I have never considered myself a Marxist. I came to adulthood at the end of the one, forty year long, period in the history of Western civilisation when there was a reduction in the chasm between the rich and ordinary people.
In consequence I believed that a tolerable society might be achieved by simple measures to ameliorate capitalism. I grew up with public ownership of utilities, natural monopolies and strategic industries, with free healthcare and medicines, free university tuition with good maintenance grants, schools under control of elected local councils, controlled fair rents including the private sector, significant public housing.
We thought it would last forever.
In 1973 I joined the Liberal Party. Much of the 1974 Liberal Party manifesto I could still believe in now. The above things like public ownership of utilities and major industries and free education were not in the manifesto, because they did not have to be – they already existed and were the basic structure. The manifesto added things like a basic guaranteed income for everybody in society, compulsory worker shareholdings in those industries not nationalised, workers’ councils, and a rent freeze in both public and private sectors.
I am not claiming it as a great socialist document – there were signs of right-wing thought creeping in, like a shift to indirect taxation. But the truth is that the Liberal Party manifesto of 1974 was at least as left as Corbyn’s manifesto. Some of its ideas were far ahead of their time – like the idea that continuous economic growth and increasing consumption are not sustainable or desirable.
Believing in essentially the same things now, I find myself on the far left – without ever having moved!
Here are a couple of extracts from the 1974 Liberal manifesto which may surprise you. This kind of language you will not hear from Keir Starmer’s Labour Party – indeed it would probably get you thrown out:
That Liberal Party is of course gone, along with the radical, anti-war, anti-unionist traditions of British liberalism. They were diluted by the merger with the SDP and finally killed off by Nick Clegg and the “Orange Bookers” who turned the hybrid party fully neoliberal, a doctrine with almost no resemblance to the liberalism it claims to reassert.
Those hardy souls who follow and support this blog are witnessing the last knockings of the legacy of political thought that was bestowed by John Stuart Mill, William Hazlitt, John Ruskin, John A Hobson, Charles Kingsley, Bertrand Russell, William Beveridge and many others, seasoned by Piotr Kropotkin and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. I don’t imagine any further generation attempting to be active in politics will develop their worldview with those thinkers as their primary motivators.
But the point of this self-absorbed drivel is that I am not a Marxist and do not come from an organised labour or socialist background or mindset.
The key thought towards which I am plodding through this morass of explanation is this: I grew up in the one era when capitalism was sufficiently moderated by palliative measures that it seemed a reasonable way to conduct society. That ended around 1980 when the doctrine of neoliberalism took hold of the Western world. In the UK, that doctrine now firmly controls the Conservative, Lib Dem, Labour and SNP parties and is promoted relentlessly by both state and corporate media.
The result of this neoliberal domination has been a massive and accelerating expansion in the gap between the ultra-wealthy and the rest of society, to the extent that ordinary, once middle-class people struggle to pay the bills required simply to live. The situation has become unsustainable.
In short, it turns out Marx was right. The crisis of capitalism is now upon us. Neoliberalism (another word for designing state systems deliberately to lead to incredible concentrations of wealth amid general poverty) is coming to the end of its course. There are no palliative measures that will make the situation bearable. A radical change in the ownership of assets is the only thing that will address the situation – starting with public ownership of all energy companies, from hydrocarbon extractors like Shell and BP, through gas, electricity and fuel generators and manufacturers, distributors and retailers.
Nationalisation should be done properly, without compensating shareholders. If I had to choose between compensating the shareholders and imprisoning them, I would imprison them. I suggest we do neither.
That is only one sector and only the start. But it is a good start. I frequently pass the Grangemouth refinery and am amazed that all that land, massive equipment, all those chemicals and processes, go primarily to the benefit of Britain’s richest man, Jim Ratcliffe, who is considering buying Manchester United as his latest toy, while his workers protest at another real-terms pay cut.
This obscenity cannot continue forever.
Wars are not incidental to neoliberalism. They are an essential part of the programme, because untrammelled consumerism requires massive acquisition of natural resources. Constant war has the helpful side-benefit for the global elite of enormous profit to the military industrial complex. The cost in human misery and death is kept at a discreet distance from the Western world save for refugee flows, which meet with a response increasingly founded in the denial of humanity.
The promotion of continual war has led to the acceleration of crisis. Much of the current cost of living explosion can be directly attributed to the provoked, prolonged and pointless war in Ukraine, while neoliberal doctrine forbids control of the horrendous associated profiteering of the energy companies.
There is going to be public anger, come spring, of a strength and reach not seen in my lifetime. The ultra wealthy and their political servants know this, and therefore strong action is being taken to forestall public protest. The new Policing Act is only one of a raft of measures being brought in to clamp down on avenues for free expression of public discontent. Demonstrations can simply be banned if they are “noisy” or an “inconvenience”. The 2 million person march against the Iraq War in London, for example, could have been banned on both grounds.
I met and talked last weekend at the Beautiful Days festival with the admirable Steve Bray; we don’t agree on everything but his public concern is genuine. He is getting used to being removed by police from Parliament Square after being specifically targeted in legislation. I reminded him – and I remind you – that the Blair government had also banned protest near the Westminster parliament, and the Scottish parliament has recently taken powers to do the same. Intolerance of dissent is a feature of modern neoliberalism, as people in Canada and New Zealand are also witnessing – or as Julian Assange might tell you.
But in addition to legislative and state attack on protest, the neoliberal state is also ramping up its more subtle elements of control. The security services are continually being expanded. The media is not only increasingly concentrated, it is increasingly under direct security service influence – the Integrity Initiative, the Paul Mason revelations, and the barely disguised spookery of Luke Harding and Mark Urban all being small elements of a massive web designed to control the popular imagination.
The splitting of the political left by identity politics has been the go-to weapon of the state for several decades now. The replacement of horizontal class solidarity by vertical gender solidarity being the most obvious tool, epitomised by the notion that it was better to elect the multi millionaire, corrupt, neoliberal warmonger Hillary Clinton than the class politics espousing Bernie Sanders, simply because the warmonger was a woman.
A specific use of this tool has been the weaponisation of fake sexual allegations against any individual likely to be a threat to the state. You see this in the cases of Julian Assange, Tommy Sheridan, Scott Ritter and Alex Salmond (they tried it on me when I left the FCO but had to drop it because they could not find – despite massive efforts – any woman who knew me who would say anything bad about me).
Those in power know that the portion of the left who identify as feminist, which is almost all of us, are highly susceptible to support alleged victims due to the extreme difficulties of real victims in obtaining justice. This makes sexual allegations, no matter how fake, very effective in removing the support base of anti-establishment figures.
The propaganda narrative against Assange, Salmond, Ritter and Sheridan depends on the idea that at the very moment that each of these men reached the peak of a lifetime’s endeavour and posed the maximum threat to the state, they lost focus, lost their marbles and acted very wrongly towards women, despite no previous history of such behaviour.
It astonishes me that anybody does not see through it.
Rather quaintly, they use different methods on women. Brigadier Janis Karpinski was the chosen patsy to take the blame for the USA’s Abu Ghraib atrocities (entirely unfairly – she had no role or authority in the CIA controlled portion of the jail where the atrocities took place). Dismissed from her post, she was prepared to testify to a memo personally signed by Donald Rumsfeld authorising torture.
How did the US security services fit up a woman, not a man, who threatened the powers that be? Shoplifting. The day after her enforced resignation, Karpinski was “caught shoplifting”. Because of course, when at the eye of an international storm and under CIA surveillance, you immediately go out and steal some clothes.
The cynical weaponisation of the trans debate has taken the art of using identity politics to split the left to a whole new level, and in particular to alienate the younger generation from traditional left feminists. It has also been used successfully – and remarkably – to neuter the most potent current threat to the UK state, by driving both the non neoliberals and the more ardent Independence supporters out of the SNP.
Similar to the use of gender politics to undermine class solidarity is the weaponisation of accusations of anti-semitism. Just as accusations of misogyny, however false, succeed in alienating left unity, so do allegations of racism.
Here it is not so much that accusations were believed – the conflation of criticism of the crimes of Israel with criticism of Jews per se being all too obvious – as that the attack was so blistering, with the full weight of the establishment political and media class behind it, that people cowered rather than face up to it. The worst example of cowering being Jeremy Corbyn.
One lesson from both the “leaked report” and the Forde report is that Corbyn and his office believed that if they threw enough sacrifices to the wolves, betraying decent people like Tony Greenstein (son of a Rabbi), Mark Wadsworth and Ken Livingstone, then the wolves would be appeased.
Israel is the last large scale project of colonisation by physical occupation of a conquered land by European people. Ukraine and Israel are the two current neo-liberal violence projects, which it is not permitted to criticise. The banning of any nuance of opinion on Ukraine should frighten everybody who is thinking rationally. If you are thinking rationally, try this small antidote to the unremitting propaganda:
The Ukraine war is unusual in the attempt to enforce wartime levels of unanimity of narrative on the population, in western countries which are not only not combatants in the war, but not even formally allied to Ukraine. The United States was a party to the Vietnam War, but it was still possible for Americans to criticise that war without having all media access banned. Today you cannot criticise Ukraine in the state or corporate media at all, and your social media access is likely to be severely restricted unless you follow the official propaganda narrative.
This is the Establishment’s strongest method of control – the labeling of opposing opinion as “misinformation” or “disinformation”, even when there is no genuine evidential base that makes the official “facts” unassailable, as with Douma or the Skripals. To ask questions is stigmatised as traitorous and entirely illegitimate, while official journalists simply regurgitate government “information”.
Yet, despite this interwoven system of dampening all dissent from the neoliberal agenda, the Establishment remains terrified of the public reaction to the crisis that is about to hit. The controlled opposition is therefore used to attack actual opposition. Keir Starmer’s banning of Labour MPs from union picket lines is a clear example of this.
We are seeing for the first time in many years an assertion of the rights of organised labour in the face of the massive attack on workers’ real incomes. This is the first time many adults under thirty will ever have encountered the notion that ordinary people are able to defend themselves against exploitation – that is one reason the impressive Mick Lynch has been such a revelation, and is viewed by the “elite” as such a threat.
The Starmer line is that strikes inconvenience the public, which you will recall is the government excuse for banning protest also. Well, of course they do. So does the spiral of real terms wage cuts. The fractured workers of the gig economy are now showing interest in unionising and organising; this is too little and too late to avert the crisis that is about to hit us, but a useful indication of the will to resist.
