Eruditorum Press

The bodies on the gears of the culture industry

election

Shabcast 34 – The Election, Corbyn, the Tories, the DUP, and Grenfell Tower

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Shabcast 34 – download here.

The image across is by Steve Bell and was published in the Guardian.  I’ll take it down if they ask.  But it seemed too brilliantly, horribly perfect to abjure.

This month I’m joined by Kit and James, to talk about the election we had last week (surprise surprise) in which Jeremy Corbyn defied his critics to resurrect the fortunes of Labour and pummel the Tories into a very uncomfortable corner.  We also talk about the horrific Grenfell Tower fire, just had just happened when we sat down to record.

Please share around, tell your friends, etc.  I think we’re all proud of this one.

Credit where its due: this episode very much came about because Kit and James organised it, and James both edited the main body of the episode and supplied the wonderful title.  I’m not even in the episode for half an hour or so.

 

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Which?

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In response to watching the silly TV show Salem, I’ve been cursorily boning-up on the actual history of the Salem witch trials. 

The first three accused people were:

1. a black slave,

2. a beggar woman, and

3. a woman who married her former indentured servant, possibly for financial reasons.

It’s almost too perfect. 

A proto-capitalist, patriarchal, colonial society.  What do they fear?  Women who make independent sexual choices, or why try to control money.  The breaching of class boundaries.  The poor and dispossessed.  Black slaves.

The initial accusations were made by young women or girls who were thoroughly indoctrinated and submerged within the ideological thoughtworld of their high-status parents, and their society. 

They went for suspects they knew would be believable to others.  They went for the stigmatised and mistrusted.

What you have there is the refracted terror of the ruling class towards their own oppressed groups.…

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Yay for voting! Ain’t democracy just peaches!

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Off out to vote today on who runs the civil service… oh, no, hang about, we’re not allowed to do that are we?

Off out to vote today on who runs the police… oh, no, hang about, we’re not allowed to do that are we?

Off out to vote today on who runs the army… oh, no, hang about, we’re not allowed to do that are we?

Off out to vote today on who runs the corporations… oh, no, hang about, we’re not allowed to do that are we?

Off out to vote today on who owns and runs the media… oh, no, hang about, we’re not allowed to do that are we?

Off out to vote today on who runs the BBC… oh, no, hang about, we’re not allowed to do that are we?

Off out to vote today for a non neoliberal party with a chance of winning… oh, no, hang about, we’re not allowed to do that are we?
Off out to vote today for a big party staunchly opposed to imperialist warmongering… oh, no, hang about, there aren’t any are there?
Off out to vote today for a big party committed to saving us from environmental disaster… oh, no, hang about, there aren’t any are there?
Off out to vote today for someone who represents my relation to production… oh, no, hang about, we vote in geographical blocs, don’t we?
Off out to vote today on who runs the judiciary… oh, no, hang about, we’re not allowed to do that are we?
Off out to vote today on who owns most of the land and property in the UK… oh, no, hang about, we’re not allowed to do that are we?
Off out to vote today on who owns and runs the banks… oh, no, hang about, we’re not allowed to do that are we?
Off out to vote today on who gets to use economic clout to lobby politicians… oh, no, hang about, we’re not allowed to do that are we?
Yay, every four or five years I get to participate – very indirectly, if I’m lucky – in an electoral system rigged against the expression of unified working class interests! 
I get a tiny, very occasional say in choosing which team of essentially identical managers cares for neoliberalism under a vastly unaccountable government system hugely influenced by private interests!  
I get to slightly influence one lever of power, while almost every other lever of power in the system is nearly entirely undemocratic and unaccountable!  
This is what the Chartists fought and died for!  [It isn’t.]
Yay for democracy!
Remember, if you don’t vote, you’ve got no right to complain.


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Who’s Jack Voting For?

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Might as well put this up.

I consider it a moral obligation to vote against the current coalition, and to maximise any impact such a vote might have… which is why, despite the fact that I loathe and despise the Labour Party, I would vote Labour were I in a constituency where such a vote might conceivably contribute towards a Labour victory. 

As it happens, I live in a constituency that has been a solid Tory seat for generations.  Really, where I live they’d elect a dog turd if it had a blue rosette stuck on it.  In fact, when I look at the robotic, empty-headed drone and waste of clothes who currently ‘represents’ me in Parliament, I think they did.

The nearest possible challengers to the Tories in my constituency are the Yellow Tories, whom I am proud to say I have never voted for in my life, not even tactically, not even in 2010 when lots of ostensibly left-leaning useful idiots tried to bully me into voting LibDem, saying (ludicrously as I pointed out at the time – something which I have since very much enjoyed being proved right about) that doing so would block the Tories.

So I shall be free to vote some non-Labour, non-coalition option.  Green probably, since they’re usually the only thing on my ballot paper that looks even vaguely left-wing (despite my issues with their lack of connection to the working class or unions, and their record of selling out workers the moment they acquire even the sniff of power).

