Showing posts with label Democracy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Democracy. Show all posts

Saturday 23 September 2023

Alternatives to the Current Political Order Part 5 - Piddling Around On the Margins of the System: Liberal Reformers

This latest review is fairly simple - just a list of six 'parties' (I have removed the Foundation Party, a pro-Brexit and anti-lockdown populist conservative party that strongly emphasised process, because its website seems no longer to be functional) who think that all our problems will be solved if we changed the nature of democracy. This, of course, is ridiculously simplistic. 

These ideas tend to come from politically naive middle class 'engineers' who do not understand that the key changes necessary to transform national governance need not be radical (such changes are unlikely to be adopted in any case and are fraught with real world unintended consequences) but should simply be changes to how existing representative democracy is managed so that it is made more informed, more independent of influence and community-accountable. The root of our problems lie in the corrupted nature of the classic liberal democratic political party and its relationship to the executive, the market and the media rather than representative democracy itself. It does not lie in our lacking an 'ideal (Platonic) constitution'.

The great flaw in the 'process reformers' (and also of many libertarian socialists, activists and anarchists) is that they think that all their fellow citizens should necessarily be interested in politics. Instead, we need a democracy that is responsive to the interests and concerns of the population at large precisely so that they have no or minimal need to be involved in practical administrative politics. Therefore none of these will make the short list or the watch list but they are presented here to show that there are a fair number of frustrated middle class reformers lurking in the political undergrowth and that you should feel free to join them if it is in your nature to be a political nerd.
  • The Movement for Active Democracy

  • The Independent Network (most famously associated with journalist Martin Bell) which sounds lovely in theory but independence is not in itself a sign of administrative talent or sound policy.

  • The Direct Democracy Movement which proposes radical direct democracy and quotes Elon Musk and Tyson Fury as radical democratic libertarians.

  • Your Voice Party 

  • A Blue Revolution is populist party centred on Lincolnshire that seems most concerned about debt. The long website reference to De Bono's theories of mind suggests that we are in the world of human resources and managerialism despite the democratic thrust. The potentially creepy part is the complaint that "the current political system wastes a lot of energy arguing and debating." Arguing and debating is how we resolve conflict without recourse to weaponry. Maybe this is putative Platonic technocracy in action!

  • Vox Pop Gov is an attempt to have mass populist democracy through technology but misses the point that principles, values and general direction should be in direct accord with the popular will but not so implementation. Implementation requires experienced and informed management. The national level of political, technical and general education is so poor that this would be a disaster, certainly with our irresponsible media and manipulative interest groups leading the debate. This is politics as 'Strictly' or 'Love Island'.

What this group of 'process' political parties tells you is that there is (if you add to them the huge number of small local and resident-based parties) a considerable amount of discontent amongst the hard-pressed white collar middle classes that is already going nowhere as far as resolving the fundamental problems of a failing representative democracy is concerned. 
 
Instead of challenging representative democracy to do better through guided and technically specific reforms to increase accountability and reduce the influence of special interests (which at least Reform UK is prepared to talk about albeit unsatisfactorily), most of these 'parties' are offering technical fixes that reek of unintended consequences. These anxious middle middles are politically naive and none (not even their processes) can be taken very seriously.
 
My sense is that these tend to be white collar graduate managerial, professional or technical types frustrated with both a national politics they barely comprehend (but think they must be expert in because they are expert in something else) and with local politics which are, democratically, a standing joke to anyone with a sense of humour. They are often mid-level local business consultants, in small service businesses or in areas like marketing or human resources. They want both liberty and order and they think these are easily reconcileable through process reforms alone. They become 'political nerds' because they are psychologically used to and trained in 'process' and think process can be applied to politics.
 
Of course, politics is not like that - it is 'struggle'. Such types are uncomfortable with confrontation and struggle from the get-go yet confrontation is necessary for any form of political progress. Our problem today is not too much struggle but too little under a political class with shared values who fixed a dysfunctional system in their favoour. They are not interested in the economic struggles of the working or lower middle class because they are relatively secure if anxious that they may not always be so. Their 'slippages' come from slow declines in respect, status and even revenue that they put down to failures of process in an act of internal misdirection. They do not put down their slow worrying decline and anxieties to great socio-economic and technological change but to failures of management - if they (as relative juniors in the managerial system) were better managed (they believe), then all would be well. Thuis, they think, new political managerial processes are required and these will solve all problems
 
One useful comment from a reader of an earlier draft can be added here: "The first things that came to my mind when reading this [last paragraph] was the growing use of 'stealth taxation' (e.g. the above-inflation increases in alcohol duty, for example) prior to the 'credit crunch' of 2008; the second was the accelerated shift towards rentier capitalism post-'credit crunch' and the ways in which 'austerity' policies facilitated such a shift. Those individuals from the less monied portion of the middle classes were essentially frogs being boiled slowly by the economic elite." The frogs in this case are beginning to notice  that they are being boiled but are simply calling for the pan to be filled with fresh water.

Sunday 21 May 2023

Alternatives to the Current Political Order Part 1 - Introduction

There is widespread discontent across the so-called 'West' with the workings of 'liberal democracy'.This is not a turn from democracy by any means but rather a sense that a political elite, buttressed by media and institutional structures disconnected from the voting population, is unresponsive and incapable of running extremely complex and interconnected societies. It is a crisis of representative democracy when representation no longer accords with public sentiment and the machinery that the representatives are supposed to manage on our behalf is out of their control. The lack of responsiveness is thus two-fold - our representatives have become creatures of a system they no longer fully understand and they have lost the will to represent those who elect them as they wish to be represented.

However, this is not going to be yet another impotent moan from another atomised individual in an impotent population. Such moans are simply ranting expressions of frustration and they generally change nothing. Atomisation means that there are few levers for individuals to exert power over the political process especially where all the institutional structures through which influence might be exerted are equally detached from us through professional bureaucracies and managements with no strategic national or community purpose - and that includes trades unions, churches and, above all, the five established major parties (if we include the Greens and the SNP). In all such cases professionalised bureaucracies and closed elites relate to each other within a similar conforming framework and compete for their own purposes - the survival aims of themselves. 

The only solution - other than an equally impotent strategy of violence such as we saw in the Capitol Hill Riots or the street explosions in France over pensions reform or protests against the placement of illegal immigrants in particular localities regardless of local wishes - is organisation but how do you organise resistance and reform when the agents and institutional structures of those claiming to reform society are themselves part of the problem, themselves embedded in a collapsing and dysfunctional system? One solution is stop thinking in terms of the value of each successive election where Tweedledum is invariably replaced by an equally incompetent Tweedledee and where politics has become a circus in which you cheer on one side only because they appear to be the lesser evil than the other side. The political cycle repeats like a broken national dishwasher where the dishes still come out dirty at the end.

The instinct of many people is just to rant away on social media and think that is politics. Meanwhile the mainstream media paint a distorted picture of reality and then try to undermine what little functionality is left in the system through sustained trivia. Many others are steadily withdrawing from the system in distaste no longer wishing to be complicit in the farce that is contemporary liberal democracy. I did not bother to vote in the recent local elections for that latter reason - my vote was futile since all it allowed me was a choice of four similar representations of dysfunctionality in a system that was already fixed in favour of our local bureaucracy and centralised authority. We are leaning towards the situation under the Soviets where 'contested' elections merely meant choosing between paper candidates amenable to current ideological 'reality'.