Popular resistance terrifies the elite and thus must be demonised. The political class is to be protected from insult or contradiction. You may recall in February it was headline news that Keir Starmer was “mobbed” in Whitehall as he walked down the street, by protestors shouting at him over lockdown and over his role in the non-prosecution of Jimmy Savile (and, less reported, in the extradition of Julian Assange).
In fact, nothing happened. Aerial photographs showed that the protestors numbered about a dozen, that they were heavily outnumbered by Starmer’s handlers and the police. The only, mild, violence was initiated by the police. There was no threat to Starmer other than the threat of being verbally opposed by members of the public on subjects he did not wish to be discussed.
This protection of highly paid politicians from the public, this claim that it is extremely bad behaviour for ordinary people to confront elite politicians with an opposing view, is an extraordinary assertion that the people must not challenge their betters.
We are going to see a great deal more of this in the coming crisis. There is currently the most extraordinary manifestation of it in Scotland where the Chief Constable has announced an investigation into people daring to protest against the Tory leadership hustings in Perth.
In truth, absolutely nothing abnormal happened. People protested. Nobody spat at anybody – there is no evidence of it at all, nobody saw it, none of scores of media cameras and people’s telephones captured it, none of the very large police presence witnessed it, not a single journalist claims to have personally seen this “spitting”. Yet the entire media reported it, to delegitimise the protest.
These are the “reports” the Chief Constable refers to – unevidenced media lies. That is the basis of policing today.
An egg – singular – may or may not have been thrown. Media showed photographs of a single broken egg on the pavement after the event. Again, footage of it flying through the air is conspicuously absent. Someone may have just dropped their shopping. It may even be a false flag egg!
Personally, I don’t care if somebody did throw an egg at a Tory. Egg throwing at politicians is a traditional expression of popular protest with hundreds of years of history behind it. It is not really dangerous – I am not aware of a single instance of a politician being maimed by a flying egg – and carries a comedic punch. Personally I would rather see the custard pie, but those crowd barriers…
But what really rattled the political class was the lack of deference shown to their agents of control, the client journalists. One such creature, the BBC’s James Cook, walked through the barriers dividing the journalist pool from the pen for the public, and walked up to the barriers to provoke a reaction.
The propaganda of the BBC is particularly unpopular in Scotland, so Mr Cook got the reaction he expected. He was shouted at, and called a “traitor” and “scum”. The most vociferous abuse came from one particular individual not known to local activists, who may or may not have been an agent provocateur. That the British security state employs such tactics is beyond dispute. But I do not enormously care if he was an agent or a genuinely annoyed member of the public.
The fact is this. Mr Cook, like Mr Starmer above, got shouted at. He did not get hit. He was not the victim of the great egg throwing scandal. Nobody spat at him. Mr Cook met with verbal disapprobation of his journalistic output, after approaching people specifically to that purpose.
Here is a photo of James Cook immediately after the “someone spoke rudely to me” incident, showing exactly how shaken and concerned he was:
The reaction from the controlled, neoliberal opposition in Scotland was off the scale.
The notion that the BBC does “not support any viewpoint”, particularly on Independence, is laughable. Also how much scrutinising of the Ukrainian government has it been undertaking recently?
Mr Cook has form in claiming that Scots expressing their opinion in the street amounts to some form of illegitimate mob or riot, when it is in fact perfectly peaceable.
A couple of days after the Perth non-incident, the neoliberal controlled opposition were joining in with the client journalists in their claims to victim status.
The interesting thing here is that these neo-liberal politicians plainly believe that it ought not to be allowed for people to call them or their journalistic enablers traitors or scum. The expression of popular protest is in itself illegitimate, according to their worldview. Politicians are using the verbal armoury of cancel culture – talk of “offence” and “safety”, as reasons to limit freedom of speech – to justify the suppression of criticism of those who wield the power of the state.
This extends to the suppression of free speech and popular protest under the guise of protecting employee rights. The neoliberal opposition quickly hit on this line on the Perth incident. Mr Cook should not have been abused because he was only an employee “doing his job”. Everyone has a right to be protected from abuse in the workplace.
As though voicing state propaganda is the same as serving coffee and as though Cook’s work is morally neutral. It is not.
Perhaps aware that journalists are not the most popular recipients of public sympathy, James Cook decided to spread the accusation of abuse wider:
Here James Cook is simply lying. I have very frequently heard extreme discontent at the BBC expressed by Independence supporters, both at public demonstrations, including outside BBC Scotland HQ, and in meetings. I have never once heard any anger expressed at staff other than the lying “journalists”.
In meetings I frequently express the view that upon Independence, BBC Scotland should be closed down and everybody made redundant (I last expressed this in Dunfermline last month). I have taken to always adding that this should apply only to editorial and journalistic staff and not to technical, clerical and industrial staff. The reason I always add it now is that, if I don’t, I am invariably corrected from the floor. There is no animus against these people.
Cook is making it up, which I suppose is his profession.
The resonances to wider cancel culture are not accidental. That the near approach of capitalism to its crisis is marked by both legal and social suppression of freedom of speech is not an accident. There is a strong resonance between the Perth incident and the cancellation of the Edinburgh Fringe show of veteran Glaswegian comic Jerry Sadowitz, for which the excuse given – accepted by a remarkable number of people on the left – was that the workers’ rights of the staff of the venue were affected.
This co-option of workers as state censors is remarkable given the complete disinterest in staff rights shown by the state in general, and by the large Edinburgh Fringe employers in particular. As food for thought, here is a 1987 transcript of Sadowitz’ act where he discusses the Establishment protected paedophile, Jimmy Savile:
“There have been serious allegations in the news of child abuse in Cleveland. Now to my mind there is only one way of finding out whether it is true or not, and that is to call in Jimmy Savile. You can’t afford to fuck about, bring in an expert. Am I right? Now a friend of mine reckons that Jimmy Savile is a paedophile, rubbish he’s a child-bender. That’s why he does all the fucking charity work, it’s to gain public sympathy for when his fucking case comes up. I’ve always known that. Aye, aye, well he may have fooled you, not fucking me, I am telling you that. He doesn’t fool this big-nosed Jewish bastard over here, I’m telling you that. I have always thought that if you took the action of a voice and turned it into a wank you would get Jimmy Savile wouldn’t you? (Savile masturbating impersonation).”
Read that with an eye to how many things in it could today have got Sadowitz banned, because somebody on the staff could have taken offence or been triggered. Pretty well every single sentence. Yet Sadowitz was one of a tiny number of people prepared to tell the truth about Savile.
I hope that puts you off the idea of canceling free speech “on behalf of workers’ rights”.
To sum up.
The 2008 banking bailout gave hundreds of billions of dollars straight to the ultra-wealthy, to be paid for by ordinary people through over a decade of austerity cuts to social services, real terms cuts in pay, and increased taxation. In the current crisis the plan is to advance money in some form to ordinary people, for them to pay off by a further decade of the same.
In neither instance was taking money from those with billions in personal wealth even considered.
The neoliberal phase of super-capitalism has run its course. The gap between the wealthy and ordinary people has become so extreme that, even in the West, ordinary people no longer can afford to live decently. Consumerism has desperately depleted natural resources and accelerated climate change. The policy of perpetual war has finally undermined the world economy to a fatal degree.
The situation is not sustainable, but the global elite have no intention to give up sufficient of their massive wealth to make any difference. They seek to control society through the propaganda model and through increasing state repression of dissent, allied to an assault on “incorrect” thought by censorship of the internet and by populist demonisation. “Left” causes such as identity politics and protection from offence have been weaponised to support this suppression.
There is no democratic outlet for popular anger. The “opposition” parties which people can vote for are all under firm neoliberal, warmonger control. Democracy has ceased to present any effective choice that offers any hope of real change. The revival of interest in organised labour and the willingness of young people to engage in direct action in the field of climate change offer some avenues for activism, but it is too little, too late.
Yet this will not hold. Discontent is now so strong, and public anger becoming so widespread, that change is coming. With no available democratic mechanism for change and a firm clampdown on the development of coherent radical programmes and on radical organisation, that change will initially manifest in chaos.
The Establishment response? They clutch at their pearls, twitch at their curtains and condemn the uncouth masses.
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Behaviour has meaning and I think that Corbyn’s pusillanimity over the bogus antisemitism allegations was not mere cowardice or fatuity. He is a bourgeois reformist and such a person will not take on one of the foundations of the political status quo. Syriza a-go-go.
Yet you insist George Galloway of all people would have stood by his comrades in Corbyn’s position. Someone who can’t get his tongue fast enough up the rectum of any establishment ghoul who gives him the time of day, be it Andrew Neil, McTernan, Rees Mogg, Steve Norris, whoever. A man who under none of the pressure confronting Corbyn abandoned a lifetime championing immigrants and other marginalised out groups in order to ingratiate himself with the far right.
Corbyn miscalculated in throwing old comrades to the wolves. It was in the face of a howling ethnic group and a political and media class determined to brand him a racist. He did it as a means to ending the howling so he could move on to ending neo-liberalism and war. You know this as well as anyone else, yet your only contributions here are one note Corbyn bashing. Sus AF.
We’ll never know will we? We do know that Galloway earned his spurs decades ago and has shown more backbone than Corbyn ever did. Do you know if he has betrayed anyone; Corbyn betrayed himself then everyone else.
You can see Galloway has come under no pressure from any quarter. Just open your eyes.
Except in Apartheid South Africa, zionist antisemite Palestine, Syria, Cuba….
Yesterday I sent the following e-mail to a relative
“My thoughts on the European energy crisis; how to explain the apparent insanity? Over the last forty years or so of neo-liberalism the aristocracy in Europe has consolidated and become more confident, from the point of view of this class the crisis will—
1 impoverish the lower orders, putting the peasantry back in their proper place.
2 result in a rapid and large reduction in carbon emissions
3 immigration will reverse into emigration.
As they say these days what’s not to like”
The trend of the article is reminiscent of William Morris’s conversion from Liberalism to Socialism, which was in part the result of the Gladstone government’s failure to enact promised radical policies once in power and to provoke war with Czarist Russia to support national capital interests. And so we have in the manifesto of his newly formed Socialist League (1884) (as described by E.P Thompson in his biography of Morris).
