Round and Round

Jeremy Corbyn is a decent man, and he’s closer to my viewpoint that just about anybody else in mainstream politics, but he’s still basically just a moderate Social Democrat.  The media buzz about him being “hard Left” is ludicrous nonsense.   It’s a sign of the media’s extreme Right-wing agenda/viewpoint, a centre-ground shifted to the Right beyond anything known since the early 20th century, and the widespread (and very consciously inculcated) political illiteracy that now pervades the UK like a plague.

I think Corbyn’s usefulness lies almost entirely in the opportunity he presents for us to push the conversation in certain ways.  I will push him over the other candidates, and I will support the good stuff he says and does as Labour leader (if elected) because it’d be insane to do anything else.  The opportunity for propaganda is itself reason to do this.  The subsequent opportunity for anti-reformist, anti-Labour propaganda when Corbyn sells out - because he will, make no mistake... they always do, the structural logic of the situation makes that inevitable - will be worth having too, speaking as a revolutionary.

The Labour Party will be relieved to learn that I have no intention of practicing entryism.  I will not be paying them £3 for the chance to vote for Corbyn.  I have no illusions about Corbyn, or the Labour Party, or what Corbyn can do with the Labour Party, or Labour’s chances of winning in 2020 whoever’s leading it.  The last thing Corbyn needs is people joining, voting for him, getting him elected, and then never getting further involved in activism, or in helping him push the party leftwards (which is what will happen with the new members). 

In many ways, Liz Kendall is a much better leadership prospect for the 'really-existing Labour Party'.  Corbyn is the candidate for people like Owen Jones, who have an essentially fantasy-based idea of what the Labour Party is.  It’s a machine for controlling and containing the Left and Social Democracy.  There's an idea out there that the Labour leaders are cowed into abandoning Left-wing principles by the media.  Bollocks.  You don't climb the Labour Party's internal greasy pole unless you are, in real terms, very very Right-wing indeed.  Labour is a thoroughly - even fanatically - neoliberal, atlanticist party which provides a kind of kennel for those elements who would otherwise be dangerously homeless.  Its main purpose it to sidetrack people who want Social Democratic policies, and channel them safely into a reformist project that is, essentially, a neverending roundalay.  Moderate the slogans to get elected.  Get elected.  Play it safe.  Get voted out when playing it safe lays you open to the vagaries of an unchallenged capitalist system.  Then play it safe to get elected again.  'Twas ever thus, to an extent, but especially since the Blair revolution, when the Labour Party was essentially remodelled into a slick, larger-membership, higher-profile version of the SDP.

I am so sick of the Labour Left’s delusions about what can be achieved with this rigged game.  In many ways I have more contempt for the so-called Labour Left than I do for good honest Blairites or Tories.

And I am so sick of the moral blackmail.  “We have to get the Tories out!  Get the Tories out at any cost!  Do anything to get the Tories out!  If you don’t support Labour, and support a moderate [i.e. Right-wing] Labour leader, you’re selling out the vulnerable people who’ll suffer under the Tories!”  Firstly, what about the vulnerable people who did suffer - and would suffer again - under Labour?  Labour pursued Tory policies, often with greater venom, vindictiveness and efficiency than the Tories.  Their specialty, from almost the very beginning.  Secondly, is this eternal fucking roundabout really the best we can do?  I mean, really?

I’ve been an implacable opponent of reformism since I read Rosa Luxemburg at college.  But even this year, at the election, I was saying “for god’s sake, vote against the Coalition, even if it means voting Labour, if you live somewhere where it might make a difference”.  I said it with no illusions, but as a stop-gap, a triage measure.  I was like someone with no faith in homeopathy, grasping at a homeopathic remedy to treat my cancer, because every other option is closed off and, after all, what harm could it do?  But that's the "We've got to do something?" logic of the panicked.  That's the same logic that makes otherwise sensible people think it might be a good idea to support NATO bombing Libya.

