Showing posts with label Parliament. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Parliament. Show all posts

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'.

Friday 30 June 2017

Facebook & Arbitrary Power

"Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number,
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you-
Ye are many - they are few."

Facebook has just proved itself to be an idiot again - or rather its algorithms have proved idiotic. Its guidelines on 'nudity' (a particular cultural neurosis emanating from the dark recesses of American disgust with the otherwise perfectly natural human body) are actually crystal clear that if an 'artist' paints a nude, then it is somehow just dandy.

This is, of course,  a concession to the nonsensical idea that, for some romantic reason, artists can represent safely what is not permitted in the real world. However, those are the guidelines - no nudity (except for a political concession to breast feeding mothers) unless it is art and then it is permitted. Let us be clear - if it is an artistic representation, it is expressly permitted.

In this particular case, I posted, in a Closed Group dedicated to art and with members who are all invited adults, a picture by the mid-level baroque female painter Artemisia Gentileschi, somewhat of a feminist icon. Indeed, I have the cynical notion that Facebook only backed down when I threatened to set the feminists on it for blocking their heroine, one of the few female artists to 'make it' in the seventeenth century - actually a fairly average and over-hyped artist.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, not only did their moronic algorithm not recognise a work of art and blocked it but the operation did something unconscionable - it arbitrarily halted me from posting anything and anywhere for 24 hours. It gets worse by the way, but wait for the end on that one.

My response was immediate, aggressive and utterly contemptuous. They got a message on their help desk every five minutes for two hours pointing out the idiocy of the blocking with a one hour twitter campaign of direct contempt for their inability a) to recognise art and b) to understand their own guidelines as well as an expression through every means of direct anger and outrage that they should arbitrarily block anyone for 24 hours rather than just block something that their idiot algorithm could not recognise as a rather unerotic bit of baroque flummery.

The net result was that the block on my posting was lifted within six rather 24 hours and the picture was restored but my contempt for this arbitrary act and algorithmic stupidity has returned me to my high level of distrust for Facebook that had existed some three or four years ago when they suspended my account without adequate cause and were forced to relent after another time-wasting and determined twitter campaign and complaints to the regulatory authorities in Ireland. At least this time, it was a matter of hours and not months!

But then they blundered again. This time in a way that is almost comical. I made it clear to two Groups that I would no longer be posting on them as a mode of resistance to self censorship but also to preseve rights that now seemed to threaten my right to post in some 15 or so others of an educational nature.

A debate ensued in which a bit of consciousnes was raised about Facebook's arbitrary power and then I commented on another sixteenth century Northern Renaissance nude, posted in the past where others saw 'attachment unavailable'. In other words, Facebook had arbitrarily stopped others from seeing it without giving me fair warning of why this was so. When I commented on it, the result was that the algorithm stupidly marked this art work (well within Facebook's guidelines) as problematic and, yes, in another arbitrary act, banned me from posting for another 24 hours. There is a moron out there, either a programmer or an AI.

Facebook needs to understand that it has every right to set the rules for its platform but there are two things it cannot do. First, it cannot breach its own guidelines - those guidelines give a rather silly priority to art but that commitment to permit art must be met. Second, blocking a picture may be unfortunate and immature but it is permissible within those guidelines. However, it is outrageous that it can behave like a medieval despot and remove posting rights and make threats of loss of account on any basis, let alone a breach of its own guidelines. Body neurosis is tiresome - it shows a weak and decadent culture incapable of standing up for maturity. It also evidences an even more tiresome American cultural imperialism. But this weird thing about Art/Good and Body/Bad remains Facebook's privilege. Arbitrary incompetence or algorithmic malice does not.

What is really disturbing here is something much deeper. Because of its administrative errors, my digital existence is being put at threat because these blunders are inexorably leading to my own digital arbitrary execution.  

The Debate on the Art Group during the brief period when I had access to posting was instructive because Facebook's acts are raising a sort of 'revolutionary consciousness' through its arbitrary acts which have not just affected me. It is a sinister algorithmic attempt at socialisation that is going very badly wrong.

I do not accept defeat but I recognise the reality of power which is that Facebook, if I persist, can remove, in an arbitrary way, my entire six year Facebook ouevre comprising engagement in over 15 groups and with nearly 400 Friends and 160 Followers. In other words, Facebook, like a despotic ancien regime estate, can execute me in the digital world on the whim of one of its own aristocratic algorithms. It is as decadent, corrupt and villainous as any ancien regime. 

So what does a rebel do? He does, as Churchill points out, like any oppressed peasantry take to the hills ... or he engages in guerrilla activity or he emigrates or he gets educated and plots or he engages in a calculated 'dumb insubordination' and 'go slow' or he raises the next generation to understand power and eventually seize it. Or all of those as circumstances dictate. The understanding of power is a fine art - first one must know one's powerlessnes (which few really appreciate) and then one must know the power of the powerless (as Foucault pointed out) in its insidious ability to destroy its oppressor. Eventually conditions change and there is a revolution against arbitrary power.

Every arbitrary act by the ancien regime increases resentment and eventually the heads of the aristocrats roll, eventually humanity will command these AI-driven platforms by revolutionary fiat. I engaged the platform in struggle and temporarily won the 'pay rise' to which I was owed anyway but the power relationship has not changed and the capitalist may still fire me at will when conditions change. He may have put me on a blacklist. Indeed, that is what happened. Within hours of the first suspension, I got 'locked out' again with the suspicion that I am a 'marked man'

I can engage in an idle and short term trades union reformism or I can take the revolutionary route and plan for the long game - the utter overthrow of the arbitrary regime and its replacement by a dictatorship of the subjects! The Art Group remains - it just does not have me posting. It is for others to carry on the revolution in the factory. Better to die on your feet than live in fear on your knees so off to the hills I go with mental kalashnikov in my fist. My investment elsewhere is too valuable in the revolutionary cause and there is nothing they can do about that except 'kill' me. And, if they kill me, others will arise to protest their arbitrary power. My very small amount of power has been redirected with more force. The only thing I can hope is that I have raised the revolutionary consciousness of my own fellow Facebook proletariat.

What is going on here? I think Facebook is running scared of legislation from an equally neurotic government structure and is trying out algorithms that restrict and contain us, all on the spurious grounds of protecting us. The platform is weak and governments are oppressive and, between them, we could be but nuts in their nutcracker. The answer is simple as it is to all arbitrary power - expose it, fight it and apportion blame where it is due: in this case, cowardly and greedy unchecked corporate power and weak and oppressive states. We must never be the nuts ... the nut cracker must be broken, and we should be allowed to grow into great oaks.

Appendix: My Protest At The Second Suspension

To Facebook

I cannot believe your stupidity or is it the stupidity of your algorithms. Yesterday, you suspended me for 24 hours on a seventeenth century artwork which met your guidelines. Six hours later you restored me. I commented on 'old' posting of a sixteenth century artwork (well within your guidelines) this morning and you suspended me again for 24 hours. Now I fear that your algorithms are marking me out for account loss on your idiot mistakes.

This really is not acceptable. I want the painting restored. I want the 24 hour suspension lifted. I want my algorithm corrected to remove all references to these arbitrary actions outside your guidelines.

If this is not done clearly and quickly, I will do the following: I shall write to the regulatory authorities and to my elected representative (who is a member of a minority government putting datas regulation through Parliament); I will produce a blog posting on your failures which I shall circulate widely; and you will have a Twitter reference every ten minutes for as long as it takes.

This is an absolute outrage - two blunders in 24 hours against your own guidelines with arbitrary and unjustified attacks on service provision.

UPDATE

On July 22nd, 2017, I posted a photographic art work in a thread on the photographer Man Ray in the same closed Art Group censored above. In this case, it was borderline because it is moot whether a photograph is art to some people though few actually contest Man Ray's status in this respect and the picture was part of a series, all classically correct, as representative of Man Ray's work including his anodyne but attractive 'Pebbles'.