“The Socialist League therefore aims at the realisation of complete Revolutionary Socialism, and well knows that this can never happen in any one country without the help of the workers of all civilization. For us neither geographical boundaries, political history, race, nor creed makes rivals or enemies; for us there are no nations, but only varied masses of workers and friends, whose mutual sympathies are checked or perverted by groups of masters and fleecers whose interest it is to stir up rivalries and hatreds between the dwellers in different lands”.
As the saying goes, “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”, but it is always important to keep on with the good fight. We can live in hope.
“There — it sickens one to have to wade through this grimy sea of opportunism. What a spectacle of shuffling, lies, vacillation and imbecility does this Game Political offer to us? I cannot conclude without an earnest appeal to those Socialists, of whatever section, who may be drawn towards the vortex of Parliamentarism, to think better of it while there is yet time.
“If we ally ourselves to any of the presen[t] parties they will only use us as a cat’s-paw; and on the other hand, if by any chance a Socialist slips through into Parliament, he will do so at the expense of leaving his principles behind him; he will certainly not be returned as a Socialist, but as something else; what else is hard to say. As I have written before in these columns, Parliament is going just the way we would have it go. Our masters are feeling very uncomfortable under the awkward burden of GOVERNMENT, and do not know what to do, since their sole aim is to govern from above. Do not let us help them by taking part in their game. Whatever concessions may be necessary to the progress of the Revolution can be wrung out of them at least as easily by extra-Parliamentary pressure, which can be exercised without losing one particle of those principles which are the treasure and hope of Revolutionary Socialists.”
— William Morris, the Commonweal, Volume 1, Number 10, November 1885, p. 93.[1]
To conclude, my little trip to Morris-land:
So goes on merrily the political disruption of our present system. Far more grim than this bad joke of Parliament and representation is the process of its economical breakup. All over the country an attempt is being made to stimulate trade by the huge advertisements called exhibitions; and royalty is playing its due part in a commercial country be opening these, and so killing, if possible, two birds with one stone — exciting loyalty on the one hand, and trying to to get it to spend money on the other. The success on the commercial side is not yet great, and trade is still ‘dull’ — a word which covers something of the same suffering as the conventional phrases used in describing a battle do. ‘The enemy annoyed our advance much:’ we all know, if we choose to think, the kind of misery that such phrases cover, and in our commercial war it is, I repeat, much the same.
—— Notes on Passing Events, Volume 2, Number 21, 5 June 1886, p. 73.
It’s strange because I find those manifesto proposals equally compelling and yet now – having discovered a passion for personal freedom and resistance to government overreach during pandemania – find myself on the “Right” despite not having moved!
That’s exactly where I find my self too. Over the last 2 years I’ve come to wonder if the whole notion of left and right politics has been deliberately moulded and their differences emphasized from behind the scenes to ensure that in times of genuine crisis us plebs will be more likely to be attacking each other than focusing on the real source of threat. It’s noticeable how often those fighting government over-reach describe it as communism. To me it’s not remotely communism, it’s authoritarianism. And it’s that authority which needs bringing down. Anyone shocked by the loss of freedoms and the coercion we’ve all been subjected to is called far right. What has it to do with the far right? The ‘pandemic’ has drawn back a veil and it’s now plain to see that the masses of ordinary people have so much in common with each other – it is a great opportunity to coalesce around the overwhelming urgency to fight off tyranny. Everything else pales into insignificance. But I fear we’re so obsessed with batting back and forth the old meaningless terms of insult like communist and far right that we will miss our great chance to change the stinking system – before it’s turned into the planned dystopian control grid with knobs on. The left in particular seems to be utterly oblivious to what’s happening around us.
And when that happens, to quote the title of a recent Jimmy Dore show on exactly this idea, “THIS Scares The Sh*t Out Of The Establishment” – “When Right Meets Left”) and finds that they have common ground).
YouTube. https://youtu.be/FtBor3A8idM
Jimmy Dore, besides being rather stupid, has been working both sides of the street for quite some time. Recently, though, he’s nothing but a right-wing stooge, while pretending to be the ‘sensible’ left.
He takes positions to get hits, and provides no more useful a contribution to ‘debate’ than any other right wing shill.
Of course, if you like that sort of thing, he’s your man.
your post is free of any examples. why is that?
You are exactly part of the problem that Alison describes.
The left strives to bee free of tyranny through cooperation. The right strives to be free of tyranny through individualism.
Tyranny eliminates the possibility to cooperate or not to cooperate.
Tyranny is the enemy.
PA:
“your post is free of any examples. why is that?“
If it wasn’t self evident, you could always ask… here are a few examples.
He dismissed the dangers of Trump becoming President and appointing a number of Supreme Court justices. In fact, he claimed that was as likely as “The moon falling into Lake Michigan”, and endorsed Jill Stein. We got Trump, and three new Supremes (actually, clerics in judges’ robes).
He peddles conspiracy theories, particularly about Covid and vaccines, for clicks. He constantly attacks the ‘Squad’ – the four most progressive members of congress – pretending that they are holding the country back and – somehow – are preventing universal medicare (with his idiotic “force the vote” campaign, showing he knows or cares virtually nothing about politics). He calls for people like AOC to be primaried by his supporters.
He attacks “Democracy Now” with Amy Goodman, probably the most consistently left wing media outlets of note. He regularly attacks Biden from the right, claiming he’s not fit for office, but promotes the likes of Tulsi Gabbard – who does not agree with universal health care at all, and takes $100K’s from weapons manufacturers, didn’t vote to impeach Trump (the only Dem to fail to do so), and Dore actually blames Bernie Sanders for spoiling her Presidential bid.
Dore also opposed the impeachment of Trump.
Dore also accused Bernie Sanders of being a Nazi, worse than ISIS, and a sociopath. But then Dore goes on to have nice interviews with members of the Boogaloo Boys (actual, genuine fascists). Oh, and he claimed these particular fascists were “liberal”. Stupid, or lying?
I could go on. Dore is like Dave Rubin, pretending to be on the left while actually not being so at all.
Of course, if you like that sort of thing – he’s your guy, as I said. But holding him up as some standard bearer for the left is an odd thing to do, given his clear record.
wrong on most of your examples. the democrats have largely rolled over on fighting supreme court justices nominated by the republicans, with rare exceptions, and have not fought for their own you have clearly fallen for the kabuki theater while ignoring the substance, which is Dore’s whole point. Dore is one of the few honest commenters with a wide platform who points out the hypocrisy of both parties, and their toady supporters (like the Young Turks).
the Squad has rolled over time and again, when it counts, and are together with Bernie mere gatekeepers at this point. again, you think he is on the right because he points out their hypocrisy. Glenn Greenwald has pointed out many of the same things, i expect you have swallowed the propaganda put forth by the fake leftists in the media that he is right wing too.
Quite so, The Squad is Corbyns in drag making the noise then voting for Republican policies same as the rest of the Damns. Force the vote? No, kiss the arse, it’s the progressive thing to do.
Another Dore: ”Banks Get $1.5 Trillion Bailout Over Coronavirus” plus ”Why Do Banks Make So Much Money?” and others by Positive Money [uk]
Another Dore: Carl Rittenhouse was just acting in self defence!
Another Dore: Boogaloo boys are liberals
Another Dore: Bernie Sanders is a sociopath/ Nazi/ worse than ISIS
Another Dore: The Covid pandemic “has exposed the authoritarian left!”
Just look at the titles to his own podcasts/ youtubes. More than twice as many attacking Biden and the left than Trump and his MAGA mob.
Just throwing a cheap “Banks are bad!” into the mix does not a genuine progressive make. Although his apologists (who are very defensive about him, I have to admit) seem to think so. Trump, Hitler and so on also used left-wing points of contention to gain popularity.
the covid pandemic has indeed exposed the authoritarian left, along with the unswerving support for warmongering and Russiagate. cite the links to your other purported titles I’ve never seen him say anything about Bernie being worse than ISIS, for example. Do you think Aaron Maté is right wing, too?
Oh dear glenn, you need to get out more.
There’s no need to “get out more”, Squeeth, when we can stay in and look things up online.
For example, you can watch this video commentary from ‘The Progressive Voice’: Jimmy Dore Is BLATANTLY SELLING OUT To The Right Wing….
Or read this article by Eric London in the World Socialist website: YouTube personality Jimmy Dore promotes fascist Boogaloo Boy
If you prefer to give your eyes a rest, you can listen to podcasts: The DOWNFALL of Jimmy Dore – From TYT Host to Right-Wing Conspiracies and Platforming a Boogaloo Boy (Last.fm), or JIMMY DORE GOES FULL MASK OFF REPUBLICAN….. (Spreaker).
I used to watch Jimmy’s shows quite often, despite his habitual over-emphasis and over-reacting schtick which can become a bit grating after a while. But over the last couple of years he has drifted politically and now seems to primarily target left wingers. Some suggest that’s for financial reasons: eg. he’s now selling “Let’s Go, Brandon” (code for “Fuck Joe Biden”) merchandise on his online store. He found a new (more lucrative) audience by promoting anti-establishment (some would say ‘right-wing’) conspiracy theories, and may be attracting cast-offs from Alex Jones. It’s a worrying development.
I’ve just watched it, thanks. Jimmy Dore is spot on.
Although it is now 4 years old, this article by Wolfgang Streeck (https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii104/articles/wolfgang-streeck-the-return-of-the-repressed) in New Left Review #104(2) March/April 2017 explains the process whereby Left and Right have united in opposition to the “extreme centre” outside the ambit of, or constituting a substantial fraction within (the Tea Party, Trump voters), established political parties, thus becoming defined (both positively and negatively according to the source) as “populist”.
A true Left (Communists) and a true Right (fascists) still exist, but they are both marginal. The real fight at the moment is between the establishment political parties (and this is where the gaslighting is going on – the fictional “Left”/”Right” opposition between parties that are all neo-liberal!) and the heterodox “populists”.
communism is control through ownership of the production-apparatus. fascism is control through regulation.
That is why communists and fascists hate each other. They both lust for control.
And of course I am not talking about “the people” who, in both instances, are controlled.
Communists aren’t lefty, they are statist popinjays, the same as all the other ideologies, save for anarchism. A plague on all their statist houses.
transitionick : If you think a half-hearted response to a public heath emergency is “authoritarian” and was just designed/faked to take your freedoms away, that really is your problem.
