The more I think about it, the more I think a humble, sympathetic, non-domineering, non-entryist engagement with the anti-oppression movements springing up around issues of gender identity (i.e. Trans issues) is going to be absolutely crucial for the Left in the coming years.
This isn't just a moral imperative. Sure, the Left must stand with the oppressed. Always. By definition. Otherwise why bother being on the Left? Otherwise, what does 'The Left' mean? But it's also a tactical imperative. The system must be attacked at its weakest points. The righteous and rightful rage felt by many on the axis of Trans oppression is absolutely one of the system's weakest points. It hits people where they live: in their bodies. Bodies are oppressed, disciplined, punished, curtailed, invaded, wounded and even dissected by capitalism... and it behoves the Left to realise that this happens in arenas outside the sites of direct capitalist production. This is one of those things that everyone formally 'gets' and then puts to one side. That's not good enough. Capitalist oppression is total, hegemonic, far-reaching and omnipresent. It is intimately and demonstrably bound up with oppression along lines of personal identity, bodily autonomy, bodily identity, sexual identity, gender, sexuality, and race. This is why intersectionality is a crucial concept that's only going to get more crucial. The task will be to relate all these issues to class. Not so that they can be subsumed, assimilated and/or digested, but so the analysis wielded by the Left can be enlarged, educated, made stronger and more inclusive. That is an end in itself - if we know what our ultimate goal really is.
The good news is that class is as intimately bound up with these things as the Left thinks it is. The bad news is that we have to stress the importance of class without playing 'issue trumps' (i.e. our preferred axis of oppression is more crucial or 'primary' or 'causal' than yours... and, by the way, how dare you stress the issues that hit you where you live before the issues that we think of as theoretically more important???).
But there is more good news. We can stress how capitalism, and thus class exploitation along lines of work and wage exploitation (which is basically just another way of saying 'capitalism'), generates and exacerbates such oppression... for the simple reason that it bloody does; it's the currently regnant form of class society, and we can adduce powerful facts to show how the structure of class society generates sexism, female oppression, gender essentialism, the reduction of people to categories, the reification of socially constructed categories into hegemonic 'facts of life', etc.
That's why this is so good. There isn't anything in there that constitutes new and startling revelation, but it's a great little summary/primer/starting-point, from the perspective of a totally 'on-side' Marxism. I found it so anyway - speaking as someone who personally embraces the elderly Goya's maxim "I'm still learning".
One (related) crucial issue to remember... and here I'd proffer the great work of Silvia Federici... is that the oppression of women is not an optional extra with capitalism, nor is it a by-product of capitalism. It is certainly generated and exacerbated by capitalism (part of the argument the Left needs to make) but is also a precondition of capitalism, intimately bound up with the creation of capitalism, and partly capitalism's parent.
The oppression of women existed before capitalism, because capitalism is a form of class society built on top of previous forms of class society (in Europe, feudalism)... just as the capitalist states are forms adapted from pre-capitalist states. And the rise of capitalism in Europe was absolutely and fundamentally bound up with the further domestication, persecution and economic subjugation of women (see Federici, among others). There really is very little wiggle room here to say that one caused the other. They are two sides of the same coin. And 'causality' or 'primary position' loses its meaning in a truly dialectical (i.e. a truly Marxist) analysis. Besides, its an academic question.
LGBTQIA+ oppression is, once again, related. (BTW: please forgive my using the long acronym as shorthand if you don't like the 'lumping together' effect, or if you're on the other side and worry that trying to be that inclusive accidentally implies that anything not covered is, by definition, not included... and also, please don't construe my raising of LGBTQIA+ oppression as an afterthought.) LGBTQIA+ oppression is intimately connected with the issue of women's oppression, and not in the sense of being a 'product' or 'by-product' or 'side effect' of it, but rather as another aspect of the suffocating enforcement and reification of gender that class society entails, relies upon, and by which it is partly produced.
ideas are icepickproof
Tuesday, 8 July 2014
Wednesday, 2 July 2014
Victory of the Icon 4
At the time, the liberals and the left thought of World War II as a battle between civilisation and barbarism, between progress and reaction. This is still the mainstream view today. But the leaders of the Allies did not think this way, if they were honest. For instance...
In the Second World War, many - probably most - ordinary people thought of themselves as fighting the evil of fascism, but
The quotes are from Chris Harman's, A People's History of the World.