I begin to think that, as with what Oscar said about charity, electoral reformism is not only a trap but actually evil.  You perpetuate the disease by offering palliatives for the symptoms.  Lesser-evilism may be the greatest evil of all, even when practiced in the 'no illusions' way that I have sometimes practiced it.  It may sound cold, but maybe what we need is a few decades of undiluted Tory rule.  Maybe that would be an acceptable price to pay, if it meant stepping off that roundabout.  Because that roundabout is kind-of attached to an underground battery, and every time you spin it, you generate more charge that gets stored in the battery, and the battery keeps the whole fucking machine working.

I've never believed that suffering is good for you.  Never.  It's a pernicious lie our culture tells us.  But, y'know... hope isn't working terribly well lately, is it?   Palliatives don't cure diseases.  A vial of homeopathic remedy doesn't make a dent on the cancer cells... and, in any case, with Labour, a better analogy would probably be a vial of acid.

Suffering may not be good for you, but sometimes desperation can make you strong.

The working class movement is now so decimated that it makes less and less sense to think of Labour and the Unions as weapons in a struggle powered from below by working class activity. The old, standard logic used by people like me to justify engagement with reformists is falling apart, leaving us with some very bleak and stark choices to make.

I’m not sure that unremitting Tory rule might not be the only way to reinvigorate resistance from below.  I mean serious resistance by the way, not one-day strikes and marches and clicktivism.  I mean blood on the streets resistance - which is now pretty much the only way Austerity can ever be seriously challenged in the rigged game of the neoliberal millenium.  Even as it weakens the working class, Tory torture fuels their resentment and rage.  Better ten riots than no strikes.

The Tories want to take us back to the 19th century.  Maybe we should let them.  After all, there was no tradition of working class struggle before the working class invented it - and they did that in response to relentless, unaccountable pumelling from a system that represented them not at all, that gave them no outlet, that had no mercy for them, that locked them up for being destitute and let them die for the want of a bed.

Resistance and organisation came from despair, originally.  In the decayed and destroyed ruins of the tradition that used to give Labour any semblance of usefulness, maybe despair is the only thing we have going for us.  Let the fuckers burn it all down.  Then, maybe, we’ll get it together to burn them down in return.  What choice will we have?  You got any better ideas?  Any ideas that don't involve keeping on turning that fucking roundabout forever, charging up their batteries, and never getting anywhere?

An Ageing System

It's always puzzled me, this thing about people getting right-wing as they get older.  You'd think that the opposite would happen.

I mean, as you get older, you notice that the world keeps having the same problems, and that they tend to have the same underlying causes, and that nothing is ever done about them.  You notice more and more of the same kinds of scandals reoccurring over the years, time and again, and always based upon imbalances of power, and upon powerful people being unaccountable.  You're more likely to have a mortgage and debts, the older you are.  You're more likely to owe lots of money to banks and credit agencies, and to be crippled by these debts.  You're more likely to have health problems, and thus to need medical care, and thus to see that the Health Service is underfunded and overstretched.  You're more likely to realise that your investments and savings (if you have any) don't pay off in anything like the way you're told they will when you're younger.  You're more likely to worry about how you will look after yourself and your partner in old age.  You're more likely to notice your retirement receding into the distance.  You're more likely to find yourself paying through the nose for medications that go with age, medications your parents didn't have to pay through the nose for.  You're more likely to meet more and more people of different 'races' and nationalities, and thus to notice that they're not too different to you.  You're more likely to have been mistreated at work, or sacked, or been forced to find second jobs or third jobs.  You're more likely to have seen talentless people around you rising while you stay still, simply because they were born with advantages you never had.  You're more likely to have lived through several wars and recessions instead of just one or two.  You're more likely to have observed the way the world's weather systems have catastrophically changed even in the last few decades.  You're more likely to have seen friends' lives ruined by discrimination or depression or stress.  You're more likely to have seen your parents face an uncertain and neglected old age.  And you're more likely to have kids and grandkids, and to see all the challenges they face.  A restricted job market, more and more pressure on them to work harder to have a chance of being employed one day, the escalating cost of further and higher education, more debt earlier in life, less chance of being able to afford to buy a house or even move out of their parents' home, spiraling costs of living, less social safety nets, a squeezed education system.  And on and on it goes.