Seems more likely that, rather than discovering an admiration for ‘freedom’, you’re simply happy with what you’ve got and become a lot more cold hearted in your old age. It doesn’t happen to everyone with age, I’m glad to say – mainly those who like socialism when they have too little, and like conservatism when they have too much.
Thanks Alison.
Bye-bye Glenn. You’re presuming things you no nothing about & your first paragraph is simply delusional. You’re in for a shock.
Oh wow, really? Could you please be more specific about this ‘shock’, or are your sources just waaay to deep for that?
I do like it when people claim to have such _secret_ knowledge that they can only hint at, and mock the naivety and ignorance of others who are not “in the no [sic]” as you clearly are, but get all coy about any specifics.
You’re really intriguing and exciting, Transitionnick. A true wow-fest, and such an original.
Regards nationalisation. Whilst a nationalised Electricity Supply Industry is appropriate in the medium/long term it is not a short term fix. There isn’t a short term fix but I believe the most appropriate immediate measure is regulation – firmly regulate the useless Regulator – who should do that is a difficult question – certainly not politicians.
Since it is a monopoly industry, scrap the ridiculous price cap and set the retail prices. Prices to be based upon actual generation/distribution costs. Pricing policy to be transparent such as variations (if any) across regions of UK and between commercial/domestic. It would of course blow the myth of competition – a con perpetrated at privatisation and incredibly, sustained ever since.
“Since it is a monopoly industry, scrap the ridiculous price cap and set the retail prices.”
If you are going to do that, you might as well nationalise it, otherwise it’s pretty certain what will happen: senior management will continue to draw very generous salaries and bonuses at the expense of every other worker, the shareholders and investment.
‘… senior management will continue to draw very generous salaries and bonuses at the expense of every other worker, the shareholders and investment’
Perpetuation of the myth of competition is indicative of how useless the regulator is. No doubt the revolving doors route between company senior management and regulator. Their incomes are not the most pressing problem but stemming of excess company profits by regulation of pricing would exert downward pressure on their incomes. Setting retail prices would just be the start.
Overpaid managers are a symbol of how things have gone wrong and so need to be reduced
“but stemming of excess company profits by regulation of pricing would exert downward pressure on their incomes.”
Senior management’s salaries are paid out before profits are calculated, so reducing profits will have no effect on salaries.
If the income of the company is reduced, profits will go before salaries, so dividends first, then investment, then pay rises for all the other workers. A regulator so reducing a company’s income that it makes a loss is going to have a hard time justifying it.
‘A regulator so reducing a company’s income that it makes a loss is going to have a hard time justifying it.’
The purpose of the proposed regulation is to ensure fair pricing of electricity supply across industrial/commercial/domestic consumers based upon reasonable profit margins for the monopoly companies – what OFGEM should have been doing for the last 32 years since privatisation. Basing a ‘price cap’ on commercial gas prices (which I believe to be the case albeit from bbc radio reports) will clearly produce a figure well above that required for fair profits.
The basis of current electricity supply pricing is somewhat of a mystery, at least to me. The majority is sold from main generators to National Grid and from NG to area distributors plus a percentage (‘embedded generation’) direct to area distributors. Supply includes long term contracts (for continuous supply), contracts for predefined intermittent supply (eg 2 shifting of gas generators), standby contracts, load following contracts, pool prices (short term supply availability). The system also encompasses contracts/trading for supply/demand compensation such as pumped hydro, static frequency response compensation (batteries), demand-side management, international interconnectors. Interface into the trading system for brokering user supply contracts must be available – such brokering being referred to as ‘suppliers’. Thus there is already some degree of price control but there is no visibility of how the system works to provide final pricing and how it is divided between consumer types and their locations. And of course the industry is a monopoly with the minor exceptions of the margins of generation and perhaps between user brokering (ie the element misleadingly referred to as ‘energy supply contracts’.
OFGEM should be able to quote chapter and verse for how the trading system works and how it controls final pricing but when they push the myth of competition it suggests they don’t know their arse from their elbow. Either that or they are being disingenuous.
I should have added into the list of supply trading – contracts for indeterminate intermittent supply (wind, solar)
” The majority is sold from main generators to National Grid and from NG to area distributors plus a percentage (‘embedded generation’) direct to area distributors.”
Well, there’s your monopoly (NG). What’s it doing buying electricity when it should be doing no more than charging for the use of its infrastructure? The distributors (who are not regional, BTW) should be buying direct from the generators. It looks to me that the whole market is set up to provide the maximum opportunity to speculating middle men, which is hardly surprising, given who set it up. There’s no point in having more regulation of a broken system, better to fix it first and then see how much regulation it needs.
Bayard
Yes NG is a monopoly and so are the area distributors – the ‘area networks’ are of course locally arranged albeit the companies might encompass multiple networks across different regions as well as generation. Generation is also practically a monopoly since excess capacity (that is feasible for routine use ie exclude the likes of open cycle gas turbines and diesel generators) is minimal.
The practicalities are that output is metered at the main generators into NG and at the bulk supply points from NG to area distributors. NG holds responsibility for determining what generation is used to maintain the supply/demand balance. It isn’t feasible to split this between multiple parties and this principle has been carried through from the nationalised industry.
As previously stated, given the monopoly status, the prices are already to some extent regulated – but how does this system work, what are the principles etc. Why then have a price cap – and one I suggest set well above that required for fair profit. Yet the regulator never seems to get queried.
” the ‘area networks’ are of course locally arranged albeit the companies might encompass multiple networks across different regions as well as generation.”
Are we talking about the same electricity network? OK, some “area networks” still bear the names of their geographically based predecessors”, but a household in Cornwall is perfectly able to buy electricity from, say, Scottish Power and a Scot is able to buy it from Électricité de France.
“Generation is also practically a monopoly since excess capacity (that is feasible for routine use ie exclude the likes of open cycle gas turbines and diesel generators) is minimal.”
It is also practically a monopoly as there is little point in competing if you have regulation of the end price, see also the cost of tertiary education. Also there is little point in having spare capacity because a generating plant is hugely expensive, and takes about a week to turn on and the same time to turn off. If there is a genuine growth in demand, then it might be feasible to build another power station, but otherwise, having a power station sitting idle is something only the state can afford to do.
“The practicalities are that output is metered at the main generators into NG and at the bulk supply points from NG to area distributors. NG holds responsibility for determining what generation is used to maintain the supply/demand balance. It isn’t feasible to split this between multiple parties and this principle has been carried through from the nationalised industry.”
Which is why regulation is a pointless exercise and the whole process should be state controlled.
Bayard,
You consistently miss the point and detract from the subject:
‘regulation is a pointless exercise and the whole process should be state controlled’
My first post in the thread suggested ‘a nationalised Electricity Supply Industry is appropriate in the medium/long term’ but in the meantime the privatised utilities need to be properly regulated.
Local area networks are a reality of the installed equipment. The names and locations of the owning companies are not relevant in the context of the issues I raise.
Limited excess capacity is the reality and relevant to minimal competition which is the context in which I mention it. I am not seeking to review or comment upon the amount of excess capacity necessary.
“but in the meantime the privatised utilities need to be properly regulated.”
Why, if regulation achieves nothing, which it has done and will continue to do so, because of the nature of the electricity supply industry?
“Local area networks are a reality of the installed equipment.”
Are we talking about the likes of Western Power, in which case I would agree that they are monopolies, but irrelevant to your point as they don’t buy or sell electricity, or are we talking about the likes of EDF, who sell electricty all over the country and are not tied to a particular area, in which case, I can’t see how you can claim that they are monopolies in any way, shape or form?
Bayard,
It might be worth me trying to summarise and expand on the main issue I am raising, as your comments suggest I am not stating my case clearly enough.
The electricity supply industry holds a monopoly position because all the plant (generation and distribution) is required to provide the supply (with the exception of the margins of generation). This is not changed by splitting the monopoly into multiple companies. The product is traded between the companies. Sales to the consumer (albeit possibly not large industrial/commercial consumers) is enabled via a brokering system where the brokers may or may not be actual suppliers (ie generators and/or distributors), but in any case are not acting in that capacity by dint of the ‘supply contract’.
I suggest that the brokering is based upon an input cost (cost per unit energy from the inter-trading scheme) and the ‘price cap’ is set well above it. This allows scope for the brokers to profit by playing customers off against each other – those that switch getting the better deals etc. The arrangement supports the illusion of competition and masking of the charging policies – such as regional differences and how the inter-trading is regulated.
The brokering is not only unnecessary but is being underwritten by the consumer to con them. The brokers and ‘price cap’ could be removed and the consumer price based on the inter-trading scheme price plus a small margin for billing costs. It would, of course, blow the myth of competition and make the pricing policies more difficult to mask.
“Prices to be based upon actual generation/distribution costs”
Which are now on average 4-6 times higher than before the USA boycott of the cheapest and largest european energy supplier.
The current higher energy prices have caused somewhat higher profits, but the higher profits have not cause the higher energy prices; those profits are a windfall of higher energy prices, not a cause. The neocons are trying to distract attention from the cause by setting up the profits as scapegoats.
What has caused the higher energy prices is simply a shortage of physical fuels because of the USA boycott. Since the supply of energy is now rather smaller than the demand, the demand has to be cut either by higher prices that cut disproportionately the demand from the poor, or by government mandated rationing.
‘Which are now on average 4-6 times higher than before the USA boycott of the cheapest and largest european energy supplier.’
Fuel pricing is one factor affecting final electricity pricing and in this case (gas) producing something less than 50% of the electrical energy output. Electrical energy price variations should thus be proportionately smaller than gas price variations. As stated above OFGEMs job is fair pricing. Other compensation/subsidies are for others to determine.
“ I grew up with public ownership of utilities, natural monopolies and strategic industries, with free healthcare and medicines, free university tuition with good maintenance grants, schools under control of elected local councils, controlled fair rents including the private sector. significant public housing. We thought it would last forever”
Dear Craig, the reason you had all those wonderful things in the 1970s was thanks to Socialism, not Liberalism! You did very nicely out of its fruits… and then bit the hand that fed you.
