Thread by @robn1980

#GE2019 [A cathartic thread]

Gramsci wrote that "the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear." He described perfectly the current political zeitgeist.

What we are seeing across the Western world today are political earthquakes at the epicentre of which is the 'digital revolution'. The dawn of the internet, and latterly social media, has empowered people all across the world to connect and organise:

from the Arab Spring to the Gilets Jaunes, from Hong Kong to Chile, mass movements have risen in revolt at the prevailing orthodoxy. The free access to information on the internet has dramatically reduced the efficacy with which the 'mainstream' media can control the public mind.

And people everywhere are finally realising that these gatekeepers are not so much attack dogs restraining power but rather lap dogs in the service of state power and elite interests.

People in increasingly large numbers are peering behind the curtain and seeing the stage-hands that have been controlling our so-called democracy.

But the new world, in which real democracy flourishes and we move to an economic system predicated on sustaining life as opposed to one that obliterates it, cannot yet be born.

We are in the interregnum where the old world of billionaire newspaper proprietors and state-mandated broadcast media still hold sway amongst significant enough numbers of people.  And that is where we currently find ourselves in the midst of this general election.

The British press is engaged in a form of psychological warfare against the British public.  In our archaic and fundamentally undemocratic electoral system, there are effectively only two people who can become Prime Minister on Friday morning:

one of them is an Old Etonian, Bullingdon-bully with a history of making nakedly racist, sexist, homophobic and xenophobic remarks and who is the living embodiment of elitist privilege;

a man only to happy to send other people's children to be killed in wars waged on behalf of the big corporate interests who profit from them and a man who sees genocide as a real estate opportunity.

A man who believes working class people are layabouts and who considers a secondary income of £250,00pa "chicken feed". A man who has such lust for power and high office that he will literally say, or do, anything if the price is right.  A man of the old, dying world.

And then there's a man with conviction - a man who believes in everything he says with unwavering fortitude.

A man who has spent his entire life opposing the bloodlust of Britain's warmongering elites and who has stood shoulder-to-shoulder with oppressed peoples throughout the world - irrespective of whether it made him popular politically;

a man who has railed against the establishment and opposed policies injurious to his constituents regardless of whether it was his own party implementing them; a man who refuses to engage in ad hominem attacks and identity politics and instead focuses on issues;

a man who in his spare time makes jam, tends to vegetables on his allotment and visits homeless people on Christmas Day.

And guess which one of these two men the British press, in its obsession with personality politics and utter commitment to destroying anything remotely resembling social democracy, has worked overtime trying to portray as a menace to society?

But politics is not about personalities.  It is about issues and it is about compromise.  The media and political establishment understand that the public is a threat that must be countered.  That is why general election cycles have become pantomime -

those who wield power aim to keep the public distracted; they do not want an engaged electorate making rational, informed decisions.  They want a disengaged electorate making irrational, uninformed decisions, often against their own interests.

This is how the Tories maintain a stranglehold on British politics and why so much of policy-making is at odds with the expressed wishes of the electorate.

There is a clear choice to be made in this election. Vote Tory and prop up the old, dying world with a party that believes the road to serfdom can be circumnavigated by filling in a few potholes and by making hospital parking free - for those visiting terminally ill patients;

or vote for the party most likely to beat the Tory standing in your constituency and allow a new world to be born:

a world in which the gross economic disparity at home is somewhat re-balanced and a world in which foreign policy is based on mutual co-operation and diplomacy rather than economic imperialism and military aggression. Everything else is just noise.

"Emancipate yourself from mental slavery
None but ourselves can free our minds." Bob Marley