I have identified three fundamental flaws in late capitalist liberal democracy and they are not 'capitalism' (despite what the Left likes to believe) or 'the deep state' as conspiracy (despite what many Right populists want us to believe). They are the corrupting effects of the businesses we call media and higher education, the bureaucratism of a state machinery and institutional structures whose prime purpose is sclerotically to preserve the system rather than transform it and the decadent state of the British political party which is now little more than a brand alternating between factions where the factions have no idea how to run anything effectively and are wholly disconnected from the populations they purport to represent. Much of this combines into the surprisingly large interconnected 'new elite' identified by Matthew Goodwin but the problem is even more structural than he implies. This analysis may unfold further in future blog posts but is not the purpose of the current series.

The question to hand is what can be done to counter control of the machinery of government by a failed 'educated' but incompetent and narcissistic factionalised elite whilst ensuring that democracy actually exists rather than is just a name used as rhetorical cover for the current playground of activists, lobbyists, managers and political professionals. Time and time again, we come up against the core of the problem that no one will face - Parliament and the way our representatives are chosen and are accountable at the point where legislation is made and the executive and its policies are approved, crutinised and controlled. Above all, it is Parliament that has failed and is failing.

This is not the time to go all 'liberal nerd' and come up with weird and wonderful 'solutions' based on constitutional tinkering. Citizen's Assemblies, for example, are just shuffling the deckchairs on the Titanic. I would have no problem with FPTP if it delivered competent, tough representatives who could explain reality to the people and yet enforce the wishes of the people within reality on the State. At the moment FPTP is not delivering and it looks as if it cannot deliver because of structural issues related to the nature of the political party, its choice of candidates and its supine approach to the media and its own ideologues. Proportional representation reluctantly becomes a necessity to break the power of the existing powers and let new blood into the decision-making process. Primaries look as if they could remove power from committee cliques manipulated from the centre. AI might be helpful in elucidating what the people want and in political education but none of these solve the essential problem which is a cultural failure that could take decades to reverse and where it may already be too late.

And this is the point. We are now talking about a long game. The 2024 election will be fought over by the usual suspects and whoever wins is going to be dysfunctional and incompetent because the system has been built to be so. Any political programme to restore the nation along democratic lines is a long play involving a deliberate over-turning of the existing form of liberal democracy (notably the parties) and weakening of the power of the current cultural elite and media alongside improved mass political education that by-passes our half-witted and trivialising media caste. This requires the courage to put forward alternative ideas with the aim of shifting cultural and political power away from the existing elite (accepting the dreadful necessity of occasional compromises) in a process that may not bear fruit until 2030 or even 2035 during which period the existing sclerotic and bankrupt elite will have ample opportunity to 'fix' the system through regulation, legislation and psychological operations to block change.

So, from where will a peaceful democratic and non-violent revolution emerge (with always the option of street action if the system fixes go over a red line? The negative observers who say this is not possible must bear in mind that national democrats are in the position of the progenitors of the Chartists in the 1830s, the Labour Movement in the 1880s, the suffragettes in the 1890s and the Greens in the 1970s - and yet all those movements achieved a considerable amount in the subsequent fifty tears. Of course, democracy, the labour movement, feminism and the greens have all horribly degenerated in recent years but all four developments were socially constructive and, no doubt, national democracy would degenerate equally by the end of the century if it succeeded. The point is that national democracy and improved mass political education are needed now and, if a movement eventually create its own nemesis having done its job too well, this is how our species works - it fights for progressive change, the change becomes sclerotic, the sclerosis creates a challenge and the challenge becomes the next progressive change until it too needs replacement. 

In this series, we are going to avoid the nostrums of specific tinkering reform because the point is to get a thousand flowers to bloom, to break the stranglehold of a failed elite (or rather network of interlocking elites) and then to cherry pick the winning combinations for a national democratic revolution that will synthesise what actually serves our nation and population from both the current Left and Right. So let us start with one of the great problematics of our time - the political party.  This is because only the political party, tragically, has the potential organisation and will and approval (through the Electoral Commission) to displace the clowns and comic singers of the five daft parties that we are stuck with.

Of course, we must not be naive. The alternative parties will also have their fair share of clowns and comic singers but our aim is not to change humanity (which will always promote clowns and comic singers to the top of its system out of ignorance and laziness) but to change the system within which humanity expresses itself. We need clowns and comic singers who can actually make us laugh rather than rant like a BBC Radio 4 'comedian' or send tens of thousands into a meat grinder like the President of Ukraine and who can sing the songs the people like to hear. We need to be able to switch them off or get them off the stage quickly if they lack talent. We need, in fact, a creative revolution in politics much as we get such revolutions periodically in popular culture.

So, I decided to analyse all the parties registered by the Electoral Commission (except the plethora of local residents' associations, the vast bulk of single issue loons who do not understand how politics actually works and the obvious comedic loons who probably do but are just in it for the laughs) and then assess them on just seven broad if controversial grounds:-

1. Their general position on Ukraine/NATO - do they see the dangerous farce that is 'defence of the West' and how it is leading us towards penury and possibly war? If there is anything that demonstrates best the sheer incompetence of a ruling elite, it is the conduct of an ideological international relations strategy based on populist sentiment and ignorance about the actual conditions that led to the war in the first place.
 
2. Do they understand that a strong State is required to control borders and organised crime and that only a strong State will deal with the biggest challenges of the twenty-first century - including mass migration encouraged by weak-minded liberals and greedy business interests and the rise of artificial intelligence? In other words, do they get that a strong state requires the recapture of sovereignty by the people through the recapture of Parliament regardless of liberal ideology.
 
3. Will they maintain Brexit as an exercise in national self-determination? This is not about Remain or Leave but about democratic respect for the results of the 2016 Referendum and the failure of the bulk of the political class to respect popular democracy and implement the will of the people with systematic determination because that is what the population voted for.
 
4. Will they challenge the negative stance of our cultural elites to our inherited identities and free choices and maintain the right of all to dissent from prevailing elite ideology? This is important because, holding the levers of power, the existing system is trying to hide its dysfunctional nature behind ever more authoritarian and manipulative measures through ever more intrusive regulation and legislation with the paradoxical and self interested connivance of the mainstream media.
 
5. Are they committed to building a prosperous 'one nation' where public service is fairly rewarded, public services are fairly funded but efficiently run (not for the benefit of the managerial classes) and where the genuinely vulnerable are cared for on the basis of an open and entrepreneurial economy in which, in turn, energy and innovation are rewarded? In other words, do they have a sense of the 'commonwealth' which means a necessary war on poverty, ignorance and disadvantage and respect for the working classes and their values as much as the middle class and theirs.
 
6. Do they understand that resilience and eco-sustainability is a national issue and is being neglected in the rush to signal virtue at a global level with inappropriate extreme business-oriented Net Zero policies? Globalist solutions should be restricted only to the essential as direct state-to-state negotiations rather than be subject to huge and foolish international bureaucratic interventions that take no account of the realities of power in the world - our useless leaders have ended up not with the world government they dreamed of but two armed blocs competing at the expense of the developing world and at the cost of our own peoples.
 
7. Are they organisationally capable in the long run of displacing our incompetent and increasingly corrupted political class no matter how small and insignificant they may be at the moment?
 
This series of postings will unfold over the next few weeks and cover as many segments of the political market as follows with as much objectivity as I can muster. The process will be controversial because I am not going to accept common media assessments of the so-called Far Left or Far Right but will investigate their merits and demerits on their own account. When the project is completed (indeed as it progresses) I hope to have provided an eventual short list of candidates for engagement and support ranked in some reasonable order. 
 
I think we can safely say that the Tories, Labour, the Liberal Democrats, the Greens and the SNP will not be on that list (even if I was Scottish). All five of those parties are 'busted' for different reasons - the Tories are provenly inept at almost everything they have touched under successive Prime Ministers, Labour has become a grim exercise in power-grabbing under a second-rate cypher, the Liberal Democrats lied to their student vote over a decade ago and lying is in their constitutional make-up as opportunists, the Greens have turned into neo-conservatives in their desperate play for elite respectability and the SNP, well the SNP ... 'nuff said!
 
