This is the most hopeful, radical, practical and achievable programme for national economic transformation put forward by a major political party in a generation. #VoteLabour2019labour.org.uk/wp-content/upl…
The UK helped lead the way into the long nightmare of neoliberalism. Now we can help lead the way out.
“You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep Spring from coming” — Pablo Neruda
History says, don’t hope,
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime,
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.
So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
And cures and healing wells.
— Seamus Heaney, The Cure at Troy
• • •
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One of the most unforgivable things about Starmer and his Labour Right faction—and a big part of why we find ourselves where we are today with a despised government having boxed itself into a corner—is the stupidity of the conversation on the economy they’ve imposed on everybody.
Far too many people who should have known better went along with all that. Household budgets, maxed out credit cards, black holes, magic growth fairy and much more idiocy besides. At one point they even rhetorically abolished the notion of any conflict between capital and labour!
Well—to use their own stupid household analogy—those bills have now come due politically. And they have left themselves with literally no place to go. Their imminent collapse is borne of their own spectacular hubris and short-sightedness, a downfall entirely of their own making.
Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you.
One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order.
No explanations, no reviews, just covers.
Day One:
Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you.
One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order.
No explanations, no reviews, just covers.
Day Two:
Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you.
One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order.
No explanations, no reviews, just covers.
The Labour Right has misjudged the function of the right-wing media, which is to distract from any challenge to wealth and power. For a time they were united in destroying the Labour left. But now—material conditions remaining what they are—the focus will be Starmer’s government.
The assumption was that, so long as Starmerite policy doesn’t challenge vested interests, they would be allowed to continue as before. But in the absence of bread someone must be recruited into the circus, and now they’re it.
Of course, the fact that they are so venal and corrupt means that it’s like shooting fish in a barrel. After years of politics on easy mode, they are suddenly in the firing line. And the polls show how well they are handling it.
A thread with a few eve-of-poll thoughts about the politics of this British general election and where it is likely to leave those of us committed to transformative political-economic change both ideologically and as a practical necessity. 🧵👇🏼
So ends the most delusional general election campaign in modern British history.
The vote seems largely a foregone conclusion, with a collapsing Conservative Party barely capable of going through the motions, able to summon only enough energy to place a few insider bets on their own impending demise.
The idea that the problem with Starmer is insufficient ‘boldness,’ rather than that he has the wrong policies in the wrong interests, is a failure of analysis and understanding that will become apparent very quickly. His commitments aren’t right but insufficient, they are wrong!
Starmer’s positions are:
-Privatisation
-Financialisation
-Derisking
-Authoritarian policing
-Atlanticist foreign policy
-Austerity
-Trickle-down economics
-Growth
-Constitutional status quo/unionism
-British nationalism
-Purge the left
There is nothing in this programme that most of the Conservative Party of the past 14 years couldn’t agree with. The remarkable thing is selling it (again!) to most of the Labour Party.
We’re in a time of decay and slow-motion system collapse that looks something like crisis-punctuated stagnation. In the in-between times the ‘normal’ rules of neoliberalism apply—or are reapplied—like a force of gravity, a dead weight on the present that prevents new departures.
But periodic crisis interruptions force new interventions—bailouts, QE, furlough payments, etc.—that are outside the bounds of the ‘normal’ operations of the system, sudden lurches or interventions that then have to be closed down and the genie reinterred in the systemic bottle.
Needless to say, this is an unstable and unsustainable state. So while stagnation reigns, and political exits are blocked off as best can be managed by and within the system, a dynamic process of decay and dissolution is also at work.