Sunday 21 June 2015

MANNIX by Brenda Neill

MANNIX
BRENDA NIALL
Text Publishing, 2015, 439 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

Daniel Mannix, Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne for half a century, could be a bit of a rebel.  As Monash University’s Brenda Niall recounts in her biography, the Irish nationalist and opponent of conscription in Australia during the first world war would show his disdain for the British monarchy by sticking postage stamps, bearing the King’s image, on sideways.

The one-time Labor Party-supporting champion of the working class, however, spent his last decades splitting the party and keeping it out of government, whilst white-anting the trade unions, by unleashing his literally secret weapon, the Italian grocer’s son from Brunswick, Bartholomew Augustine Santamaria, in a clandestine, anti-communist offensive.

Born to a tenant farmer in Ireland in 1864, Mannix was always conscious of the grim and violent past of British rule in that colony.  This survived his seminary training and he retained his Irish republican sympathies when he was sent to head the Church in 1913 in Melbourne, the then seat of federal government.

Mannix condemned Britain’s murderous reprisals for the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin which declared an ill-fated independent republic.  Alone amongst Australia’s Catholic Archbishops, Mannix “took the side of the rebels” and declared himself for Sinn Fein, Ireland’s radical nationalist republicans.  Unwilling to see colonial lives sacrificed for British empire, Mannix opposed, and helped defeat, the two conscription referenda during the Great War, adding that ‘the working class would pay the highest price in the war and then be forgotten’.

Mannix openly supported Labor and his working class parishioners in north Melbourne, and, during the seamen’s strike of 1919, said ‘the worker must get a fair share of the wealth he produces’ and that people are ‘more sacred than property’.

The worm in the apple of this putative Red priest, however, was anti-communism, an ideology shared by all the Catholic hierarchy.  Mannix sought to promote Catholic leaders in the secular world, beginning in the politically turbulent 1930s, to ensure that if people ‘are to move along safe lines, the public mind should be leavened by Catholic principles’.  ‘Safe lines’ meant stopping the Red Menace.

It was fine to give coins to the poor, as Mannix did on his daily walk to his Cathedral, or to organise welfare relief, but just don’t let the workers do anything about their lot that might actually challenge capitalism, or the Church.

Santamaria’s publicly nameless and secretive anti-communist strike force was Mannix’s insurance against any such outcome.  Mannix “ensured funding for The Movement” as it organised ‘Industrial Groups’ to overthrow Communist Party leadership of key Australian trade unions and it penetrated the ALP to campaign against its left, splitting the party in 1954-55 and keeping it out of office until 1972 courtesy of the anti-Labor preferences of his splinter Democratic Labor Party.

Santamaria was Mannix’s lever for directly influencing public political and industrial policy in the way an Archbishop could not openly do.  In a 1961 interview on ABC TV, two years before his death, Mannix called Santamaria ‘the saviour of Australia’.

Niall, for her part, is in fairly comfortable proximity to the Mannix-Santamaria ideological cosmos.  Communism, she agrees, “was a cruel failure”.  She puts down all Communist Party union leadership to “ballot-rigging, intimidation, physical force and mass apathy”.  Her first job was research assistant to Santamaria and, although she claims not to have been aware of The Movement at the time, Niall would probably have been right at home with its politics as demonstrated by her going on to work for Santamaria’s anti-communist News Weekly as book reviewer.

Niall’s wooden anti-communism is complemented by a largely unreflective Catholicism.  The Mannix hobby-horse of state aid for private religious schools is assumed to be a good and just thing.  The ethics of Church wealth is unchallenged (as is the hypocrisy of the worker-friendly Archbishop living in wealthy Kew, in the conservative electorate of Liberal Prime Minister, Robert Menzies).  “Atheistic communism” (simplistically reduced to Stalinist horrors) is assumed to be undesirable.

Niall’s academic career was in English literature, not history, and her personal background that of Catholicism not Marxism.  Unsurprisingly, therefore, her portrait of Mannix is closely intimate rather than politically substantive.  Arcane points of Catholic doctrine and institutions tend to crowd out a fully rounded analysis of Archbishop Mannix who, like the majority of working class Irish Catholics at the time, was mocking of the Union Jack, cold on conscription and who could be numbered with the unionists and the left but who wound up undoing all this as a remote control leader of the anti-democratic, anti-communist Catholic right in Australia.

ELEANOR MARX by Rachel Holmes

ELEANOR MARX
By RACHEL HOLMES
Bloomsbury, 2015, 508 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

“Is it not wonderful when you come to look at things squarely in the face, how rarely we seem to practise all the fine things we preach to others?”, lamented Eleanor Marx in 1892.  Karl’s youngest daughter was to be the tragic victim of this truism, as Rachel Holmes explores in her biography which extricates this pioneering revolutionary socialist-feminist from the giant shadow of her father.