There are likely to be perhaps six or seven candidates for engagement, a shopping list or menu if you like, with at least one to suit any particular revolutionary taste - and, eventually, one of these will displace the Tories and one of these will displace Labour and either Labour or the Tories will displace the Liberal Democrats. It may take many decades although perhaps not at the rate required by a country crumbling under the most inept elite since the last days of the Roman Empire. The key takeaway is that it is time for all of us to consider detaching ourselves from the parties we have been told to support for so long as electoral cannon fodder or out of a ridiculous tribal loyalty some of us might better reserve for Arsenal or Aston Villa and find opportunities for new parties that can compete and struggle to transform our nation through transforming the terms on which we, the people 'do politics'.

Saturday 15 April 2023

Evading the Causes of the Current Cost of Living Crisis

We need a more open debate about the causes of the current cost of living crisis. The elites would like us to blame a pathogen and an alleged autocrat but this is far too simple. It is certainly not caused solely by Vladimir Putin’s alleged weaponisation of Russia’s immense gas supplies. In fact, despite the furore over the Nordstream explosions and the closure of the Baltic pipelines, Europe continues to be supplied with gas at rates not dissimilar to those that applied before the war. Supply chain issues related to COVID recovery and many other fundamentals have certainly contributed to price rises not forgetting the pressure on commodity prices from the disruptions involved in the Green Agenda and problems with food supply accentuated by climate issues. But the disruption to trade caused both by the economic sanctions on Russia and threats of sanctions on China are a significant contributing factor and these policies are those of our leaders.

The invasion itself need never have been much of a factor in itself - it is just that Western leaders (without much consultation with their own peoples) decided that the costs of economic warfare against Russia were a 'price worth paying' and then got suprised by just how open-ended that price would turn out to be. It is not only the effects on trade and inflation but also the ridiculously high commitments of capital being made to prosecute an unwinnable war (shades here of Afghanistan) and eventually to the reconstruction of a nation that has been encouraged to fight that unwinnable war. The Ukraine War had emerged from a failure of diplomatic dialogue between the West and Russia over the previous two decades and the fault for that lies as much in London and Washington as in Moscow. The UK must take part (though certainly not all) of the blame for that and so for the immensely damaging rise in the British cost of living which is to a considerable extent attributable to the disruption caused by its foreign policy priorities and its extremely poor understanding of the consequences of its actions. 

Over a year on from the invasion, we have to draw some distinction between the energy component of inflation and 'core' inflation - the underlying inflation in food and services that has triggered high interest rates. Energy inflation if it does not go on for too long is something one works through. European governments could deal with it by adding to their fiscal burden with what amounted to massive dole outs - another price that might not be worth paying as national debt levels, already burdened by COVID social cohesion doles and green agenda doles (soon to be added to with increases in defence budget expectations) reach levels that require austerity and high taxes under conditions of low growth, that is, if the Western system is not to crumble under the weight of its own debt mountain. But energy inflation has triggered core inflation so that as energy prices fall, the lag in wage and commodity inflation continues to drive prices and forces up interest rates.

Nevertheless, funds to deal with energy inflation could be regarded (like the Green Agenda), at least in part, as a debatably necessary adjustment and an 'investment' in future energy security. After another year of recessionary misery (or soft landing from an optimistic point ov view) everything will be fine and recovery from 2024 and after will allow the debts to be paid off and prosperity to return. Except that the game is not over. The Europeans (which includes us) have just shifted their energy dependence from being one on Moscow to one based on the US and Gulf dominated spot markets. Renewables are not managing to fill the gap left by the decline in hudro and nuclear energy. Europe is still vulnerable not only to increases in the spot price of LNG and OPEC+s determination to maintain fairly high oil prices in at least the $80-$90 band (Brent Crude) but to the Russians deciding to turn off the spigot for gas or oil directed at Europe because they have (eventually) an adequate market in East Asia and have just had enough of European insults and support for Ukraine. The Chinese are busy committing to long term Gulf contractual terms while dilatory Europeans sit and hope for pries to come down regardless.

In other words, the 'headline' inflation problem has not gone away - it has just been pushed forward to next winter if the Europeans in particular do not manage to sign their own long term contracts for energy, Chinese recovery sucks in energy from elsewhere, there is a cold winter, the spot markets rise and the alternative energy structures that are supposed to displace Eurasian energy are not in place. If conditions deteriorate between Russia and the West to the extent that Eurasian gas is no longer available in Europe at all and the grey market in Russian crude going to refined products that serve Europe dies off in favour of East Asian needs, then European governments may face a fiscally destructive demand for yet more social cohesion payments to protect the most vulnerable households and businesses and this will be ... inflationary. 

So, we are in a position where markets are convinced that recessionary tendencies must mean that interest rates have peaked and are buoyant but a) the continuing rise in 'core' inflation means that, even if interest rates peak, central banks may be obliged to hold them at near peak levels for a considerable period of time while the mounting costs of all this to governments, households and businesses starts to unwind the viability of at least some of all three in a slow-burning creative destruction that weakens confidence and contains multiple political risks while b) the current relatively beneficial state of the energy market could simply be the eye of the hurricane, vulnerable at any time to a whole number of political grey swans and risking, if things go down hill, significant fiscal interventions for which there may no longer be united national political consent (or the cash) as the costs mount.

Looking at the world before February 2002 and after that date, we can see only one major trigger for a polycrisis that was probably waiting to happen on many other fundamentals - an ill-thought-out sanctions approach that was supposed to bring Russia 'to its senses' or even trigger regime change and Russia's economic collapse. It has clearly not done so nor is Russia isolated. At best, sanctions may achieve their ends only at immense cost to the poor and vulnerable at home and overseas, to working households and to those small businesses who may not survive beyond the doles they have been given to survive the next round of energy price hikes. A lot of the damage caused by COVID and sanctions is silent. About a year into COVID, I produced a list of local Kent and Sussex small breweries and put it to one side. This week I went back to it to see what had happened to them. Roughly a quarter seem to have crashed and burned as independent businesses. Walking around our mid-sized Kentish town, we see the gaps where shops used to be.

Inflation driven by huge fiscal inputs to deal with both crises and ideological convictions (such as Net Zero and the insanity of increased weapons expenditure) and by incompetently drawn up economic warfare policies, added to COVID-related supply chain problems, have meant interest rate rises. Short term subsidies to the population have meant high borrowings. High borrowing has meant weakened currencies against the dollar. Weakened currencies mean imported inflation which means yet more interest rate rises. Interest rate rises eventually mean recession. Recession means job losses and business failures. High borrowing eventually means high taxation yet recession means lower tax take. Increased taxation to deal with this and high interest rates mean a drag on growth. And so it goes ... a spiral of failure. All this is, at root, not down to Putin but to our collective paranoid and hysterical reaction to Putin led by a bunch of loopy ideological Tories and their fellow travellers in the Labour Party.

These have been many serious failures of policy derived from poor analysis and intelligence. We know this now whereas a year ago we only surmised that this might be so. Exactly how bad Western analytical intelligence has been perhaps only became clear with the release of the latest batch of Pentagon Papers. It is said that the professional foreign policy and intelligence community in Washington are distraught at the poor quality of their own political masters who are driven by simplistic ideological seat of the pants policy-making. Western democracies are, in any case, no longer fitted for the sort of long-range planning that seems to be the norm in Moscow and Beijing. A 'price worth paying', seen originally perhaps in terms of eighteenth century type war subsidies (wasteful but not critical to our own economy), has been transformed into a massive price for war and the reconstructive integration into the European and Western system of a basket case of a state riddled with corruption .

