I’ll put this here, to keep myself out of trouble on social media. It seems that the Labour Party has been trounced at the election, and already the ‘moderates’ are blaming Corbyn and saying that this is what happens when you nominate a ‘scary lefty.’ Those were the exact words I read in my feed, from a Democrat supporter warning that Trump will win again if the Democrats go left. Total rubbish. First thing, Trump beat not a leftist last time, but the perfectly ‘moderate’ Hilary Clinton. Before her was another ‘moderate,’ the bomb, oil, and Wall Street president. This political disaster is self-authored, and the liberal ‘moderates’ should own it, or be made to. Because, as ever, if it the working class who will pay the price of their mendacity and cowardice.
With respect to the UK, moderates hacked off the working class, as they always have done with Labour. Labour's history is one of 'moderates' defaulting to the status quo, dividing and demoralising its own basis, did in the sixties and seventies. I suppose Blair, Brown and some comforting myth about 'the aspiring classes' would suffice for moderates - along with globalisation, social engineering, PFI, dodgy dossiers, invasions, extraordinary rendition. That’s not to mention the ‘light touch’ of financial ‘regulation’ and the biggest crash for eighty years, followed by bailouts and austerity. People repeat ‘system change, not climate change’ like a mantra, and yet when there is a prospect of radical change, the establishment join forces to vilify and marginalise, and erstwhile radicals run off for some nice and easy ‘middle way’ workaround. Let’s call it for what it is – cowardice. The choices were clear here and are clear now – one way or another, the future is radical. ‘Moderate’ people don’t have what it takes. You lot a clueless if you think there's a 'moderate' way out of the accumulating crises that are upon us. Paul Mason was spot on weeks ago when he wrote of the liberal establishment and technocratic elites standing powerless before a crisis and reaction it cannot comprehend, because too few are prepared to examine the material roots and class dynamics. Crawl back to Clinton and Obama, then - where on Earth do you think this whirlwind is coming from? Ming the Merciless. Such ‘moderate’ politics is clueless and empty, appealing to those who lack what it takes to seize the political initiative, endlessly rehearsing the next defeat and blaming others for it.
This vote is a vote engineered by the rich for the rich. It betrays a mindset that is the product of 40 years of neoliberalism, and the way that selfishness, public indifference, social callousness, and intellectual and political cynicism have been hard-wired into the social psyche. It is also the product of the liberal ‘moderates’ who, in these same decades, have worked assiduously to defeat, marginalize, and suppress radical alternatives to the status quo. This is a vote the Establishment has worked for at all levels, in politics, media, and culture, including the upper echelons of the Labour Party itself. History repeats itself, Marx said, first as tragedy, second as farce. It is exactly forty years since the victory of Margaret Thatcher. That’s four decades to have learned some key political lessons the hard way. But times really have changed. The crisis that is upon us is very much a result of the neoliberal project inaugurated in 1979, itself an attempt to deal with capitalist crisis. That involves putting the labour movement in a legal straightjacket and marginalising and silencing the left. That happened, inequality rose, and power and resources shifted from labour to capital. That neoliberal political and hegemonic class project succeeded. And brought us the converging crises that are upon us. The pretence of being radical and bringing change won’t wear. Brexit has merely been a shield. With Brexit ‘done,’ there will be no hiding from the long standing and deep seated nature of the crisis that is underway. We are living in a slow Apocalypse. There is no possibility of Johnson being able to construct a hegemonic project. The slogan of getting Brexit ‘done’ has a short shelf life, and once its date is up, there will be no evading the crises and conflicts to come. There is no British economic revival in sight, and no resolution to the global capitalist crisis either. And climate change is going to get worse. It’s a defeat, yes, but it was to be expected. And it is much less of a defeat – and victory – than people may think. People have been hoodwinked, they have fallen for easy answers and surrogates. Reality is much less easily swayed than people. In an era of capital reaching its absolute limits on a global scale, rising popular discontent, and increasing climate crisis, the election of clowns to public office merely fools a few for a while. The problems will come back harder. And that’s what radicals need to do. As for 'moderates,' they can go and find a spine, have the guts to take ownership of their part in this debacle, or just do us all a favour and clear off.