In a Britain where women had no political or economic rights, Eleanor willingly took after her rebellious dad.  The young Eleanor was questioning and combative, absorbed in the free-thinking, theatre-loving, fun-filled and intellectually-rich but financially-stunted Marx household.

If Eleanor inherited Marx’s political genes, she chose to nurture them with frenetic activism and inexhaustible political stamina.  Her support for the 1879 Paris Commune (‘the first attempt of the proletariat to govern itself’, as Karl put it) gave her her first public profile but it was her leadership in the trade union movement that defined Eleanor’s political impact.

She was “the epicentre of strategy and organisation” for the newly-stirring ranks of unskilled, often female, workers who had been long-ignored by the craft unions.  She opposed divisions between skilled and unskilled unionists, and between men and women workers, arguing that women must refuse to undercut men’s wages and that men must insist on equal pay for women for the same work.

Eleanor’s many successes in the labour movement, however, were not replicated in Britain’s revolutionary circles.  ‘Socialism’, she said despairingly, ‘is at present in this country little more than a literary movement’ and it was a time of “faction, schism and split” with nationalists against internationalists, revisionists against revolutionaries, and the anarchists against everyone.  Eleanor, nevertheless, stiffened the Marxist cause by bringing to it her strengths of organisation, strategy and economics (she was one of the few who had actually read, and understood, Marx’s Das Kapital).

Her most original, and most enduring, contribution, however, was the development of socialist feminism.  She detested domestic drudgery, was appalled by the grim lives of women factory workers, and resented the cultural constraints of the period which saw both of her (socialist) sisters’ lives wasted by the demands of housework, motherhood and their (socialist) husbands’ careers.

Eleanor followed Engels and other Marxist men who deplored women’s oppression and saw socialism as its solution but she went further, making women’s liberation necessary to, as well as dependent on, socialism.  Her pamphlet, ‘The Woman Question: From a Socialist Point of View’, refocused feminism from its limited rights for middle class women to full equality at work and at home for the great mass of poor, working class, women.

Despite her feminist principles, however, Eleanor’s own ‘free-love union’ with the playwright and socialist, Edward Aveling, spectacularly failed to achieve socialist-feminism in one household.  Economic independence or domestic equality was doomed for her because, although “Eleanor loved Edward”, “Edward loved himself”.

Aveling’s main interest was in sponging off Eleanor’s earnings and exploiting her famous name as his passport to fame.  He treated lecture tour expenses as his own little pork barrel, did no share of the housework, and was decidedly lacking in courage compared to Eleanor who put herself in the front line of free speech and free assembly fights and wore the scars of police violence for her pains.

To top it all off, he killed her.  Or she suicided.  Soon after she had shatteringly discovered that the latest in Aveling’s series of sexual infidelities had resulted in a clandestine marriage to a 22-year-old actress, Eleanor was found dead in 1898 from chloroform and prussic acid (cyanide).

Her timely death also opened Aveling’s way to the money the recently-deceased Engels had bequeathed to Eleanor (Aveling had been the chief beneficiary of Eleanor’s will and remained so after he destroyed the codicil by which Eleanor had disinherited him after her discovery of his secret marriage).  Literally or morally, either way, Aveling was responsible for Eleanor’s death.

Holmes’ book is more a page-turner of a period historical novel, narratively propelled by the collision course between the villainous Aveling and the deaf-to-all-warnings Eleanor, than a politically-rounded biography.  Eleanor, for example, agitated for an electorally-focused labour party but lacked any premonition of the pitfalls of parliamentarism, which Holmes, despite the benefit of over a century of disillusioning hindsight, also does not critically explore.

Nevertheless, Eleanor Marx’s forty-three years of socialist-feminist activism are dynamic enough to make even a romantic pot-boiler a tribute to her and her cause.

Friday 12 June 2015

THE UGLY GAME: The Qatari Plot to Buy the World Cup, BLAKE & CALVERT

THE UGLY GAME: The Qatari Plot to Buy the World Cup
HEIDI BLAKE and JONATHAN CALVERT
Simon & Schuster, 2015, 472 pages

Review by Phil Shannon 

The only surprising thing about the currently unfolding FIFA corruption scandal is that anyone should be surprised, given the long history of credible allegations of bribery in world football’s governing body.  As Blake and Calvert, investigative journalists at Britain’s The Sunday Times, reveal in their exposé of Qatar’s corrupt winning in 2010 of the hosting rights for the 2022 World Cup, the technical merits of the competing bids “were not worth the glossy paper they were printed on”.  What mattered was money.

The winner was the world’s richest (GDP per capita) country, the sweltering desert monarchy of the football minnow, Qatar, as it bought the most votes amongst the 24-member FIFA Executive Committee, the “elite cabal” who run world football.