This is a price certainly not worth paying, incurred at the expense of national populations, long term economic prospects and future generations yet a reversal of policy is no longer acceptable to elites not for simple ostensible moral reasons but because back-tracking will shatter confidence in them. Like Macbeth, they are so steeped in metaphorical blood they may as well go forward as back but their doubling down constantly increases the risks that a serious situation could become a critical one. The financial technocrats remain extremely worried about more bank failures and so should we be, The system is under enormous strain and yet there is no way forward for Western leaders to do anything more than carry on being as stupid as they were in the far less critical situations of Iraq and Afghanistan. As in those two cases, the end game is now predictable - defeat or a victory earned at such cost as to be Pyrrhic.

Here, in the UK, the Government, the media and the political class are all in denial about these truths because are fully complicit in February's blunders and the even worse blunder of not using British influence to encourage peace talks back in April. We all know Boris was a chancer but his gambling sucked in everyone around him. Now our political addicts think that just one more throw of the dice (presumably this time it is the touted Ukrainian counter-offensive) will win back the shirt they are losing off their back. They now have no way out of the hole they have dug except to dig ever deeper and then cross their fingers, hoping that if they do so vigorously enough they will come out in Australia and all will be well. It is now no longer theoretically possible that Russia, clearly backed by a China throughly alienated by the incompetents in the State Department and in Brussels and Berlin, will collapse, be forced to withdraw from Ukraine or the Putin regime be replaced. Even if these events happened, none of them are likely to take place within the time frame required to avert serious damage to the Anglo-European economy and social cohesion. The cheap and hitherto reliable Eurasian energy resources in question are Russian and not ours so we cannot seize them any more than we can seize its massive mineral resources (much of it vital for Western industrial development) and grain output. They, not us, decide what is to be done with these assets of global importance.

It will take years for Europe to put in the infrastructure necessary to restore permanently lowered energy and commodity price structures in a global context. Europe will be competing with Asia for both sets of input and its competitive advantage in having cheap Eurasian energy to hand is now lost, almost certainly forever. Germany, apart clearly from the unstable coalition that rules it, has begun to fear de-industrialisation and has just, with immense stupidity, managed to undo all Macron's good work in China ten days or so ago. The German Foreign Minister alienated China under the massive illusion that its opinion on the Ukraine matter actually matters to Beijing. Macron to a great extent and Orban to a complete extent 'get' what is at stake for Europe and 'get' that it (and we in Britain) have been played by Washington. The embarrassment of watching Sunak kow-tow like all his predecessors to a President who touts a united Ireland tells us all we need to know about national decline. A nation has liberated itself from Brussels only to be a vassal to Washington.

The confrontation between Putin and Western liberal elites is likely to last years as Russia pivots to Asia while a Trump victory and growing European resentments and fragmentation could leave us Britons high and dry in any case. We could take the economic hit now only to see the rug pulled out from under us later. Whatever short term wheezes are being promoted by this Government to take the heat off itself and secure its position for an election, the huge damage to our economy of yet further tranches of borrowing (following the COVID experience) and to social cohesion from the inevitable austerity and increased taxation in the long term are certainly not 'prices worth paying' for the bulk of the population. It is as if (surely not) Government continues to undertake every wheeze to protect the asset rich middle classes in the rather stupid belief that they are the majority of voters and the rest of the electorate has no choice other than to vote for a variant of the liberal establishment that protects that class. This is true in a world made up of Red, Green, Orange and Blue 'Tories' but all four are skating on thin ice. That world may collapse under sufficient economic pressure.

These are all self-inflicted wounds on the British nation not so much by the Government alone but by an entire political class that continues its arrogant neglect of its own population in order to meet the needs of moral philosophy (as interpreted by Oxbridge, the media and the liberal intellectual class) and its own self-serving class interests. The media is wholly complicit. The butterfly minds of the elite have left an apparently powerless population to do what it can to get by - the Government has simply stopped inflation becoming intolerable for the middling sort but pushed those costs forward in time. Huge numbers of the Crown's loyal subjects will face a serious loss of living standards regardless. Perhaps the assumption of the liberal establishment that they are too stupid to see this and who is responsible will be its eventual downfall.

For a brief moment (maybe this coronation) we will now get to see what our nation can be at its most romantic but we note that the strong national engagement in respect for the late Queen Elizabeth has already diminished for her successor in opinion polls. We are seeing how national decision-makers are divorced from the condition of the people as much now as in the age of Victoria. The open debate we need may never happen - evasion of the conditions under which power is exercised may be what holds this nation together as it sinks slowly but steadily into penury. But never mind ... perhaps the upper middle classes think they can survive and since this is their Kingdom more than ours, then we must judge that all is good in the world. Why question such good order, they may ask. Why not, we should reply.

Tuesday 8 March 2016

The Naive and the Cruel - The Ideological Struggle for the Heart of Europe

Part of the pro-European Union pitch relies on the promotion, mostly from Marxist intellectuals and fellow-travellers in the Academy, of a naïve anti-Atlanticist economic model which is designed to appeal to the younger generation. Needless to say, both the Atlanticist neo-liberal and this neo-socialist European model are deeply flawed but the latter is naïve where the former is cruel. Because the former is cruel, the latter becomes attractive and so it must be ripped apart by serious democratic socialists before it gets traction.

The two key issues neither side are addressing are a) the massive impending flow of refugees this year and possibly in subsequent years and b) the economic instability of the Eurozone in the context of a global slowdown not only in Europe but also in China and the US.

These people are not getting it – a perfect storm of an economic system on the edge and massive population shifts for which there has been no preparation does not lead to democratic socialism but to authoritarianism and national populism. And eventually to violence which can only be handled by the surveillance society (and not that either).

The only real solution is the restoration of flexible and responsive national democracies in a framework of internationalism (not supra-nationalism) in which democratic socialists (not neo-socialist liberals) restrain the forces of reaction and maintain ‘civilisation’ before returning to effective long term power and the rebuilding of the welfare commonwealth - and then perhaps returning to the construction of a new collaborative Europe from the ground up.

The economic projects of the European neo-socialists are doomed on massive welfare costs and the revolt of the Middle European middle classes from the taxation and inflation required. A system built on the assumption of constant high economic growth relying on cheap labour and minimal infrastructural investment has been called out by history. Eight years after the 2008 Crash, the reliance on the 'inevitable' up-turn looks more futile than ever. There will eventually be a massive structural up-turn on technological innovation (biotechnology, nanotechnology, AI/robotics) but it will be fiercesomely disruptive and our elites are simple not competent enough to handle it.

Even if they get into power, like the French Popular Front in 1936, our backwards-looking soft Left will be out of it within a year or two. The logic that destroyed Tsipras still exists within the European Project and Varoufakis can appear on TED as many times as he likes with his 'alternative strategy' but it is little more than the same old intellectual failure re-packaged for dim-witted liberals.

Worse, this is not the way to help the refugees or the working population most threatened by break down. Both deserve better - they deserve realists and not idealists, a political class prepared to get stuck in and bring peace to troubled regions, fund reconstruction for destroyed territories, turning camps into viable townships where return is not possible. We must match migration aspirations to labour shortages and not rely on spurious human rights claims and the demand for ever cheaper labour to feed the maw of late capitalism. Liberal internationalist idealism (as opposed to democratic socialist internationalism), the deontological impulse of the cultural studies departments, is at the very root of the murder and mayhem we see across the peripheries of the West.

The liberal idealists who now sit, like Cnut before the waves, at the leading edge of European 'socialism' are worse than simply naive, they are potentially destructive in that naivete, part of a failed elite instead of the vanguard of a new democratic socialist political elite (there I have said it) that will transform the condition of the people under conditions of democracy, technological innovation and socio-economic redistribution within an internationalism of free democratic welfare states.