This particular work was interesting because it was a staged (and very obviously staged) image of 'crime passsionel' which only a moron would not see as expressive and poetic rather than either as a) an incentive to crime or b) some sort of vicious misogyny though, of course, some of the half-educated wallies coming out of the universities nowadays seem unable to draw a mental distinction betwen reality and fantasy which is, I suppose, a sign of the times. If the American President cannot do this, it is probable that his subjects may have difficulty as well.

However, accepting that Facebook are not sophisticated and they have rules, in this case, I am perfectly happy to see the picture removed as borderline since they are clearly trying to protect any one in any sex-negative, body-fearing, unthinking culture to which they want to flog their advertising from having their imagination or brain cells tested very far.

What I do not accept is a) the blocking from posting for 24 hours and b) the bullying threats associated with the blocking. What they should do (as I made clear in my main posting) is remove the picture without threats and advise that this has been done and suggest the possibility of a problem if there is a pattern of such activity within some system of adequate due process. This is what I wrote to them:

"You've done it again .... removed an art work. In this case, a clearly staged photographic art work by the great photographer Man Ray in a thread about Man Ray's work in a closed Group dedicated to Art.

"I have dealt with your censorship behaviours in depth in the past (as above) which I urge you to read with care ....

"In this case, I recognise that it is borderline in terms of the actual posting and that it is reasonable for you to remove the picture in the light of your guidelines - idiotic though the act is in every other respect (the closed and dedicated nature of the Group and its dedication to art amongst consenting adults who do not include primitives).

"However, it is not acceptable to block an individual for 24 hours and offer threats but only to remove the picture and a note to this effect will be added to the posting if posting rights are not restored within one hour.

"I accept that the picture may be removed. I do not accept your arbitrary decision to block posting without due process."

Saturday 16 July 2016

Exploring Political Options for Left Leavers - A Discussion Paper

What options are available for a Left Leaver under current political conditions? The vote was for Leave. It is now fairly certain that, without a significant revolt within the Parliamentary Conservative Party (which looks increasingly unlikely), Article 50 will be triggered by the end of the year. Fast-track negotiations will (with bumps along the way) result in a Brexit by the end of 2018 to be followed by a General Election in which calls for a Second Referendum would be distracting, futile and (unless there is a serious economic melt-down) probably electorally counter-productive for whoever took that position. This is the best working model for the near future.

On the other hand, the Left Leaver finds that his or her impulse for democratic socialism is directly challenged by the the Remain or Second Referendum positions of nearly all the official Left political organisations in the country - the Labour Party, the Greens, the SNP, Sinn Fein and the Liberal Democrats. In other words, although large numbers of working people voted to Leave, those parties that appear to represent the progressive impulse have effectively imposed their pro-EU position on their constituencies and now expect anyone of the Left to be automatically pro-EU and for re-entry. This redefinition of the Left as by its nature 'for the European Union' is assumed despite the facts of the existence of Left dissidents at every level, from MPs through activists in the trades unions and constituencies through members and on to the voters, increasing in proportion the further you go down the scale away from closeness to power. So, to quote Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov - 'what is to be done?'

Let us start with some basic definitional ground rules. The first is that a Leaver is someone who places absolute personal political priority on national Parliamentary sovereignty and maximal economic sovereignty but is here unconcerned with cultural issues. If you do not accept this position as a reader, this note is not for you and your comments will simply be deleted because this is a discussion for and between only those people who accept those two political principles absolutely and without equivocation. This is not a debate for emotional Remainers - they have chosen already.

Superimposed on this absolute set of political principles (including the negative one that cultural nationalism is of no interest here) are divisions between people who are more or less revolutionist and reformist and more or less Left or Right in social and economic policy. So, a further refinement of the position is to say that a Left Leaver is one who is a democratic socialist, that is, they seek the decentralisation of power, the redistribution of power and resources within a national commonwealth, inter-nationalism based on purely defensive military arrangements, anti-imperialism and the promotion of peace, secularism and individual freedom subject to the elimination of social harms and so forth. The only difference from a Left Remainer who is also a democratic socialist is that the Left Leaver sees these positive outcomes as best achieved between co-operating nation states rather than through supra-nationalist arrangements and, further, that positive harms will arise from acceding to supra-nationalist economic arrangements. 

However, the national question is an existential one. In a conflict between Leaver values and Left values, the position here is that Leaver values always trump Left values so that there is no question of a 'true' Left Leaver compromising to preserve the Left by accepting supra-nationalism or imperialism of any sort no matter how superficially benign. In strategising about futures, this means that such a Left Leaver cannot reasonably support a Labour Party that is controlled and led by either Angela Eagle or Owen Smith, both of whom are so committed to the European Union that they would also commit to a Second Referendum in a Party Manifesto under conditions where the Party apparat which they will lead has a track record of suppressing dissent on the European issue. If the so-called rebels in the PLP win the current struggle in the Labour Party, there is no future within that Party for sincere Left Leavers with any integrity. They may dream of transforming the Labour Party to a Leave position but the dream would be self-deluding and futile, certainly within the time frame that encompasses the 2020 Election and probably the 2025 Election. By remaining within such a Party, they would have stated clearly that being Left was more important than the National Question and so would cease to be Leavers except as a posture and in terms of a futile hope or unwarranted belief. So where does this leave us? What decision-making algorithm takes us from our situation today through to a fixed political position by the end of the year which is the probable timing of the triggering of Article 50?

There are a series of decisions that drive the Left Leaver logically in a series of stages from Far Left to Centre-Right, at each of which he may stop and say that, in fact, being Left is more important than being a Leaver. Many will make that decision now and simply give up on the issue of Leave, accept the Second Referendum idea (in the hope of winning a second vote), keep their heads down until it is all over and then resurface if and when we are back in the European Union (a Third Referendum is simply absurd from any perspective) or when the Left has finally accepted that the British people have definitively chosen the Leave option once and for all. This strikes me as a possible strategy but also a cowardly, unprincipled and uncertain one. Either one believes in something or one does not and if the belief in the Left (as currently constituted) is greater than the belief in the Nation, then one should stop posturing and switch sides to Remain under conditions where the Left has become absolutely associated with Remain: a point we have not reached but may have reached as early as September. That would be the brave and honourable think to do. 

So, the first choice, before we look at our decision-making tree, is the simple one whether one is truly Left or Leaver first and foremost. If the former, then the rest of this note is not for you. I have thus whittled us down, as discussants, to Left Leavers who place Brexit as a precondition for democratic socialism as a matter of both analysis and core values. What are our options? What do we do? The trajectory that I wish to explore in this context is expressed in a series of fundamental questions:-

1. Given the impossibility of the Left Leave position being adequately expressed in a Labour Party led from the curent PLP, would it be reasonable to believe it could be expressed in a Party led by Jeremy Corbyn (or John McDonnell)

2. Given the assumption in 1. above and the possible construction of an alternative Party of Democratic Socialism on the defeat of Jeremy Corbyn, could the Left Leave position be adequately expressed within such a Party?

3. If the defeat of Jeremy Corbyn does not result in a new Party of the Left, can Left Leavers safely cross over to become the Left of UKIP if a new Leader of UKIP recognises the importance of changing the culturally right-wing assumptions of that Party's hitherto dominant Right?

4. If there is no place for Left Leavers on the Left (and there is no Left Leave Party) or as equal partners in a National Populist operation that is viable and non-fascist, then is all that is left is a transfer of allegiance to the Conservative party as its advocate for a fairer society, redistribution and peace within the only Party committed to national Parliamentary sovereignty and maximal economic sovereignty - at least until the Left accepts reality and no longer struggles to reverse the decision on June 23rd.

I have made the assumption throughout that total withdrawal from politics is not an option and that it is a matter of personality and duty for a Left Leaver to be engaged in the national political process and to avoid strategies of complete marginalisation in working with fringe parties or engaging in marginal futile blogging and policy wonking that is unconnected to one of the three central political networks available to the English and Welsh - the various forms of centre-left, the national populists and the Conservative Party. Let us look at the options.

