Demand the impossible

[argilligan]

Why is Donald Trump the president of the United States?

To the surprise of most observers, Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election in the United States. It is clear that an important task at the present time is to oppose his policies and the political climate they have helped to build. Trump has already signed orders that are, among other things, racist, sexist, and Islamophobic, bringing millions of people around the world to the streets to oppose him. But as well as tackling the consequences of Donald Trump being president of the US, it is important to understand the reasons why there was a Republican victory in the November elections: what does this tell us about the underlying political and social climate in the US?

Particularly from outside of the US, it seems odd that although Clinton gained 2.5 million more votes than Trump nationally, it is Trump that sits in the White House. The reason for this is, in short, that the Democrats lost in Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Iowa, Michigan and Wisconsin. In all states apart from Maine and Nebraska a presidential candidate simply needs to be the person with the most votes in that state to win all the electoral college votes, so a win of 51% is worth just as much as a win of 85%. Because the Democrats lost the Electoral College votes of the six states mentioned above, Trump was able to far exceed the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the presidency.

All six of the states that changed from Democrat to Republican in 2016 were viewed, rightly, as battleground state prior to the election. With the exception of Florida, they had predominantly voted Democrat in the previous six presidential elections, albeit sometimes with very slim margins.

We focus here on trying to understand what changed from 2012 to 2016 by comparing electoral and demographic data on a county-by-county basis within these states, and then compare these results to similar analysis across the US. Looking at the data on this level of granularity means we can hopefully better tease out some of the details that get smoothed out when looking at the state as a whole. In particular we are interested in what demographic factors correlate with the relative change in vote for the Democrats and Republicans, respectively, from 2012 to 2016.

It is reasonable to say that Clinton lost the election just as much, if not more, than Trump won it: the Democrat vote went down in 2689 of the 3107 counties examined across the US, and many cases the Democrat loss was numerically larger than the Republican gain. Thus understanding the change in Democrat vote is as important as understanding the change in Republican vote to gain a clear picture of the election results.

To come up with explanations as to what is happening in the world, we need to augment our own experiences with data gathered by others.  This can mean reading journalists’ reports of events, but it can also mean looking at demographic information.  While demographic information is only a part of the story, the far left is currently too weak across the world to be able to answer the question through daily conversations with others. Looking at demographic and polling information rather than exit polls has the advantage of covering a much larger section of the population so hopefully having more accurate results.  

We investigate thirteen demographic variables:

Percentage of population below the poverty line

Percentage of the population over 25 with a bachelors degree

Percentage of the population over 25 who graduated high school

Percentage of the population who are homeowners

Percentage of the population aged over 65

Percentage population change between 2010 and 2014

Median household income

Percentage foreign born population

Percentage white (non-Hispanic) population

Percentage black population

Percentage Hispanic/latino population

Percentage Native American/Native Alaskan population

Percentage Asian population

We express the measure of correlation in terms of the correlation coefficient, r.  An r value of 0 indicates no correlation (i.e. the two things have no relation), 1 indicates a perfect positive correlation and -1 a perfect negative correlation.

Change in Democrat vote

In the six states that changed from Democrat to Republican in 2016, the strongest and most consistent correlation with the change in Democrat vote from 2012 to 2016 as a proportion of the 2012 vote is found to be the proportion of the population who have bachelor degrees. Looking at the data for each state on a county-by-county basis, the correlation coefficient, r, ranges from 0.76-0.94 and, as can be seen in the figure above, there is a strong positive correlation in each state, although the model describing the data does change slightly on a state-by-state basis. This is an important demographic factor in most other states too: our results show a strong (r>0.7) positive correlation in 32 of the states investigated, and a moderate (r=0.5-0.7) positive correlation in a further 9 states: the lower the proportion of people in an area with a degree, the larger the decrease in the Democrat vote as a proportion of the 2012 Democrat vote.

There are strong to moderate positive correlations with the population change in the six changed states, ranging from 0.65 to 0.76. Although some of the change in vote may be due to actual changes in the population, the change in Democrat vote is in many cases an order of magnitude or more larger than the population change. The correlation of change in Democrat vote with population change is an important factor in other states too: of the 48 states investigated 18 show strong correlations and a further 14 show moderate correlations.

Other factors showing strong to moderate correlations with the change in Democrat vote in most of the states that changed from Democrat to Republican in 2016 are percentage Asian population (r=0.60 to 0.88), median household income (r=0.59 to 0.73), percentage foreign born population (r=0.42 to 0.87). These are all factors that show strong to moderate correlations in many of the other states investigated, although non are as a consistently strong correlation as the proportion of people with bachelors degrees. With the exception of Florida, percentage population over 65 (r=-0.46 to -0.74, Florida 0.08) also shows a strong to moderate negative correlation, although many other states only show a weak correlation.

Poverty shows a weak negative correlation to no correlation with the change in Democrat vote, and across all states there is a wide range in r values: it does not show a consistent pattern. A similar pattern is observed with respect to homeownership there is a weak negative correlation in the changed states, but no consistent pattern across the board. With the exception of the Asian population other racial demographics show only weak correlations. There is a generally negative correlation with respect to the white population, generally positive with respect to Black and Hispanic/Latino populations and no consistent correlation with respect to the Native American/Native Alaskan population.  