Courtesy of a FIFA whistle-blower who leaked a mountain of confidential Qatari documents, Blake and Calvert copiously document the corrupt backroom deals and vote-rigging by the architect of Qatar’s Cup victory - Mohamed bin Hammam, the construction industry billionaire, Royal Family insider, Asian Football Confederation (AFC) President and FIFA Executive member.

Despite being privately described as ‘our greatest asset’ by the Qatari bid team, Hammam was publicly kept at arm’s length as he successfully bribed scores of FIFA officials through his AFC, construction company and other slush funds.

Hammam paid more than $5 million  to the presidents of thirty national football associations in Africa, venal men who had risen from Africa’s endemic poverty and who fully intended to stay that way.  $1.7 million of Hammam money found its way to greedy soccer chiefs in Asia.  The recipients’ emails to Hammam contain effusive outpourings of brotherly devotion and, by the way, yes, US dollars would be fine and here are my personal bank account details.

These national football bosses would influence their regional Cup-voting FIFA Executive representatives, whose vote was also ripe for cultivation by Hammam through cash backhanders and lavish hospitality for international, all-expenses-paid junkets.  It was corrupt business-as-usual for these top decision-makers, whether voting on Cup sponsorship by major corporations, Cup broadcasting rights, Cup venues or FIFA presidents.  Hammam also dished out vote-inducing football ‘development’ grants to poor countries through FIFA’s ‘Goal Program’, a vote-currying creation of FIFA president, Sepp Blatter.

Hammam was as adept at gas-for-votes as cash-for-votes, facilitating massive and highly favourable trade deals for football nations on Qatari gas (for Thailand) and Siberian gas extraction (for Russia).  His flurry of commercial matchmaking also procured the support of other countries through billion dollar corporate deals on property (for Thailand), land (for Cyprus), football clubs (for France’s financially-plagued Paris Saint-Germaine), football television rights (for the French government  from Al Jazeera to televise French football) and Cup infrastructure building contracts (for Belgium).

The official Qatar Cup bid was not content to outsource all the vote-buying to Hammam.  They secretly offered $1.5 million to key African members of the Executive and to African national football presidents, whilst also funnelling $1.8 million to Africa for a well-catered regional football shindig whose real business took place in side-meetings between Hammam and African football chiefs.

The other string to Hammam’s bow was vote-trading collusion, which is technically forbidden under FIFA rules but undetectable because Cup voting is secret.  Amongst other pacts, Hammam arranged for his Asian confederation votes to go to the joint Spain-Portugal bid for the 2018 Cup in return for the Iberian votes supporting Qatar for 2022.

All this activity delivered the prize when the FIFA Executive, barely pausing to acknowledge, let alone read, the FIFA technical assessors’ report which rated Qatar’s as the worst of the bids, voted for Qatar to host the 2022 Cup.  The incredulity at this decision sparked renewed allegations of corruption but over at Sleepy Hollow, FIFA’s Ethics Committee, serenity reigned - and why would it not when the committee’s members included the corrupt (Hammam, for example, was an initial member) and ancient judges whose well-remunerated sinecures depended on not upsetting the FIFA family business.

The vehemence of public outrage, however, eventually compelled FIFA to refurbish its ethics window-dressing by beefing up the Ethics Committee with a criminal investigator (a former Melbourne, and Interpol, police detective).  Qatari money again proved its power, however, as FIFA’s internal cop, and his entire investigations team, was bought off with well-upholstered positions at a new International Centre for Sports Security in Doha.  FIFA’s internal investigation was duly closed delivering no adverse corruption findings.

At the end of this Great Cup Robbery, Hammam took the time to attend to his own nest, challenging Blatter for the top job in FIFA’s 2011 presidential election.  Hammam deployed his usual junkets, bank transfers and envelopes stuffed with cash.  Blatter, however, out-Machiavellied Hammam, using the public backlash against Qatar’s corrupt purchase of the 2022 Cup vote to threaten Qatar with being stripped of its hosting rights unless they pressured Hammam to withdraw from the presidential race, which Hammam duly did.

As a heavily censored new internal ethics investigation report put Qatar (and Russia) in the clear for their Cup wins, all ended well for FIFA’s privileged parasites.  Qatar’s 2022 Cup was safe.  Blatter’s job, and its massive, but secret, salary, was safe.  FIFA’s culture of corruption remained safe.

The FBI, whose recent raids narrowly post-date the publication of this angry but pessimistic book, may be the ‘super-sub’ which sinks the FIFA rust-bucket but FIFA’s structural corruption needs a radically more democratic game-changer, a revolution in who control the people’s game – those who profit from it (whether by fair means or foul), or the people who play and love the game.