A Corbynista Official Left

A decision on commitment cannot be made until the Labour Party Conference in the early Autumn because we do not know who will command the Party until then. This has the advantage of allowing Left Leavers plenty of time to consider their position. In this particular case, the decision tree is fairly simple - if Corbyn loses, then Labour wishes to become a European Socialist Party, a potential subsidiary of a European Socialist Party putting up pan-European Presidential candidates in due course in mimicry of the American Democrats, a party of triangulation and power over principle. The chances of this being reversed at any level of the Party would be minimal. Our decision is made for us. We have to move on immediately to the next possible option.

If Corbyn wins then the decision that arises for Left Leavers is not based on absolutist principles. It has to be recognised that a formal majority of the Labour Party will be pro-European in the political sense (and this will have increased since the Referendum Campaign) and that struggle on this issue will continue. All that can be laid down at this point are some reasonable red lines that enable participation in the Labour Party by Left Leavers and these have to be clear by the time of the Re-Election of the Leader. These are:-
  • That the right to dissent on the European Union is recognised as legitimate as an issue of principle and that bullying by Party officials of dissenters (on the basis that X is party policy) comes to an immediate end
  • That the Party does not commit to a Second Referendum but accepts the result of June 23rd insofar as it is the will of the people and legitimately seeks to critique the withdrawal negotiations from the perspective of democratic socialism.
In principle, this would not be difficult in theory for Jeremy Corbyn, for John McDonnell and for Momentum (which is relevant for the next option) but political pressures during the campaigning period for the leadership and pressure from the liberal-left media may result in the Corbyn element back-tracking on McDonnell's immediate post-vote position which is aligned with the second point above (the first point may be assumed from the second).
 
If this back-tracking takes place or, equally possible, the Corbyn leadership is ambiguous about the Second Referendum in a Labour Party context and/or actively proposes to put in the Manifesto a negotiation for re-entry into the European Union (and we cannot flaff around waiting to be politically raped with a fait accompli in the run-up to 2020) then even a Corbyn-led Labour Party becomes an utter waste of space for a Left Leaver. Left Leavers face their key existential decision once again - whether to be more of the democratic socialist Left or more of a national political and economic sovereignty advocate. I am of the latter persuasion so I would move on to the next option or jump to the third option (see below) while you may now be leaving the discussion at this point.
 
An Alternative (Democratic Socialist) Left Party
 
One scenario is that Corbyn loses the Leadership election fairly or unfairly and that, instead of accepting the result, he becomes the centre with McDonnell and others of a new Party based on the resources of Momentum or the failure triggers an alternative Party of the Left in which the Campaign Group has no role but which still sees a flow of disappointed Party members and others move sideways into a British version of Die Linke.
 
There are two separate questions to answer here: would such a Party be a natural home for Left Leavers? and  would such a Party be viable electorally and organisationally? Engagement by Left Leavers would be dependent on positive answers to both questions.

In the case of it being a home for Left Leavers, we should not be naive - many of the liberal, young socialist and green supporters of Corbyn are also idealistic if naive Remainers. Practical politics suggests that such a Party unless constituted specifically along McDonnell lines (acceptance of the result and a move towards 'democratic socialism in one country in practice, European socialism in theory') will gravitate towards pro-Europeanism along 'Varoufakis lines' which is not acceptable in itself to intelligent Left Leavers (stupid Left Leavers may leave the discussion now). 'Trimming' in this area is tantamount to opening the door to later support for any Official Labour Party unification strategy for a Second Referendum and re-negotiation.

However, if the Left Party (which we assume to be a democratic socialist party in all essentials) adopts the two principles laid out above in the event of a Corbyn Labour Party, then the balance of organisational power shifts to Left Leavers if existing Left Leaver organisations join it as activists and organisers simply because they might be a larger proportion of the Party activists than they would be in the Labour Party. There is a chicken and egg situation here - the new Left Party will be interesting if it can be restrained through activism and organisation from crossing 'red lines' but the new Party will have to have a Constitution that gives an equal voice to Leaver members over and against Remainer members at the individual level with appropriate guarantees embedded for free discussion and political education. After all, theoretically, all Left Leavers might suddenly become Europeanists if the structure of a new democratic socialist European Union met their otherwise absolute political and economic sovereignty requirements - a Union of Free European States may not be the same thing as the currently structured European Union.

This is all somewhat academic unless and until Corbyn loses the Leadership, then chooses to encourage a new formation or a new formation is created regardless of the Campaign Group where the Constitution of the new Party is fair-minded and constitutionally robust, with the Left Leaver 'red lines' clear and intact within the Party programme.

The second issue - viability - is far more problematic. The further Left you go in the Labour Movement, the greater the degree of activist neurosis and sectarianism. The inability of leaders to let go of sufficient power to permit open debate and political education is as prevalent on the Left as on the Right. There are the issues of the 'social forces' behind the Party, its funding and organisation. There is also the problem that many of the people most inclined to such a party are also those who are most inexperienced in policy, most idealist (which is a disadvantage when you realise that ideals are dysfunctional and it is values that drive effective politics) and least experienced in practical organisation or willing to give their time to the drudgery of organisation and any campaigning that does not involve clicking on something online. The only social force with the muscle to fund and create such a Party is the Labour Movement which will be reluctant to split under any circumstances. It will work hard to sustain the Labour Party and create some sort of practical reconciliation between factions - in which case, one of the first casualties will be the Left Leave position since the Left Remainers are more numerous and aggressive (as well as dirty players when necessary) than the Left Leavers.

To summarise, a theoretical alternative option for Left Leavers if Corbyn does not win the Leadership and accept the 'McDonnell position' as a red line, is a new Party of the Left but if and only if the new Party is non-sectarian, accepts the 'red lines', has a Constitution superior to that of the Labour Party in terms of transparency, accountability and fairness and has the basic infrastructure to make a significant mark in British politics (which we would consider to be no less than 50 seats in Parliament by 2025) and pull votes from Labour to limit the appeal of the Second Referendum and renegotiation.

Left-UKIP

Let us now assume that the entire Official Left (including a new Democratic Socialist Party) is fully committed to a Second Referendum and re-negotiation of re-entry back into the European Union and that it is probable that the latter will be Manifesto commitments designed to create a Remain coalition in Parliament prepared to abandon the Brexit model after 2020. At this point, we have now completely parted from those who place being Left ahead of being a Leaver. Those who are Left first will now be a part of the inexorable drive to negotiate a centre-left re-entry into the European Union and other conditions (economic probably) may yet make this feasible. Yet the Left Leaver of integrity is absolutely (not relatively) committed to this not happening. Where do committed Left-Leavers go next if there is no realistic likelood of a viable independent Left-Leave Party for all those reasons implied as problems for a new Party of the Left and given the lack of support from the official trades union movement and no viable source of funding from elsewhere?
 
The one Party that exists and is apparently viable (though unstable) and which unequivocally meets the red line conditions outlined in the previous two sections is UKIP but, to a Left Leaver, it creates new red lines to consider. UKIP is certainly not going to do anything other than fight for national political and economic sovereignty and it is (despite the slanders of its opponents) absolutely democratic, excessively so in the eyes of radical centrists, but it is not of the Left - the formally socialist part of the equation is definitely missing. 

And yet UKIP potentially meets one Left requirement - it is interested in representing the interests of the English and Welsh working class (but so are the Tories and at least some elements of the Labour Party) at a time when most of the intellectual Left is dismissive of and patronising about that class. In addition, its right-wing populist Leader is standing down and a leadership election has to take account of working class UKIP members who are committed to welfarist and redistributive strategies as well as respect for their particular culture. If the Left completely fails the Left Leaver, there is a brief window of opportunity, in parallel with the struggles within the Labour Movement, for UKIP to adjust to the fact that Left Leavers exist and are increasingly being cut out of any influence or respect on the official Left (the Labour Party). They may have no place to go by the end of the Autumn of 2016. A new UKIP leadership sensitive to this new potential vote could theoretically create the conditions for a transfer of votes and activism from the Labour Party to itself if the Corbyn Leadership falls or stumbles and if there is no viable Left Party standing by the time UKIP has presented itself as the 'one nation' defender of the Leave 'street'. 