Change in Republican vote 

Looking at the change in Republican votes from 2012 to 2016 it is not surprising to see some of the trends from the change in the Democrat votes mirrored, although the correlations are generally weaker and less consistent between states. The proportion of people with Bachelors degrees remains the strongest correlation for all of the changed states, apart from Florida, with r values of -0.68 to -0.87 (Florida r=-0.28): the lower the proportion of people with bachelors degrees in a state, the more the Republican vote went up by. Looking at the data set as a whole, the strong correlation with change in Republican vote and percentage bachelor’s degrees holds generally true for states where the Democrats won in 2016 and 2012, but the correlation is weaker in states that voted Republican in 2016 and 2012.

A difference in the correlation coefficients between Democrat and Republican voting states can also be seen in the correlations with population change, median household income and Asian population, with all of these showing moderate correlations in Democrat voting states, but much weaker correlation, and sometimes of the opposite trend, in Republican voting states. Such differences are not really seen in the correlation coefficients for the change in Democrat vote.

Combining factors to produce a better model

In order to fully understand what happened it is useful to look at combinations of factors.  To do this we produced the best linear model looking at all the counties in changed states. This was done for both change in Democrat vote and change in Republican vote, the models being different in each case.

Looking at change in Democrat vote, a model of four factors was found.  These were percentage bachelor’s degree, percentage Hispanic/Latino population, percentage black population, and change in population. Combining these four factors gave a model that was an improvement on using the percentage of people with bachelor’s only. The results of the model are shown on the graph below. (Fl = blue, IA = red, MI = green, OH = yellow, PA = magenta, WI = cyan).  It is worth noting that there is a positive correlation with all of the parts of the model (i.e. the Democrats did better when there were more people with degrees or a higher proportion of black or latino people or where the population is increasing). The model fits the data quite well and better than fitting individual demographic factors on their own.

Having produced the model based on data from the six states that changed hands in 2016 it is interesting to see which other states fit this pattern.  The model was tested individually on all 48 states in our study and they were ranked according to how well they fit the model.  The model can account for over 70% of the variance in 24 of the 48 states, indicating the trends found in the swing states were replicated across many parts of US, but not everywhere.  The following table shows the states listed in order of how well they fit the pattern. States highlighted in orange are taken from Wikipedia list of swing states. In yellow are the six states that switched from Democrat to Republican in last election.  The list of states the model best fits are mostly Democrat voting states or states the Republicans have recently taken from the Democrats.

When carrying out the same analysis on the Republican vote the results were not as clear.  The change in Republican vote could not be modelled as well using the demographic information.  A model containing six factors was produced: percentage of people with bachelor’s degrees, percentage black population, percentage over 65, percentage below the poverty line, percentage of people who graduated high school and percentage population change.  For the change in Republican vote, the proportion of people with degrees and black population both had a negative effect, the rest were positive. The model was only able to describe just over half the variation present in the data and adding in other demographic factors was unable to improve the model further.  The graph shows the model is reasonably accurate, but it fails to explain the counties with the largest increases in Republican vote, tending to underestimate the change in vote there.

The same model was then used to try and explain the Republican vote change in the other states. As is to be expected, it is a worse model than that for the change in Democrat vote and only explains the vote change well in a small number of states.

The high values for Delaware and Rhode Island are not reliable as neither contain enough counties for accurate analysis by this method.  Wisconsin and Michigan are the only two of the states that swung to Trump that the model fits well. It is again worth noting the model appears to fit Democrat voting states better than Republican ones.

Discussion

While there are some limitations of using demographic data to try to analyse election results in this way, it is an analysis based on facts rather than trying to fit the world to how we want it to be.  Having a clear picture of how the world actually is, rather than how we would like it to be is an important step in deciding how we take the movement forward.  

Looking at change in Democrat vote, our results show that the strongest correlation is with the proportion of the population with degrees. We do not think this is because of ‘education’ in a narrow sense. Furthermore, the analysis we present here doesn’t necessarily tell us how people with or without degrees (or indeed any of the other demographic factors) behaved in the election. Rather, what the results do demonstrate is that areas with higher proportion of people with degrees, and areas that don’t, behaved differently when it came to giving Clinton support compared to how they had voted with respect to Obama. Explanations are more likely to lie understanding what the effects are of there being more or fewer people with degrees in these areas and why this difference has arisen.  

People who have degrees are largely more mobile than people who do not, and are more likely to move. Specifically, they are more likely to move to areas with more jobs, in a similar way to how many migrants behave. Thus areas with more jobs are likely to be the ones with the highest proportion of people with bachelor’s degrees.

While there has been some limited and partial recovery from the 2007-08 crash in the US, this has been quite uneven, with some areas that were badly hit seeing little improvement or things getting worse. A study by Georgetown University in 2016 showed that of the 11.6 million new jobs created since the recession, only 80,000 went to those without some post-high school education after this group lost 5.6 million jobs between December 2007 and January 2010. In contrast, 8.4 million new jobs went to those with bachelors degrees or higher. Further, they find that 57% of all wages in the US go to bachelor’s degree holders, despite, at present, those with degrees making up 36% of the workforce.  