Saturday 5 March 2016

The Labour Party and Its Culture of Pessimism

I saw a smidgeon, but only a smidgeon, of what Iain Duncan Smith has recently been talking about (‘bullying and threats’ from the anti-Brexit campaign) at our local Labour Party this week. I do not want to get this out of proportion. Our local Party is represented by a really decent and civilised group of people who generally treat each other with respect and courtesy. The 'bullying' (such as it was) came from an outsider. It should also be said that some of the grassroots supporters of Brexit on the Right are far more vicious in their own presentation of their case than their opponents and that these Brexit Tweeters lose votes every time they lift their malign little fingers. However, I would have expected far more from the official representative of Labour's campaign to remain within Europe.

I am not interested in naming names. It may just have been an 'off night' but the pro-European Union speaker (there was no representative of the countervailing case) directed comments at the only eurosceptic in the village (me!) which overtly associated my position with that of fascists like Nick Griffin. This was unacceptable and recognised to be unacceptable (he apologised for the 'offence' but not the misrepresenting claim) but a lot of half-truths and claims remained unchallenged and on the record. That's fine up to a point - after all, the party apparat is using a conference decision to claim priority for the pro-European case. This gives it carte blanche, one supposes, to walk all over those of us with a more nuanced vision of democratic socialism and a healthy distrust of Delorsian promises that have not been delivered, are not being delivering and will not be delivered.

It was conveniently not mentioned that the speaker might as equally be associated with Goldman Sachs as I am apparently associated with extreme nationalists but let that pass. Although (to his credit) he came clean about his presumably paid position at The European Parliament, it would also have been nice to have someone represent the Stay Campaign who did not have such an obvious professional interest in the result.

Regardless of all that, my political position was redundant. Not only was there no speaker for the alternative case (which is fine), I was not given the chance to respond to the implied slurs on my character (which was not). I did not expect to be allowed to challenge the misrepresentation and half-truths of the campaign itself and indeed had made that clear but I did think it reasonable that the specific charge of association with nationalistic fascism be refuted (the Chair failed at this point). Whatever! The membership seem totally sold on the European Project regardless of anything that I might have said in any reasoned way. Further intervention on my part would have been useless. I just disliked being treated like that by a 'comrade' who had been placed in a superior position by the decision of the Executive Committee ... if I was not such a tough nut, I think I might reasonably call that 'bullying'. Nor am I alone in this from reports in other parts of the country. It may raise questions for many people whether this liberal internationalist and European Socialist Party is really their natural home but I think that assessment comes later.

I walked away that evening very much more aware of the determination and resources of the soft left machine behind Stay within the Labour Party (with its very glossy and well produced brochure), of the risks that the Party is taking in its potential alienation from its historic working class base (not only on this matter but on the refugee crisis), of the dominance of the left-liberal (rather than democratic socialist) component of the Party and of the lack of fairness and tolerance towards other voices on this issue on the grounds that it was 'party policy'. This reproduces the mentality of past Labour top-down authoritarianism if worn with a relatively velvet glove.

Further reflection has also made realise just how much the party machine is broken in terms of its responsiveness to the twin needs of mobilising and engaging new members and creating a machinery for political education that can act as a transmission belt between the wider population and the 'avant-garde' of party thinking. Again, do not get me wrong - the local Party is friendly, vigorous in its own way, and making serious attempts to professionalise its approach to the electorate. There was an excellent local election policy statement developed by a leading member, albeit one that threatened to be turned into a curate's egg by its need to satisfy the standard liberal-left posturing on some issues.

But rules (which, of course, members can do nothing about) that mean that a member only gets a CLP vote when they go through the palaver of attending a branch meeting and getting elected as a 'delegate', and the way that these delegates are forced into supporting branch resolutions created in meetings which they could not attend, means that many new members sit at the CLP as observers rather than participants, delegates lose an important degree of autonomy in discussing policy and the processes are excessively manipulable by the sort of activist who can give up time at the convenience of the party calendar.  Small branches can also be out-manouevred by the effective organisation of large branches instead of being in the position of persuading the members as a whole on the merits of a case.  Surely members themselves should feel free in their own right to bring up resolutions if they can get sufficient support from other members.

Of course, to be fair, the branch activists are also the ones who organise the machinery that gets candidates into office and so perhaps should have some additional rights but the balance strikes me as wrong. The sort of party reform that has been batted around since the mid-1990s is long over due. It is good to hear that Tom Watson, Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, is looking into this and, indeed, according to reports, is giving special attention to the digital issue which includes the particular problem of the possible disenfranchisement of those who do not have digital access. These are complex issues with no easy answers but at least there seems to be some intent to grapple with them under the new Leadership team.

In my own case, as a result of the manner in which the meeting was held this week, I came to a decision that I could not face our local electorate (as requested) in May under conditions where I might be misrepresented as supportive of the European Project simply by virtue of being a Labour candidate and so I withdrew.  Six months of engagement in the Party has started to make me feel uncomfortable on other grounds. The bottom line was that I could see that taking on UKIP in a strongly working class area would be almost impossible under such circumstances making me, suddenly, a pessimist which is not what I want to be - and life is short!

The Party's own aggressive stance on Europe had simply made me more determined than ever to stand for non-fascist and non-racist democratic socialists' argument for Leave and to give that struggle absolute priority, to the exclusion of every other political project, over the next four months. The national pessimism about May seems to have become infectious. I have caught the disease so that saving the nation from supra-nationalism in the greater interests of its working people in the long run suddenly seems so much more important than maintaining the illusory dreams of the jobsworths in the European Parliament. This does not mean that the Labour Party and Labour Movement are not to be supported as the primary voice for progressive politics in the United Kingdom (quite the contrary - they are, sadly, the only voice left!) but it does mean that the support should not be as unconditional as it once was in the days of tribal politics.

As I see it, the Labour Party at the moment has become mired in a 'culture of pessimism' as a result of the disastrous Blair-Brown legacy, the failure in the 2015 Election and the prospect of losing millions of pounds because of some particularly self-interested and vicious Tory legislation. Spend time with any activists working at a national level and they are excessively pessimistic about the prospects for their own Party. They are excessively pessimistic about their own Leadership in many cases. They are certainly ridiculously pessimistic about the opportunities to continue the democratisation and transformation of our own nation. As a result, this culture of pessimism has grabbed hold of an utterly undemocratic belief (for it is a belief) that a Social Europe can do the job that the Party cannot do domestically. This is added to a romantic idealism in which internationalism is reframed as supranationalism, democracy as platonic bureaucratism and the genuine cultural concerns of the working class as proto-fascism.  In other words, these liberal idealists would prefer a bureaucratic Europe to impose their values on the British people rather than persuade the British people to adopt those values itself.  That is not the democratic way and yet what has distinguished the Left in Britain since the days of the Chartists has been its commitment to democracy.

Sunday 21 February 2016

Robotics, AI, Sexuality & Power - A Brave New World

In a somewhat breathless report in the Financial Times on February 14th, Moshe Vardi, computer science professor at Rice University in Texas, is quoted as saying that “We are approaching the time when machines will be able to outperform humans at almost any task. Society needs to confront this question before it is upon us: if machines are capable of doing almost any work humans can do, what will humans do?"

There may be a dash of panic emerging about the emergence of robotics and AI - after all, scientists and engineers have form when it comes to doing the 'chicken licken' thing as they move into the public sphere. It is as if these professions have a deep psychological problem in understanding social and system complexity, adaptability and unpredictability. We have certainly seen this with climate change much as we once saw it with scientific panic about racial degradation!