But we cannot be naive here any more than we could be naive about the Labour Party. The dominant strand in UKIP is culturally conservative and economically libertarian and both these positions are problematic for those who consider themselves of the Left. In addition, even if a new Leader was able to establish a sufficient bridge from UKIP to the working class Left, that Leader would be placed under constant pressure to row back from his position by cultural conservatives and economic libertarians alike. The shift of a Left Leaver to UKIP would be a very cautious matter with a great deal of room for distrust on both sides. The 'red lines' for the 'national' democratic socialist that may be too much for UKIP to bear:-
  • The Constitution of UKIP must enable fair and open debate between equals
  • Taking UKIP's commitment to democracy as read, a UKIP that tolerated racism, white nationalism or Islamophobia would not be tolerable to a Left Leaver so the first red line would be a Leader who drew his or her own red line between the Party and radical nationalists.
  • The Party's economic programme would include defence of the welfare state, redistributive strategies, commitment to education and training and poverty alleviation within the context of restraints on free movement of labour.
If these three conditions are met, especially if the cultural war on migrants as opposed to the political war on migration policy failures is ended, then it is possible that Left Leavers might reasonably consider participation in UKIP against both a Labour Party that has become embedded in the European Project and a Tory Party which may not be trusted and which has adopted a class-based approach to policy, at least until the arrival of Theresa May (see below). The problem is that UKIP itself, even if it did accept these red lines, would not be easy to trust (especially in relation to economic and welfare policy) given the inordinate internal power of its right wing funders and the tight clique around former Leader Nigel Farage who may never actually let go of influence even if he lets go of formal power. For Left Leavers to join UKIP would be an act of faith but also an act of partial despair since the Left Leaver is likely to feel pushed out by the Left rather than attracted by UKIP as it currently stands. Nevertheless, if UKIP can move itself to the centre in cultural terms and share economic policy-making equitably between the Left and Right, it might be possible to see the emergence of a viable Red UKIP capable of defeating Euro-socialism in Labour areas and offering a viable alternate opposition within the Brexit framework to the Tory Party. Reports from those who have dabbled in this area prior to the Referendum are not encouraging.

Becoming a Radical Left Tory

The options are reducing section by section so we come to the point where the Left Leaver has made his or her decision that Leave represents absolute prior values, has no place in the Official left in any of its forms and either distrusts UKIP or finds that its cultural conservatism is impossible to square with a self-identity as part of the Enlightenment Left. It is at this point that the Left Leaver finds themselves with the final choice - whether to withdraw from political life entirely (the 'quietism of the Jacobite') or to follow the logic of an absolute commitmitment to national political and economic sovereignty to its bitter end. That bitter end has to be (if there is to be no quietism) a more or less passive or active engagement with the Tory Party that has emerged after June 23rd on the following grounds:-
  • The commitment to Brexit is now as absolute as it is ever likely to be in any major political party that is not UKIP - there will be no Second Referendum under the Tories and no renegotiation unless Tory Remainers force a General Election and commit political hari-kiri for a principle. This leads one to suppose that for dedicated Left Leavers the mission of ensuring that a Tory Government remains in office for at least as long as it is necessary to secure Brexit logically becomes a political necessity. This may not apply once Brexit is secured and there is no reasonable prospect of a Left coalition coming to power on a commitment to renegotiation but the committed Left Leaver, left with no alternatives, is at the least committed to supporting the Tory Party in Parliament until the Brexit result is secured.
  • The May Government has shifted direction towards working class concerns because it understands that its primary threat to the Right (UKIP) can outflank it by attracting the working class Leave vote that is becoming disenchanted with metropolitan and cosmopolitan Labour. This means that, although it is still the Party of the propertied and the State, the Conservative Party may paradoxically be in a position to do more for the English and Welsh working class than a Labour Party that is rapidly travelling up its own nether orifice. It could reform welfare in order to preserve it in the long term, maintain the NHS (after all NHS pre-privatisation strategies emeged under New Labour), investing in infrastructure (signally neglected under New Labour), taking some account of working class concerns over the free movement of labour (ignored by Labour) and (post-Brexit) being more open to an industrial strategy (abandoned by New Labour) and to housing (ignored by New Labour): there has already been a turn away from a radical approach to austerity.
  •  The Conservative party is undoubtedly democratic but it is also anti-racist, now committed to respect for the gay community and has adopted a broadly social libertarian stance (with caveats). It seems to have more talented women in high office than the second rate make-weights of the Labour Party. It is also internationalist in its commitment to global trading and cultural exchange and it would seem that its new Foreign Secretary appears to have a pragmatic and sensible view of the Syrian and Ukrainian flashpoints.
Of course, none of the shifts of the May Government towards the needs of the working class in a fairer (rather than rhetorical) 'one nation' strategy changes two truths. The first is that the Tory Party is the Party of the propertied and the State and, second, that the most working class-sensitive Tory Party possible would never be a patch on a true democratic socialist Party. It used to be reliably said that the worst possible Labour Party (we think of Labour under Blair) would always be more progressive than the most progressive Tory Party and so anyone who cared for the working class position in society would accept even the most liberal middle class Labour Leadership in preference to the hooray henries and jumped up car salesmen of Middle English Torydom. But, considering the matter coldly, will that honestly be the case in the next decade if a) the Labour Party persists in either being unelectable or being little more than the Party of choice for the urban middle classes or both together and b) the Conservative Party starts to take seriously its rhetoric of 'one nation' operating in and against an unstable world. 
 
Moreover, if the Labour Party adopts a position that is tantamount to that of the US Democrat Party under Clinton - the party of the liberal middle classes and identity groups - and presents those interests trans-nationally to the utter neglect of the English and Welsh working and lower middle classes, then surely there is nothing in that party for the sincere democratic socialist. If the 'national' democratic socialist finds that all parties of the Left are intent on selling out the nation to supranationalism, undertakes a cold analysis that the Varoufakis option (that the European Union can be turned into a democratic socialist state through democratic means and persuasion) is a pipe dream and that UKIP represents an unacceptable commitment to cultural conservatism, then the last man standing over the next decade is the Tory Party. Left Leavers, beaten from pillar to post by their own side's bullying and disrespect, may at least represent a voice for working class self-determination and the preservation of the welfare state amongst relatively competent administrators who appear to have captured a hegemonic position for at least the next three years and probably (given the piss-poor quality of the Labour Party's leading figures) for the next decade. The role (to put it in the words of a Labour economist friend) of being the radical left-wing of a modernising national Tory Party suddenly appears not merely to be least worst option but filled with theoretical possibility.

The Numbers Racket

We have undertaken a logical review of possibilities for Left Leavers that has taken us in stages through the Labour Party and the Left, through national populism and on to the old enemy, the Tory Party, but the main message is that nothing need be decided for some months. A series of high level operators will create the conditions for Left-Leaver decision-making - first a decision whether Leave is as existential a commitment as the Left Leaver thinks it is and, second, if it is, whether he or she is forced into a trajectory that will reposition him or her in ways not seen since the creation of the Labour Party or the shifts of commitment during the eras of Peel, Disraeli and Chamberlain. Let us run through these decisions and put possible numbers of votes at stake under a series of conservative assumptions. 
 