People may have, rightly, felt abandoned by the Democrats over the last eight years, and so abandoned the party when it came to the polls.  

The Republican vote change is less well described by the demographic factors examined here. This possibly indicates there are significant political variations between different counties which determine to at least some extent people’s enthusiasm for voting Trump versus just staying at home.

Finally notable that on a state level that it is possible to draw quite clear divides between Republican and Democrat voting states based on some of the  demographic categories (although not all). Once again the proportion of people with degrees is marks out an important dividing line.

Only two Republican voting states, including the ones which changed to Republican in 2016, have a proportion of people with degrees over national average of 28.3%. These are Utah, which is unusual in having a high Mormon population, and Kansas. Further, only three Democrat voting states had proportions of people with degrees below national average: New Mexico and Nevada, both of which have high Latino populations, and Maine, which actually saw one of its five electoral college votes go to the Republicans rather than the Democrats.

This possibly shows that the proportion of people with a degree is a signifier of longer term divides between Republican and Democrat states.  This may indicate that the result of this election and how people voted was a continuation of ongoing national trends rather than a break with them.

Conclusion

We have carried out an analysis of the election result using demographic data.  This has shown that areas with a lower proportion of people with degrees saw the biggest drop in Democrat vote.  This trend holds across Democrat and swing states but to a lesser degree in Republican states.  This model can be improved by taking account of racial make up of the areas and also changes in population.  The changes in Republican vote can not be modelled as well using demographic data, although a similar but weaker trend is observed.  While demographic analysis alone does not provide us with answers to the important political questions of what do we do now, our explanation of the election result needs to be consistent with reality and demographic information can help us understand what that reality is.  

- AG and DW 

[argilligan]

What do the referendum results show – and where now?

Three things need to be disentangled when thinking about the EU referendum results: (a) why people voted the way they did, (b) what the consequences now will now be of a leave vote and (c) what the consequences might be of Britain leaving the EU, and the process by which this might happen. 

The closeness of the vote and because, according the Lord Ashcroft polling, 19% of people made their mind up on the way to the polling station, means any analysis need to try and understand both why people voted remain and why they voted leave. It is entirely possible that the vote could have gone the other way and so if we ignore motivations on either side this doesn’t give us the full picture of what the state of play is in British politics at the moment. Given the closeness of the vote, and the fact that the working class represents the vast majority of society, I don’t think it can be seen as a working class voting one way or the other.

The trends on the Guardian site, comparing the EU referendum vote and demographics of these areas, show the strongest correlations with the percentage of residents with higher education (the higher the percentage, the higher the remain vote) and percentage of residents with no formal qualifications (the higher the percentage, the higher the leave vote). The correlations with median annual income and median age are very weak. There is some correlation between a higher median annual income and a remain vote in London, however the higher cost of living in London has to be taken into account – people might not necessarily be better off than people on a lower annual income in parts of the county where housing costs aren’t as high, for example. There is some correlation with ABC1 social grade – but this is stronger among leave voters than remain voters. Places with a high percentage of the population born outside the UK (>30%) had a higher remain vote, however there was no correlation with lower a lower percentage of the of population born outside of the UK. 

For all six of these trends areas in Scotland dominate the outliers (along with some parts of London). How people voted in the EU referendum in these places was quite different to places with similar demographics in England. It seems like there are some factors that could be important given the rhetoric around ‘control’ from the leave side: devolution, the independence referendum and feeling like there is some viable alternative to Labour and the Tories in the SNP. It could be that some Scottish voters didn’t feel quite as out of control as their counterparts in England (and Wales).

Generally it would be instructive to understand the different trajectory that Scotland has undergone over the last 40 years – in the 1975 EC referendum Scotland was the least pro-EC area in the UK. In that referendum the only areas that voted no in the entire country were both in Scotland: Eilean Siar and Shetland. The difference in the vote this time is unlikely to be dominated by factors related to the EU directly.

Sturgeon seems keen to try to keep Scotland in the EU, with various options being floated around from a reverse-Greenland to an independent Scotland joining the EU. A Sunday Post poll this weekend shows that 59% (65% removing don’t knows) now support independence. If there is another independence referendum, where the question of EU membership will loom over it more so than last time, part of the challenge for socialists will be ensuring that a campaign for independence can exist separately from cheerleading the EU. The idea of a border-poll on Irish reunification has also been raised by Sinn Fein.

For England and Wales, places with higher internal migration (both people leaving and coming to an area) had higher numbers of people voting remain. Looking at the maps of how different areas of England voted two things are particularly striking. Firstly it is very easy to spot where the cities are because they overwhelmingly voted remain, while rural areas generally voted leave. Urban/rural fringe locations (e.g. places like Rochdale, Oldham etc.) also seem to largely voted leave. These are largely places with a strong Labour presence in the councils. It is possible that more complicated patterns could emerge in these places if data were available on a ward level. The striking exceptions to the cities pattern are Birmingham, which, albeit closely, voted to leave and Sheffield. The second notable thing is that it highlights a split in Tory voters - around Oxfordshire and the Cotswolds (the area Cameron is from) people voted to remain, as they did in London, while in other traditionally Tory areas went for leave. 