Nevertheless, AI and robotics are set to make an impact similar to that of the introduction of machinery in the early agricultural phase of the industrial revolution. This pushed masses of peasants out of traditional jobs into the cities as cheap labour. This lead to the next round of applications of machinery to industrial processes as urban labour started to become more expensive. Administrative, clerical and skilled labour are now expensive enough to drive the next set of applications of machine intelligence.

Robotics probably will eliminate many skilled manufacturing jobs. AI will certainly eliminate many clerical and even professional jobs. Robotics plus AI will eliminate many unskilled jobs. On past form, new jobs of a different nature to meet new needs eventually get created. Human existence and experience, after a painful disruption, then improves significantly yet the disruption could be politically and socially dangerous.

In the earlier cycles, there was no democracy so we had riots, then revolutions and then the formation of new political parties constructing the democracy and other radical forms of governance that allowed society to engage in the internal Darwinian struggle that led to the triumph of a rather weak form of welfarist liberal democracy.  This may have frustrated Nietzsche who saw the 'weak' collectivising to become strong and it is true that this collectivisation could de-humanise as much as the machines did but the outcomes were, on balance, more beneficial than not in terms of creating the conditions for at least the possibility of personal empowerment and individuation.

The next cycle looks as if it will be expressed through populist upsurges. We are now into new territory, so we may as well enjoy the ride ... but the one thing we can be sure of is that this new system like the old will be managed by self-reinforcing elites periodically replaced by more suitable self-reinforcing elites.

This is the nature of power - it cannot be held by everyone at the same time although the powerful are just as controlled by those over whom they exercise formal power, in subtle and devious ways, as they control those who have no formal power. Foucault was good on the complexity of all this, If so, the first 'new' elite will only be the cleverer elements of the old elite seeking to manage the new populism. It is when that fails that the fun and games begin ...

But before we get over-excited here is an example of hype that needs treating with care, The FT again: "Prof Vardi said it would be hard to think of any jobs that would not be vulnerable to robotics and AI — even sex workers. “Are you going to bet against sex robots?” he asked. “I’m not.”" As usual in our rather sexually anxious culture, the Professor uses sexuality to heighten the air of tension. We really do need to grow up about sex but that is not why I raise it.

If you think about Vardi's comment, it begs the question of what sort of sex worker - we are speaking of the oldest profession, one that deserves being taken seriously and respected in our otherwise sex-negative society. There is the aspect of 'relief' and of 'fetish' whose demands might be relieved by autonomous robots with no personality (the problem of robots with personality and consciousness is one for science fiction and very far into the future but still one eventually to be taken seriously).

But there is the very separate aspect of human need for contact with other humans, as opposed to the autistic but perfectly reasonable human need to have no contact with other human beings, where the elimination of the exhaustion of work and our daily scrabbling for 'time-resource' (an overhang from the industrial era) might actually create a positive need for a huge range of erotic services for all sorts for very different people in safe and psychologically healthy ways.

Perhaps the female interest in the performance art of burlesque or the turning of pole-dancing into a form of athletic prowess are just the beginning of this vast range of human-to-human interactions which will involve 'trade' and extend to all other forms of experience - ambience, performance, fashion, play, aesthetics, humour, dance and movement, fragrance, seduction, ritualised safe violence (which is what much sport is at heart), magical belief and the invention of cults, psychotherapies and philosophies, new ways of constructing family and community, new politics (against the reactionary politics of Iron Age religiosity and industrial age bureaucracy), safe altered states and new forms of economic organisation.

All that will then be needed is a limited framework for protecting the person (and the animal and eventually the conscious robot) from unwarranted unequal exploitation and physical and (within reason because all conscious creatures create themselves out of risk and struggle) mental harm. The State should, ideally, as Marx expected, 'wither away' except that there will long be a need for something to construct and set the limits for the massive infrastructural investments that will help create that limited framework's potentialities.

Professor Vardi chooses sex workers as a trope because our culture is still hung up on sexuality. A socially conservative puritanism is re-emerging in this context as the last reactionaries hope to use the coming crisis to reintroduce their worn out values - hence the explosion of Islamism, Papal energy, Super-Federalism, Neo-Cold War idiocies, counter-terrorism strategies, surveillance, prohibitionisms and engineered anxieties and panics.

The choice of sexuality as the primary point of excitement itself suggests the problem - a deep cultural issue with the normality of sexual response and the ancient fear of it in a context of limited resources, the need by elites to control humans as property (which still carries on in those states that conscript their young) and the danger to order of emotions in closed spaces.

The new technology opens up spaces, no longer permits humans to be treated as property (which is very scary to people who find security in being slaves) and increases resources - suddenly, there is no excuse at the educated and intelligent end of society for savage authoritarian mores other than the existence of the disturbed personality type of the authoritarian.

We have often noted that the struggle between freedom and authority or power, often generational, is far more central to the human condition even than class or gender or ethnic conflict. The problem then becomes one of the fear of ancient ways dissolving and releasing the mob into chaos (which is the current terror that permits social conservatism to be tolerated).

The AI/robotics revolution may be scary for the disruption in employment and community (but what positive change in society is not) but it is also scary for another reason - it will terrify Authority faced with the loss of their elite control over the distribution of resources, over cultural space and over the disposition of labour value.

The most frightened will be the 'educated' (education not being the same as usefulness or intelligence) who have believed that they rule by divine right because they have ruled, at least culturally, for over half a millennium in some form or another, whether liberal-bureaucratic, pseudo-socialist, progressive, corporatist or fascist.

So, for the rest of us who embrace the future while thinking it reasonable for new elites to arise who will mitigate bad effects on humans and who will prepare for the day when the descendants of the AI/robots will be our conscious equals (and one hopes our friends), it is a case of watchfulness against the claw-back of power by the losing classes, the exploitation of fear and anxiety to impose restrictions on our freedom and the crass over-claims of excitable scientists and engineers. Avanti!

Monday 9 November 2015

Text of Presentation at the TEAM EU Counter Summit London, November 7th, 2015

I am on the Advisory Board of the Democracy Movement which is a long standing critic of the anti-democratic nature of the European Union and I attended the first meeting of the Leave.EU Advisory Board last month. This was a contribution to the discussion on the coming British Referendum of whether or not to leave the European Union which was held at a useful one day Summit [1] convened by TEAM [The European Alliance of Euro-Critical Movements] on Saturday. 

First of all, I must make clear that, today, I am speaking for the Democracy Movement and not for Leave.EU. The difference is important as I shall make clear. 

I am going to try and do three things in the limited time at my disposal and I will welcome questions later.

First, I want to inform you of what the Democracy Movement is doing in the great cause and re-cap a little on its history to explain how it has got to where it is.

Second, I want to give my impressions of what Leave.EU, one of no less than two [major] euro-realist or euro-sceptic organisations that have emerged in recent weeks and months, is and why I think it is potentially very important.

Third, I want to thread the two themes together as I speak and show why the Democracy Movement is minded to support Leave.Eu while not yet having made its absolutely final decision although it is a decision expected very soon.

I cannot emphasise enough that not only DM but Leave.EU and the socialist and democratic organisations operating in this space consider themselves internationalists and true Europeans.

To be a true European is to stand for democracy and the self-determination of the European peoples collaborating as nation-states on equal terms. This is the legacy of the European Enlightenment and is also resolutely anti-imperialist.

This commitment to being European but firmly against the European Union is something that must be stated again and again in British contexts because the lie being perpetrated about the ‘leave’ camp is that it is anti-European, xenophobic or ‘little Englander’ (a very useful lie when mobilising our Celtic brothers and sisters). [2] 

Nothing could be further from the truth. If anything, the modern British Eurosceptic craves a deeper and firmer cultural connection with Europeans.

What he or she will not accept is being dictated to by Eurocrats when we have a perfectly good sovereign Parliament and ancient liberties at home.