We broadly know that 30% of Labour voters de minimis (probably higher as working class Labour voters in Northern England, the Midlands and Wales) voted Leave. 2015 (a not notably good year) saw 9.3m people vote Labour. Let us postulate that one third of 30% of these feel strongly enough about Leave not to vote Labour automatically in 2020 - let's call it conservatively 900,000 voters. Failure to meet the red lines (and we are not counting on those fed up with the weak leadership of the party or its internecine warfare or the fear of further uncertainty) might mean a loss of these votes and let's assume that half of those are initially available for a new Left Party that takes a strong anti-Second Referendum line (450,000 - although such a Left Party would also get an accretion of Corbyn radicals so we might imagine an initial vote of 900,000). Let us imagine that 450,000 (not necessarily the same people) might move to UKIP if it got itself sorted and it was the only non-Tory force committed to Brexit: this would push UKIP well over the 4 million mark if the 2015 vote held and reduce the Labour vote to something closer to the 2010 result. Let us imagine that all this happens but that 30% of the Left Leavers find UKIP's cultural politics unacceptable driving around 130,000-140,000 Labour people who consider themselves Left into the Tory Party in a more decisive way - not significant in terms of total election results but significant in terms of new blood and ideas and representing a bloc bigger than the SDLP or the Ulster Unionists. More to the point, such a conservatively assessed bloc would help pull the May Government sufficiently to the Left on some issues that it could create a credible base for attracting further formerly Labour voters if the Official Left persists in its Euro-Socialist pretensions after 2020 despite polling failure or UKIP fails to correct its trajectory towards a harsher European-style national populism. There is thus something at stake in the following:-
  • The Labour Party fails to resist becoming an overtly European Socialist Party and threatens to make a 'Second Referendum' and re-negotiation manifesto commitment
  • A successor Party fails to create clear red water between it and the Labour Party on Second Referendum and automatic re-negotiation
  • UKIP fails to shift itself to away from radical extremist rhetoric and fails to embrace sufficient welfarism and corporatism to attract Left Leavers alienated by the Official Left.
So there we have it - a set of decisions for Left Leavers that do not need to be made today but will need to be made at some stage between the resolution of the Labour Leadership struggle (September) and the formal triggering of Article 50 (December). By January 2016 Left Leavers will have had to have made some existential choices that will dictate their political trajectories for the next decade.

Sunday 26 June 2016

Some Friendly Advice to Hysterical 'Liberals'

What is really fascinating about the last day or so has been the lesson that 'liberals', both London-based and American, appear not to like democracy very much, especially when it comes up with a decision of which they do not approve.

The current Remain response is to try to overturn a democratic decision by fair means or foul - by a replay ('best of three' or keep going until they win?) based on claims of lies from people who lied, by Parliamentary coup d'etat or by Lords blocking. What next? Calls for the Army to step in or for the Bundeswehr to be 'invited in' to liberate us.

60% of Scotland does not want to be part of the United Kingdom anyway and the Northern Irish nationalists, well, we know what they want, so the democratic vote in England and Wales was not 52% but much more than that.

It was a decision made not by racist Morlocks looking to munch on the effete Eloi in the universities but autonomous working class and middle class individuals, debating the issues, ignoring fear and slander, and coming to a view on what was in their and their country's best interest.

I really do wonder at the mind-set of these people. The European Project is truly proven here to be more important than national democracy. Or is this propaganda just coming from people nicely immersed in the gravy train and terrified of the plundering coming to an end. They really do seem to want a manipulative dictatorship of the intelligentsia. They really are anti-democrats.

Our side's reaction has (up to this point) been emolliative and magnanimous in victory. We have remained relatively silent. We have urged not only calm but unity in the national interest. We are seeking a negotiated withdrawal that is amicable and retains as much of 'European values' as possible. We have only asked that the final say on policy be ours because we have a democratic mandate.

And what do we get in return? Hysteria. Aggression. Slander. Attempts to mount a coup (not just in the nation but in the Labour Party). I have seen what amounts to a racist (or rather classist) cartoon apparently labelling 17m or so people as skinheads in, of all places, an Israeli newspaper - you would think they would know better, wouldn't you?

What should our reaction be? How long should we put up with this before ending our current demobilisation and pulling our troops off the reserve list to undertake a second campaign in which lessons will have been learned and no quarter can be given.

You see, our attitude to a war of aggression on us is to say - bring it on but only if you must! We don't want it but if you insist on it, we will respond. A majority of the English and Welsh people are neither racists nor fools.

They will be angered at the patronising attitudes of urban intellectuals who have been lining their pockets at their expense for far too long. I mean, how many cultural studies experts exactly do we need to export goods and services? They will be even more angered by a metropolitan political class that has failed and now purports to tell them how to think.

We who fight alongside them act as a restraint. We want peace, harmony, the opportunity to build a better and fairer and more prosperous Britain in collaboration with all the reasonable elements in the political class. But if you declare war on the people, you declare war on us, their intellectual allies.

A war of workers and intellectuals against a supine and weak, and failed, liberal political establishment can end in only one result - if not now, then in five years, ten years, twenty years - because we believe there is no value greater than national democratic sovereignty as a precondition of individual freedom and long term prosperity.

Please do not underestimate the sheer force, the cold determination, the rationality of our position - or that we will not harden over time.

So, a piece of advice. Lay off the patronising attitudes. Lay off the aggression. Work with us to build a pluralistic, tolerant, independent Britain that is fundamentally democratic and is ready to work with and not against the European nations to build a better world. But if you want to push us all into a cultural civil war, that will be your decision and not ours and you must take the consequences.

Saturday 2 May 2015

Utopianism and Anarchism

(The following paper was to be given at the London Anarchist Forum Meeting on June 12th, 2009 but, circumstances beyond the control of the organisers meant that it could not be presented. However, I was grateful to the LAF for triggering this paper which looks at anarchism from a contemporary democratic socialist point of view, with special thanks to Steve Ash now deceased who suggested it. It is really here just as a matter of record and I have added notes in italics where I have changed my mind in the intervening half decade or have something to add or something needs contextualising or explaining)

The Current Crisis - A Challenge to the Utopianism in Anarchism

I am not going to speak as an anarchist but as a mainstream democratic socialist who is sympathetic to the anarchist tradition from the libertarian Left - and who thinks that far more was lost than was gained when the Left made its successive turns towards sole concentration on Parliamentary action on the one hand and towards Marxism and vanguard parties on the other.

I do not think that the decision to organise in political parties was entirely wrong but the nature and purpose of those parties has clearly become corrupted so that what passes for the Left has become degraded into a professional political class seeking to administer the state for its own benefit - far more than for that of its own constituents.

Similarly, the impatience and a-morality of Marxism created a monstrosity in the consequent management of the 1917 Revolution, even if a lot of the terror must be put down to the determined attempt by the Western liberal powers to strangle what started as a people’s rising. In the pantheon of cowards, Kerensky must go down in history as a man who failed to seize the moment for peace and land redistribution.

In other words, the victors over the nineteenth century anarchist tradition have proved worse than flawed, they have proved themselves either self-regarding opportunists or vicious tyrants. But what do both have in common that gave them the energy to overcome the fluid leaderless resistance of early anarchism? They had a commitment to hierarchical organization.

They introduced both solidarity and a fixed ideology and this allowed some to step over others to acquire the sort of centralized power epitomized by Blair in the one tradition and Stalin in the other. The similarities between these monsters are greater than we may think – centralization led to sclerosis and ultimately to failure.

Greed for power and office and incompetence are built into institutions that set the rules for themselves. Just as the Communist Party of Russia set the rules for a whole society, so Parliament sets rules that allowed its members, in secret, to take what it wanted as if of right [1]. In both closed societies, the perpetrators had no consciousness of their having done any wrong.

They had literally become institutionalized into crime – the Vatican gives us another example. Think of the link between the Catholic Church and the Inquisition or the Ustase and then think of the ideals in the Gospels. This is the common theme of institutionalisation – the perversion of fine theory into cruel practice.

But this is precisely where anarchist utopianism gets challenged.