I would be perfectly within my moral rights to abstain from voting given this depressing scenario.  Even what I feel is my moral duty to vote anti-Coalition doesn’t fool me into thinking that my vote will mean anything.  Like millions of people who have been effectively disenfranchised by our rigged system and its varigated monopoly of neoliberal parties, I would be accused of ‘apathy’ by assorted finger-wagging smuggos if I abstained.  But abstention is a morally defencible option.  It just isn’t one I feel I can take at the moment.

So I shall hold my nose, vote Green (probably) and then go home and vigorously wash my hands in scalding hot water and bleach, feeling simultaneously dirty and relieved that I managed to do what I consider to be the least possible amount of evil.

Ain’t democracy inspiring?…

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Greece is the Word

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Yes, yes, Syriza is a bourgeois reformist party which has drifted to the right even in the last few years.  I know.  A Syriza victory will not bring full communism in Greece.  No, true.  A Syriza government will cave in and give up all over the place.  The way all bourgeois reformist parties always do, even quite Lefty ones.  Yes.  I know.

I knows and knows and knows. 

The point is that, as with all Left-wing reformist parties, it will be as strong or as weak as the movement among the working class.  It will be pushed to the Left by a genuine movement on the streets and in the workplaces.  Or to the Right by the absence of such a movement.

The anti-reformist gloom of writing off Syriza before it starts is, paradoxically, the gloom of the reformist.  It is the gloom of those who secretly expect (or want) elected governments to do it all for them.

A Syriza victory would create a space within Austerity neoliberalism for a challenge (however partial and bourgeois and reformist and imperfect) to the prevailing, even suffocating, orthodoxy.  The punishing flow of weath upwards may be slowed, just a bit, just for a change, somewhere.  And, with work and struggle, this could be exploited and built upon.  This would push the government further.  Which would expand the space for resistance, etc etc etc. 

Every victory – however partial – for the working class is to be chased and seized upon and celebrated (yes, critically celebrated, of course) because every victory for the working class, evey improvement in the position and confidence of the working class, strengthens the only force in the world that has the power, ultimately, to fundamentally change it for the better.

This isn’t a fully worked out theoretical position.  There are plenty of better places you can go for that. …

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X

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On the ballot paper in my region there are no less than five extremist Right-wing parties.  Six if you include the Conservatives.  Apart from that there are two centrist neoliberal parties: Labour and the Liberal Democrats.  I know a fair few very nice, likeable and principled Lib Dems (online and in real life), but as a national political force the party is part of a coalition with the Tories and, as such, constitutes a de facto Right-wing party.  So that’s seven Right-wing parties of various shades running from crypto-fascist to poujadist to centre-Right – none of which has any serious quarrel with the neoliberal consensus – and one centrist neoliberal party, Labour… which is now so degraded and debased that it seperates itself from the Tories and Lib Dems by a few whiskers.  Centrism has itself been shifted so far to the right that the modern Labour party is to the Right of the pre-Thatcher Tories on many issues.

That’s democracy for you.  That’s apparently the best we can do.  That’s the freedom I’m supposed to relish and celebrate.  What a barren wasteland of horror.  What a terrifying landscape of hatred, dishonesty, bigotry and unthinking compromise.  This is politics, supposedly.  This null, anhedonic, empty, contentless, vicious, small-minded, dead, echoing, dreamless nothingness of non-choice.  This is what the best of all possible worlds looks like.

But, I’m going to vote.  Not because I want to.  Not because I like any of the ‘options’.  I don’t want to.  I don’t like any of the ‘options’.  I consider the trip to the Polling Station to be a humiliating chore that will drain me of what self-esteem I have, that will degrade and compromise me, that will implicate me.  I feel physically sick at the prospect of ticking a box on that ballot paper.  I feel that I will be signing a contract with a panorama of bullies, agreeing to let them come and kick me in the balls any time they want, agreeing to thank them afterwards, agreeing to sit by and nod and share their guilt when they rob and exploit and lie and torture and kill.  But it has to be done.

I cannot not vote against such an artillery of closed-minded, spiteful, minority-hating, jumped-up, Little Englander swine.  I cannot not vote against the BNP and UKIP and the English Democrats, etc etc etc.  I don’t expect my vote against them will change anything.  Ultimately the only thing that will prevent these scum from wreaking any havoc they get a chance to wreak will be the mass mobilisation of activists against them, will be blockades and counter-demos that stop them marching, will be barricades that stop them getting into the BBC where the corporation is drooling to promote their agenda.  Ultimately, they will only be stopped when their empty heads are acquainted with pavements.  Roll on the day.  But, meanwhile, I have to vote against them.

I also cannot not vote against the current government, which is possibly the most evil and wantonly destructive in living memory, a wrecking ball being swung through the last ruins of the social-democratic consensus, through all human decency. …

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