Stephen H
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
The lunacy continues
The latest stunt is not as stupidly disruptive as their antics on the trains last year, but it’s a pretty pointless action nonetheless. We should debate XR where possible. I think somebody affiliated to SW branch was going to see about setting up a meeting with them in our region – I’ll chase that up.
Patrisse Cullors, a ‘co-founder’ of BLM certainly describes herself and fellow organisers as ‘trained Marxists’, as has been reported across the mainstream media. But it seems clear from her background that she’s a Leninist. Needless to say, this is a gift to conservative commentators, who are happy to take things at face value and use her comments to bash both BLM and Marxism.
A critique of Black Lives Matter that we could probably endorse.
Alan says: ‘If it is going to be the issue of the environment, need we talk about class anymore.
I can envisage some of us returning to the basic idea, that it is the worker who is the creator of all wealth, applying brain and muscle power to Nature but perhaps when it comes to the environment, we might begin to view ourselves no longer as working class in the Marxian sense. Our “class” consciousness has transmogrified into “human” consciousness. In terms of achieving the socialist revolution we have become already “class-free”, unlike the owning capitalist class who cannot free themselves from their class-chains.’
Isn’t this basically Marx’s (Hegelian) idea of the working class having become the ‘universal class’, the only class that stands for human progress? So I don’t think it’s such a heretical idea. The way that I would put it is that the working class revolution has become more and more of an ‘existential’ necessity, especially over the last century with the world wars and after WW2 the threat of nuclear annihilation.
On the point about the protests not resonating with mainlanders, that’s unsurprising in a way. HK wasn’t reported on at first, and the level of propaganda flowing through mainstream news and social media in China is staggering. When I refused to condemn the protests, the Chinese people I know in China and the UK have all informed me that I am a dupe of Western media, that the protestors are paid stooges, that most demonstrations are actually on the streets in support of the police, that the protestors are violent and attacking police, etc. But there are regular, absolutely massive demonstrations in China itself – there was a huge anti-pollution protest recently in Wuhan, for example, and riots by workers are quite common. Mainstream media generally doesn’t report these events, though, and social media is increasingly tightly managed and monitored.
On the question of public support, a friend of an XR activist in Portsmouth told me that they’d been booed and called hippies during a march through the north part of the city, so I guess the level of public sympathy varies, even in the UK.
Just went to the Portsmouth anti-Trump protest where myself and a few sympathisers handed out the SPGB leaflet ‘The Problem Isn’t Trump, It’s Capitalism’. About 100-150 people there (a BBC journalist I spoke to there was estimating 250, which seemed much too high to me). It was organised and dominated, of course, by the Trots and noisily visited by an EDL-type contingent of about 20 skinheads, who were quickly encircled by the police and seen off by the crowd.
Will try to get to the Birkbeck event, Adam, and will bring any spare flyers with me.
Yes, I wouldn’t even click on conspiracy sites like Global Research. And it’s true that a lot of the anti-5G discussion is coming from the utter nutcases of the online world like Chossudovsky, Max Igan, Ian R. Crane and David Icke. That said, concern about the health effects of 5G has been raised by well-qualified (so far as I can see, anyway) scientists like Martin Pall of Washington State University and doctors like Sharon Goldberg. The ‘precautionary principle’ should prevail until the technology has been proven to be fully safe. It’s worth pointing out that legitimate concerns over the safety of 3G/4G have been raised by Devra Davis and other scientists. I’ll be very happy to be proven wrong on this, but it seems there are grounds for concern here; certainly, one article on SkepDoc.info isn’t enough to convince me otherwise.
I did the last hustings of our campaign in Brockenhurst last night. It was organised by a Remain group, New Forest for Europe. There were about 100 people present and 10 parties represented (no Brexit Party candidate, unsurprisingly). After opening statements all candidates were asked a few questions and I’ve briefly summarised my answers to them below:
Q. We find ourselves in a unique position where some of you (the candidates) wish that the positions you’ve proposed yourselves for didn’t actually exist. Can you tell us how you see your party’s role within the EU Parliament if you’re elected?
I said that our party’s approach to the Euro elections is the same as our approach to national elections, which is that we would take our seats if elected, but we would use it as a platform or tribune to advocate solely for socialism. The reason being that our party has no intention of trying to reform capitalism, an approach that cannot work.
Q. Many people are saying that democracy is broken. Do you agree? What would you do to fix it?
I said that we have limited political democracy in the UK (although elections are massively subverted by donations and vested interests). But there’s no economic democracy: we must all work for an employer who will exploit us, or we will starve. And no democracy in distribution – 8 men have much wealth as half the world’s population. So we need a truly democratic society where ordinary people control production and distribution. We are a party with a fully democratic structure that reflects the kind of society we want – no leader, run by members, no personality cult.