We can even thank Communism. Fear of the of the Soviet Union, and its brooding presence as an example of what could transpire if the working classes got too “bolshy”, was sufficient motivation for the ruling class to condescend to offer the rest of us those policies that served to mediate the effects of full-blown unbridled capitalism; mediations which were weakened, and then fell apart, at approximately the same time as did the Soviet Union itself.
And here we are, over forty years later, in a state of national crisis thanks to rampant neoliberalism that has been given carte blanche, thanks largely to the collapse of Communism, and the accompanying universal discrediting of the left.
But #EnoughIsEnough
1970s Liberalism isn’t the remedy – it will offer nothing; 1970s Socialism is what we need, and fast.
And then it needs to be defended, preserved and nurtured, not later weakened by Liberal, “now we’ve got full employment, a functioning welfare state, NHS and public housing sector, we can take those for granted and push for more individualism”, complacency.
I agree with all of that. I remember the uncontained joy of the governing classes of Europe and the USA when the Berlin Wall came down, and feeling rather uneasy at what might follow. Thirty years on these same advocates of freedom are trying to build their own walls to prevent Russians and foreigners from stepping on NATO soil. The militarisation of the police force- obvious even in its uniform- and digital monitoring of the individual seem a lifetime away from Craig’s 1970 liberal world.
I am thankful for you Mr S putting my thoughts into words. It was not out of compassion but out of threat!
Dear MrS,
I was in my 20’s during the ’70s, and living in UK, and I can assure you it was a period of great social turmoil.
Personally, I bow in gratitude to the likes of Harold Wilson, whose Government paid my University fees, living and travel allowances, which allowed me to study for 4 years from 1976, even with two kids at home. Truly awesome.
But there was much bs in the Labour party too….for example a so-called social contract, which limited wages, but failed to curb living costs, when inflation was running at 30% in 1975.
Not wishing to patronise, I recommend the following historical review, which despite its rather unpromising title seems to me quite balanced:
Britain in the Seventies – Our Unfinest Hour? by Kenneth O. Morgan
https://journals.openedition.org/rfcb/1662
“Dear Craig, the reason you had all those wonderful things in the 1970s was thanks to Socialism, not Liberalism!”
and the Socialism was thanks to the public attitude of the time. We will never get 1970s Socialism back again because we no longer think like we did in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. We are no longer a nation that lived through one or two world wars. The civilians who were turned into soldiers and back into civilians are all dead or dying. The altruistic spirit of post-war Socialism has become the selfish spirit of the new millennium, Greed is Good and I’m all right Jack. “What ought I to do?” has been replaced with “What can I get away with doing?”
“What can I get away with *not* doing”, shurely? ; )
“The altruistic spirit of post-war Socialism has become the selfish spirit of the new millennium, Greed is Good and I’m all right Jack.”
I don’t disagree; “Because I’m Worth It” US-style individualism, and social atomisation has been a notable trend for years – although I wonder whether the cost of living crisis and resurgence of TU activity will bring about a more collective tendency in the national psyche soon enough?
Sadly our host, Corbyn and many more fellow champions of autonomy, enlightenment and justice, appreciate the thin ice of dissent, the storm of flying in the face of bureaucracy.
We are all vulnerable, at the mercy of being discredited, vilified or slandered.
The Post Office Address File (PAF) was developed by an Israeli (dual nat.) owned company under the direction of a database guru from Israel. Bolted on to that digital information are other supplementary data-sets that contain for instance your income bracket as a binary score. Others might contain your acumen, property/business ownership, banking, political bend and more from social media, hacking, blogs and online activity plus in key based code. Such is the digital age.
As deputy leader at the last election Sir Ed Davey proposed permanent austerity for Britain.
https://inews.co.uk/news/politics/general-election-2019-liberal-democrats-permanent-spending-surplus-363716
Ordinary rank-and-file Lib Dems liked that proposal so much they elected him party leader after the election.
This should be people’s first thought whenever they hear talk of a “progressive alliance” or of PR bringing an end to neoliberal rule.
Brilliant stuff, Craig
Specific to the rhetorical coda regarding the capture of all msm by the State.
I don’t think I’m imagining this, in the 70’s the excellent World in Action championed the cases of the Birmingham six, the Guilford four & the Maguire seven. This wasn’t a popular position with the public and certainly not with the State. In the 70’s, the BBC’s Panorama output retained credibility.
Changed days indeed.
What’s missing is specific cited instances of bias in BBC Shortbread’s output.
Let’s remind ourselves of the Question Time / Menthorn Media / Billy Mitchell scandal. This began as a joke on the comments section of the WoS website; “Wonder if yon bloke in the orange jaiket will be on Question Time again tonight?”
And he was. BBC Scotland were caught red handed. Their response, flat denial.
Donalda MacKinnon, Director BBC Scotland position was; “What you thought you saw and heard didn’t happen.” Truly Orwellian stuff.
Subsequent events; the admission by Mitchell that he was chauffeur driven to recordings and the photo of him carousing in the Green room with Michael Forsyth, didn’t alter MacKinnon’s preposterous position.
Tellingly Nicola Sturgeon backed BBC Scotland to the hilt. Nothing to see here move along now.
Meanwhile, our msm remains studiously disinterested in events at the John Smith Centre for Public Service. A registered charity employing six people that’s never published accounts. A political influencing outfit that keep the sources of its funding hidden. Let that sink in. Surely there’s a story for some intrepid journalist there? Infuriatingly there are no journalists left, just State stenographers.
Then there’s the recent news that the JSCfPS Director Kezia Dugdale has been awarded Professorial status (£65k) by the University of Glasgow despite lacking a PhD or any genuine teaching experience. Just tumbleweeds.
Excellent piece Craig. It’s not so much that Marx is suddenly right; he was never wrong. There have been many crises of capitalism and incipient revolutions (1848 anybody?) but they have been crushed or otherwise subverted. The period you referred to, 1945-1975, was but a generational retreat by Capital in response to WW2. It merely regrouped.
I was fortunate to study Marx in some depth at university. Hitherto a Tory, I quickly realised that what he said remains plainly true today. Hell, more so. That’s why everyone is still talking about the old boy, who’s now been dead for 140 years.
But Marx was also a political agitator. He was never likely to say, ‘we may win, but it may take us 300 years’. The biggest non-sequitur in Establishment media today is the supposition: ‘Soviet communism has failed – it follows therefore that capitalism has either succeeded, or must succeed’.
«fortunate to study Marx in some depth at university. Hitherto a Tory, I quickly realised that what he said remains plainly true today»
Many conservatives are themselves marxists to a fault (usually in private, some in public), they strongly believe that their profits can only come from exploiting workers, they just think that is as it should be, on social-darwinist grounds: winners must win, losers must lose, class war against the losers is an evolutionary imperative for the winners.
Bingo Blissex!
Marx was a creation of the same old Powers – his job to reinforce the New Religion of Economics , not a science just pseudo – he was cementing the false dichotomy of Capital/AntiCapital. Just like Heaven/Hell, Christ/Satan.
The truth is that there have only ever been slave Owners and Slaves , some Slaves actually believe they have raised themselves to the same heights as the Owners, they are the CEO psychopaths who are the fronts. Such as the potus’s, PM’s Bozo, standings, Starmer and actual clowns and actors, Elenskii …
There is only top and bottom. There is no left – right or even that 90’s favourite 3rd way , centrists.
That is where CM is incorrect. The Liberals had the compromised Thorpe, paedo Cyril Smith, compliant Steele, dodgy bromancer Clegg and many such liberal yards splitting the socialist real Labour vote – their main function since 1945. Any real politicians they ever had were destroyed. They are a total waste of time in achieving any betterment of the Slaves agains the Owners.
‘There is no democratic outlet for popular anger. The “opposition” parties which people can vote for are all under firm neoliberal, warmonger control.’
This is the essence of a comment I appended to Mr Singumatsu’s remark on the Lib Dems yesterday. (Since disappeared).
To reiterate, at the last election LD deputy leader Sir Ed Davey proposed permanent austerity for Britain.
https://inews.co.uk/news/politics/general-election-2019-liberal-democrats-permanent-spending-surplus-363716
That proposal was so popular among rank-and-file LDs that they elected him party leader after the election.
These facts should always be recalled whenever middle-class liberals or elite pundits tell you a ‘progressive alliance’ is the answer or claim PR would end neoliberal rule.
Mr Shingemitsu, excuse me.
It’s “Shigemitsu”!
My original LibDem-related comment was prefaced with a correction to Craig’s text re: the colour of Liberal books(!), which was indeed corrected, so the mods prob felt it was superfluous.
—
[ Mod: Yes, your comment was suspended after the text was (re-)corrected, along with a note of thanks. For reference:
MrShigemitsu
2022/08/30 at 13:06
Craig, the “Yellow Book” was the Liberal party’s industrial policy from the 1920s; I think you mean the “Orange Book”; neoliberal economics as promoted by its authors: Laws, Cable, Davey, Huhne, Kramer and Oaten among them.
—
[ Mod: That was actually corrected a few days ago, along with other issues, but Craig restored all the errata when he subsequently updated the article. Thanks for pointing it out again. ]
]
—
But yes, there is an austerian streak running right through the LibDem pantheon, including the seemingly harmless Ed Davey, and we would all do well to remember it. Thank you for the reminder of his parsimony.
You might have noticed that William Beveridge tried to condemn the working class to permanent austerity with his Social Insurance and Allied Services report of 1942. Liberals are fascists in cardigans.
Or, as the Italians say, “Scratch a Liberal and a Fascist bleeds”.
Just Brilliant Work Craig..Thank You
> The neoliberal phase of super-capitalism has run its course.
I’m no longer comfortable with the term “neoliberalism”. It used to refer to attempts to revive 19thC classic liberalism; so free trade, light regulation, light taxation. Now it seems to refer to neo-colonialism, permanent war, and a kind of class war on behalf of the very rich. It’s morphed like the word “fascist” – it’s a universal term of abuse. Nobody admits to being a fascist, and nobody admits to being a neoliberal.
The idea that capitalism will inevitably eat itself is a pseudo-Marxian dogma. My understanding is that yes, capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction; but its end requires a struggle, because unlike the Soviet Union, capital will refuse to curl up and die. I believe Marx’s view was that the end of capitalism will require violent struggle (He thought the UK was a sole exception, but I doubt he’d still think that if he were still alive).