I will go further and say that, while some Eurosceptics are stuck in the old Atlanticist model, the modern British Eurosceptic is very much an internationalist at a much more global level.

If he is a Eurosceptic of the Left, he wants to ensure that global trade and Western power are used to better the lives of the vast majority of humanity that still lives in dire conditions across the world.

If she is a Eurosceptic of the Right, the emphasis may be on global trade and the betterment of humanity through that means.

Both Right and Left will disagree profoundly on means and, in some respects, ends but what they have in common is that freedom can only be offered by example, by a free people freely determining its laws through sovereign institutions.

Having given that cultural background, let me move on to the Democracy Movement which has one of the longest continuous records as defender of national sovereignty from a non-partisan point of view in this country.

It was founded as all-party, as the voice of those who wanted to have the risks to democracy of technocracy brought to public notice. Over subsequent decades it came to link traditional right of centre concerns about the European Union with those of the Left.

It was central to the creation of the People’s Pledge, a non-partisan movement which included both Euro-sceptics and Euro-philes, which demanded and got a Referendum – something the elite of our country would happily have denied us.

Tony Blair himself clearly loathed the very idea of the people making a choice for themselves about the future destiny within the European Union.

He said in his Durham constituency in April: “Think of the chaos produced by the possibility, never mind the reality, of Britain quitting Europe.” 

Well, I see no chaos in the streets or the markets but I am too polite to endorse Boris Johnson’s assertion that Blair was an ‘epic, patronising tosser’ for making his remarks.

The point is that the Democracy Movement and People’s Pledge helped to make a Referendum happen against the massed ranks of the old elite. Now that the Referendum is assured, we will see the same determination to see the matter through to final victory – to leave, leave, LEAVE!

The strategy of the Democracy Movement in recent months has been to husband its resources which include its substantial mailing list and campaigning experience and ensure that those resources are used correctly and to maximum effect when the time comes.

This is an asset that must not be wasted and the activists on its lists must be treated with the utmost respect as fellow soldiers in a shared battle.

But the most important aspect of DM (to use its shortened acronym) is that it has long acted as clearing house for contacts between otherwise mutually suspicious Left and Right Euro-sceptics. This now becomes invaluable in ensuring that the two wings remain united as we get closer to the vote.

The obvious tactic of the Eurocrats is to try to set Left and Right Eurosceptics off against each other in the street.  This must not be allowed to happen. 

For the Eurocrats, given their base-line of centre-right, State and big business support for the pro-European position, the game is to silence the Left and have the old pre-Corbyn elite of the Labour Movement and the Labour Party speak as one voice for the European Union.

But it is not going to happen like that for a number of reasons.

The first is that the numbers of Euro-sceptical left-wingers are much higher than the mainstream Press would like you to believe. They have simply been overwhelmed [in the past] by the group-think of those who purport to speak for them. They simply need leadership and to know they are not alone.

Some became frustrated enough that they drifted across to so-called ‘Red UKIP’ as working class people who felt their concerns were not being addressed by New Labour.

I am reliably informed that many of these people – who are not racists or xenophobes – are now going home to Labour with the arrival of a new Leader, in Jeremy Corbyn, who is clearly more open to the concerns of working people and to open debate on difficult issues such as Europe, TRIDENT and even migration.

However, I am not here to speak of the Left since our Chairman, John Boyd, and Brian Denny of CAEF can do so with more authority than I can.

The Democracy Movement has, however, been helping to prepare the ground for a resurgence of Left Euroscepticism in very difficult times and now the Left can be assured that they are not alone and need not be embarrassed (or as little as possible) by the more rabid nationalist elements on the Right who can sometimes lose more votes than they secure in British contexts.

I am personally very much of the Left with a long track record of activist organisation in the Labour Movement. My long two decades or more association with DM has caused me no problems whatsoever.

There are issues, of course. This is politics. Many on the Left will not sit on a platform with some on the Right. Democratic socialists will not always sit with democratic nationalists but issues like TTIP, the incompetence of the European External Action Service in Ukraine (which has exposed the lie of the European Union as instrument of peace) and the appalling treatment of the Greek people are bringing activists together for this critical vote.

Without a functioning representative democracy answerable to the people, a people with a common history and struggle, there is no opportunity for Left and Right to contest a constitutional space if the only constitutional space available is one dictated by lawyers and technocrats.

Which leads to the final independent initiative of DM alongside maintaining its campaigning asset and increasing understanding between Left and Right democrats –the promotion of the ideal of democracy itself.

What happened in Greece and is now happening in Portugal is a sharp reminder that we are faced by a post-modern Imperial Power that hides its brute corporatist economic force under a velvet glove of liberal ideology.

DM is actively pulling together a second wave of British groups on the theme of national sovereign democracy. These are wholly committed to a ‘leave’ vote when it comes.

Now, at last, let me speak of Leave.EU. As you know there are two ‘leave’ organisations in Britain. I can characterise ‘Leave.EU’ as the mass-orientated one that seeks to mobilise the street to reach the people who really matter here, the voters.

The other ‘camp’, originated by Business For Britain, is a far more elite operation dominated by Members of Parliament of all parties and conservative business interests.

My own view is that there is room for both. Although they may be rivals for funding and attention, there is room for the elite and the mass to have their own organisations.  I see no virtue in public quarrels.

We are on the cusp of a major change in politics where power shifts from the old elite politics to the new politics represented by the power of social media and the rise of Jeremy Corbyn.

The radical new politics straddles party lines – Labour’s Tom Watson is matched by the Tory Zac Goldsmith – and both Douglas Carswell and the Bennite Left see the Levellers, the radicals of the old English Republic, as part of their inheritance.

Yet the old politics still has strong residual power. Some people will still be persuaded to their position by the leadership role of ‘big beasts’. The elite is still part of the game.

So which way will DM jump?

Leave.EU is much closer to the new politics model and DM was a pioneer of this approach. DM shares with Leave.EU a belief in the ultimate wisdom of the people and the need to communicate with them in a two-way dialogue. 

Although no final commitment has been made (since DM, perfectly reasonably, wants to know that its carefully acquired campaigning asset will be managed appropriately and effectively) DM, like so many radical democratic organisations in this country, is minded to give its wholehearted commitment to Leave.EU at the right time.

At some stage, the Eurosceptical arguments are going to have to be put to the people within the funding and other restrictions of the Electoral Commission.

We trust this body. It is not partisan. In our judgment, faced with an elite or a mass offer where the latter has a significant track record of campaigning over decades, it must, if it is to be fair, go with the people and not the big beasts. 

But what I personally like about Leave.EU is that it is not allowing itself to be the rabbit in the headlights of officialdom and not relying on that outcome.

It knows that the pro-European Union lobby has been planning its campaigning for years, has accumulated massive resources and will have the same devious forces working for it as those who stole the first Referendum vote in 1975.

There is no advantage in hanging around until everything is perfect. Battle must be joined sooner rather than later. Leave.EU has simply decided to by-pass the old system of what it calls the ‘Westminster bubble’ and go into the struggle regardless. And we think that is entirely the right strategy.


Notes

[1] Delegates included, in addition to the host nation, Danes, Germans, Greeks, Irish, Norwegians and Slovenians amongst others with a supportive statement from Austria.

[2] A question from the floor by an Irish member of the international delegations raised the point that many of our Celtic brothers and sisters would not mind so much a 'Little Englander' approach if it meant that the people of England would free themselves of an imperial mind-set and commit to their own self-determination alongside that of the peoples of Eire, Wales and Scotland. However, the point stands because, in an English context, the phrase is used by critics of the 'leave' campaign to suggest that their opponents have no understanding or empathy with European culture. Having just finished reading a short story about hope under conditions of institutionalisation by Wolfgang Borchert written in 1947 just before writing this note, I am confident that we can argue that it is our love of Europe and European culture that makes us determined to resist its bureaucratisation, corporatisation and institutionalisation.