The Churchill who demanded a no-holds-barred prosecution of the war was the same Churchill who had been present during the butchery at Omdurman, sent troops to shoot down striking miners in 1910 [this is probably not true], ordered the RAF to use poison gas against Kurdish rebels in British-ruled Iraq [this is arguable], and praised Mussolini. He had attacked a Conservative government in the 1930s for granting a minimal amount of local self government to India, and throughout the war he remained adamant that no concessions could be made to anti-colonial movements in Britain’s colonies, although this could have helped the war effort. ‘I have not become the king’s first minister’, he declared, ‘to oversee the dismemberment of the British Empire.’ He told Roosevelt and Stalin at Yalta, ‘While there is life in my body, no transfer of British sovereignty will be permitted’.
In the Second World War, many - probably most - ordinary people thought of themselves as fighting the evil of fascism, but
the motives of the rulers remained very different from those of their peoples. This was shown in the conduct of the war. Between the fall of France in the spring of 1940 and the Allied landings in southern Italy in 1943 most of the fighting by British armies was in northern Africa. Why? Because Churchill was determined to hang on to the area with the Suez Canal and the oilfields. His worries were not just about Germany but also the US, as was shown by a bitter diplomatic tussle between him and Roosevelt over Saudi Arabia.
The invasion of Italy was itself a consequence of Churchill’s obsession with re-establishing British hegemony in the Mediterranean. He refused pleas from both Russia and the US to open a second front in France at the time when the most vital battles of the war were being fought in western Russia. Instead he claimed that Italy and the Balkans constituted ‘the soft underbelly of Europe’—despite mountainous terrain which was bound to mean bloody battles and a very slow pace of advance.
Churchill’s refusal to concede the principle of independence for India meant that in 1942, while the decisive Battle of Stalingrad was taking place, thousands of British-led troops were brutally crushing demonstrations in India instead of fighting the Nazis, and that an Indian ‘liberation army’ was formed to fight on the side of Japan. It also led to a famine which killed three million people in Bengal.
The quotes are from Chris Harman's, A People's History of the World.
Monday, 23 June 2014
Apropos of Nothing
Bourgeois law sets up a system which seems, superficially, to draw
its moral force from the common sense morality of ordinary people (in
the West this is filtered through the formal Christian ethics
internalised by our civilisation). Its actual function, of course, is
to promote and enforce a social orderliness which allows the relatively
untrammelled existence of social hierarchy.
(This isn't a conspiratorial view, by the way. Conspiracies undoubtedly happen - the ruling class, and their adjutants, are as capable of getting together and discretely working towards their own agendas and advantages as anyone else - but conspiracy is not the basis of the system. Conspiracies are often criminal and, though frequently winked at by The Law, they are theoretically punishable. They are, in a very real sense, an aberration. An endemic aberration certainly - and more endemic the more confident the ruling classes get - but an aberration nonetheless. It's important not to be too cynical about the concept of law, to imagine that it is just a sham, and that everyone at the top knows it to be. That isn't how systems of control endure. Systems of control endure by being extremely plausible both to those who are screwed by them and those who benefit from them. Corruption is real. It is a by-product of a system that generates unaccountable and hierarchical structures. Corruption is also an important psychological category for making the system seem plausible, for making it seem to have validity and integrity. Everyone - the corrupt and the non-corrupt - partly derives their idea of what constitutes legitimacy from their idea of what constitutes illegitimacy.)
Part of how bourgeois law manages to be an effective and enduring system of control is by appearing to be impartial in its normal operation, to be aimed at securing justice except in aberrant circumstances, and to be based on moral categories... and one way in which it manages this is by, to some degree, some of the time, actually bothering to be all those things. You can get good results from the bourgeois justice system. It has to be capable of working properly in order to look like what it claims to be. You can trace the influence of popular ideas of morality in its structure and strictures. This is, to the greatest extent, the accreted result of popular pressure to reform the system. But then the absorbtion and adaptation of popular demands, the rationed distribution of progressive gains, the assimilation of democratic ideas, is another part of how systems of control survive. Ultimately, all worthwhile conceptions of 'justice' come from the democratic impulse from below. This isn't to say that they come from the innate goodness of people, or the nobility of the oppressed, or the spirit of mankind, or anything like that. Rather, the oppressed - always the more universal class because they are the most widespread and the most thwarted - develop the democratic impulse towards justice precisely because they are denied it. Injustice breeds the idea of justice in people. Inequality creates the aspiration towards equality. Justice isn't a thing that exists in the world a priori, it is a human idea. That makes it no less real, but it does mean that it bear the marks of its social origin.
