That Thin Illusion Of Democracy.

        Well the "election" is over all the ranting about change has resulted in the system staying the same, did you expect anything else? Now the privileged parasitical political ballerinas can get on with the business of plundering the public purse, and putting the ordinary people in there place, subservient at the bottom of the pile. Perhaps it will have some people scratching their heads and saying, "what was the point" of all that hype and phony hysteria. Let's hope so.

       This little summing up from Acorn Winter Oak:

The capitalist system will not abolish itself.

In fact, it will always do all that it physically can to preserve itself and its control over our lives. While it likes to pretend its structures of domination amount to “democracy”, this is not the case, because it could never leave the door open to the possibility of its own abolition by democratic means. The only changes possible via the fake-democracy of the system are limited reforms, which leave the system very much in place. When we say “limited”, we perhaps mean “extremely limited”, because even the mildest of social-democratic tinkering, undoing some of the worst excesses of contemporary neoliberalism, is beyond the pale for the system.
 

corbyn smear

        However, when the system draws the line too tightly around its preferred outcomes and uses its vast powers of manipulation to prevent these limited reforms, it risks exposing its so-called “democracy” as a sham. A whole new raft of people suddenly become aware of the true nature of the system and its fake-democratic window dressing. Their eyes are opened to the fact that there is no point in playing by the rules devised by the system, no point in walking time and time again into the same traps that it sets for us.
      These moments are risky for the system, because they risk radicalising people who, up to this point, had bought into much of its charade. The UK is currently experiencing one such moment. A vast amount of enthusiasm and hope had been invested – naively, from our perspective – in the possibility of an election victory for Corbyn’s Labour Party. The reforms proposed by Labour were far from fundamental and yet remained unacceptable to the system.
       The unprecedented blatancy of the propaganda assault on Corbyn has left many people, particularly young people, asking themselves some serious questions about the nature of British “democracy” and the approach that is needed if real social change is ever to be brought about.

 And that can’t be a bad thing!

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Free And Fair Elections????

        We are entering the last few days of the UK general election, or as I prefer to call it, the UK Crooks and Liars Competition. We are told we have "free" and "fair" elections in this country, but a little survey of the press coverage, that sewer of putrid propaganda, tells a different story. A media search in all UK national press over the last 3 months, hardly looks fair reporting. The number of articles covering the two main candidates:

Corbyn and antisemitism – 1,450
Johnson and Islamophobia – 164
Corbyn and IRA – 272
Johnson and Yemen and war crimes – 2

 

      A wee bit of bias perhaps, or downright attempt to scupper one candidate and glorify another. Ah the beauty of a free and fair press, standing up to defend our fair and free elections. Bullshit, and a plague on all your houses. 

 

 Photo by John Hartfield.

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Anti-Semitism--Anti-Zionism!!

       The great antisemitism witchhunt: McCarthyism redux. By John Wight 

https://off-guardian.org/2019/06/29/the-great-antisemitism-witchhunt-mccarthyism-redux/

          This article was first published on March 1st of this year, however, it is given fresh relevance in the wake of Labour’s reinstatement, and then re-suspension, of Derby MP Chris Williamson.

PUTNAM: Now look you, sir. Let you strike out against the Devil, and the village will bless you for it! Come down, speak to them — pray with them. They’re thirsting for your word, Mister! Surely you’ll pray with them.

PARRIS: (swayed) I’ll lead them in a psalm, but let you say nothing of witchcraft yet. I will not discuss it. The cause is yet unknown. I have had enough contention since I came; I want no more.
Arthur Miller – The Crucible

         In his magisterial autobiography, Timebends, describing his motivation behind his classic work The Crucible (extracted above) — the most compelling and enduring allegorical piece of drama to grace the American theatre — Arthur Miller reveals the following: 

      What I sought was a metaphor, an image that would spring out of the heart, all-inclusive, full of light, a sonorous instrument whose reverberations would penetrate to the centre of this miasma. For if the current degeneration of discourse continued, as I had every reason to believe it would, we could no longer be a democracy, a system that requires a certain basic trust in order to exist.”

        The ‘miasma’ referred to by Miller in the above passage was the atmosphere of censorious paranoia whipped up by the anti-Communist witchhunts of the 1940s and 1950s, starting under the auspices of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), established in 1938, joined thereafter by Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Senate hearings into alleged Communist infiltration from the late 1940s. 