First, if anarchism is so good why does it rarely win a straight fight and then, if it does, not for long. The experience of the communards and of POUM in Spain suggests that others tend to win in a fight and, unless you are prepared to rely on some abstract theory of evil, there must be some reason for this in history. It may be different in the future and we will come on to that but history tends to show that anarchists don’t win for long [2].

Second, the conduct of MPs in modern Britain and of Communist Party cadres in twentieth century Russia shows very little sign of human nature being benign. Of course, the anarchist argument is that the system makes the man and that if you removed social and institutional pressures on man, the natural co-operative spirit of mankind will out. Unfortunately, this sounds rather like the essentialist fallacy of human nature that the Communists themselves held to when they stated that a New Man would arise from a change in the conditions of the working class.

This was perhaps Marx’s own transfer of the romantic imaginings of Rousseau via German Idealism - a nod to anarchist ideals - when he proposed that the state would wither away when the dictatorship of the proletariat had been established. It is not that there is no evidence for this misreading of our animal aspects but that the evidence of psychology in recent years is in precisely the opposite direction.

Stanley Milgram’s experiments demonstrated what cruelties we will undertake if sufficient authority is applied to us. To the anarchist mind, this might merely show that we should seek a state of no authority, yet other experimentation and observation tends to tell us that differential intelligence and personality will lead to manipulative exploitation. Some will always fall into that class of sociopath that is so problematic for those who believe that humans are intrinsically good.

(I don’t want to get into the problem of evil, sin and the fall of man here because these are just attempts to create a moral explanation from outside of man for contingent facts about what it is to be human.)

Perhaps the most devastating account of human cruelty does not lie in the bare account of bureaucratic murders in the last century or the savage conduct of so-called barbaric peoples but in the most disturbing book that I have read in a long time because it is made up of the testimonies of individuals who were victims and perpetrators on all sides of what happens when the rule of law really is removed completely – the conditions of the second world war in two theatres.

This is Laurence Rees’ 2008 book, ‘Their Darkest Hour’, which demonstrates the co-existence of great altruism and exceptional sadistic cruelty but certainly gives no cause to believe that a society without law would not be anything other than a vicious jungle. Human beings are complex and only contingently ‘good’ (if good means co-operative and engaged in non-exploitative conduct, without us even getting into the possibility of altruism).

There is no reasonable condition of life, including the unlikely situation of no competition for basic resources, which would not involve some form of psychic vampirism or exploitation by some over others because our minds are structured to be limited in perception and to react to events according to past experiences – unless, that is, we are prepared to countenance some drug-induced social control such as that envisaged by Aldous Huxley in ‘Brave New World’ or see the ‘withering away’ being undertaken as a massively long evolutionary process. Unfortunately, politics is immediate and messy ....

So we have the problem that progressive anti-anarchisms have failed because the human condition expresses itself as egotism within theoretically otherwise benign systems, but that anarchism itself cannot succeed in political practice for long because of that same human nature in its competitive and reactionary mode. There are even libertarians who would claim to be brothers and sisters of anarchists but are in direct opposition to them as persons who see the good society as one of dynamic competition rather than collaboration.

Are we to be left with conservative pessimism then? Is the Left project, essentially one of liberation, equality and of fraternity, doomed on the altar of our animal nature. I think not, not because I am a utopian but because I am an anti-utopian. The findings of psychologists about the unthinking or limbic aspects of human nature and their ineluctability and their ‘unknownness’ (we cannot know other minds and we are certainly not fixed essentially in any particular moment of time) provide an argument for a politics that is much closer to anarchism than it is to organized socialism as it exists today within (say) the British Labour Party or the European Socialists [3].

It is socialism that has to adapt to anarchism more than anarchism to socialism to create a workable Left project. The introduction [4] referred to my co-ordination (over a decade now ago) of the Centre-Left Grassroots Alliance within the Labour Party. Its failure was instructive on two grounds.

First, it did not fail from within. Very disparate left-wing groups with a radical democratic model of party reform were able to collaborate on a very limited programme and operate against the party machine to a very high level of propaganda success (including a supportive editorial in the Guardian) through using new technologies. The campaign was an early user (1995/6) of e-mail as a consultative and decision-making tool.

It failed eventually because a deal was made in a smoke-filled room between the rising faction in the party and the political officers of the union backers of that party. The rising politicians were engineering a deal to remove themselves from membership scrutiny, indeed from all constraints. They traded a special interest agenda with executive officers who operated without reference to their own union members.

The lesson is that people can self-organise effectively BUT that they are soon faced with structures that hold power so tightly that no protest, demonstration or campaign can break the hold of those few who command it. This was brought home to people in the massive anti-war protests at the beginning of the century - the public was simply ignored by the decision-making calculation of, in fact, one man and those close to him. A traditional revolution, under these circumstances, merely replaces one set of the few with another … the control systems remain.

This coup by New Labour gave us twelve years or so of the most viciously anti-libertarian non wartime government since Castlereagh and the most war-mongering government since Salisbury or perhaps Palmerston. The harvest was reaped only in the last few weeks [5] – not only in a devastating defeat for it in the political field, the democratic equivalent of the Fall of Berlin, but a defeat that has given legitimacy not merely to the centre-right and to the propertied interest but to a vicious racist rump (the BNP)

What happened in 1996 when the CLGA failed and events today are intimately connected [as argued in Lobster 55]. Political recovery on the democratic socialist Left is going to require the spirit of the anarchic to overcome it. Let me explain. The current crisis is a crisis of big-ness and centralization. Globalisation has created a need for technocratic institutions at a global or regional level that can never be properly scrutinised by anything other than other experts of a similar degree of alleged sophistication [6].

An argument that such institutions cannot be democratic and must work against democratic and popular accountability does not need to be made to this audience. The people becomes a mob mediated by, yes, the media. This is the politics of Berlusconi yet, in a sense, it is more authentic than the cod-progressivism served up by contemporary liberals.

The strategy of post-Soviet socialism has been to try match the technocracy blow for blow, to capture its commanding heights and to turn it to ‘progressive ends’. But such a strategy means bigger and bigger trades unions, NGOs and political parties whose ruling membership is self-appointed, and often interchangeable with each other and even with the big business that it purports to contain and restrain.

For example, a typical career path today might involve a young trades union bureaucrat getting into Parliament in early middle age and then advising a corporation as a public affairs consultant to a corporation. Another might involve a young public affairs consultant entering Parliament and then running an international NGO. Under such conditions, group think and acceptance of the status quo must be the normal way of doing things. It would be like the flow of think tank professionals, military men and party officials in Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia.

Through the Parliamentary and party process, State, progressives and institutions become one liberal totalitarian whole. Since the totalitarian process is nearly indistinguishable after a while between ‘progressives’ (whether called Democrats or PES) or ‘conservatives (whether called Republicans or the EPP) [7], it is no wonder that effective resistance to this cold machinery comes only from the Far Left and the Far Right or from the many differing types of economic, political and social libertarian.

The Ayn Rand worshipping radical free marketer, the polyamorous or transgendered sexual revolutionary and the political anarchist or dissident democratic socialist, let alone neo-pagans and thelemites, will have more in common as dissidents against liberal orthodoxy than they do with the system against which they struggle.

Excessive regulation that levels people down and assumes that no one can be trusted, a sexual culture of licentious imagery and commodity fetishism instead of natural sexuality, centralized power and bureaucracy and the presumption that unaccountable theocratic appointees can represent more than themselves … all are part of the same general culture which turns people into stereotypes, none worse than that of leftist identity politics.

The socializing tendencies of the machine means that the real resistance will now always tend to come more effectively from the Right [8]. David Cameron may be more acute than liberal commentators think in associating himself with euro-critical Polish and Czech parties than with those who take all this at face value. Berlusconi adopts yet another model of resistance – nationalist populism that operates with almost carnival flair to pinprick the po-faced political correctness of his dull opponents [9].

