the break with capitalism could only be achieved by democracy and organisation of working people to establish and hold on to that just society against forces that would destroy it."

Jones recalls that his father, a Militant supporter in the 1970s, held to the entryist idea of ensuring the election of a Labour government and then organising working people to make sure that government delivered. "I think that's the model," he says. How very un-New Labour. That said, after we talk, Jones texts me to make it clear he's not a Militant supporter or Trotskyist. Rather, he wants a Labour government in power that will pursue a radical political programme. He has in mind the words of Labour's February 1974 election manifesto which expressed the intention to "Bring about a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in favour of working people and their families". Let a young man dream.

What's striking about Jones's literary success is that it's premised on the revival of interest in class politics, that foundation stone of Marx and Engels's analysis of industrial society. "If I had written it four years earlier it would have been dismissed as a 1960s concept of class," says Jones. "But class is back in our reality because the economic crisis affects people in different ways and because the Coalition mantra that 'We're all in this together' is offensive and ludicrous. It's impossible to argue now as was argued in the 1990s that we're all middle class. This government's reforms are class-based. VAT rises affect working people disproportionately, for instance.

"It's an open class war," he says. "Working-class people are going to be worse off in 2016 than they were at the start of the century. But you're accused of being a class warrior if you stand up for 30% of the population who suffers this way."

This chimes with something Rancière told me. The professor argued that "one thing about Marxist thought that remains solid is class struggle. The disappearance of our factories, that's to say de-industrialisation of our countries and the outsourcing of industrial work to the countries where labour is less expensive and more docile, what else is this other than an act in the class struggle by the ruling bourgeoisie?"

There's another reason why Marxism has something to teach us as we struggle through economic depression, other than its analysis of class struggle. It is in its analysis of economic crisis. In his formidable new tome Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, Slavoj Žižek tries to apply Marxist thought on economic crises to what we're enduring right now. Žižek considers the fundamental class antagonism to be between "use value" and "exchange value".

What's the difference between the two? Each commodity has a use value, he explains, measured by its usefulness in satisfying needs and wants. The exchange value of a commodity, by contrast, is traditionally measured by the amount of labour that goes into making it. Under current capitalism, Žižek argues, exchange value becomes autonomous. "It is transformed into a spectre of self-propelling capital which uses the productive capacities and needs of actual people only as its temporary disposable embodiment. Marx derived his notion of economic crisis from this very gap: a crisis occurs when reality catches up with the illusory self-generating mirage of money begetting more money – this speculative madness cannot go on indefinitely, it has to explode in even more serious crises. The ultimate root of the crisis for Marx is the gap between use and exchange value: the logic of exchange-value follows its own path, its own made dance, irrespective of the real needs of real people."

In such uneasy times, who better to read than the greatest catastrophist theoriser of human history, Karl Marx? And yet the renaissance of interest in Marxism has been pigeonholed as an apologia for Stalinist totalitarianism. In a recent blog on "the newcommunism" for the journal World Affairs, Alan Johnson, professor of democratic theory and practice at Edge Hill University in Lancashire, wrote: "A worldview recently the source of immense suffering and misery, and responsible for more deaths than fascism and Nazism, is mounting a comeback; a new form of leftwing totalitarianism that enjoys intellectual celebrity but aspires to political power.

"The New Communism matters not because of its intellectual merits but because it may yet influence layers of young Europeans in the context of an exhausted social democracy, austerity and a self-loathing intellectual culture," wrote Johnson. "Tempting as it is, we can't afford to just shake our heads and pass on by."

That's the fear: that these nasty old left farts such as Žižek, Badiou, Rancière and Eagleton will corrupt the minds of innocent youth. But does reading Marx and Engels's critique of capitalism mean that you thereby take on a worldview responsible for more deaths than the Nazis? Surely there is no straight line from The Communist Manifesto to the gulags, and no reason why young lefties need uncritically to adopt Badiou at his most chilling. In his introduction to a new edition of The Communist Manifesto, Professor Eric Hobsbawm suggests that Marx was right to argue that the "contradictions of a market system based on no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous 'cash payment', a system of exploitation and of 'endless accumulation' can never be overcome: that at some point in a series of transformations and restructurings the development of this essentially destabilising system will lead to a state of affairs that can no longer be described as capitalism".

That is post-capitalist society as dreamed of by Marxists. But what would it be like? "It is extremely unlikely that such a 'post-capitalist society' would respond to the traditional models of socialism and still less to the 'really existing' socialisms of the Soviet era," argues Hobsbawm, adding that it will, however, necessarily involve a shift from private appropriation to social management on a global scale. "What forms it might take and how far it would embody the humanist values of Marx's and Engels's communism, would depend on the political action through which this change came about."

This is surely Marxism at its most liberating, suggesting that our futures depend on us and our readiness for struggle. Or as Marx and Engels put it at the end of The Communist Manifesto: "Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win."