Comparing with the make up of councils in England (because of how the votes were counted this is the easiest direct comparison rather than Westminster constituencies), there is no correlation with proportion of Labour or Tory councilors. For other parties there is also no correlation, however the numbers are too small to meaningful. It is possible some trends could emerge if you looked at the proportion of the vote in each ward for each party (i.e. there might be 80% Labour councilors but these only won 30% of the vote share and UKIP won 25% or Labour might have won by 70%) but this requires more work to get the data in that form.

 The Tories are not in that good shape, but neither are Labour. The pro-Brexit Tories face the problem of winning but having essentially no plan. Aside from the immediate questions surrounding Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party, Labour hasn’t fixed their more existential crisis of what the Labour Party is. Is Labour - or the right wing of it at least - actually a reformist party anymore? The Tories’ different wings have representation in both the parliamentary party and the wider membership and I think a clearer vision of what unites them overall. In Labour there is a wider gulf between the parliamentary party and the membership, and is more uncertainty about its overall political trajectory. That said, in England it is difficult to see where the Labour vote could go to - there isn’t the SNP or other equivalent force - so they could continue on, and Corybn does have a mass of support as a 10,000 strong rally called at 24 hours notice clearly shows.

According to the Lord Ashcroft (and other) polls young people overwhelming supported remain. Following the vote there have been various expressions of despair that this vote has destroyed their future (as something distinct to worries around increased racism and what effect it will have on migrants). There is bitterness that 16 and 17 years olds weren’t allowed to vote and that people who will affected for the shortest amount of time were the ones who wanted it to happen. Millennials (roughly people born between 1980 and 1995 – 21-36 year olds), and those younger than them, seem to have more europhile - distinct from feelings about the EU as institution - tendencies. Understanding why they feel this strong connection to ‘Europe’ is worthy if further investigation.

The differences in the voting patterns of young people can’t be put down to “youthfulness” but more likely reflect material differences in people’s lives. Given that the percentage of people with a degree was probably strongest indicator of how people in an area would vote it seems that the social role of universities is something that needs deeper consideration, in addition to the educational and economic role that they play. This is not to for one moment say that this vote is anything to do with ‘intelligence’. Close to 50% of young people now go to university and have been doing for over a decade now, representing a far more significant demographic change than in the 60s and 70s, which I think did see some expression in how younger people voted in the EU referendum, but may represent some deeper change across the working class more generally. 

The remain vote, for many, was because they believed (not necessarily correctly) that this was a way to prevent an increase in racism, show solidarity with migrants, and to protect workers’ rights.  However wrong we might think people were to think that the EU is in safeguarding migrant rights or workplace rights, the fact that people were wanting these things to happen is something positive. Realistically these (largely remain) people are probably the ones that we have the most chance of working with in the immediate/medium term because of geography and other demographics they are most likely to be the people that we know, given the areas where the far left in the UK has any significant presence voted to remain.

It is interesting to note that the places in Northern Ireland where People Before Profit won seats in the Stormont assembly recently (Foyle and West Belfast)  – by far the best success of the far left electorally for a while – had overwhelmingly large votes for remain. Foyle had the 4th highest remain vote in the whole referendum.

The fact that the referendum was called in the first place has shifted the political terrain in such as way that racists feel more confident, and that more mainstream politicians make anti-immigrant speeches. The anti-immigrant vote dominated the leave vote - much of this probably wasn’t explicitly racist, but people did see fewer immigrants, as was being suggested by the leave campaign, as a solution to their problems. A challenge is whether we (or anyone else) can persuade them that this isn’t a solution.  

Entirely expectedly there has been an uptick in reported racist incidents since the referendum result as a result of racist feeling emboldened. Even if polls don’t necessarily show an increased support for racist parties (i.e. UKIP) these cannot be dismissed. Fighting against this racism has to be a priority. Relatedly since the referendum result many EU migrants feel more insecure - lots of people have reported people coming into work or phoning them in tears on Friday morning. We need prioritise pro-migrant, pro-open borders work.  

We don’t know what Brexit (indeed if it actually happens) will look like yet. Given Johnson didn’t actually want to leave the EU, but rather wanted a leave vote to get a better deal in the EU, it seems likely that he would push for something as close to the status quo as possible (a Norway-type model perhaps). But this doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t try and use Brexit as an excuse to crack down on migrant rights, again highlighting the need, again, to prioritise this work.  

While it was right to dismiss pretty much all of the remain scaremongering around Brexit, it could have an impact on people’s working lives and could well lead to job cuts due to lack of funding from the EU - but this is likely to focussed in some specific industries i.e. Higher education and research, charities, environmental. Without sowing illusions in the EU, we will probably have to try and defend jobs and conditions that could likely happen as a result as Brexit.

Considering the positions that the left, and specifically people in rs21 took prior to the vote, I think it was perfectly possible to have the exact same analysis of the nature of the EU and British politics, but still come to different conclusions about how to vote: divisions largely seemed to lie around whether this was a question of principles or tactics, thinking about consequences of the vote vs effect of Brexit, a dominant focus of wider european context vs dominant view around British politics. Various assumptions and gambles were about what might happen both positively and negatively - now we have to both see, and attempt to shape, what might happen next.  