I am glad I went public on this rather than be wise after the fact. Brexit is a ruling class issue and split. The attitude of the left should have been to make ‘take back control’ more than a slogan aimed against foreign political powers, showing where real financial and economic control lies and demanding the social restitution and embodiment of power and resources. “Not my circus, not my monkeys” should have been the attitude to the EU. Unless the left detaches itself from the liberal middle class and its pet concerns and prejudices, it will keep going down to defeat with them. In or out of the EU, crisis in its myriad forms is upon us. Brexit and its slogans and simplicities has been allowed to dominate the political agenda. There is no radical resolution of capitalist crisis in those terms. You can resolve a problem; you cannot resolve a contradiction. It should have been socialism and social transformation on the agenda. Instead, it was Brexit and the EU. Instead of class consciousness, the alternative to the conservative right was “Remain,” which is to say cleaving to the very status quo that has palpably failed and is being rejected by those demanding change. I’ll say the same with respect to climate change, with the proviso that that crisis is a crisis with radical potential. Addressing the crisis in the climate system requires the radical social transformation of the capital system. Anything short of that – and government action, expenditure, and regulation is far short of such a transformative politics – and climate change will carry on in all its adversity. Instead of system transformation, we will have system preservation. And climate change. And this precisely because a supposedly radical or left politics is confined within middle class liberal reformist terms. It ought to have been plain that slogans like ‘Take Back Control’ and 'Get Brexit Done' resonated with people demanding change against a status quo that has palpably failed. Instead of lecturing people about the way they are being misled – they are – there should have been a politics of real change leading the people. “Remain” is not that politics. It serves no purpose to call the working class stupid for voting Conservative, or for voting for Trump. You had better start grasping the class dynamics. Working class people have twigged that middle class liberals are not only not on their side, but hold them in contempt. The failure to transcend the liberal parameters of Brexit and climate change will lead to more reactionary politics. There is no ‘moderate’ way out of these crises of capitalism.
Brexit has been a political and intellectual shield. That works once. Power is best preserved by being concealed. The converging crises that are upon us are going nowhere, in or out of the EU. There will be no shield next time. The media will not be able to spin away reality in the long run. The power of illusion will be broken. Then it’s politics on a more even playing field. Nothing has been resolved. The next few years are going to be ones of struggle. But before that comes, there is a need to think long and hard as to why, after liberalisation and deregulation, financial crisis and economic depression, then a decade of austerity, the forces of the political right can win so convincingly. There is something very badly amiss in the agencies of left of centre politics. But remember the presidential election in France in 2017, the left wiped out leaving a straight choice between neoliberal technocrat Macron and the fascist Le Pen. Within a couple of years, we had the Yellow Vest movement, after that demonstrations and mass strikes.
Abandon all hope …
Upholding transcendent standards independent of time and place, I am less shaken by this result than others seem to be. Those standards remain, regardless of any transitory vote and election. That doesn’t make politics irrelevant, merely that any defeat – or long succession of them – is never final. Truth and goodness have more enduring qualities than mere power, enabling us to cleave to visions, values, and virtues beyond external opinions, powers, and events. I don’t, therefore, subordinate truth and value to the vagaries and vicissitudes of electoral results that are more often than not mere expressions of hegemonic narratives. Such ‘democracy’ is a device for ensuring not the rule of the people, but rule over the people by their own consent via the inculcation and reproduction of narratives to which the populous is exposed on a daily basis. A radical manifesto and programme cannot be delivered externally, it has to be grounded organically in the demos themselves as change agents. Without that grounding, it will not only seem like an extraneous imposition, it will appear unreal and utopian and be spurned. A radical and far-reaching programme also has to possess depth in popular support and commitment; it cannot be persuasive as an ideal programme or statement of principle. The result of all of this has been to protect the establishment from radical reaction and critique in light of decades of class struggle from above - privatisation, deregulation, economic crisis, austerity, inequality, and division. A crisis with transformative potential has been stabilised and pacified, in the short run, its potential being diverted into system preservation rather than social transformation. Votes have gone to establishment forces posing as rebels. Apart from the deliberate determination to frame crisis in a way that diverts populist reaction to the right rather than the left on the part of establishment forces, there is also the phenomenon of a supposedly radical, progressive or left-of-centre politics which, eschewing ‘extremist’ and conflictual positions, adopt collaborative or legislative-regulative approaches which are reversions to the old reformism, moralism, utopianism, and idealism, whether the focus is the do-it-yourself incrementalism from below or a comprehensive institutional engineering from above. The absence of a genuine politics with roots in broad masses of people is palpable, and shows up on election day. Far too many are repeating principles gutted of any real political substance, and are even taking pride or solace in this activity. They are still arguing for a ‘non-political’ ‘beyond politics’ agreement upon common solutions. That view is politically clueless, cretinous, and pusillanimous. These people really do think that climate change is a great universal interest that will unite all people beyond political and social divisions. You only need to imagine them taking that argument to the parties that win these elections to form governments to see how uncommon the appeal is. It reminds me of the undefeatable Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, arms and legs chopped off one by one, and then suggesting we call it quits.