(This isn't a conspiratorial view, by the way. Conspiracies undoubtedly happen - the ruling class, and their adjutants, are as capable of getting together and discretely working towards their own agendas and advantages as anyone else - but conspiracy is not the basis of the system. Conspiracies are often criminal and, though frequently winked at by The Law, they are theoretically punishable. They are, in a very real sense, an aberration. An endemic aberration certainly - and more endemic the more confident the ruling classes get - but an aberration nonetheless. It's important not to be too cynical about the concept of law, to imagine that it is just a sham, and that everyone at the top knows it to be. That isn't how systems of control endure. Systems of control endure by being extremely plausible both to those who are screwed by them and those who benefit from them. Corruption is real. It is a by-product of a system that generates unaccountable and hierarchical structures. Corruption is also an important psychological category for making the system seem plausible, for making it seem to have validity and integrity. Everyone - the corrupt and the non-corrupt - partly derives their idea of what constitutes legitimacy from their idea of what constitutes illegitimacy.)
Part of how bourgeois law manages to be an effective and enduring system of control is by appearing to be impartial in its normal operation, to be aimed at securing justice except in aberrant circumstances, and to be based on moral categories... and one way in which it manages this is by, to some degree, some of the time, actually bothering to be all those things. You can get good results from the bourgeois justice system. It has to be capable of working properly in order to look like what it claims to be. You can trace the influence of popular ideas of morality in its structure and strictures. This is, to the greatest extent, the accreted result of popular pressure to reform the system. But then the absorbtion and adaptation of popular demands, the rationed distribution of progressive gains, the assimilation of democratic ideas, is another part of how systems of control survive. Ultimately, all worthwhile conceptions of 'justice' come from the democratic impulse from below. This isn't to say that they come from the innate goodness of people, or the nobility of the oppressed, or the spirit of mankind, or anything like that. Rather, the oppressed - always the more universal class because they are the most widespread and the most thwarted - develop the democratic impulse towards justice precisely because they are denied it. Injustice breeds the idea of justice in people. Inequality creates the aspiration towards equality. Justice isn't a thing that exists in the world a priori, it is a human idea. That makes it no less real, but it does mean that it bear the marks of its social origin.
Sunday, 22 June 2014
Voluminous Description
Finally finished Kershaw's biography of Hitler. I've been
working on it - both volumes, unabridged - for years, picking it up for a
bit, putting it down for a bit, etc. (This is how I usually tackle mammoth
reading projects.)
Can't help feeling underwhelmed. I mean, I'm in absolute awe of the scholarship and knowledge and patience and effort involved in such a massive and detailed project... but it fails to live up to the hype from the middle-brow and/or reactionary reviewers - Paxman, Sereny, Hastings, Burleigh, etc - that is splashed so proudly all over the back covers.
Kershaw has produced something that is, at least for long stretches, narrative history. The narrative history of one protagonist. This would be fine if the protagonist possessed fascinating and complex (if vile) interiority. Hitler, however, did not have anything of the kind. He appears to have been a nonentity, a psychological nullity, a hazy cloud of pedestrian neuroses, a reflex machine made of clockwork prejudices, a lazy fool, a windbag, a crashing bore, a plodder, a cold and self-involved man, a man with little capacity for any passion other than fury, and little in the way of emotional complexity. His reactions are utterly predictable once you've spent any time (so to speak) in his company. This leads to endless paragraphs which begin with Kershaw saying something like "Hitler's reaction was predictable", followed by a re-run of something you've already read a hundred times. Kerhsaw isn't to be blamed for Hitler's personality, but he is - perhaps - to be blamed for taking so much space repeatedly describing it in detail, despite the worthlessness and tedium of such a project. Kershaw doesn't really have much to add when it comes to explaining how such a man could so entrance so many people. He makes glancing references to national pride, demagoguery, etc - all the usual explanations - and then seems to get back to the recitation of events.