[argilligan]

Motivations of remain and leave are strongly split in EU referendum

I got distracted today at work while code was running and ended up looking in detail at the latest YouGov survey. It shows that those wanting to leave the EU or remain are even on 39% and that Cameron’s ratings have taken a beating in the last few weeks, while Corbyn’s are creeping up.

One the more surprising results in the poll was that "Which is likely to help us deal better with the issue of immigration” comes third in response to the question "Which ONE of the following will be most important to you in deciding how to vote in the [EU] referendum?” with 16% (1% down from an earlier poll in February). This is behind "Which is likely to be better for jobs, investment and the economy generally”  and "Which is likely to strike a better balance between Britain's right to act independently, and the appropriate level of co-operation with other countries”, both of which have 31%. So this would potentially indicate that suggesting that immigration is the dominant issue in the EU referendum is wrong. However, YouGov fortunately provides a more detailed breakdown of the results, and this is where I think things get interesting.

The majority (56%) of those saying they want to remain in the EU say that “jobs, investment and the economy in general” is the most important factor to them. For leave voters it is "Britain’s right to act independently” (39%) and “dealing with immigration” (31%) dominate.  

These trends are also reflected in responses to questions as to how people think various things will change as a result of Britain leaving the EU (pages 12 and 14). 82% of those wanting to leave think it will result in less immigration, from which an inference (possibly not necessarily valid, but unfortunately I suspect true) may be drawn that reducing immigration is a strong motivating factor in them wanting to leave the EU. The other things where there is a majority view among leave voters are it being good for the NHS (64%) (it would be good if this was about TTIP, although I suspect it is probably about a false idea of immigrants using the NHS), thinking that there will be less terrorism (50%) (also I suspect driven by racist notions), and that Britain will be better off economically (53%). Majorities of leave voters also think it will make no difference to pensions (63%), their personal finances (61%) and Britain’s influence in the world (57%).

For remain voters, it is only on the question of Britain’s economy - 74% of remain voters think it will be worse if Britain left - where there is a clearly opposite position to leavers, and even this is a much more strongly held position. Remain voters do seem more motivated by economic issues more generally - a majority think Britain leaving will be bad for jobs (75%) and that prices will go up (72%). A majority of remainers think Britain will have less influence in the world (69%) and that it will make no difference to terrorism (61%). There isn’t a clear position on any of the other issues.

So what can we draw from these figures? My reading of them is that, generally, and as is often the case in elections, each side is motivated by different questions.  Of those surveyed, immigration plays a much larger role in people’s decision to vote to leave the EU, and that they seem to have more anti-immigrant views. Remainers are more motivated issues around jobs and money, although from these particular questions motivations around these don’t necessarily come from a progressive place. It is not that people are voting to stay because they are pro-migrant, nor, for the most part, that people are voting to leave because of economic issues.

In the period immediately following the referendum I think what people think they have voted for will be most important - any actual changes either way will take significantly longer to manifest. A leave vote, based on this data, I think would give confidence to anti-immigrant forces, but many on the remain side wouldn’t necessarily be seeing it as a sign that they need to join pro-migrant campaigns. A leave vote would be a loss for pro-migrant campaigns, but a remain vote wouldn’t automatically be a win. On the other hand, a remain vote could well be seen as implicit support for the Tories austerity policies (who are the main architects of austerity in the UK, not the EU), and is no guarantee of migrants rights, although the breadth of the remain camp (from Corbyn to Cameron) perhaps means this outcome will be more ambiguous. There is probably a higher proportion of people who are voting remain for progressive reasons than there are people voting leave for progressive reasons.  

In the run up to the referendum and beyond, regardless of personal feelings about a leave or stay vote, I think the priority needs to be around migrant solidarity and opposing austerity through protests, community campaigns, strikes. Whichever way the vote goes, having the strongest movement possible around these will be the best thing we can do to try and fight our corner in the coming months and years.  

(As an addendum - another interesting thing to note was that the majority of Tory voters thought Cameron should stay on as PM even if there was a vote for leave, and the largest proportion thought he should stay on until just before the 2020 election. I’d be interested to know what Tory MPs thought here, and how a leadership challenge might be prompted in the Tory party if Cameron thought he had Tory voters’ support.)

[argilligan]

Review: The Imperial Radch trilogy

Recently I found myself racing through Anne Leckie’s excellent Imperial Radch trilogy: Ancillary Justice, Ancillary Mercy and Ancillary Sword. They’re an great SciFi series, but also quite political, addressing questions around imperialism, workers’ rights and especially gender. There is also a lot of tea drinking. Leckie well deserves the awards that she’s received for creating an absorbing and complex universe that is both thoughtful and humorous.

The story is narrated by Breq and centres around the dominant group of humans - the Radchaai. For the last two thousand years the Radchaai have been annexing other groups of “uncivilized” humans. If any resist they either get frozen for future use as ancillaries for the ships’ artificial intelligences or killed. The first book is set on the brink of civil war, and uses flashbacks showing how cracks began to develop in Radchaai empire. The second and third books are focussed around the Athoek system as the civil war develops.