I spend a lot of time reading Dante’s Comedy. It’s all in there. Many people ponder which circle of Hell certain people belong for their misdeeds. The misdeeds of some assuredly result in others ending upon in a Hell of one form or another. It brings some sense of justice to think that maybe, one day, people will be made to own the consequences of their actions, suffer those consequences themselves, and maybe change their ways as a result. It’s clear to me that there are any number of people representative of the establishment who could be placed in the Eighth Circle, the circle reserved for fraudsters. Many people are abusing and insulting working class voters as stupid and gullible, calling them turkeys voting for Christmas. Their votes and hopes are misdirected, certainly. That said, I can tell the abusers here that many working class people have voted out of desperation rather than in hope. This is a reaction that has been a long time in preparation.
This is not the end of any of the problems besetting politics. We have a hollow government with no vision beyond tax cuts for the rich, austerity for the poor, some form of anti-immigrant xenophobic nationalism to serve as a surrogate community, a community that is actually deeply beholden to vested interests, blocking any possibilities for dealing effectively with climate crisis other than authoritarianism.
Is that what the people who chose to ‘rebel’ with their votes wanted? Of course not. And they’ll soon realise they’ve been had. For four decades now, the neoliberal class struggle has survived one crisis after another by the spreading of one illusion after another. Reality cannot be evaded forever. Now, with no external force to blame, neither the trade unions nor ‘big government’ nor welfare spending nor the EU, the last illusions of the neo-con project will be stripped away.
And not just neoliberal illusions, but liberal illusions generally. The EU is the pet project of the reformist, legislative, regulative liberal middle class, those who think that capitalism can be morally tamed and made to work for the common good by appropriate laws and institutions. The EU has done much that is good and is preferable to ‘free market’ economic libertarianism – the anarchy of the rich and powerful. But it is a reformist project that optimistically advances an alternative to social transformation in the form of a reformed but preserved capitalism. If that view proves incapable of restraining the contradictory dynamics of the capital system – and it has – then we are effectively forever rebounding back and forth between free market to regulative approaches, with the space for a genuine radicalism being further and further diminished by the collapse in public power, commitment, hope, and imagination.
Corbyn lost as a result of Brexit. This is not a socialist issue, and Corbyn should – if he could – have fought on other ground. He’s been prevented from doing that, of course, as a result of being under relentless assault by the establishment in politics and media. The massive counterpropaganda against Corbyn’s Labour reveals a truth that many will prefer not to see. Reformists and centrists will, of course, be happy to ignore the systematic assault against Corbyn and instead blame his extremism, Marxism, and socialism. That destruction of political hope and alternatives is, of course, the entire point of the counterpropaganda. Corbyn would have had a huge fight on his hands regardless of Brexit. But Brexit is a killer issue for socialism. I have said all along that the attitude should have been ‘not my circus, not my monkeys.’ The issue may have excited middle class liberals, but it is treacherous ground for those seeking an alternative to capital and its social and ecological crises. Corbyn, Labour and the left were always at serious risk of going down to ignominious defeat as a result of failing to detach themselves from a tinkering, moralising, hectoring, liberalism that has failed continuously and consistently to hold global economic libertarianism in check, and has itself been complicit in that globalisation that people are now rejecting in droves. The fact that the many warnings keep being missed indicates that the reformist liberal middle class cannot change their ways, merely keep offering what people consider to have failed and are now rejecting. It is a bitter irony to note that it is figures like Trump and Johnson who are appearing as political rebels leading the populist reaction against failing institutions. That rebellion should have been the responsibility of left leaders and parties in charge of a substantive social transformation in light of capitalist crisis.