Q. Last week the UK Government were the only EU state to miss the deadline on claiming aid to benefit the poorest people in this country, losing £600k and jeopardising £2.9m in future payments. What would you do to ensure that the UK Government uphold and take advantage of all EU funding opportunities?
This is not really a question for us, because even if the interpretation of the UK government’s missed deadline is correct, we don’t need to take part in the ‘reorganisation of poverty’. We live right now in a society of potential abundance. Therefore we don’t need a system of rationing, which is all that a money system is. We need to unlock the wealth that is being kept from us and use it to transform society. We don’t want crumbs, we want the bakery.
Q. EU migration to the UK has dropped to a 10 year low putting increasing pressure on our agricultural, hospitality and service industries. Who will fill these roles if we leave the EU?
This is partly a question about ‘freedom of movement’. The limited freedom of movement that the EU has afforded some workers is one of the few benefits of EU membership for ordinary people; but let’s also remember that the EU is also preventing freedom of movement elsewhere, effectively drowning refugees into the Mediterranean (not much response to this from the Hard Remain audience). The question of who ‘we’ (i.e. capitalists) will find to exploit if EU workers are not here is not our concern as socialists representing the working class. We want a world without ANY exploitation.
In the open questions at the end, I challenged the Labour candidate’s claim that Labour represent the only challenge to the ‘rise of the right’, pointing out that the last Labour government actually ‘out-righted the right’ with dawn raids on immigrant families, detention centres and Gordon Brown’s infamous ‘British Jobs for British Workers’ slogan, taken from the BNP (I think?)
A few people I spoke to at the end said thanks for our contribution to the debate. ‘I didn’t know you could be so far left’, said one! (I pointed out that we’re not on the left and she said she’d explore our literature). A kindly email from one of the organisers this morning: “Out of everyone I think you stirred the most interest, in a landscape where we are used to politicians using different words to say the same thing, to have a view that is completely different was great and for me completely fascinating”.
Is there a link and a title for the text? I can pass it on to WSPUS
Here’s a link to my blog if that helps (title: From Obama to Trump: An Orange Thermidor?’):
Thanks for the links, Alan, I’ll take a look. With just a few modifications, the above text would make for a good leaflet. FWIW, below is something I wrote about Trump, from 2016 (a tad pretentiously, on reflection…)
“His cupboard bare; his vision hardwired” – Wire, ‘Internal Exile’
As some wag tweeted after the recent presidential election, orange is the new black: Trump the Terrible will soon replace Oleaginous Obama as the leader of the world’s most powerful nation. Trump’s white nationalist supporters and hangers-on are naturally ecstatic – and some of them may even find positions of power in the new administration.
Trump himself, of course, is a thoroughly rebarbative figure, a blundering clown in the freakshow of American democracy. Every element of his face betrays his nastiness and narcissism: the florid cheeks with their expression veering between phoney solemnity and leering frivolity; the puckered, hole-in-a-pie mouth, twisted at the corners into a rictus of sneering contempt; the cold, watchful eyes of a deep ocean predator. Groucho Marx once said, ‘I never forget a face, but in your case I’ll be glad to make an exception’. But we will not be allowed to forget. For the next four years at least, Trump’s fleshy fizog will be squinting and gurning from every television screen and social media feed, a demented icon of capitalist degeneracy.
Although the competition is fierce, Trump might just be the most dimwitted president in US history. This is, after all, the man who publicly said 7-Eleven when he meant 9/11. He is certainly highly dysfunctional, hailing from a traumatizing and traumatized family. Like his father (by all accounts), Trump is a bully, a psychologically damaged man who is now projecting his own malignancy onto a range of officially sanctioned Others: Mexicans, Muslims and women. From a psychoanalytical point of view, his tough-guy persona might be explained in terms of the ‘traumatic bond’ that often forms between victim and abuser, which in Trump’s case was likely forged with his father in childhood. This ‘identification with the aggressor’, as Sándor Ferenczi famously called this kind of defence mechanism, might also explain the appeal of Trump for the many disgruntled left-behinds who voted for him: in a harsh and unforgiving world, it’s best to keep on side with Big Daddy, however obscene his behaviour.
While it is unlikely that Trump will go through with all, or even many of his pledges, we can expect the policies of Trump’s administration broadly to match the reactionary rhetoric of his presidential campaign. Disaster certainly beckons – for workers, minorities and the environment.
But some context and a sense of proportion is also needed.