If you’re expecting SciFi you wouldn’t be disappointed - there’s space stations, aliens, gates for travelling quickly between star systems, guns where bullets travel precisely 1.11m and the ability to regrow body parts including lungs and legs. All of these make for an excellent story on their own. But the political messages are one of the things that, for me anyway, made it particularly interesting. Imperialism and the rigid system of patronage in Radchaai are rightly critiqued. Workers in a tea plantation go on strike for fair wages and better conditions. The nature of consciousness and what it means to be a ’significant being’ is explored. The thing I found most compelling, however, was how gender is explored.

Throughout the book feminine pronouns she and her are used for all characters when they’re speaking Radchaai. This isn’t because everyone is a woman, but rather because the Radchaai don’t have genders. While Leckie has received some friendly criticism (and has explained her reasons for doing it) for using a feminine pronoun rather than a gender neutral one such as Zie, having nearly everyone who is talked about being addressed as ’she’ does have a powerful effect.

Initially I did think everyone was a woman. Women as soldiers, ships captains, temple priests, civil servants, doctors, ruthless overlords and so on. This struck me in two ways. Firstly because these are roles its still relatively unusual to have dominated entirely by women, especially when this is their dominant characterisation (rather than there character being ‘a woman’). Secondly, because it seems relatively unusual (at least in many of the books I’ve read) to have just have so many women and to barely have any men mentioned at all. I can think of several books (Lord of the Rings is one that springs readily to mind) where you can go chapters and chapters without there being any women, but this isn’t something that I’d particularly noted - its not something that seems that unusual. But chapters and chapters with only feminine pronouns was striking.  

Eventually I actually paid attention properly to the story and understood that these were characters without genders. In someways I found this one of the elements of the book that was hardest to picture, and had to actively stop myself trying to assign genders to people. It certainly serves to highlight the completely pervasive nature of gender (and gendered expectations) in literally everything about how we live our lives - our social interactions, language, clothes, assumptions we make about people - and reinforced the importance of respecting and championing people’s own gender identities.

While I was reading the books I also finally got around to seeing the new Star Wars film (an enjoyable film, but it did feel quite a lot like fan fiction). As many of the discussions I’d seen about the film had been around gender, it was interesting to contrast different ways dealing with questions around gender were explored in Star Wars and in the Imperial Radch series.

The most recent Star Wars film does represent some advance in the portrayal of women compared to previous ones: Ren can repair and drive the Millennium Falcon and manage to escape pretty well on her own form the First Order. Its great to see her tell Finn (who she has just met) to stop holding her hand. But she is presented very much as an anomaly. People are constantly expressing surprise at the things that she can do. And Leia, despite being the Rebel general, isn’t even told what the plan is. The position of women in Star Wars: the Force Awakens seems to me to reflect the gains that have been made since the first films were made, but are limited in their imagination to the dominant expectations of the society we live in. The Imperial Radch, on the other hand, presents a different situation to our world, but one that forces you to question the way gender is in our society.

[argilligan]

Thoughts on Lise Vogel's Marxism and Women's oppression

These notes were mainly written in August 2014 shortly after I finished reading the book, but with a few more recent thoughts. I haven’t re-read the book since then, but I thought these notes might be useful in advance of the rs21 book day in November.  

I was quite surprised, given both the seeming hype around this book, that by-and-large there isn't really much I thought was that controversial in this book. It roots women's oppression in an understanding of class society and how class society has changed over time.

When it was first published there were some complaints (e.g. In reviews in the ISJ and Socialist Review) that it was too abstract. This is something that Vogel readily admits to, and I actually found the abstract nature very helpful - it means you can think about how the ideas of social reproduction apply today just as well as you could in 1983 (and when Marx was writing for that matter). That is not to say that it is ahistorical, but rather that it avoids the potential trap of polemicising against very specific arguments at the time it was written, or being overly reliant on the statistics only valid at a particular moment.

The primary (and probably the most interesting thing for further discussion) thing I got from the book is that when we talk about Social Reproduction it's not just about babies: it encompasses everything about how a workforce is reproduced. This includes education, welfare, health, and isn't dependent, necessarily, on new generations being born - migration is an important part of social reproduction for example. Following from this, I felt it was important to consider that any form of society (slave, feudal, capitalist, socialist etc) is going to have to have some form of social reproduction, the question is what is that form, and does that form involve the oppression of other people to make it 'work' (in both explicit and implicit ways).

The book also made me think about some other questions:

Maternity leave seems to be a compromise that capital has had to make in trying to resolve the contradiction of replenishing the labour force by generational reproduction. It's something that the working class has had to fight for. Why is maternity leave in the US so much lower (i.e there is no statutory maternity leave!) than pretty much everywhere else? (Is it because a lack of a fight?) What are the consequences of this? Are there any differences in how women's oppression manifests that are due to this? In some countries there has been a shift to parental leave that can be split between parents - what have (or might) be the implications of this? Will it still result in women being the ones who take time off work because they often earn less in the first place? At what point does it cost capital more to have someone not working because they are looking after their child than for capital to make childcare outside of the home cheap and attractive?

China seems to throw up some interesting questions. The one child policy (possibly) seems to point towards capital trying to balance the cost to it, but also the need, of generational replacement. It seems that there is a 'problem' of workforce distribution meaning that there is workforce reproduction largely through mass migration from the countryside into the cities. The daily forms of social reproduction (life in dormitories for example) could be an interesting example to explore other forms of social reproduction other than the privatised family. There is a potential question about what this means for women's oppression - what forms does it take?