Kershaw almost apologizes in the preface to Volume One: Hubris, talking about how he has knowingly strayed from his background in social history. He'd been plugging away at the social history of the Third Reich for years before writing this biography - a more 'popular' type of book - and often brings insights from social history to bear... especially in Vol.1 (which is by far the better book)... but it can sometimes feel like a series of asides in the dull story of a dull narcissist. The asides can be genuinely fascinating. Kershaw is good on the mechanics of how the Nazis were levered into power by cynical bourgeois politicians, for example. The repeated motif of 'working towards the Fuhrer' is cleverly seized-upon by Kershaw to show how much Nazi policy originated at lower levels with ambitious lickspittles and careerists pandering to Hitler, and his perennial attraction to the most radical 'solution' to any problem. In the second volume, the best bits are about how the haphazardly evolved structure of the Nazi state meant that, with more and more power invested in a man pathologically incapable of countenancing retreat under any circumstances, almost everyone except Hitler knew that the war was lost, yet were unable - often unwilling - to do anything about it. Kershaw also takes pains to trash any suggestion that Hitler was ignorant of the fate of the Jews. Hitler was plainly in that swamp of horror right up to his floppy fringe, even if he kept himself out of the detailed running of it (as he tended to keep himself out of the detailed running of anything).
But Kershaw never really connects any of this to an over-arching analysis. He describes the composite parts of Nazi ideology, yet never explains why a reactionary - yet radical-sounding - scavenger ideology appeared in Germany in the post-WWI era. He describes the garbled jargon of Nazism - which mixed anti-Semitism and ultra-Nationalism with apparent anti-capitalist rhetoric - but never gets into the fully capitalist nature of the regime, or the reasons why a movement with populist left-wing-sounding slogans could be so essential to saving German capitalism from revolution. He details cynical bourgeois political manouvering, yet never goes into the ways Nazism formed a continuity - as well as a rupture - with both pre-war German imperialism and modern capitalism. Imperialism itself appears as a pathological emanation rather than as a world system driven by economic competition; Germany becomes the site of a peculiarly destructive form of this pathology, with no deeper analysis offered. Etc.
Of course, one risks falling into the trap of criticising an author for not sharing one's own ideological viewpoint... as though that's a flaw or fault, rather than a point of difference... but reading Kershaw is often - all too often - like reading a summary description (albeit a fantastically detailed one) rather than an analysis. You need Walter Benjamin and Trotsky and Daniel Guerin and maybe even bits and bobs from Wilhelm Reich in your head as you read Kershaw.
Kershaw would doubtless disagree, but then part of the problem with him - in my opinion - is that his view is evidently that of the liberal who sees ideology itself as a primal evil, leading to extremism, leading to utopianism, leading to revolution, leading to disaster (though I should stress, one of the virtues of Vol.1 is Kershaw's detailed fact-based rejection of the idea that Hitler was voted in, or that he staged a popular revolution). Such normative assumptions are the foundation of the entire book. Ideology is something that extremists or revolutionaries have, not bourgeois states, mainstream 'democrats' or liberals. Civilisation and barbarism are opposites (rather than, as a Marxist might say, different sides of the same coin) and the descent of Germany from the latter into the former is a unique puzzle. If the respectable bourgeois politicians - and other such civilised people - helped or capitulated to Hitler, the answer to this apparent paradox must lie in 'opportunism', 'militarism', and other such extraneous pathologies... and, in this way, like so many liberal historians before him, he always circles back round to find a terrible conundrum that can only be described in detail and bewailed.
Also, he's not much of a prose stylist. He's okay when he's not trying, but when he gets ambitious he also gets clunky.
I feel rather mean-spirited now, because Kershaw has assembled an amazing description, parts of which are genuinely insightful and useful, and all of which is based on sincere (and appealing) revulsion...
But it is, ultimately, only a very long description.
Can't help feeling underwhelmed. I mean, I'm in absolute awe of the scholarship and knowledge and patience and effort involved in such a massive and detailed project... but it fails to live up to the hype from the middle-brow and/or reactionary reviewers - Paxman, Sereny, Hastings, Burleigh, etc - that is splashed so proudly all over the back covers.