Judging by mainstream journalism and social media commentary, most liberals reckon a Trump presidency to be a worse outcome than a Hillary Clinton one would have been. I am not so sure. While the Orange One is undoubtedly a monstrously vulgar reactionary capitalist, Clinton is a thoroughgoing neoliberal and a corrupt sadist. Who can forget her derisive quip following the butchering of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi in a drainage pipe: ‘we came, we saw, he died’? And as Secretary of State under Obama, ‘Killary’ was responsible not just for cruel words, but for spreading real death and destruction across the globe. There is no reason to assume that she represented the lesser of two evils in the recent election.
Similar points could be made about the relationship of Trump to his predecessor, Barack Obama. Many liberal commentators see the passage from Obama to Trump in terms of what Carl Jung called enantiodromia – a radical transition from good to evil. Throughout the election campaign, they execrated Trump’s every racist remark and lewd confession – and even seemed to derive a perverse enjoyment from doing so. And when Trump emerged victorious, some US liberals even expressed a desire to emigrate before the nasty stuff got underway (I’m a cosmopolitan individualist, get me out of here). But while liberals have revelled in the daily reports of Trump’s bigotry, they have generally been silent on the crimes of the man who was US president for the past eight years. When these crimes are considered, Trump’s succession appears less like a break with the past and more like business as usual.
So let’s briefly consider Obama’s track record. Obama implemented – and lied about – an unprecedented surveillance campaign against his own population, waged a veritable war on whistleblowers, normalized extrajudicial killing, deported more immigrants than Clinton and Bush combined, and presided, with Hillary Clinton, over the destruction of Libya. Nor was Obama averse to expressions of Trump-style narcissism. In reference to his global drone murder programme – described by Noam Chomsky as ‘the biggest terrorist campaign in history’ – Obama is reported to have made a typically creepy joke to his aides: ‘it turns out I’m really good at killing people’ (an example, perhaps, of what psychoanalysts call ‘defence through admission’). And who can forget his violent and patriarchal Correspondents Dinner ‘joke’ about using predator drones to take out potential suitors to his daughters. During the financial crisis, meanwhile, Obama showed himself to be the friend of the bankers and the hammer of the working class, bailing out the banks and opposing a moratorium on home foreclosures.
Indeed, it should surprise nobody that the Obama years saw an unprecedented transfer of wealth in the United States from the poor to the rich. Trump, should he actually manage to survive as President, will surely bring misery to the working class at home and abroad; but Obama, the slick desk-bound assassin, has been doing precisely that for the last eight years, even if the US liberal-left, hopelessly lost in the labyrinths of identity politics, has largely proved unwilling to criticize his administration. Whatever else it stands for, then, Trump’s triumph hardly represents a rolling back of eight years of enlightened governance. This is no Orange Thermidor.
Nevertheless, the shift from Obama to Trump is not just a changing of the guard, a transition from Tweedledum to Tweedledumber. Trump’s victory, like the Brexit vote in the UK, does seem to signal a certain reconfiguration of forces in the post-crisis political landscape. The so-called ‘neoliberal’ political consensus of the past few decades is facing a challenge to its legitimacy and this, it seems, is giving rise to new strategies of ideological containment. This not a resurgence of fascism. Some ultra-right elements in the US have certainly been emboldened, even empowered in the wake of Trump’s success. But this is not the 1930s and Trump is not a new Hitler, popular as such tropes are among many liberal activists. Rather, it is right-wing populism that is the order of the day and Trump’s rise is mirrored in the ascendance of regressive strongmen all across the international stage: Duterte, Orbán, Erdoğan and other xenophobic demagogues.
The precise meaning of this populist turn is not yet clear. Some radical analysts argue that the populist surge actually operates against the interests of dominant ruling class factions and thus represents a certain strategic impasse and even a loss of control among the bourgeoisie in the established democracies. According to this view, all is not well with the ruling order. Yet even if this analysis is correct, given the current absence of almost any serious working-class struggle (or even, let’s be honest, basic organization) in most parts of the world, this destabilization of global politics is a potentially dangerous development.
As socialists, we can only reiterate that populism and charismatic leadership, whether in its right-wing or left-wing form, is not the answer to our problems. To those seeking a world without exploitation, war, xenophobia, racism and sexism, it matters little which butcher is currently wielding the cleaver over what Hegel called the ‘slaughter bench of history’. As Marx insisted, the liberation of the working class must be conquered by the working class itself. With this in mind, we should reject the idea that salvation lies in a nicer president or more enlightened prime minister. Whether black, white or tangerine, these politicians speak and act in the interests of the ruling class. In the immortal words of the punk group Crass, ‘we’ve got to learn to reject all leaders, and the passive shit they feed us’. When Trump fails to make America – or anything else – great, we socialists will still be around, arguing that our future rests in our own hands.