Advance in capital mean there is more potential for purchasing ready-made articles outside of the home - food, education, clothes etc. This is something that is enjoyed by working class people. Does this mean that the cost of reproduction of the working class family increases? Is this balanced by greater income?

How do we understand reproduction taking place in private but non familial settings (where there aren’t (or aren’t going to be children) - for example in house shares where adults that aren’t related to one another but where things like cooking and cleaning are shared and where there is a level of emotional care?

[argilligan]

Corbyn’s victory means revolutionary left needs to sharpen up

At the end of June I started to write a piece about Corbyn and the Labour Party. It started off “Imagine on the afternoon of 12th September, at the Labour Party conference, Jeremy Corbyn is elected leader.” I decided at the time this was too ridiculous proposition and didn’t finish the piece. Well it’s now the 13th September and Corbyn is the leader of the Labour Party. John McDonnell is Shadow Chancellor. It doesn’t seem quite real. Labour is a “threat to national security” according to Cameron. Not just Corbyn, but the entire Party.

Corbyn’s victory is unquestionably something to celebrate. It signals the potential for a much more substantial opposition to the Tories within parliament. There is a Labour leader who supports Palestine, opposes imperialism, wants Trident to be scrapped. This now means that these things can’t be dismissed as fringe, far left issue, but are part of mainstream discourse.

In the immediate term, hopefully Corbyn’s victory will lead to strengthening of anti-austerity politics and will give confidence to those who may have felt uncertain about speaking out against the Tory attacks - they will see they’re not alone. A test of this will be if the mobilisation for demonstration at the Tory Conference in Manchester on 4th October harnesses some of the energy from the Corbyn campaign.    

I was six when Blair was elected leader of the Labour Party. Through out the entire time I’ve been active in politics (the last 15 years or so) it’s been very easy to see why you wouldn’t want to be a member of the Labour Party: they’ve pushed through neoliberal policies, they went to war in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq, they’ve failed to offer meaningful opposition to austerity. The leaders, in particular Blair, embodied this. What now, then, when you have a leader of the Labour Party who has opposed all of these things, and been on far more demonstrations than I have? It is something qualitatively different.

Large numbers of people have been joining Labour since Corbyn has been elected. I wish them well in this - hopefully it will mean that Corbyn is able to withstand attacks from the Tories, the right of Labour and the possibly well meaning, subtler, pulls to the right from some in the Labour Left. I’m not going to be one of them. For me, not being a member of Labour isn’t primarily due to who happens to be the leader, but is based on the changes I think are necessary in society (a revolutionary overthrow of capitalism) and how I think this can happen (through the mass self-activity of the working class), being different to the aims and perspectives of the Labour Party.  

For the revolutionary left this is an interesting time. Not because it suggests that there are masses of people waiting around the corner for revolutionary ideas - there are hopefully some, although we shouldn’t delude ourselves.  But what is does do is force us to have to sharpen up our arguments about what we mean by revolutionary politics. We can’t get away with thinking that Labour won’t be a pole of attraction to people on the left because its clear its ‘blairite’ or ‘neoliberal’ or ‘pro-austerity’. We need to think about where Labour came from, it’s role within capitalist society, and it means the debates about reform or revolution are ones we should be prepared to return to.

[argilligan]

Is real ale against “Labour Values”?

All the political groups I’ve ever been involved in have spent quite a lot of effort trying to increase the number of people who are members and supporters. You want your organisation to grow. In recent weeks it seems that the Labour Party have hit on a winning formula for doing this: the number of people on the electoral roll for the Labour leadership election was over 600,000. But unlike most other groups, Labour seem to want to get rid of as many of these as they can - I woke up this morning to find my facebook newsfeed full of people who’d been rejected as a Labour supporter or, in a couple of cases, from membership.

Some of these I’m not surprised by, for various reasons. Others, though, I don’t quite understand. One of those is my mum. Okay she may have been on a demonstration or twenty, and be an active peace campaigner, but the only group she’s a signed up member of is CND. She was even an active Labour Party member in the 1980s and early 1990s, and hasn’t been a member of any other party since. Unluckily for her, Simon Danzcuk is her MP. This is a man who recently said he’d "do all I could to oust Corbyn from leadership”. It seems to be starting even before then.

I was also very surprised to hear of another friend who’d been rejected. His dad was a Labour councillor. Although, like millions of others, we went demonstrations together against the Iraq war, in recent years he hasn't been particularly politically active. Indeed as far as I know the only group he’s been in is CAMRA - the Campaign for Real Ale. I’m pretty sure that this isn’t an organisation opposed to the Labour Party or against it’s values.

The Corbyn campaign so far, even for those of us who aren’t in Labour, has been quite exciting - rallies of thousands of people around the country are a sight to behold. But it has also exposed the underlying tensions within the Labour Party; wings that are now in open conflict with one another. So much of an anathema is the prospect of Corbyn winning to the Labour right that they are willing to squander support from young, enthusiastic people who could be crucial to Labour’s success (in their terms) in the coming years.  