I don’t see the signs of that violent struggle brewing, so I don’t share this optimism about the end of captalism.
“I’m no longer comfortable with the term “neoliberalism”. It used to refer to attempts to revive 19thC classic liberalism; so free trade, light regulation, light taxation. Now it seems to refer to neo-colonialism, permanent war, and a kind of class war on behalf of the very rich.”
It is a much too elastic term indeed, but that “neo” is indeed an important prefix because it indicates that it is derived from but not the same as classic liberalism (which was also a class war on behalf of the business rich).
The difference between classic liberalism and neoliberalism is that the latter includes strong elements of tory rentierism, especially as to finance and property rentierism. Neoliberalism is about no state intervention to support workers and businesses, and massive state intervention to support finance and property rentiers. Classic liberals were against rentier interests such as the Corn Laws; neoliberals have no such issue with rentier interests.
This is in part because classic liberalism was a struggle of “new money” from business against tory “old money” from property and merchant finance, but what was the “new money” interests from business have largely acquired property and merchant finance assets and have become “old money” themselves.
Marx’s theory was that competition rather than improving quality and keeping down prices would lead to monopolies free to charge whatever they like for poor quality. Generally this has not happened. I don’t think many people would want full on Marxism where the state owns everything and controls every aspect of the individual’s life.
Problem with nationalisation without compensating shareholders is that not only are many of these companies foreign owned (Grangemouth is 50% Chinese) which invites sanctions and other retribution but major shareholders are pension funds. Anybody prepared to tell ordinary people with company or private pensions that the schemes they paid into for decades are now worthless? Thought not.
“Problem with nationalisation without compensating shareholders is ….”
You’re the only one talking about nationalisation without compensation. It would be more to the point to talk about nationalisation with compensation.
Re:
‘You’re the only one talking about nationalisation without compensation.’
There was this line in the original blogpost, Bayard:
‘Nationalisation should be done properly, without compensating shareholders. If I had to choose between compensating the shareholders and imprisoning them, I would imprison them.’
And also a couple paragraphs earlier:
‘I am not a Marxist’
Going by a recent Tweet, I think our excellent host may be feeling a little run down at the minute and might benefit from some R & R with his family.
Missed that. Not the best bit of the post, IMHO. TBF, PM was replying to Jimmeh, rather than making a fresh comment.
Nationalisation should indeed be done properly and that means not just replacing the shareholders with the state and everything else being left the same.
Thanks for your reply Bayard. Fair point about your original comment being a reply to Pears. In view of his recent treatment by the Scots authorities, in addition to advocating confiscation without compensation, it’s disappointing to see our host even contemplating imprisoning people for the putative crime of owning things. I think he really needs to take some time off. Yesterday he was even tweeting that: ‘ISIS was very largely a creation of Western intelligence agencies’. Dear oh dear.
“full on Marxism where the state owns everything and controls every aspect of the individual’s life.”
Where does Marx advocate this?
In the Mail, Express, Sun, and in MAGA/Teabagger circles, I’d imagine
@Pears Morgaine The state does control everything but much of the control is disguised by proxies like businesses and banks.
As far as I know Marx said that as capitalism declines then it will make it easier for the workers to take over (basically take over the running of factories etc.) and carry on what they always did (run the factories – the energy production and so on) without the need for capitalists.
Bsaically: we don’t need capitalists in order to run anything – but you do need workers to run everything.
If a particular section of industry doesn’t need to innovate and invest to survive, then, yes it doesn’t need capitalists. Once you have the need to innovate and invest, you need capital to do that, and someone or some people to organise the allocation of that capital. Even if these people are “workers”, they will be indistinguishable from capitalists.
they dont need to invest and innovate in order to survive, they just need to buy politicians and the regulatory bodies. which they have done very successfully in the United States.
Bayard the thing is is that the State becomes the sole investor and in theory of course ( there have been many socialist/communist experiments in history ) the returns from that investment (in theory again) would be re-invested in infrastructure such as free education – health service – social care etc.
What we have now with private investor capitalism is basically monopoly capitalism with all its inbuilt profit motive funded by a rentier capitalist class who get paid dividends and assets even if the compaines they run do make any profit at all plus executives who’s only motivation is to be paid high sums rain or shine.
As i say – many socialist experiments have occurred in the past and the Chinese economic model is described by many on the left as State Capitalism and maybe it is but there is no arguing with the fact that this particular socialist experiment has lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese people out of poverty and rasied literacy rates and so on and in that respect relative to neo -liberal economics of the last 43 years looks pretty decent to my eyes.
Even if China operates on a State Capitalist model The State runs the show and if the private capitalists don’t do as they are told then the State stops them from operating in the Chinese economy.
Many nay have their arguments about the Chinese political model as a One Party State but the US parties and the UK parties never interfere with private capital inestment or income.
Ironically because of what is happening in the Western World there will have to be more State investment – not less.
It will take the dimwit Technocrats and poiticians a long time to realise that it can’t be avoided and they will make all manouvres to avoid it but the clever capitalists will twig that it is better to be a poorer capitalist than no capitalist at all.
Roosevelt knew this and acted accordingly to save them from themselves.
” the State becomes the sole investor and in theory of course ( there have been many socialist/communist experiments in history ) the returns from that investment (in theory again) would be re-invested in infrastructure such as free education – health service – social care etc.”
Yes, that was the thinking behind the post-war nationalisations, but it is bonkers. Once the state is running something, it doesn’t need to make returns, and, as history shows, it very soon doesn’t. A good example of this is the nationalised electricity industry. Its purpose was to provide electricity to the population. It did this by massive investment on which it never expected a return, because that wasn’t the object of the exercise. History also shows the futility of the state expecting to own a profit-making joint-stock company, competing in the market.
There are some things that work well under state control and others that don’t. Ditto private ownership. This is tiresome to those who want the economy all the one or the other, but is an unfortunate fact of economics.
any business needs to convert raw material to goods through labour and sell at a profit. It is the amount of the profit and how much of it goes to labour and how much is reinvested or given to share holders. Capitalism is based on extraction of any added value from profits to dividends. This often means underpayment of labour, maximisation of profit in order to pay these returns to the investors. So all that is needed from the initial institution of a business is capitalisation and the rest should follow once the business is profitable. Capitalisation is basically a form of borrowing for which the interest is translated to dividends which will always exceed what would be a much lower loan repayment with interest.
To compound the extractive part of capitalism we have many examples now of partial privatisation whereby a company, like railways and water utilities have a partial subsidy from government in order to be able to pay dividends rather than pay workers better, reduce consumer prices or invest more in infrastructure and development.
Another aspect of extraction is financialisation, which is totally parasitic. Speculation, market spot traders, futures and hedge funds are highly profitable activities that are purely parasitic. They add no value and extract money.
“Capitalism is based on extraction of any added value from profits to dividends.”
That is because the whole enterprise was financed by capital originally. The extraction of the profits is the return on that capital, it is why the capital was invested in the first place. The alternative is to have no Capitalists, no capital, no enterprises, and thus no workers. Sure, if it was the workers who put up the capital in the first place, then they should enjoy all of the returns, otherwise not. Why should anyone invest their capital in an enterprise if someone else is going to enjoy all the returns? They would be better off converting it all into gold and burying it in the garden.
” This often means underpayment of labour, maximisation of profit in order to pay these returns to the investors. “
Just because something can be and often is being done badly is not a reason not to do it all.
“Capitalisation is basically a form of borrowing for which the interest is translated to dividends which will always exceed what would be a much lower loan repayment with interest.”
There is actually an important distinction between borrowing and capitalisation. Capitalisation makes the investor a part owner of the business. If the business is liquidated and the debts paid off with nothing left over, the investor loses everything. However the lender’s loan is one of the debts that were paid off, with interest, so the lender loses nothing. So capitalisation is not a form of borrowing, although the reverse can be true.
Superficially neoliberalism is associated with policies like deregulating, privatising etc. But at a deeper level it’s been described as the attempt to distil the world around us into individual numbers (neoliberals love to call them metrics) which are supposed to be the ultimate judge of whether something succeeds or fails, lives or dies. That’s all we need – the economic metrics. No need for politics with its principles or values leading to time-wasting discussions about right and wrong, the kind of world we want to live in… Neoliberalism can be seen as the triumph of economics over politics, numbers over ideas or convictions. Looked at in that way, neoliberalism, far from being on the way out – it is actually closing in on its perverted nirvana. A cashless world of surveillance and digital currencies programmed to tot up our social credits and aberrations and duly apply the automatic appropriate penalties. The technology is now in place to run the control grid and provide all the metrics needed – no need to bother with the messy business of elections because the numbers will create the perfect order.
Capitalism on the other hand IS on its last legs. It supposedly self regulates through the free market but markets are not free. They’re completely rigged, dominated by monopolies which have been allowed to grow without challenge. And now states, instead of playing their role in ensuring a free market, they are hand in hand with the global corporations, working together in their joint interests against the people.
And I disagree that there are no signs of violent struggle. The last 2 years we have been living through a coup – in effect a third World War. The diabolical alliance between big Pharma and their govt lackeys have committed one act of violence after another on the public. Inappropriate tests and lethal care home prescribing policies to produce the stats to ‘prove’ a real pandemic – abusive emergency powers, lockdowns that destroyed businesses, livelihoods, childhoods, denied access to health care, denied the dying any contact with their loved ones. And now the US/NATO contrived war in Ukraine, the sanctions which were always going to hurt the West most, the excuse to increase utility bills by 70% every quarter in readiness for winter, the BOE ‘pencilling in’ a 4% rise in interest rates (a more stupid time to do it you could not dream up), numerous examples of sabotage of food supply chains and attacks on the farming community and policies to accelerate ‘rewilding’ (at a more stupid time you could not dream up).
And all that without even mentioning the experimental genetic injections they have attempted to (and continue to) stick in the entire global population despite knowing that it does not stop you catching or spreading the disease. Effective early treatments had been worked out by summer of 2020 by frontline clinicians using cheap, safe, long used, repurposed drugs – all of which were discredited with lies by a complicit, coordinated media. The safety signals on the adverse reporting systems across the west are worse in the one year since the covid shots have been rolled out than the sum total of all adverse reports for all vaccines for all years since the systems were set up. Both in deaths and injuries. The harms from this roll out are unprecedented (and concealed from view). Main categories are cardiac, neurological, thrombotic. LOTS of death of course. And for good measure they coerced these things on pregnant and breast feeding women before the trials on pregnant women had been completed. Have you read the trial data Pfizer was forced to release by a court (75 years earlier than it wanted to)?