Kershaw has produced something that is, at least for long stretches, narrative history. The narrative history of one protagonist. This would be fine if the protagonist possessed fascinating and complex (if vile) interiority. Hitler, however, did not have anything of the kind. He appears to have been a nonentity, a psychological nullity, a hazy cloud of pedestrian neuroses, a reflex machine made of clockwork prejudices, a lazy fool, a windbag, a crashing bore, a plodder, a cold and self-involved man, a man with little capacity for any passion other than fury, and little in the way of emotional complexity. His reactions are utterly predictable once you've spent any time (so to speak) in his company. This leads to endless paragraphs which begin with Kershaw saying something like "Hitler's reaction was predictable", followed by a re-run of something you've already read a hundred times. Kerhsaw isn't to be blamed for Hitler's personality, but he is - perhaps - to be blamed for taking so much space repeatedly describing it in detail, despite the worthlessness and tedium of such a project. Kershaw doesn't really have much to add when it comes to explaining how such a man could so entrance so many people. He makes glancing references to national pride, demagoguery, etc - all the usual explanations - and then seems to get back to the recitation of events.
Kershaw almost apologizes in the preface to Volume One: Hubris, talking about how he has knowingly strayed from his background in social history. He'd been plugging away at the social history of the Third Reich for years before writing this biography - a more 'popular' type of book - and often brings insights from social history to bear... especially in Vol.1 (which is by far the better book)... but it can sometimes feel like a series of asides in the dull story of a dull narcissist. The asides can be genuinely fascinating. Kershaw is good on the mechanics of how the Nazis were levered into power by cynical bourgeois politicians, for example. The repeated motif of 'working towards the Fuhrer' is cleverly seized-upon by Kershaw to show how much Nazi policy originated at lower levels with ambitious lickspittles and careerists pandering to Hitler, and his perennial attraction to the most radical 'solution' to any problem. In the second volume, the best bits are about how the haphazardly evolved structure of the Nazi state meant that, with more and more power invested in a man pathologically incapable of countenancing retreat under any circumstances, almost everyone except Hitler knew that the war was lost, yet were unable - often unwilling - to do anything about it. Kershaw also takes pains to trash any suggestion that Hitler was ignorant of the fate of the Jews. Hitler was plainly in that swamp of horror right up to his floppy fringe, even if he kept himself out of the detailed running of it (as he tended to keep himself out of the detailed running of anything).
But Kershaw never really connects any of this to an over-arching analysis. He describes the composite parts of Nazi ideology, yet never explains why a reactionary - yet radical-sounding - scavenger ideology appeared in Germany in the post-WWI era. He describes the garbled jargon of Nazism - which mixed anti-Semitism and ultra-Nationalism with apparent anti-capitalist rhetoric - but never gets into the fully capitalist nature of the regime, or the reasons why a movement with populist left-wing-sounding slogans could be so essential to saving German capitalism from revolution. He details cynical bourgeois political manouvering, yet never goes into the ways Nazism formed a continuity - as well as a rupture - with both pre-war German imperialism and modern capitalism. Imperialism itself appears as a pathological emanation rather than as a world system driven by economic competition; Germany becomes the site of a peculiarly destructive form of this pathology, with no deeper analysis offered. Etc.
Of course, one risks falling into the trap of criticising an author for not sharing one's own ideological viewpoint... as though that's a flaw or fault, rather than a point of difference... but reading Kershaw is often - all too often - like reading a summary description (albeit a fantastically detailed one) rather than an analysis. You need Walter Benjamin and Trotsky and Daniel Guerin and maybe even bits and bobs from Wilhelm Reich in your head as you read Kershaw.
Kershaw would doubtless disagree, but then part of the problem with him - in my opinion - is that his view is evidently that of the liberal who sees ideology itself as a primal evil, leading to extremism, leading to utopianism, leading to revolution, leading to disaster (though I should stress, one of the virtues of Vol.1 is Kershaw's detailed fact-based rejection of the idea that Hitler was voted in, or that he staged a popular revolution). Such normative assumptions are the foundation of the entire book. Ideology is something that extremists or revolutionaries have, not bourgeois states, mainstream 'democrats' or liberals. Civilisation and barbarism are opposites (rather than, as a Marxist might say, different sides of the same coin) and the descent of Germany from the latter into the former is a unique puzzle. If the respectable bourgeois politicians - and other such civilised people - helped or capitulated to Hitler, the answer to this apparent paradox must lie in 'opportunism', 'militarism', and other such extraneous pathologies... and, in this way, like so many liberal historians before him, he always circles back round to find a terrible conundrum that can only be described in detail and bewailed.