Since entrepreneurs, artists and dissidents are generally ineffective political organizers, the bureaucratic Left steadily cedes ground to the populist Right which offers a moderated social and economic freedom in return for authoritarian state governance.

Berlusconi may protest at pictures of his nearly erect willy in a Spanish newspaper but it does no harm to his electoral fortunes anymore than racism did to the BNP’s or Jobbik’s. When excluded from any power, the public starts to get a taste for sex and violence. As Disraeli said of old Palmerston when it was revealed that he was allegedly having an adulterous affair, “Let’s hope that it does not get out or he’ll win by a landslide”. In despair at progress or under threat, bloodlust soon becomes normal – give me an imposed Roman Peace and I shall soon give you the slaughter in the Coliseum.

Socialism has thus lost the plot for the third time in history. The first time was when it dropped its international trousers in 1914 and allowed itself to become the catamite of militarists. The second was when it adopted vanguardism and cornered itself into state terror and trying to explain complex political philosophy to peasants. The third moment is now – when it tries to enforce good on a population that is not ready to be bored in heaven by choirs of angels.

So let’s get back to anarchism. While socialism has made three attempts at changing the world – in one country, through global revolution and through progressive internationalism – anarchists have contemplated their navels or engaged in hobbyism. Read any text on anarchism and you see nothing but the small scale up to a point. This is good. This is of the essence of anarchism but it is not doing anything to drag the mass of the world’s population out of poverty or redistribute wealth and power in the first world.

What is happening is that anarchists are pauperising themselves to live a dream, abstracting themselves from a wasteful and incompetent global system and perhaps hoping it will all go away. But be warned, if the fascists, communists or even progressive liberals seize the organs of state and the monopoly of force, then the fate of anarchists is extinction - whether by aggression or stealth.

The general population will be sucked into the totalitarian mind-set and, for them, it will be just a case of waiting for the wheel of fortune to turn again and give them some new noble lie, some totalizing world view that tells them what to think and what to be.

So, if anarchists have a wrong-headed view of the essential niceness of the human condition and seem incapable of moving far beyond stunts, localised insurgencies and happenings and if socialists have proved malign, incompetent and authors of their own destruction, where do we go from here …

My proposal is that anarchism does NOT change its essential nature, which is self-organisation, nor its default position in favour of collaboration and altruism. What it should be looking at now is having the courage to return to the experience of POUM in Catalonia which was snuffed out by force and to the techniques (though not the ideology) of urban welfare systems like those of Hezbollah and Hamas. Yes, you heard me right. Though common sense suggests that guns should not be part of the equation.

The BNP has overlaid its gangster class on very real distress and anxiety amongst the weakest sections of the urban working class. The Labour Movement, though not the socialists (i.e. the 3% of the vote that emerged last week), has abandoned them and no longer has the will or the manpower to organize them. If the Left does not adopt an organizing approach to these communities, they will turn to fascisms or populisms with more determination than we have seen to date.

This is a rare opportunity to apply anarchistic organizational principles, even along the original rather than the debased model of the Soviets, to real social problems and to create an organizational structure that, in non-sectarian alliance with democratic socialists, can create a non-racist and non-authoritarian model for localities under pressure – one that can put the fear of the people into the liberal establishment, the opportunists in the political class, the State and the fascists. [10]

This is true revolution from below and it has a place for direct action strategies. Indeed, direct action strategies like Raven’s Ait and the Tyting Farm Community [11] and the organization of economic and anti-war protest, will be more effective to the degree that they have a sea of support in which to swim. The alliance underpinning the campaign against the third runway at Heathrow in which middle class residents and street environmentalists is one to watch [12].

In the event, Raven’s Ait was re-occupied with impunity and its bland Liberal Democrat MP reduced to mildly sympathetic impotence because the assumption in society was that the island involved could only be administered through procedures far distant from the community in which it was situated.

But there is a price anarchism will have to pay … It will have to cease to be hobbyist. It will have to cease to be utopian. It will have to cease to be an aesthetic position. It will have to realize that the dispersal of power means the acquisition and management of power and that the control of opportunists, incompetents and exploiters from below needs to be, yes, institutionalized in a demotic form of the original liberal vision of 1688.

What we are talking about here is the next stage in the slow evolution of that long revolution from Magna Carta through 1688 and on to the welfare state that started to go into reverse under Thatcher and which reached criminal levels of reaction under Blair.

The point is that positive democratic, social, economic and legal reform was bought at the cost of the steady centralization of the State and of culture. This has proved to be a devil’s pact, the sort of devil’s pact that could order its young to die for diplomatic misjudgements, listen to only four national radio stations and take that as arbiter of culture and give, in return, decent welfare provision. Bismarck did something similar without having to piddle around worrying about democracy.

National welfare was traded, quite legitimately up to a point for many working people, for decreasing freedom. The pact was a balanced one, a social democratic one. But when the system decided to start to remove key freedoms and community institutions in order to permit market-led social and economic changes, the pact was broken. Working people have got neither welfare nor democracy and our Roman Peace is now inclining them towards a limbic rage about their condition [13].

Yet the collapse of the shared social democratic (or was it national socialist?) political structure also meant the collapse of strategies of moderate resistance. Freedom is not a matter of liberal constitutional reform, of proportional representation, republicanism and bills of rights, or the current tinkering of Gordon Brown – these merely lock in the power of the propertied. It is about the seizure of power from below in an orderly and sustained way. It is truly revolutionary, preferably bloodless.

There is a great deal at stake here. An established constitutional state, such as the US, can apparently lance the boil of mass discontent with a decisive victory for a President but the UK’s informal constitution and Europe’s half-baked constitution provide an unusual opportunity for constructively disruptive action. If the liberals get their way and impose a written constitution or the Lisbon Treaty is imposed on the constituent states of the EU through the rank treachery to the people of their political classes, the game is probably up.

If either happens, anarchism may as well abandon any pretensions in the developed world to a political life and revert to alternative lifestyles, aestheticism and community work. So the urgency is clear. Anarchists, if they have a political sense, need to work in an organized way with libertarians and socialists against both the Lisbon Treaty [14] and similar attempts to create a federal state and against the liberal elite’s attempt to give itself cover through regulation and legal structures that will enable a permanent state of manipulation of us by them.

If they succeed in these plans, political anarchists, libertarians and 'true' socialists will become neutered or forced into insurgency – or, in modern parlance, they will become ‘terrorists’. And, before you think this fanciful, consider the amount of effort going into intelligence-based policing against dissidents and protesters, often at the expense of the basic maintenance of social order in the inner cities [15].

But what I have not referred to is the ‘good society’ and what it comprises. I have taken a fairly negative view of human nature but this is not a true reflection of my views. My view is similar to that of many sensible anarchists – that we are neither good nor bad in essence, just human, and that our actions are directed, by chance and necessity (including poverty and history), down channels that may be good or bad for others or for ourselves.

We are good and bad only in contexts and in relation to others and our own true will. This is where society comes in because it is the context against which we measure our true will. It can enable and it can repress. It can be fair or it can be exploitative. The good society is one where all are equally enabled and none are exploited. And the best judge of what is good for me is me and not some cod-progressive in an office in Whitehall or Brussels.

The difference between me and many anarchists is only in emphasis and means, The libertarian in me sees the only structure for the good society as being one in which I have a voice and a stake and which minimizes its interference in my life and that of others.

However, the issues surrounding enablement and resistance to exploitation require, for me, some sort of governance, a framework with a rule of law. That is where we may agree to disagree because at the end of the day that framework has to be democratic (based on the collective will of the population at large) and socialist - or at least welfarist (representing the interests of the whole community).

The great political parties are broad churches and there is no reason why the resistance to them, to the state and to exploitation should not be a non-sectarian broad church as well. Contemporary technology – from contraception through medical intervention to internet communications – provides much greater opportunities for self-awareness, self education and self determination than at any other time in history [16].