We’re living through state coordinated violence on their people on a shocking scale and is worse to come. This really is world war 3. And late-stage capitalism is being phased out as we sit here to make way for something much worse – unless the masses stand up and start saying no.
> But at a deeper level it’s been described as the attempt to distil the world around us into individual numbers (neoliberals love to call them metrics) which are supposed to be the ultimate judge of whether something succeeds or fails, lives or dies.
Ah, this is reminiscent of Adam Curtis’s documentary “The Trap: Whatever Happened to Our Dream of Freedom”. On that analysis, neoliberalism is a kind of perverted managerialism.
Wise words from a man officially beyond the pale. Captures the truly rotten state we are in. Fearless and with a perspective and erudition the stenographers who make up the journalistic mainstream could never aspire to. Thank you Craig.
PS – have you got your NUJ card back yet ? If it’s a no, then shame on them.
I notice Craig name checked Luke Harding in his article and it seems that very gentleman has imposed his own censorship in The Guardian. A few minutes ago I read this BTL comment concerning the death of Mikhail Gorbachev.
‘After Putin, Russia will need another Gorbachev. Putin will leave behind a demoralized country without a clue. Fighting Nazis in Ukraine? What utter nonsense. A painful lesson awaits.’
My reply was perfectly polite although phrased as a pointed rhetorical question.
‘Were the Azov Brigade who surrendered at Mariupol not fascists?’
It’s not difficult to anticipate how such a comment might be countered but instead I have been informed that my reply was counter to the terms and conditions of the newspaper. It has been whooshed. Whether because I used the taboo word ‘surrendered’ or because there is a suggested link between supporting Ukraine and supporting fascists is unclear.
“‘Were the Azov Brigade who surrendered at Mariupol not fascists?’”
They were just liberals who like swastika tattoos.
Found this reported on my favourite social website.
“At church this morning people who never come to church arrived with their newly delivered pet Ukrainian refugees in tow. Actual real ones, surprisingly. Two white women.
Far more than is normal, the church reeked of sanctimony and confected compassion as a result. As you can imagine, the prayers of intercession were unctuous and insufferable.
The two women reminded me of the Ukrainian girl in Derry Girls; Miserable, taciturn, unimpressed, ungrateful.
However, God, who was clearly fed up with this appalling show of cod virtue, intervened. At coffee afterwards one of the Ukrainians said that the war need never have started and that Zellensky was a cocaine addict and a crook. The second Ukrainian piped up and offered that the war was caused by the EU and that Zellensky should have surrendered on day one. I have never seen such crest fallen faces since the Brexit vote was announced.
Asked how they escaped they said without hesitation; “The Russians got us out”.
To add insult to injury, a few more MSM myths were put to sleep and a sombre and deflated congregation was left somewhat bereft. Thanks be to God: It was wonderful to behold his works at hand.”
@Kate “I have never seen such crestfallen faces since the Brexit vote was announced.” ;O) :O) :O)
“expansion in the gap between the ultra-wealthy and the rest of society, to the extent that ordinary, once middle-class people struggle to pay the bills […] They seek to control society through the propaganda model and through increasing state repression of dissent, allied to an assault on “incorrect” thought”
The point in this post are realistic, but the whole is undermined by a the omission of a very important detail: it is not the “ultra-wealthy” versus “the rest of society”, but the ultra-wealthy and the property owning upper-middle classes versus the lower-middle and lower classes.
Neoliberal rentierism has benefited hugely for 40 years not just a few hundred ultra-wealthy, but also millions and millions of property owners, who vote with relentless ferocity for more neoliberal rentierism. These people are 20-40% of voters, not merely 1% or the 0.01%.
That is the huge political problem that those wishing for “change” have to overcome: a huge rentierist, authoritarian voter block, voters who want to change to a system that has delivered to them for decades booming living standards thanks to ballooning property profits entirely redistributed from the lower-middle and lower classes.
It is not realistic to blame only the ultras-wealthy and completely disregarding the eager complicity of millions and millions of voters with them. Mass rentierism is big problem, both electoral and political, and must be acknowledged for any change to happen.
Well said. How to tackle it?
If Mick Lynch is such a threat to the elite, then why is he never off the telly these days? Serious question.
I suspect because he makes for good telly.
Audience figures, and attendant personal career advancement, trumps all – political instruction included.
Things will no doubt revert to the mean once there’s some dirt, real or invented, on Lynch, and the media tire of the novelty, or abandon their feeble attempts to defeat his arguments – at which point he’ll be de-platformed.
Thanks for another great bit of journalism, to the point and thoughtfully questioning.
@Mr. Shigimitsu. When they say ‘enough is enough’, do they really mean it?
Their aims do not include nationalisation of energy, but they want more money so they can pay privatised utility companies what they demand…why?
Is Cant pay wont pay a succinct part of their campaign?
Raising the minimum wage and then carry on as usual is delaying fundamental change whilst paying multinationals dividends and pension demands up top.
Our impact and demand on resources in this world, combined with reduced harvests in Europe, Americas, China and here, with forcasts for the next year being around 40% less harvests globally, we will see the gour horsemen in full gallop. Btw. the fertiliser industry that re started to provide us with their biproduct CO 2 to bubble our drinks, has shut down again.
China is rationing fertiliser and small gardeners such as myself find it harder to get any sort of muck.
so is Enough#Enough really enough? Is that all we can do?
Well, you’ll have to ask them all those questions.
It may well be that the “#EnoughIsEnough” campaign is necessary, but not sufficient.
«while official journalists simply regurgitate government “information”.»
Honest journalist report true facts by marking that “information” as hearsay, e.g. “Ukrainian forces will soon be surrounding Moscow, says ukrainian general”, the less honest ones report them as statements of fact without the “, says ukrainian general” qualifier. Honest journalists rely on readers being aware of the convention that anything reported as hearsay from one side is likely to be made up, else it would not be reported as hearsay.
Excellent update Craig, I cannot disagree with any of it, the millionaire knight of the realm and leader of the Labour party is in my opinion an establishment figure through and through, and has been for a while possibly even from the start, you just need to look at how he handled the Jimmy Savile saga and the Charles de Menezes one as well.
Sturgeon is quickly turning Scotland into an authoritarian banana republic, via her attack dogs Wolffe (now replaced with Bain) and Livingstone; those mainly in the crosshairs as you will know are indy supporters and prominent bloggers. I’m of the opinion that Sturgeon has no intentions whatsoever of holding an indyref, and that she prefers the status quo.
The BBC in Scotland in several of its cities are nothing more than propaganda outlets for Westminster, after we dissolve the union, as you rightly say it the offices need a good clean out from top to bottom. That goes for Radio Shortbread aka Radio Scotland as well.
“an establishment figure through and through,”
No, Starmer is a forelock-tugger.
V good, thought-provoking piece and links, Craig. Thank you.
The admirable Steve Bray……………his public concern is genuine
Admirable…meh
Who’s funding the gobby SB ?
My Grandad was a bus conductor. In the 1950s and 60s, on a bus conductor’s wage, he was able to keep a wife and two kids, buy and run a car, and save up the deposit for a bungalow in Mountcastle, buy the house, service the mortgage, and equip the place with all the mod cons available at the time.
There aren’t any bus conductors any more, but the chances of anyone in a comparable occupation nowadays being able to do any of that are zero.
That’s the absolute truth which Tories and their apologists never want to talk about.
They like to talk about “hard working families”, because they like the idea of entire families (which includes kids above toddler age) working very hard indeed, and getting nothing but a grudging nod of approval for their efforts along with the odd crust.
I am quite amazed how they’ve pulled it off, in such a short time.
From a decent day’s pay for a decent day’s work, with a pension, holidays, sick pay and security, to barely scraping by as you work an insecure job on an entirely casual basis with zero benefits.
From apprenticeships to a degree being essential. And then that degree goes from having a reasonable grant and free tuition, to zero grant plus hefty tuition – all within a single generation! We’re suddenly in the American model of having to worry about putting our kids through college, alone in Europe.
From renting being a reasonable option for a large segment, to being a desperately unfavourable option to the point of being punitive, but no way out of it while the landlord class makes massive returns while sitting on assets growing at a phenomenal rate.
From saving being the prudent and encouraged behaviour, to savings being ridiculous – zero interest rates, spend, borrow, spend more!
Not to mention it being somehow patriotic to outsource virtually all manufacturing, sell off our national assets, and allow foreign governments to run our essential services while we pay to subsidise their own.
But as long as Tories and their mates get rich while waving that Union Jack, we’re just supposed to tug our forlocks and decry anyone questioning all this as a suspect, a commie, a Corbyn cultist, and just generally nasty.
Unbelievable.
The opposition are outdoing them in talking about hard working families and in waving flags and dressing up as soldiers. They are also decrying anyone who objects as Corbyn cultists. In fact the shadow chancellor straightforwardly labels them antisemities and has promised she would cut welfare harder and faster than the Tories.
No argument from me, but that isn’t contradicting what I said – the opposition is led by Tories. Red Tories, in this case.
> hard working families
This is a phrase that revolts me; it seems to be used only by politicians. The implication is that people that don’t work hard (or don’t have families) are not worthy of political attention. It’s of a piece with the phrase “benefit scoungers”.
When I was a teenager, I was thrilled by new developments in automation and efficiency. It seemed to me that these developments would (or at least could) result in a world where “work” was optional; there simply wouldn’t be enough jobs to keep the population employed. People would “work” because they loved it. People choosing not to work would be paid a (decent) basic income.
The automation has arrived. Employment opportunities have diminished, as I expected. But the monstering of people who don’t work has just increased. I’m terribly disappointed. I guess I was naive.
“From renting being a reasonable option for a large segment, “
Apart from council tenants it was a very small segment, privately rented accommodation being very thin on the ground indeed, which is what you get if you tip the rental market in favour of tenants, very few landlords. That was, AFAICS, a feature of the rent acts, not a bug. The idea was that, if you wanted to rent, you rented off the state. Most of the problems of the rental market today date from Thatcher selling off the council houses.
