Blogs to my mind allow for an interlude of ‘thinking out loud’, so it is perhaps not so surprising that the blog I intended to write when I turned on my laptop has already been superceded. The reason for this is sheer frustration at the level of ineptitude and, far more seriously, of corruption in and around what people see as our parliamentary democracy. May is surviving (just) for the sake of surviving, opportunistically as is the way of Tories, while the class interests she embraces and represents stand ready to switch allegiance if, or rather when, it becomes necessary. These ‘class interests’ will long outlast a peculiarly vacuous, robotic and ill-suited PM.
My contention here is that many people, and for a variety of reasons, are either innocent or, worse naïve, about politics and the structures our putative representatives in the Houses of Commons and Lords ‘surf’, often to their personal and/or collective advantage. One reason for this is the poverty of our fragmented education system, which leaves too many school-leavers ignorant of the social words they inhabit, and another is the increasingly crude propaganda now spewed out well beyond the shrinking readership of the tabloids. I have written a lot – in books, chapters and articles as well as blogs – about the structural and cultural changes that have occurred since the 1970s, and which are causally implicated in the assertions that follow, and I and will not repeat myself here.
I contend that the assertions made here possess an evidence base, sometimes historical and comparative rather than overtly sociological. That some will be irritated is entirely predictable and in itself affords them additional prima facie support. An hypothesis is that many people have a certain level of awareness that the assertions have substance, but: (a) are intimidated and baulk at what can easily be cast in the mainstream media as crazy hyperbole; (b) find the ideas and information difficult to process without cognitive dissonance; (c) surrender to passivity in the absence of alternate narratives; and (d) divert their minds and distract themselves in order to ‘get on with life’ (‘they’re all the same’, ‘it’s human nature’, ‘what can you do?’, ‘I don’t let it get me down’). Here we go.
• Capital accumulation on the part of the new transnational super-rich and their well remunerated facilitators in the Tory Party, together with a Tory-lite Blairite rump in the Labour Party, easily trumps all else.
• Policies are literally ‘bought’ by a hard core of capitalists from politicians of this ilk.
• The capitalists – largely transnational, post-national and nomadic rentiers, financiers, CEOs – don’t give a shit about the Daniel Blake’s of this world, let alone the 40% in developing countries who are neither producers nor consumers and therefore redundant (they would not be missed).
• The deals done by this select band of capitalists and elite politicians, amounting to well under 1% of the UK population, are strategic, clandestine and independent of issues of morality.
• Neoliberalism and the political device of ‘austerity’ have been, and still are, being deployed as an ideological warrant for an accelerated transfer of capital to the rich at the price of an enhanced exploitation of the middle- as well as working-class employed, as well as benefit cuts for vulnerable groups like the long-term sick and dis-abled.
• Another aspect of this transfer of capital, and an exemplar of ‘bought policy’, is the selling off of public assets to for-profit providers, notably in relation to the NHS and other ‘basic services’. The ‘revolving door’ means that many elite politicians who act as conduits are personally rewarded for their corrupt interventions.
• Hard-core capitalists, and the leading politicians only too comfortable in their pockets, afforded loyal support by the mainstream media, much of it owned by non-dom, non-tax paying proprieters, as well as by television channels, including the BBC, are neither accountable nor answerable to any democratic body.
• In this context racist ‘populist’ appeals – most conspicuously augmenting and playing on Islamaphobia – are a calculated political device.
• The well-documented political and media bias against Corbyn’s Labour , and the constant personal smears, are a function of the threat he is seen to present to vested capitalist and elite political interests, as well as – via his support of Palestinian rights – to the racialised domestic and militaristic foreign policies of Israel (the West’s geopolitical satellite in the Middle East).
• As the capitalist world order destabilizes, political repression, already being (mis)used under the rubric of anti-terrorist legislation to enhance the surveillance of ‘dissent’, is likely to be ramped up against oppositional politics of all kinds, even more so in the event of a ‘hard Brexit’.
• If Corbyn were to be elected PM there would be an immediate capital-led, transnational campaign to bring him down, initiatives beyond mere smears involving fabricated or ‘fake news’ disseminated by the mass media, and rapidly extending to ‘capital flight’ and concerted attacks on the economy and sterling.
• The only route to survival/durability in office for a ‘non-compromising’ or socialist Corbyn-led Labour government would involve an extension and mobilisation of an effective extra-parliamentary movement base emergent from, and consolidated out of, a deep crisis of public legitimacy confronting a split Tory Party.
I’m already thinking that I am pulling punches here. I recall the nascent plots against Harold Wilson, who was at the time and even subsequently accused of being paranoid.
But there are strong evidence-based lessons to be learned. Significant segments of populations can be fooled, and they are presently at risk of being so in England/UK. Moreover they are fooled in a carefully planned and strategic or amoral manner, and in ways that impact on bank balances. Follow the money. Proto-fascist initiatives are striking cords through Europe and elsewhere, and the dangerous half-wit Trump is President of the USA. UKIP or a sucessor could yet re-emerge. Hitler was democratically elected in the 1930s because he appeared to offer a (Weberian ‘charismatic’) exit route from economic crises and their psychosocial concomitants. I have no hesitation is asserting that the hard-core, transnational capitalists and those of the political elite under their (financial) sway would prefer a fascist regime functioning in their interests than a democratic option that threatened their accumulation of capital and/or cosy, ‘gated-community’ detachment from the travails affecting many of the 99%. In that event, repression amounting to armed ‘policing’ would logically follows: it’s what fascism is.
There are the less-than-1%, plus the allies they rely on, and there are the 99+%, a majority of whom are ‘little people’ who simply don’t matter, that is, except as producers and/or consumers, or unless enough of them come together to conjure up a crisis of legitimation for a Tory or other pro- capitalist -1% regime and support, fuel and sustain an oppositional movement for a radical social transformation.
This is manifestly not a call to be cynical. It is an invitation to look at the evidence and be realistic.