Also, he's not much of a prose stylist. He's okay when he's not trying, but when he gets ambitious he also gets clunky.
I feel rather mean-spirited now, because Kershaw has assembled an amazing description, parts of which are genuinely insightful and useful, and all of which is based on sincere (and appealing) revulsion...
But it is, ultimately, only a very long description.
Friday, 23 May 2014
UKIP SURGE AHEAD ON SHABOGAN GRAFFITI
The main headlines today.
THE BBC NEWS DIVISION HAS TAKEN OVER OWNERSHIP OF OBSCURE DOCTOR WHO BLOG SHABOGAN GRAFFITI
"The blog will now be run according to proper BBC guidelines of impartiality," said that lying Zionist shitsack James Harding, head of BBC News.
In other news...
UKIP SURGE FORWARD AND ONWARDS TO CERTAIN FORWARD MARCHING MARCH OF ONWARD SURGING SURGENESS AHEAD ON SHABOGAN GRAFFITI.
The BBC Newsroom is reporting that despite there being no sentiments ever expressed on Shabogan Graffiti that a Ukipper would ever find acceptable, UKIP have broken through with a breakthrough on Shabogan Graffiti and are now surging forward and ahead to breakthroughs and surges on the unpopular blog.
"Apparently the vast majority of the British electorate do not read Shabogan Graffiti," said a hairdo on top of a suit behind a desk, "but even so, the fact that UKIP have now broken through and surged across the blog shows clearly that the British public think UKIP are a force to be reckoned with and a reckon to be forced with and surging and breaking through and getting the mainstream establishment parties running scared."
Finally...
BBC ANNOUNCES NEW SERIES OF POSTS ON SHABOGAN GRAFFITI, TO BE ENTITLED 'IMMIGRATION: ASKING THE DIFFICULT QUESTIONS THAT MOST WHITE WORKING CLASS PEOPLE WANT ANSWERED BUT WHICH THE POLITICAL CORRECTNESS NAZIS REFUSE ANY OF US TO TALK ABOUT'.
Andrew Marr is 412 years old.
THE BBC NEWS DIVISION HAS TAKEN OVER OWNERSHIP OF OBSCURE DOCTOR WHO BLOG SHABOGAN GRAFFITI
"The blog will now be run according to proper BBC guidelines of impartiality," said that lying Zionist shitsack James Harding, head of BBC News.
In other news...
UKIP SURGE FORWARD AND ONWARDS TO CERTAIN FORWARD MARCHING MARCH OF ONWARD SURGING SURGENESS AHEAD ON SHABOGAN GRAFFITI.
The BBC Newsroom is reporting that despite there being no sentiments ever expressed on Shabogan Graffiti that a Ukipper would ever find acceptable, UKIP have broken through with a breakthrough on Shabogan Graffiti and are now surging forward and ahead to breakthroughs and surges on the unpopular blog.
"Apparently the vast majority of the British electorate do not read Shabogan Graffiti," said a hairdo on top of a suit behind a desk, "but even so, the fact that UKIP have now broken through and surged across the blog shows clearly that the British public think UKIP are a force to be reckoned with and a reckon to be forced with and surging and breaking through and getting the mainstream establishment parties running scared."
Finally...
BBC ANNOUNCES NEW SERIES OF POSTS ON SHABOGAN GRAFFITI, TO BE ENTITLED 'IMMIGRATION: ASKING THE DIFFICULT QUESTIONS THAT MOST WHITE WORKING CLASS PEOPLE WANT ANSWERED BUT WHICH THE POLITICAL CORRECTNESS NAZIS REFUSE ANY OF US TO TALK ABOUT'.
Andrew Marr is 412 years old.
Saturday, 17 May 2014
X
On the ballot paper in my region there are no less than five extremist Right-wing parties. Six if you include the Conservatives. Apart from that there are two centrist neoliberal parties: Labour and the Liberal Democrats. I know a fair few very nice, likeable and principled Lib Dems (online and in real life), but as a national political force the party is part of a coalition with the Tories and, as such, constitutes a de facto Right-wing party. So that's seven Right-wing parties of various shades running from crypto-fascist to poujadist to centre-Right - none of which has any serious quarrel with the neoliberal consensus - and one centrist neoliberal party, Labour... which is now so degraded and debased that it seperates itself from the Tories and Lib Dems by a few whiskers. Centrism has itself been shifted so far to the right that the modern Labour party is to the Right of the pre-Thatcher Tories on many issues.