[argilligan]

Ideology drives maintenance grant cut

A report today from the Institute of Fiscal Studies shows that the government’s plan to scrap maintenance grants for students from the poorest households will mean that 40% of students will graduate with debts of over £53,000. They also show that cutting grants will do very little to lower the amount that the government spends on higher education - only deceasing it by 3%. This is because student loans in England are Income Contingent Loans and have a fixed payment term: what you pay back is dependent on how much you earn, not how much your debt is. 

Graduates begin paying back when their income is over a certain threshold (for those who started university after 2012 this is £21k, and for those before it is £15k), the amount they pay back is 9% of their income over this threshold, and the loan gets written off after a set period of time (25 years for 2006-2012 cohorts, 30 years for those starting university after 2012). This means there will be quite a lot of people who never pay off their entire student loan: in 2010, when tuition fees were increased to £9000 a year, it was estimated around 40% of student debt would be written off. You can increase the amount someone owes the Student Loans Company (SLC), but provided the loan terms remain the same and they don’t earn more, they wouldn’t pay back more. 

So what is the point in moving from maintenance grants to maintenance loans if it isn’t going to change the amount of money it ends up costing the government in the long run? One part is fancy accounting - grants count as expenditure while only the bit of loans you don’t expect to get paid back do, so the balance sheets look better right now. This is not dissimilar to what happened with the changes made in 2010 when teaching grants that were paid directly to universities were scrapped and replaced with higher tuition fees.  

The bigger picture as to why they want to cut maintenance grants is neoliberal ideology. It pushes the cost of university on to the individual student, confirming the idea that you go to university as a customer for your own personal reward. This serves to fill universities with market ideology and in the long term paves the way for privatisation of the Higher Education sector. 

In the immediate future I think we will have to be alert to any changes to the terms student loans - be it the rate at which they are paid back, changes to the repayment threshold (which is set to be frozen at £21,000, rather than increasing with inflation) and making the loans open ended, rather than having them written off after a fixed period of time.  

Fighting for a free higher education system has to be the aim. This has to include fighting for grants for everyone to cover living costs, not just against fees, and should ensure it is linking up with those working in HE who are also feeling the effects of the marketisation of Higher Education.

For a more in-depth analysis of HE funding Andrew McGettigan’s book The Great University Gamble (2013, Pluto) has a lot more detail. 

[argilligan]

The only outcome we can be certain of #TheyDontRepresentUs #bbcqt http://thndr.it/1I8lMYY

[argilligan]

Revolutionary correspondents aren’t just writing for the sake of it, or to just recount what has happened, but to push forward revolutionary ideas with the aim of changing the world.

Scaffolding struggle: what is a revolutionary media?

[argilligan]

‘Politics’ in Britain over the next two months will be dominated by the run up to the general election. Although the outcome at present is far from clear, the electoral landscape – be it the Green surge, the rise of UKIP or the meteoric growth of the SNP – is changing.

rs21 magazine Spring 2015 editorial

[argilligan]

Review: Selma

I’ve just got back from watching the powerful new film Selma, which focuses on the the movement to demand the vote for black people in the US. It focuses around Martin Luther King and others in the SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference) coming to Selma, Alabama in 1965 and the march, and attempted marches, from Selma to the state capital, Montgomery.

There were two scenes in the film I found particularly moving: when the police shoot a young man in a restaurant after he’s taken part in a night time protest, while brutally beating his mother and grandfather,  and the first attempt that the people of Selma make to march to Montogmery. On the other side of the bridge are state troopers, cops and other racists who charge on the non-violent demonstrators. The scene is quite long, not flinchign from showing people being battoned, beaten and tear-gassed by the state. It’s impossible, I think, not to think of the police doing the same things to black people in the US today although filming began before killing of Mike Brown in Ferguson, and the explosion of the #blacklivesmatter movement.

I have to admit knowing not very much about the civil rights movement in the US, however one of the thing that struck me as quite interesting were the debates between different parts of the anti-racist movements at the time. These are still debates happening today.  President Johnson in the film is relived that there is someone like King leading the movement rather than Malcolm X (Malcolm X does appear in the film briefly), and there is a running tension between the SCLC and SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) about the tactics that they should be using.

I’d highly recommend going to see this as soon as you can!

[argilligan]

The peace scarf used on yesterdays protest was part of the seven-mile long scarf that was used at the Wool against Weapons protest last August.

Peace scarf “wraps up” MoD at anti-nuke protest

[argilligan]

Curbing the growth in US production from fracking, to try and maintain their market share is one of key reasons that Saudi Arabia and OPEC more generally haven’t cut production.

8 things you need to know about the oil crash 

[argilligan]

Four black girls lead the march carrying a banner reading “Fists up! Fight back!”. It was clear that a radical current ran through the march with the chants “Shut it down!” and “Indite, convict, send those killer cops to jail, the whole damn system is guilty as hell”.

Report from Oakland demo against police violence on rs21.org.uk 

[argilligan]

This new movement is young and it is militant. It has experience of the state and isn’t afraid to confront it. It is a movement that we should celebrate. And it is a movement we should help grow.

Report from the #londontoferguson solidarity demo on rs21.org.uk

[argilligan]

Objectifying women in the way this shirt does is not acceptable anywhere and should be challenged. Helping to land something on a comet doesn’t give you a free pass to behave in a sexist way.

Women in science and the sexist space shirt on rs21.org.uk