Arthur Miller

        The period concerned, commonly referred to as McCarthyism, illuminated the parameters of free speech and expression in a country and culture which prides itself on both. It drilled home the profound truth that tyranny is less the by-product of totalitarian political systems and more the product of totalitarian ideas and nostrums that sustain political orthodoxy in a given space and time. And, too, whenever those ideas and nostrums come under challenge, said democracy is exposed as a cloak behind which mendacity resides, ruthlessly seeking malcontents to expose and miscreants to punish. In Britain in 2019 we need no longer turn to US history for an understanding of McCarthyism and its execrable fruits.
       For in Britain in 2019 McCarthyism is with us and among us, corroding our public and political discourse, poisoning it with the untruths, lies and mendacious smears of some of the most malignant political forces that ever existed in these islands.
       Reds under the bed has been replaced with antisemites under the bed; this with the full and open complicity of a mainstream media whose dread over the prospect of transformational political change is entwined in tight embrace with that of an Establishment — political and security — in ensuring nothing but nothing will ever change in this country apart from the colour of the curtains on the windows in Downing Street.
      Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party has to intents been usurped by his deputy Tom Watson, a man for whom Shakespeare’s “Hell is empty, and all the devils are here!” line from The Tempest could have been written with in mind. 

Labour Friends of Israel

       Watson is the Labour Party’s Matthew Hopkins, the infamous witch-hunter whose reign of terror in 17th century Britain finds its metaphorical equivalent in the 21st century with the objective not of locating and hanging out to dry antisemites but instead anti-Zionists, which means to say genuine anti-racists.
       For what is Zionism if not racism, a species of white supremacy responsible for relegating the humanity of five million men, women and children of the illegally occupied West Bank and besieged Gaza Strip to that of latter-day Helots?
      Adding to the mountain of intellectual and moral ordure erected in service to this miasma of untruth and base hypocrisy, are the findings of a UN investigation into the Palestinians killed and wounded by Israeli snipers during last year’s Great Return March in Gaza.

According to the UN’s Santiago Canton:

        Israeli soldiers committed violations of international human rights and humanitarian law. Some of those violations may constitute war crimes or crimes against humanity.”
       In diplomatic-speak, Mr Canton is here referencing the manner in which Israeli soldiers shot down dozens of unarmed Palestinians — among them children, medics and journalists — like deer in a forest, with some of those Israeli soldiers caught on tape laughing and celebrating their ‘kills’.
       It is to this monstrosity of an apartheid state Tom Watson and his friends are giving succour and sanction; and it this supremacist juggernaut of oppression we are expected to accept as compatible with left-wing progressive values.
       There is nothing more grotesque than being lectured to about antisemitism, or any other form of racism, by apologists for a racist apartheid state. Yet this grotesquerie is precisely where we have arrived at in response to Corbyn’s unlikely elevation to the leadership of the Labour Party.
        His legacy as a staunch supporter of Palestinian human rights and self-determination has been weaponised against him and his supporters by a pro-Israel lobby within and without the Labour Party, plumbing depths of indecency last witnessed during the era of McCarthyism across the Atlantic.
       For those who doubt how deeply entrenched the pro-Israel lobby now is within the UK body politic, Al Jazeera’s blistering documentary The Lobby is required viewing.
       Given the context and the stakes involved in this ongoing witch hunt and smear campaign, the lack of meaningful resistance on the part of Corbyn is unconscionable; his refusal to mobilise his base in the face of it inexplicable. The result has not been to see it disappear but for it to prosper and grow in ferocity.
          Be under no illusion either of the complicity of key figures in and around the Labour leadership in whipping up and/or acquiescing in this baseless hysteria — Lansman, McDonnell et al. — to the point where Corbyn has been rendered well nigh unelectable as a prospective prime minister.
         That this is a smear campaign and witchhunt conducted, regardless of the fog of obfuscation deployed to the contrary, on behalf of a foreign power — and an apartheid power at that — compounds the offence.
        But this issue is now bigger than Corbyn. It is about where we stand on matters of intellectual and moral integrity; and most of all on the rights we accrue to an oppressed people and those of their oppressor. Future generations are watching and waiting for the stance that we take.
         Arthur Miller understood this, which is why his light will shine forever bright as a beacon of moral courage in an age of deceit.

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The Prostitution Of Language For Political Gain.

 

         It is common place in today's political world to indulge in the prostitution of language for political gain, Orwellian double speak is the language of the politician and requires deconstructing and interpretation before digesting. Now however it has also invade all aspects of "news" reporting, meaning that dialogue in that field is practically impossible.

         Some words from my friend and comrade Stuart Christie, words that I fully embrace and would like the population at large, before switching on the TV or picking up a "newspaper" to repeat out loud at least three times.
   