Decades of life means decades of observing the world getting worse, and the so-called solutions never working, and the so-called progressive parties always selling people out, and the persistence of poverty and corruption never being addressed, and inequality and injustice always being at the root of the problems.  And it means becoming more and more vulnerable, as an individual or as part of a family, to the insecurity and hardships capitalism causes and relies upon.

Basically, the saying "you get more right-wing as you get older" is something only applicable to people who are already economically and socially privileged.  Such people can afford to dabble with being left-wing when they're young, if they feel like it.  They can rely on rich parents to bankroll such flirtations with leftiness.  When they're young and cushioned, it costs them nothing.  Principles are always easier if they cost you nothing.  Then, as they get older, they take their place in the system of privilege that was always waiting to welcome them.  They see their savings and investments rising (because, generally, the more you have the more you make from it), their property becoming more and more valuable, their financial situation getting comfier and more secure every day.  At the very least, they see themselves comparatively insulated.  Their parents enjoy a luxurious old-age and then die, leaving them more property and investments and savings.  Their own children and grandchildren don't have to worry about the deficiencies of state education, or the deficiencies of the NHS, or the debts accrued during further and higher education, or the uncertainties of the job market.  Jobs wait for them.  Economic security is built into life for such people and their families.  Like all people with privilege, their primary focus is to hold onto it ferociously.  We all know that privilege causes people to feel aggrieved by the faintest suggestion of a challenge to their privilege.  This is at the root of much misogyny.  Patriarchy causes men think of women as appliances.  How angry would you be if your vacuum cleaner suddenly refused to work?  I dunno about you, but when things like that happen to me I swear at the errant machine and feel pretty damned aggrieved.  Men extend the same logic to women who don't want to be treated as equipment.  And Corey Robin, a historian of ideas, has done some very good work describing how modern conservatism is, at bottom, the ideological expression of the struggle to retain privilege.

This pattern is most pronounced in the very rich, of course.  But it used to hold pretty reliably (if scaled down) for the moderately rich, and down to the middle classes.  (It even used to hold for a certain extent to the working classes during the long post-war boom, which looks like a utopia of economic justice, job security and progressive welfarism compared to where we are now.)  However, like many old cultural certainties of capitalism, this pattern is breaking up - with increasing speed.  (Capitalism does this.)  The middle classes and petty bourgeoisie are more and more squeezed, more and more threatened by uncertainty.  The iron law of neoliberalism is the redistribution of wealth upwards - and this is really just a variation on what always happens in capitalism during its built-in periodic crises.  And, the bottom looking increasingly drained, neoliberalism - especially now in this era of crisis and austerity - is feeding on the middle.

Of course, the people in the middle can't be expected to draw left-wing conclusions from all this.  Such people generally drift to... da daaa!... the populist far-right (i.e. UKIP, BNP, the Tea Party, various European equivalents).  And, in the absence of organised organs of workers' struggle, the people at the bottom will often drift that way too.  Especially when you factor in the massive effort neoliberal capitalism puts into pushing and sustaining ideological disorientation.

Neoliberal capitalism itself is getting more ideologically right-wing as it gets older.  The only sane response is to go in the other direction.

But it's not easy.  Because, with that lifetime of confronting the horrors there also comes a lifetime of getting entangled in the very hard work and stress it takes to navigate them, and the fatalism of seeing nothing ever getting better, and the pessimism of constant defeats, and the confusion sewn by decades of 'There Is No Alternative'.  That's why the only thing that has a chance of fundamentally altering this downward spiral is a resurgence in working class organisation, in the teeth of the longstanding and hugely-successful neoliberal project of destroying the power of unions. 

That's why every success for the left, however compromised, however embedded in reformist politics and parliamentarianism, has to be seized upon. 

Because the dialectic of change has to start somewhere.