That's democracy for you. That's apparently the best we can do. That's the freedom I'm supposed to relish and celebrate. What a barren wasteland of horror. What a terrifying landscape of hatred, dishonesty, bigotry and unthinking compromise. This is politics, supposedly. This null, anhedonic, empty, contentless, vicious, small-minded, dead, echoing, dreamless nothingness of non-choice. This is what the best of all possible worlds looks like.
But, I'm going to vote. Not because I want to. Not because I like any of the 'options'. I don't want to. I don't like any of the 'options'. I consider the trip to the Polling Station to be a humiliating chore that will drain me of what self-esteem I have, that will degrade and compromise me, that will implicate me. I feel physically sick at the prospect of ticking a box on that ballot paper. I feel that I will be signing a contract with a panorama of bullies, agreeing to let them come and kick me in the balls any time they want, agreeing to thank them afterwards, agreeing to sit by and nod and share their guilt when they rob and exploit and lie and torture and kill. But it has to be done.
I cannot not vote against such an artillery of closed-minded, spiteful, minority-hating, jumped-up, Little Englander swine. I cannot not vote against the BNP and UKIP and the English Democrats, etc etc etc. I don't expect my vote against them will change anything. Ultimately the only thing that will prevent these scum from wreaking any havoc they get a chance to wreak will be the mass mobilisation of activists against them, will be blockades and counter-demos that stop them marching, will be barricades that stop them getting into the BBC where the corporation is drooling to promote their agenda. Ultimately, they will only be stopped when their empty heads are acquainted with pavements. Roll on the day. But, meanwhile, I have to vote against them.
I also cannot not vote against the current government, which is possibly the most evil and wantonly destructive in living memory, a wrecking ball being swung through the last ruins of the social-democratic consensus, through all human decency. It is a moral obligation - I feel - to vote against the Tories and the Yellow Tories.
If there were no Green Party candidates in my wretched, squalid, parochial, bigoted little rural shitpit of a region, then I would have to hold my nose, gird my loins, keep a grip on my stomach in the hope of not puking up my soul, and vote Labour. My hand might wither and drop off. Luckily, however, there are Greens to vote for. So I'll do that.
If I felt for a moment that abstaining from voting would achieve anything worthwhile, I would do so. But it won't. I don't believe that 'the vote' is a meaningful way to change society within the smothering death grip of the rotting zombie of capitalist democracy... but my disbelief in the power of the vote is also why I disbelieve in the power of the non-vote, the withheld vote. Piffle like that is for the likes of privileged simpletons like Russell Brand.
I'm not telling anyone else what to do. I'm just telling you what I'm going to do.
That's democracy for you. That's apparently the best we can do. That's the freedom I'm supposed to relish and celebrate. What a barren wasteland of horror. What a terrifying landscape of hatred, dishonesty, bigotry and unthinking compromise. This is politics, supposedly. This null, anhedonic, empty, contentless, vicious, small-minded, dead, echoing, dreamless nothingness of non-choice. This is what the best of all possible worlds looks like.
But, I'm going to vote. Not because I want to. Not because I like any of the 'options'. I don't want to. I don't like any of the 'options'. I consider the trip to the Polling Station to be a humiliating chore that will drain me of what self-esteem I have, that will degrade and compromise me, that will implicate me. I feel physically sick at the prospect of ticking a box on that ballot paper. I feel that I will be signing a contract with a panorama of bullies, agreeing to let them come and kick me in the balls any time they want, agreeing to thank them afterwards, agreeing to sit by and nod and share their guilt when they rob and exploit and lie and torture and kill. But it has to be done.
I cannot not vote against such an artillery of closed-minded, spiteful, minority-hating, jumped-up, Little Englander swine. I cannot not vote against the BNP and UKIP and the English Democrats, etc etc etc. I don't expect my vote against them will change anything. Ultimately the only thing that will prevent these scum from wreaking any havoc they get a chance to wreak will be the mass mobilisation of activists against them, will be blockades and counter-demos that stop them marching, will be barricades that stop them getting into the BBC where the corporation is drooling to promote their agenda. Ultimately, they will only be stopped when their empty heads are acquainted with pavements. Roll on the day. But, meanwhile, I have to vote against them.