Already the voices of US Democrats are being heard reading precisely the wrong lessons. Nominate a ‘scary left’ leader, and the party will go down to certain defeat. What is missed here is the extent to which each, any, and every political leader serious about addressing social, economic, and ecological crisis will be subjected to such propaganda as to make him or her ‘scary.’ For ‘moderates’ and ‘centrists’ here, read cowards who will be forever acting in and out of the opinions of the ruling class. Next to fall will be Sanders et al in the US. And once they have been taken out, with the useless reformist moderates selling out to a failing status quo back in place, it will be clear to one and all that present systems of democratic governance are the road to ruination, not salvation. It’s a bleak day for democracy conceived on a public scale. Already voices are being heard for a return to centrism and moderation above, and the building of small scale resilient communities below. That’s a choice between government reformism from above and a do-it-yourself reformism from bellow. It’s not enough. It seems we have lost the public imagination as well as the public life.
It is tempting to blame the stupidity, gullibility, and racism of the working class. With the likes of Blyth and Leigh as solid Labour seats voting Conservative, many are blaming the working class of northern England. Being northern English working class I can comment freely and bluntly. Blair and New Labour and the fawning over ‘the aspiring classes’ and the middle class severed the links between the old working class and Labour politics. The belief system, culture, and normative commitment was ended, and with them the old loyalties. New Labour lost Scotland to the SNP. It seemed the attitude was that the English working class had nowhere else to go but Labour. Now large parts have gone or are going, and may never return. The loyalty and attachment is broken.
It is even more tempting to blame the media bias. That bias has been so manifest and massive as to be normalised. It’s an issue, with the BBC joining in with what has been the norm for the bulk of the press and positively campaigning for one side and against another, quite explicitly. The intensity is different, but there’s nothing new here. And it is tempting to blame the Conservatives for … well, being Conservatives. Nothing new.
The real corruption lies at the heart of Labour to the extent it failed to detach itself from the failures of left-of-centre reformist politics. Corbyn couldn’t distance himself from Remain delusions and illusions with respect to the EU. He wanted to, but the hostile PLP forces encircling him ensured that instead of a genuine revolt against a neoliberal cartel in the name of socialism, we get a pretend rebellion that keeps neoliberalism firmly in place. The people wanted rebellion, but unable to separate Labour from the reformist Remain fantasies of the liberal middle class, the revolt – and a lot of working class voters - went elsewhere. The working class on zero hours contracts, subject to a punitive welfare system, reliant on food banks, struggling to keep a roof over their heads etc have no good to say about the globalisation of economic relations, of which the EU is the most visible, and most hittable, form. Blair did it with globalisation in the 1990s (and Clinton in the US). Thinking that the working class have nowhere else to go, the challenge was issued: ‘Vote against us if you dare.’ The belief all along has been that working class people, so loyal to a belief system so cynically abused by its supposed political representatives, would not vote against the political bluffers. They didn’t at first. But now they are doing so in droves. Any party that aspires to anything resembling socialism cannot continue to lie to its class base without, in the end, losing its raison d’être. Finally, after countless abuses in history, the working class are in revolt against its own agencies of representation. In 1989’s Divided Societies Ralph Miliband wrote of the crisis in the agencies of labour dividing and demoralising its own side. He optimistically thought that this crisis could be resolved in the context of a commitment to substantive social transformation. That social transformation is still possible, and is certainly necessary. But the internal demoralisation has now become disillusion and dissolution.