It was just too easy for the ruling class to smother Corbyn’s mild-mannered Keynesian project, using his sympathy for Palestine as evidence of “antisemitism”. Despite his history of antifascism, being re-elected year on year by a constituency having the tenth largest Jewish community in the UK, and having good relations with many observant Jews in it, this was the stick they chose to beat him with.
The bourgeois media, aided and abetted by the parliamentary labour party, an uninspiring gang of careerists and time servers who would rather see a thousand years of fascism than anything resembling social democracy, closed ranks. All those publicity-hungry Jewish ‘celebrities’ allowed themselves to be led by the nose, following their self-appointed ‘community leaders’ into spluttering that they would feel unsafe in the care of the labour left. They’ve been strangely quiet of late. No other community or diaspora on this island recognises such a leadership, one that consistently opposed autonomous anti-fascist activity by Jews that foiled genuine antisemites many times in the 20th Century.
Never mind, for my money the Labour Party lost all credibility when it supported the First World War.
How they rejoiced when Starmer ejected the tatty old Bennite possiblist and routed the loony left, who had deluded themselves they might achieve economic democracy (and free broadband) by voting for it. He returned labour to a centrist euro-style Christian democrat party, halving its troublesome membership in the process, though he had no problem spunking the money they brought in on his election campaign.
Starmer would like to revive the post-war consensus, of which the pundit and former MP Brian Walden remarked: “The two front benches liked each other and disliked their back benches … turning the opposition into government made little difference, for we believed much the same things.” Walden was closer to Corbyn than Starmer, but then so was Ted Heath.
Anyone who “voted for change” is going to be sorely disappointed. Sturmer warns the Working Class we won’t get any special consideration and menaces us with all manner of authoritarian provisions. He is dedicated to the alienation of labour and by extrapolation, the alienation of needs from abilities. Now he’s having a pedal over artificial intelligence, which might give him enticing new opportunities to coerce and control us. Capitalism is a dirty word now except in the USA where it is mistakenly confused with an ideology, so it is hidden behind ciphers such as “business” and “economic growth”. Socialism is so out of fashion few people can coherently describe what it involves.
I characterise economic growth thus: We are digging a hole and piling up the dirt, the bourgeoisie sits on the pile, in return for our efforts we are allowed to eat the dirt that falls on us. As the hole gets deeper, the pile grows higher, representing their increasing purchasing power, and inequality expands. Increasing productivity means we dig harder, and the dirt piles up faster. It is the wealth of the few that restricts our access to the products of our social labour, including the necessities of life. It determines where we can live, and what we eat, whether we get medical treatment and education, whether we die in comfort or misery. It is literally a power of life and death.
Are the bosses satisfied now then? Not a bit of it, consensus is not on their agenda. They will accept nothing less than unhindered capital accumulation. The bourgeoisie must be free to pursue their trajectory of pharonic inequality in resources and imbalance of power. Whatever the electorate may seem to want, they must not have rights at work, free public utilities, any kind of progressive taxation or redistributive economics. They must pay to access the services they themselves provide, to use the land and the structures they built on it. They are human resources, they must submit to their exploitation, even to destruction.
So this benighted government will give no-one anything they want; the walls are closing in already as they bleat forlornly about the mess they inherited. Every government in my lifetime has spent years doing this before becoming mired in corruption and incompetence. The state broadcaster, unusually not chained to the governing party but to the feudal status quo, is daily trumpeting its failures. Talk of market volatility is disingenuous, the traders are gambling on Sterling going down. It’s interesting that the long-term thirty year gilts are especially unpopular, indicating that the bourgeoisie believe they have already wrung the dregs out of our people.
The fact is the markets couldn’t care less if children are prostituted, deal drugs and stab one another or burn to death in tower blocks, if the innocent are imprisoned or deported. Contaminated blood; they got paid for that. Slavery is back, arms sales are booming, mugs gamble their lives away on their phones, and if half the earth becomes uninhabitable, they will simply charge a premium to live on the other bit.
Narcissistic half-wit Elon Musk presently controls as much purchasing power as some countries, such that his incoherent prejudices are reported and discussed, otherwise no-one would give him the time of day, like the nutter on the bus. One of Musk’s companies, Star link, a provider of mobile internet connections, played a significant part in the Ukraine war, after its services were offered free of charge. Once they’d become utterly dependant on it the Ukrainian generals were dismayed to find that musk had opinions about how it should be used and would limit its range accordingly. It’s as if your twelve year-old computer nerd offspring had taken over not only the family business but the whole high street.
If you’re familiar with my writing you will appreciate that I am disdainful of ideology, which I regard as self-delusion. You can at last, for all intents and purposes, take the ideology out of politics. We are living through the death of empire, like any other: Rome, Egypt, Greece, Spain, England, USA. This is the end of civilisation, by which I mean the habit and ethic of living together in communities, not some high-blown concept of converting heathens. Whether barbarism arrives through a glowing screen or swarms down from the hills makes no difference.
So what is left? The Working Class are still digging that hole, still doing it for love – but of what? The bastards can’t do a thing without us and they know it; that will never change. Artificial intelligence is never going to change their light bulbs for them. The more they big up their technology and belittle us, the more insecure they look. They distract you with gadgets and gimmicks like bloody snake-charmers, but you can bite them any time you choose. Am I the only one whose blood boils when some rich geezer explains that security of employment will put us all out of work?
The Working Class is powerful when it declines to work, when it occupies territory and declines to relinquish it. Withdrawal of labour is all we’ve got, as Tim Acott once put it “the only spanner big enough for the job”. Wildcats, sit-ins, sabotage, we need riots targeted to coincide with stoppages, not futile expressions of abstract frustration. We the Working Class are ultimately responsible for everything that ever was or will be. When we accept that responsibility and harness our strength to our imaginations, we will do a lot better than this.
January 16, 2025
Categories: Anarchist, London, Palestine . Tags: Anti fascist, anti-capitalist, antisemitism, Class War, Der Starmer, International, Labour party, state repression, strike, workers . Author: wessexsolidarity . Comments: 1 Comment
Wessex Solidarity