Saturday 13 September 2014

Critiquing Traditionalism ...

[This note assumes a very basic understanding of traditionalism and the perennial philosophy and of the work, in particular, of Rene Guenon, on the part of the reader]

Where traditionalism is right ...

1. ... in its suspicion of democracy because the working components of a democracy [individuals] are never equal in information or power. The skills of manipulation by those with information or power will always tend to disconnect a democracy from what it is to be a human being in the world. Traditionalism rightly questions whether deliberate modernising socialisation is ever compatible with 'gnosis' (that is, self awareness and self development) even if it falls into its own trap by proposing a socialisation derived from the past.

2. ... in its suspicion of the liberal insofar as liberalism is an ideology of rights, an absurd essentialist philosophical invention which too easily becomes a tool of the private oppression of some in the cause of the liberation of specific others. However, democratic neo-traditionalists make traditionalism even more wrong where it might have been right when they adopt the language of the Enlightenment against post-modernity.

3. ... in its particular suspicion of the bourgeois constitutional State which is the exemplification of both the false friend that is democracy in our current condition and of the equally unsound language and ideology of rights (and, as its associated liberal-communitarian heresy, of duties).

Where traditionalism is wrong ...

1. ... in its suspicion of modernity and the illusion that things known can be unlearned. Worse, that it would be good if some things had never been learned or that learning new things should now stop or be considered of lesser importance than endlessly regurgitating old things. The current situation of humanity is the highest truth of the moment and it supercedes all past moments of truth just as new truths will emerge from the process of existing in the world in time - and time is not reversible.

2. ... in its suspicion of the liberal insofar as liberalism is a practice of freedom. A person cannot exist as a person of spirit without making choices and choices require full freedom to make those choices whether with full information (the ideal) or best efforts at acquiring full information.

3. ... in its claim of a primordial essence of wisdom based on faith in a wise divinity that is embedded in the founders of each new faith in turn ... for if the founders of the great faiths were sparks of this primordial wisdom, why not the scientific materialist Karl Marx. How can traditionalists not know if Marx and Engels, whose movement was essentially religious, were not capturing some of this alleged divine essence? The claims of traditionalists in respect to religion as wisdom are absurd.

However ...

... what traditionalism, a false acquaintance seductive to simple minds, might have an insight into is a truth that is neglected in our time - that there is something primordial in us and in our society with which we must contend.

It is not that there is some absurd divine primordial truth out there but that there is a real evolved animal substrate to what it is to be human that is embedded in all human ideological forms and from which we will evolve further but over immense tracts of time.

There is no perennial philosophy here but there is a permanent foundation to humanity with which those who would bend humanity to perfectability or to the dictates of the ideal contend. The cruelties of the world often arise from the inability of humanity to be what either traditionalists or progressives wish it to be.

This is also not to say that Rene Guenon was not insightful in drawing a distinction between the exoteric (what we might call the various forms of socialised 'spiritual' reality) and the esoteric but he was mistaken in his understanding of the latter.

The esoteric is an individual reality that might be very various in form and need have no history beyond the person's creation of himself or herself against their immediate experience of the world.

There can be no union between an individual and some over-arching 'principle' because any such principle is either the creation of the person themselves in a state of illusion or is the creation of the social i.e. is, by definition, a form of illusion at the individual level.

The individual represents its own union with itself and this union is simply a coming to terms of the individual with his situation in the world, a process of individuation.

To claim to be part of a tradition that belongs or answers to to the Absolute is to fail to understand that the Absolute has no knowable existence under any circumstances and that the only coming to terms with the Absolute that is possible is its creation in his own image by the individual.

It is a crafting of the Absolute for personal use-value. Each individual is thus his own God and he creates his own redeeming 'Christ' by appropriating the Absolute for his own internal salvation. An analogy might be torn from any of the world religions which are all misleading in this respect as far as true 'salvation' is to be found.

Again, there is insight in Guenon when he identifies, gnostically, the spark of the Absolute within the person yet he then misdefines it. The spark of the Absolute is not there to be discovered but is to be created out of nothing by the individual looking into themselves and relating to the world.

The Asian religions (to which Guenon looked in this respect) are the falsest friends of all because they edge so closely to the reality of the situation. They recognise the closeness of the Absolute to ourselves but then give privilege of place to that Absolute over the person, whereas this Absolute-thing is, in fact, the illusion and it is the person in the world that is real.


Traditionalism as Hysteria and Fear

Traditionalism descends into hysteria when it becomes 'millenarial' with its myth of our living in the Kali Yuga as if the past was ever more golden. We are, in fact, not descending, we are rising. It is the sense of the Kali Yuga that drags traditionalism into the arms of the Far Right by means of its appropriation by (say) Evola, a half-baked theorist seeking liberation through evasive strategies.

The pessimism of the traditionalists drives them ever downwards in their alienation from the process of being in this world and in this time. It is wiser to be always ready for the next 'this world' in the next 'this time'.

The Kali Yuga for these radical traditionalists is apparently determined ontologically by matter whereas earlier times were not. This is truly absurd - it is not that we are distanced from spirit and increasingly embedded in matter but that we are rising out of matter slowly but surely through the exercise of our increasingly developed minds into something for which the word spirit or soul might be used analogically but which is neither ... simply enhanced being.

Minds are constantly exhibiting new qualities (or discovering how to make use of untapped capabilities) on the basis of the increasing sophistication of matter in constructing minds, triggered in part by our own human determination on technology. The word 'spirit' may become redundant but perhaps 'soul' might be recovered here to describe what is being created.

As for traditionalist initiation, one can have no objection to it as a free choice for free persons but it is a choice in favour of limitation and constraint. Initiation in particular exhibits a fear and anxiety about the terrors of self-creation that will embed a person more, not less, deeply in their own psychic matter. It is an attempt to close off mental 'inputs' and become micro-socialised against the world.

The Politics of Traditionalism

The traditionalist critique of modernity in a religious or 'spiritual' sense must be differentiated sharply from the use to which such ideas are put by the far right in particular. A true traditionalist is an a-political or a conservative pessimist but is rarely a right-wing extremist because right-wing extremism, in countering some forms of the modern, becomes severely modernist in its actuality.

The a-political traditionalist is wise - all ideologies that counter democracy, bourgeois constitutionalism and rights theory to date have been attempts to shift power from the beneficiaries of liberalism to those who have not had a slice of the cake. The ideas are mere excuse.

In this, they are no better and no worse than liberals ... but a radical idealist's lack of respect for the bargaining and the negotiation that is explicit in liberal democracy means that, when they seize power, they are accordingly more cruel and less basically competent in the long run, cruel and incompetent though liberalism often is itself.

There is an experiment in this being carried out in the Middle East as we write. ISIS, a radical traditionalist operation, has managed to make the cruelties of the US, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Syria seem benign but only because it has offered levels of apparently causeless (though we merely refuse to recognise the cause) violence and cruelty without apparent purpose far beyond the cruelties of modernising statecraft - or so we like to believe.

Traditionalism's conservative pessimism about politics or rather about the struggles for advantage within any socialised reality is probably correct - its extension to the human condition in the very long term may not be. There is no need to be pessimistic about humanity and its condition or to pull up a drawbridge against the modern world.

Traditionalism is a dead end in our culture - an attitude held by a type of mind, the product of gloom and anxiety, a means of withdrawing from complexity - but it does raise questions about the intellectual viability of liberal Western culture that remain unanswered and which will come to haunt us in the coming decades as the enlightenment is forced to return to its mission of applying critical thought to the issue of what it is to be human.