        Don’t get me wrong, full disclosure: Jeremy Corbyn is, in my highly subjective opinion, a Cromwellian tosspot, albeit well-intentioned and principled — as far as anyone engaged in party politics can be principled. But the relentless, covert/overt, McCarthyist misinformation campaign—carefully orchestrated by a cabal of Likudnik Blairites and Thatcherites led by Tom Watson and Sajid Javid, the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the media-owning political-economic elite (e.g. the Mail on Sunday’s recent blunt hatchet job on Seumas Milne, Corbyn’s strategy and communications adviser, by ex-SIS head (1999-2004) Sir Richard Dearlove), et al, — maliciously fusing anti-Zionism and opposition to the State of Israel with anti-Semitism, and painting Corbyn as a dangerous headbanger and latter-day Julius Streicher, isn’t doing a great deal for my irritability quotient or blood pressure. I know I'm banging my head inside an echo chamber here, but for the sake of my psychic wellbeing, I just had to vent some spleen. Just saying!

        Activist and academic Sai Englert explains why conflating Anti-Zionism with Anti-Semitism is "problematic".

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Towards An Anti-capitalist Politics.

       Sometimes you read an article that draws together some of your thoughts in to a clearer understanding, it says some things better than you could yourself. Though I don't embrace every word in this particle article, I certainly think it is well worth reading in full.

    Three excerpts from Jerome Roos's article, Towards an Anti-capitalist Politics, in ROAR MAG:

     Faced with the overwhelming power of capital and the escalating violence of the state, stuck between the institutional inertia of the old left and the ephemeral spontaneity of the new, the opposition remains impotent and confused. Evidently, it is not the “historical inevitability” of the capitalist law of value, but the left’s own lack of internal coherence and the conspicuous absence of visionary post-capitalist perspectives that keeps it stuck in an endlessly repeating present.

    As the future collapses in on itself and the left’s revolutionary aspirations wither on the vine, it is the weakness of our clenched fist and the paucity of our collective imagination, far more than the “natural laws” of their invisible hand, that now makes the end of the world appear more likely than the end of capitalism. It has become painfully clear that, if the left is to truly to chart a way out of capitalist barbarity, it will have to first reinvent itself.

Let the dead bury their dead

    What could such a “reinvented left” look like? Clearly, it will not come falling out of the sky, nor can it be conceived on paper by the high priests of radical theory. Rather, its political imaginary, organizational forms and strategic orientations will all have to be constructed through collective processes of political agitation and firmly rooted in the structural contradictions and periodic crises of contemporary capitalism; in the material conditions and lived experience of ordinary working people, oppressed minorities and marginalized communities; and in the concrete materiality and revolutionary potential of actually existing struggles.

A little further on, on the rise of Corbynism:

      Democratic socialism, by contrast, appears to have been staging a cautious comeback in recent years, especially in its various left-populist forms. Buoyed by the collapse of social democracy and the constituent impulse of recent mobilizations against neoliberalism and austerity, a raft of leftist forces has been on the rise on both sides of the Atlantic—ranging from the progressive governments of the Latin American Pink Tide to the radical left parties in Greece and Spain, on to the self-declared “socialist” candidacies of Bernie Sanders in the United States and Jeremy Corbyn in the United Kingdom.

    But while the emergence of electoral alternatives to neoliberal cynicism certainly marks an advance compared to the shallow theatrics of electoral politics prior to the crisis, the defeat (and subsequent cooptation) of the radical left in Greece and the gradual receding of the Pink Tide in Latin America clearly reveal the limits of the once-vaunted model of “21st century socialism”, whose dependence on global capital and international financial institutions remains woefully undiminished.

Closing with a wee look to the future:

        Yet it often seems that the future remains trapped between the internecine squabbles of two seemingly irreconcilable “lefts”: an old one centered narrowly on taking power, and a new one still struggling to come to terms with its own potential. Beyond the haughty impotence of the former and the apparent perplexity of the latter, the theory and practice of building power offers fertile and expanding political ground for a new anti-capitalist politics. We must now explode the tensions between them into a common project that can begin to give a concrete and democratic organizational form to the restive constituent potential that is craving to assert itself from below.

       As we gather force and move along the process of construction, we will gradually notice the horizons of possibility expanding: the higher we rise, the farther we see; until, one day, all that meets the eye is the glorious sight of rebel cities everywhere rising up against the common enemy, humanity resolving at last to “throw its revolutionary broadsword into the scales.” Until then, you will find us in the streets: preparing the ground, laying the foundations—building power.

      Rather than exploding the tensions between the "old left" and the "new left", I believe the "old left" has to abandon its tried and failed ideology, and throw its lot in with the anti-parliamentarian  left of the streets, there's where success for the people starts and eventually culminates in success.  

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