I also cannot not vote against the current government, which is possibly the most evil and wantonly destructive in living memory, a wrecking ball being swung through the last ruins of the social-democratic consensus, through all human decency. It is a moral obligation - I feel - to vote against the Tories and the Yellow Tories.
If there were no Green Party candidates in my wretched, squalid, parochial, bigoted little rural shitpit of a region, then I would have to hold my nose, gird my loins, keep a grip on my stomach in the hope of not puking up my soul, and vote Labour. My hand might wither and drop off. Luckily, however, there are Greens to vote for. So I'll do that.
If I felt for a moment that abstaining from voting would achieve anything worthwhile, I would do so. But it won't. I don't believe that 'the vote' is a meaningful way to change society within the smothering death grip of the rotting zombie of capitalist democracy... but my disbelief in the power of the vote is also why I disbelieve in the power of the non-vote, the withheld vote. Piffle like that is for the likes of privileged simpletons like Russell Brand.
I'm not telling anyone else what to do. I'm just telling you what I'm going to do.
Wednesday, 14 May 2014
The Pit
I want to take a moment to tell you all about some music I love. I am a devotee of movie soundtracks. I am particularly fond of two movie scores by Eliot Goldenthal.
Alien 3 (which I've been thinking about lately because of this)
and
Titus
Amazing scores. Do stick with Titus after the famous bit at the start. The rest of the score is equally good.
I also adore George Fenton's music for Mary Reilly.
I'm using these scores (on a loop) along with some others (Hans Zimmer's music for The Dark Knight Rises and Nicholas Hooper's gorgeous score for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
) while trying to write a fiction project I've currently got on the boil. I really don't know why I'm telling you this, except that I like to share nice things.
By the way, the films I've mentioned are all particular favourites of mine (apart from The Dark Knight Rises, which is a bloated, pompous, incoherent fascist nightmare of a movie). Yes, I like Alien 3 and Mary Reilly. In fact, I love them. And Half Blood Prince is a genuinely good movie (god knows how they managed to make a genuinely good movie out of a such a wretched novel).
My fiction project is basically a 'serious' reworking of a comic strip called Planet of the Hedgehogs that I wrote - and drew! - between the ages of 9 and 11.
I am about to have a baked potato.
I'm reading a book called Shades of Grey that was recently sent to me as a gift by the lovely Lucy McGough. No, not 50 Shades of Grey, just Shades of Grey. So far, it's fun.
Pardon this silly post but I'm clambering out of a bit of a pit at the moment, and this is a way of saying "hello again world". Bye.
Oh, and R.I.P. (Rest in Perversity) H.R. Giger.
Alien 3 (which I've been thinking about lately because of this)
and
Titus
Amazing scores. Do stick with Titus after the famous bit at the start. The rest of the score is equally good.
I also adore George Fenton's music for Mary Reilly.
I'm using these scores (on a loop) along with some others (Hans Zimmer's music for The Dark Knight Rises and Nicholas Hooper's gorgeous score for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
) while trying to write a fiction project I've currently got on the boil. I really don't know why I'm telling you this, except that I like to share nice things.
By the way, the films I've mentioned are all particular favourites of mine (apart from The Dark Knight Rises, which is a bloated, pompous, incoherent fascist nightmare of a movie). Yes, I like Alien 3 and Mary Reilly. In fact, I love them. And Half Blood Prince is a genuinely good movie (god knows how they managed to make a genuinely good movie out of a such a wretched novel).
My fiction project is basically a 'serious' reworking of a comic strip called Planet of the Hedgehogs that I wrote - and drew! - between the ages of 9 and 11.
I am about to have a baked potato.
I'm reading a book called Shades of Grey that was recently sent to me as a gift by the lovely Lucy McGough. No, not 50 Shades of Grey, just Shades of Grey. So far, it's fun.
Pardon this silly post but I'm clambering out of a bit of a pit at the moment, and this is a way of saying "hello again world". Bye.
Oh, and R.I.P. (Rest in Perversity) H.R. Giger.
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