Yes. I worked as a bus conductor for London Transport in 1979-1981 and I can vouch that somebody so employed could easily get and pay off the mortgage on a modest house in London at that time; indeed, many of my workmates were doing so.
My parents were lecturing at a local college 1979-81 (longer); we never had any money and it was always a struggle to pay the 14% interest mortgage and buy food. My dad was taxed what my mum earned so they both worked 40 plus hours a week, including three evenings and most of the weekend for one wage. Neither had been able to stay on at school and went to Night School or the mature student route whilst working full time and in my Mum’s case also looking after young children at the same time.
I couldn’t get a grant after my A-levels from the same council authority who paid their FE wages.
It put me five years behind my peers and in the long run never I had a home or family or secure paid work that even my parents took for granted.
Incidently many women never have occupational pensions so many pensions funds (RE: talking about fossil fuel investors) are set up for, and benefit, mainly men.
I heard no outcry in the late 90s when hundreds of thousands of lecturing posts were taken away from my generation, and all the other graduate jobs.
The young graduates who work today . . . making coffees haven’t access to Unionisation because they work in the gig economy.
In my time the employers from Middle Class backgrounds expected people in their 20s to work for free . . . which helped the employers pay for their New Town houses. They had no intention of taking the free labour on permanently on a paid salary; instead they found the next hopeful. Big companies do this now on a huge scale under the guise of Internships.
Whole generations are laid waste here despite it not being a military battlefield. All their effort goes to the 1%.
If some graduates were able to leave the UK in the 1980s the current brain drain is the dumbing down of society and the control in Universities now that limits educating for the expansion of knowledge and the limiting of opportunity afterwards.
Social mobility has been backwards, especially in Scotland.
Thank you. A great read.
I suggest we start getting to practicalities.
I guess we could start with “can’t pay, won’t pay’.
It got the anti poll tax campaign revolutionary. Started in Scotland as I understand.
We can move to a organised ‘spoilt vote’ , ‘none of the above’ in the next elections. We really could.
If they don’t listen. We could get a bit miffed.
That would worry the Power.
They don’t like it up ‘em.
I believe John Cleese has written on it recently.
I know. But. Some clowns are actually serious jesters.
John Cleese is saying don’t vote for any of them? I thought he was a card carrying Liberal Democrat.
No he is not saying that, he has humorously stated stereotypes in context of the current geopolitics. All I say is that it was funny
I’m saying voting and democracy if it ever existed legitimately can only be saved by Spoilt Ballots – not by apathy. Otherwise the Fascists have won.
Spoiling your ballot in a fascist election is worse than abstaining, which shows the value of your vote. Go bowling instead.
Finals day today, plenty of trophies with my name potentially on them – wish me luck?
No, conforming at all is a dead end. Given that both property parties rely on a fascist electoral system, they won’t give a tuppenny damn about spoilt ballots. Go bowling.
Confirming is one of their words. Just like conspiracy theory.
It’s bs and I say anyone saying not to use the system against itself is helping the system.
Slaves have to rise. Even if it means believing the gospel. But making freedom songs out of it. We must use the system against itself. That’s judo.
? fair enough. I have tried to do better with a new post on the updated article. All best.
Of course “Well analyzed and well spoken” would be a bland cliché, because the need to see it written down cannot be overestimated.
Here in Holland, the latest thing is, that even IN parliament, the Minister of Agriculture has FEELINGS first and foremost, and POLICIES secondarily.
So are we to now anticipate a sex scandal involving Mick Lynch?
Maybe he’ll ‘fall’ out of a window.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-62750584
Russia’s elites are thousands of miles away. Are you okay?
Here in the West people “commit suicide”. Do try to keep up.
Meanwhile Ukrainians just send in thugs to shoot dead “traitor” (according to the Sun or something similar, I believe) Ukrainian MPs who disapprove of the regime’s policies (not the ones Zelensky was elected on, but the ones he has actually implemented). And Western media are okay with that.
A sax scandal involving Jazz? ;O)
The people who really control things in the “West” deliberately create a false dichotomy with “left” and “right” political labels.
George Carlin nailed it back in 2010.
Transcript:
“Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice . . . you don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own, and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear.
They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying . . . lobbying, to get what they want . . . Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I’ll tell you what they don’t want . . . they don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that . . . that doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests. That’s right.
They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table and think about how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fuckin’ years ago. They don’t want that.
You know what they want? They want obedient workers . . . Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork. And just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it, and now they’re coming for your Social Security money. They want your fuckin’ retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street, and you know something? They’ll get it . . . they’ll get it all from you sooner or later, cause they own this fuckin’ place.
It’s a big club and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in The Big Club.
By the way, it’s the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head with their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy.
The table has tilted folks. The game is rigged and nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. Good honest hard-working people . . . white collar, blue collar it doesn’t matter what color shirt you have on. Good honest hard-working people continue, these are people of modest means . . . continue to elect these rich cocksuckers who don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t give a fuck about you . . . they don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t care about you at all . . . at all . . . at all.
And nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. That’s what the owners count on. The fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue dick that’s being jammed up their assholes everyday, because the owners of this country know the truth: it’s called the American Dream cause you have to be asleep to believe it . . .”
Deep bow to Mod for creative editing of this post. Thanks!
Carlin’s analysis is even more impressive, coming as it did before the Great Financial Fraud of 2008!
J:
“George Carlin nailed it back in 2010. “
Even more impressive still, considering he died two years earlier!
Hmm..yer not wrong…interesting he popped his clogs the same year as the Big Club perpetrated the aforementioned Fraud
“Democracy has ceased to present any effective choice that offers any hope of real change.”
This is the most worrying part of the article. Millions feel this way, they are utterly disillusioned with “Western democracy” which has nourished the 1%. I am pretty much a Marxist, and (or “but”) I also believe in democracy. There has to be a way of combining both, that is the challenge. I still believe that it was the DESIRE for this that led the millions to vote for Brexit – they wanted more participatory democracy and control of the means of production (the voters, not the cynical manipulators who ran the Brexit campaign).
We are not a democracy but an oligarchy. As Aristotle pointed out long ago, it is mistaken to identify democracy as the rule of the majority and its opposite oligarchy as the rule of the few; rather democracy is the rule of those without resources, its opposite is oligarchy, the rule not of the few but of the rich , who are few. The mark of a democracy is selection by lot, the mark of an oligarchy is election by ballot which the rich will normally win thanks to their superior wealth and education.
I have been thinking about something that Francis Lee wrote recently in a Saker article where he suggests that the idea of “knowledge is power” is a myth and the reality is that they who control the means of the production of knowledge, the corporate media, have abused their power by creating layers of virtual reality, phantasies in other words, which delude us ordinary people into accepting them as objective truth.
The implication is that no-one should ever accept at face value what anyone is telling them, whether corporate media, social media, independent media, bloggers, vloggers or people who make comments, without working out on the balance of probabilities what they are being told is true.
For example, Sadowitz rather then pre-empting the “truth” about Savile could simply be thought of as associating two rumours inflated by the media circulating at the time. “Cleveland” was the product of the phantasies of two doctors who used spurious clinical methods akin to witch floating to “prove” that children were being sexually abused mainly by their parents, who suffered tremendously from these false allegations. Savile was never charged with anything and was demonised only after his death. his demonisation helped by a journalist biographer who cut his teeth on writing for sexy magazines, methodologically flawed inquiries, and of course the media in general.
All the stuff of phantasy to “manufacture consent”.
However just today we have a different version of reality coming from “the other side”, which my confirmation bias would love to accept as true. This is the idea that Boris Johnson masterminded with the help of MI6 the failed Ukrainian assault on the Zaporozhe NPP so that if successful he could somehow declare a war-time emergency here and justify clinging on to his premiership.
Now who could ever believe that?
Well, Saville certainly wasn’t tried in a court of law. Any “investigation” after the fact was at best slip-shod.
Lobster Magazine: Anna Raccoon and the Dawn of Savlisation, by Andrew Rosthorn
Actually Police enquiries focused on young girls that had documented contact with Saville at the Duncroft Approved School, established that Saville was a “creep” but beyond that did nothing actually illegal.
The Public Enquiry was an invitation for every fantasist out there to step forward and receive approval from the establishment. Every accusation was accepted as accurate without any forensic examination of the time and place of the accusation against the known whereabouts (where this could be established) of Saville. The accusers ran zero risk unlike Carl Beech who was eventually hung by his web of malicious fantasy and lies.
Did you see the Netflix documentary? Girls from the Duncroft school said they gave him blowjobs when he took them out in the car. I think that’s illegal (they were well underage at the time).
Difficult to conceive that a close friend of our royal family could have been a prolific paedophile.
I presume that was sarcastic Jay?
I don’t have access to Netflix.
Were the witnesses featured, inmates of Duncroft from the mid-60’s or mid-70’s? The distinction is important if you read the attached article.
I can’t critique a documentary I haven’t seen, but Netflix is a commercial enterprise providing entertainment. In terms of provenance they have a vested interest in a sensationalist narrative.
Any commercial incentive for Dr Smith (now Prof Smith of your old alma mater) and Dr Burnett is less easy to project. Generating the 2018 paper for the International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy could have led to public approbrium for defending “the most prolific paedophile the country has ever seen” ©️every msm outlet. Then again, perhaps they courted controversy?
Vivian.
Yes Savile was well protect from on high, and his Friday Morning Club was also attended by many police officers; Savile certainly knew where the bodies were buried. I’m surprised he wasn’t Epstein-ed at one point; possibly not, due to his strong connections to the royals.
https://www.leeds-live.co.uk/news/celebs-tv/jimmy-saviles-friday-morning-club-23628420
Dear Craig ,
Thankyou very much, for this, it is a great article and (despite the barrage of comments below), I saw some constructive hope in it.
You also write in such a way as to assume that the reader is intelligent enough to make up their own minds / take what resonates with their experience, without being hung up on the source that prompted the reflection.
Especially as intelligent constructive conversations about where we are at the moment are not always to hand for some people, others seem to take them for granted.
Any conversation in person is a rarity for many in these times. Let alone something thought-provoking.
Also greatful for the inclusion of the interviews as it is increasingly hard to find such content on the net.
Particularly without signing in to youchoobe.
So I find the many hair-splitting commentators below quite petty in light of nuclear clouds threatening again.
Hope you are hail and hearty.
All the Best