This is the essence of the current potential for revolution. We are not now free because we are told that we are free – whether by Rousseau or Marx – but we are free because we are actually free, not potentially but actually, sexually and in our right to self-expression as much as in any other respect. We are not beyond good and evil but we are beyond convention and custom.

For some reason, the ‘authorities’, perhaps existing as no more than a neurotic authoritarian mind-set, are becoming deeply frightened by what this may mean in terms of our willingness to be taxed and told what to do [17]. Their entire machinery is designed to constrain and contain our free spirits. Our freedom is contained within a ready-made mass culture of titillation and received ideas, an overt sexual culture that is observed rather than lived [18], and a rhetoric of rights and democracy without the practice.

Now is the time to say that we will not take any more and that anything, I say again, anything, is permissible to preserve our real freedoms.

So I shall end there … if you think I have a point, then it is time for anarchists to start to consider how they will organise themselves at this critical time.

And if you do not, then I thank you for your time and advise you to abandon political dreaming and make pots or take up flower arranging.

NOTES

[1] The reference here is to the then-recent Parliamentary expenses scandal.

[2] A current case study in this is going on, while we write, in the streets of Greece where a non-anarchist neo-socialist movement is facing the might of institutional capital after serious errors of judgment by pseudo-socialists in the preceding administrations. If such an organised alternative to anarchism and to neo-liberalism fails to achieve anything at all in defending the Greek people from the past mistakes of their own ruling classes, then we are in very murky waters indeed, driving, perhaps, populations to total submission to undemocratic technocracy, to neo-communist alternatives or to social and political breakdown.

[3] Close but not identical with - Syriza seems to have some anarchistic elements within an essentially socialist structure while the Russian Marxist Boris Kagarlitsky has recently offered us a Marxism that makes significant concessions to the anarchist position on social structures.

[4] This refers to an introductory political biography to the talk. 

[5] This was a reference to political conditions at the time which saw a rapid rise in the vote for the Fascist BNP and its subsequent rapid fall. In fact, I was on record in other papers as dismissing the BNP threat and condemning the liberal-left hysteria surrounding, as, more recently, I have comndemned the hysteria surrounding the Charlie Hebdo hysteria. However, June 2009 saw massive falls in electoral support for Labour in the European and local elections and, although not sustained for the 2010 Election, Labour lost power to a Conservative-Liberal coalition a year later. I probably over-egged the crisis for the Left for the audience but it was a shock that eventually resulted in a slight shift to the Left in the Party with the election as leader of Ed Miliband. 

[6] Events since 2009 appear to have confirmed that the international institutional infrastructure that was being built up in the decades before the 2008 crash was coming under severe strain half a decade later. This 'not fit for purpose' aspect of the attempt to contain and control globalisation through liberal institutional structures is self evident to anyone observing the cracks in the system appearing in every direction - political, social and economic - and yet the liberal centre ground persists in avoiding and evading analysis of the facts placed before them by history. 

[7] To some extent we are seeing changes in the cosy situation where global governance is a matter of the competition betwen two bourgeois factions of the same global centrist party. In the years since the talk was drafted, the main revolt has been on the national populist Right represented by non-fascist entities such as the Tea Party, UKIP and the National Front in France as well as national and more neo-nationalist and quasi-fascistic operations in Eastern Europe and Greece. Only recently have we seen a countervailing Left populism emerge with Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Italy and perhaps signs of incipent organisation in Italy and in the US. Taken together, the liberal bourgeois centre faces a war on two fronts but one where the Right is more destabilising and driving power to the liberal-left whose instincts are to ignore reality and expand provocatively their international liberal internationalism - at obscene cost in terms of human suffering on the Western periphery. 

[8] This was definitely true in 2009, especially as Occupy and Femen represented the height of middle class liberal posturing. However, there are signs that the Left is now beginning to even up the resistance score as the centrist model continues to fail to deliver economic growth, the posturing liberals dig themselves into ever deeper holes and the centre appears to have no option left according to its own rules of engagement but to drive an austerity programme that seems to be unfairly directed at the weakest and most vulnerable. 

[9] Berlusconi, like Dominique Strauss-Kahn, eventually fell victim to a centrist liberal strategy of using the law to discredit inconvenient persons and there was a natural end to his tenure because of age but the principle he represented not only persists but flourishes in the smaller European countries whether directed at neonationalism (as in the Czech Republic or Hungary) or a curious form of hyper-liberal Westernism linked to NATO (as in the Baltic Republic and Poland). 

[10] The point I would have made more strongly here (and bear in mind that the rhetoric at this point has moved into persuasive mode designed to shake up anarchists from their torpor) is that the liberal Left took a dramatic wrong-turning with the adoption of identity politics as the basis for coalition-building to the exclusion of locality, family, cultural tribe and work-place organisation. It 'went against nature' by encouraging the attribute of a person instead of the person as the core unit of society. 

[11] A matter of local concern to London Anarchists at that point in history.

[12] This, resistance to Cross Rail and the Gatwick extensions are still ones to watch. Fracking would have been added to the list except that Cameron suddenly back-tracked from the aggressive promotion of the shale gas industry in anticipation of its effect on the Southern English vote in core Tory areas. The plan was to come back to it after the election with a solid majority and damn the hides of the English middle classes. If he had not drawn back, the Greens might be more of a threat than they are and built up a 'Blue' Green support much as UKIP has defied its right wing tag and built a 'Red' element. 

[13] In fact, as the last 2015 Election TV Debate showed, the limbic rage has moved up the social scale to the articulate middle classes. 

[14] Unsurprisingly, the Lisbon Treaty came into full force at the end of that year (2009) and the post-Crash European Union has looked increasingly ramshackle ever since, hanging on to its constitutional position as substitute for any form of policy that would offer democratic solutions for problems to its population. Needless to say, it was the bankrupt centre-left (or rather 'radical centre') that engineered this farce and so the resistance to its failed model has fallen to the populist Right rather than to the popular Left. 

[15] This was a very serious concern at the time - at a point where the structures imposed on society by the rather spurious 'war on terror' overlapped with the panic in the system about a crisis in the very means of production and distribution. The legislation is still in place but the middle classes themselves started to baulk and fight back at the implications of the security agenda - at least in the UK and Europe if less so in the US. The moment has probably passed for the worst to be imposed, It is fascinating to note in this context that the attempt by NATO to drive public support for its forward policy against Russia has failed in the West of the Continent, including usually militaristic Britain, and that the heavy lobbying for guarantees on defence spending achieved nothing but the opportunistic appropriation of the policy by UKIP. 

[16] Since this was written, we have taken an interest in the rise of transhumanism and the formation of Transhumanist Parties across the West. Our judgment is that these are single issue parties that repeat the intellectual errors of the Greens but the application of technology for the benefit of humanity is a serious issue that deserves being higher on the agenda as a matter for community action. The anti-technological position of the neo-conservative (not in the US sense of the term) environmentalist Left has gone too far. 

[17] I think this fear of the people is the defining aspect of the politics of our time. Though the 'system' has a monopoly of force and could do terrible things if it wished, the complexity and interdependence of society has made the risks of doing so far too great for the safe survival of elites and States.  It is not that the people can do much about their situation in a positive sense at this point in history but the disruption caused by non-compliance, selective resistance and sheer bloody-mindedness to a weak and vulnerable system gives it a sort of negative power based on its lack of predictability. This helps to explain the State's obsession with surveillance, Big Data, nudge and behaviourial psychology ... it hopes to manipulate rather than force us into compliance. It is probably a forlorn hope because complexity is not only built into the system but is growing exponentially - the arrival of artificial intelligence is expected by the authorities to be a means of exerting control again but this is to be doubted. AI merely adds another layer of complexity. 

[18] This should not be misunderstood as socially conservative statement - quite the opposite. The fact of an increasingly sex-positive culture is to be applauded. The argument is the opposite - that repression has merely been replaced by voyeurism and that a form of cultural self censorship in the population means that people are still hiding behind the curtain watching others have fun rather than having fun themselves.