What this crystallised for me is how much a particular body of ideology critique, which includes Ash, goes completely wrong by posing the initial question: The working class are a majority, so why don’t we have socialism? The answer is always “ideology” of some sort. What if the working class *proper* aren’t a majority though (as Marx, Lenin, Gramsci… all take as their starting point)? What if politics is about strategic capacities to act against capitalism not numbers? What would our analysis look like then?

The frustrating thing here - & what’s destructive of serious discussion - is the lack of clarity with “the left” or “we”, & it’s that that leads to this limiting of horizons & reactionary conformism.

https://twitter.com/sunraysunray/status/1866962329562456158

What we should do if we had the leadership of the Democrats or Labour in order to win an election - which is essentially the question being posed here (and answered wrongly but plausibly) - is a very different question from what can be done in this situation here & now.

The set up opposition here feels very off: the choice isn’t between mockery (& I’ve seen very little of that, though it would be a very understandable human response) & building a coalition that includes “Israelis”.

https://twitter.com/rivkahbrown/status/1848732969302716779

The choice is between clinging to an absolute fantasy “subjectively” (let’s look at what the average “Israeli” wants) & “objectively” (every settler colonist has an interest in the perpetuation of the settler colony) or a commitment to a national liberation struggle.

This is analytically stupid &, far worse, strategically disempowering.

https://twitter.com/philipproudfoot/status/1824048031760601326

Strategically disempowering: it removes us from anti-fascist struggle. The question becomes entirely about Starmer’s policies and their (automatic) effect - we can’t shape either so instead of anti-fascist tasks derived from the conjuncture, told you so passivity.

Been thinking about the dynamics in our conjuncture of the breakdown of the cordon between what Hall calls “respectable” & “rough” far-right. And here Murray voices entirely “rough” sentiments. A key aspect in respectsbilisation is support for “Israel’s” genocide of Palestinians.

https://twitter.com/jdportes/status/1821802620782068129

Murray has been (further) radicalised, or perhaps, what he’s “allowed” to say and still remain “respectable” has become more & more extreme - and a major part of that is that enthusiastic support of a genocide on contemporary fascist terms is deeply “respectable”.

I think there’s quite a danger on the left of saying the racist riots are people with legitimate economic concerns but these concerns are displaced onto something illegitimate and find a racist expression. There’s a theoretical problem: His Majesty the Economy is decisively operative. All the (apparent) Marxist guarantees are working. No need to really think race because that’s epiphenomenal to the real problem.

I'm more & more interested in how many reactionary ideological texts run on a slippage of meanings constituted by an absolutely classically Sartrean bad faith - & how this generates further bad faith ideological texts. Great example here, where the bad faith of Pidcock's tweet then generates the bad faith of "controversial" here. Everyone knows that Pidcock wasn't effectively saying what she literally said. Words have connotations, exist in a contextual field.

https://twitter.com/MrBenSellers/status/1681259313216598016?t=zqWg6CX-HV9t8yc1-cLY3A&s=19

This is an absolute fantasy from Mason, there aren't tens of thousands of left members, activists and trade unionists who think it is at all plausible that Starmer will live up to leadership pledges. Starmer has chosen a right-wing course and that isn't going catastrophically. Telling here too that while Mason's attacking OJ, OJ was pushing this unity around policy, live up to the ten pledges line far, far longer than was plausible, but the situation has led to even him abandoning it, leaving Mason utterly alone in this fantasy position.

I’m really excited about this edition, hopefully we’ll be able to challenge a lot of the shite that gets talked about in discussions of class in Britain - including on the left, please take a look & consider pitching if you have ideas or experiences.

https://twitter.com/newsocialistuk/status/1523965257559023616

Also, there are lots of books that really deserve attention & exploration - we’re very interested in reviews (& if there are other books you’d like to review, get in touch too).

The sadism towards Corbyn ought to be remarkable. They could have let him go back to being a very good constituency Labour MP making himself useful to people in Islington North and a moral voice for peace who they’d largely ignore. But no... It would be very, very good for the left to move on from Corbyn, to move on from arguing with dishonest & stupid people being dishonest & stupid for attention, but duties of solidarity mean it is necessary to attempt to defend him.

“There is no equivalence between the indiscriminate actions of Hamas and the targeted military response by a democratic ally with the right to self-defence.” Beneath contempt.

https://twitter.com/_LFI/status/1394725276274372613

There’s also something interesting in the “moral imperialism” of it, presuming Britain has any role whatsoever in making “efforts for peace”. There’s no neutral role for Britain, only getting out of the situation - by not selling arms to Israel and putting pressure on “our ally”

I’ve been thinking around the politics of knowledge around the various “lol people expressing opinions about Palestine without being able to answer my quiz” & there’s a risk of conflating popular capacities to grasp situations & affirming everything said on “our side” is good. It’s true that people, with an interest, often rooted in solidarity or being directly affected, can learn - and also true that official channels of learning (media almost entirely, academia to a significant extent) block learning, knowledge acquired here is not necessarily useful

What if capitalism can, in certain ways, resolve the crisis of climate change to allow its continued reproduction & the maintenance of a fairly similar standard living in the Global North? This had never struck me as impossible. Forced suppression of consumption by the global poor + geoengineering to keep to 2 degrees + adaptation in much of the Global North + radically intensified border regimes because even 2 degrees means huge, huge numbers of climate refugees.

Under Corbyn Labour talked endlessly about jobs & houses, and buses, and bills, and the frustrations of work, about all these very immediate, material things. Corbyn, shamefully, barely talked about trans rights.

https://twitter.com/JamesManuell/status/1278630784174350336

Has Starmer talked about housing? There was that pandering to landlords but otherwise??? And just saying repeating jobs six times isn’t actually a plan for jobs.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the fash protestors & their “anger & anxiety but at the wrong targets, the left needs to show them the right targets” type line & how wrong: formalistic & dangerous it is. Why formalise anger like this? A political ontology (a Schmittian position) whereby the apparent grasping that politics is antagonistic is good whatever the content of that antagonism is & the content, the poles of the polarisation can be transformed leftwards in easily enough.

Under Starmer, I think the left need to: 1. Stay in the Party, exercise power constructively & creatively where we can. 2. #keepitfrosty - there’s very little to be gained by wrecking & obsessing over the leadership. If it goes badly, they can own it, if it goes well, great. 3. Refocus, build community power, do mutual aid even beyond Coronavirus, the Labour Party as an electiralist project is not ours for now, as a basis for connection & activity it still can be and it’s still where that power is most cohered.

I think on the level of Parliamentary manoeuvres Labour's line on Brexit has broadly been sound or at worst the least bad of a bad set of choices. But there's been a total failure of communication & conceptualisation with regard to what's external to Parliament, instead that communication has mostly been explaining the strategy from a parliamentarian point of view.

Clownish authento bullshit, I organised extensively and successfully against bad pay and zero hours contracts including with Czech, Polish and Spanish comrades. We organised together and won because workers fractured on "nationality" are weak.

https://twitter.com/EddieDempsey/status/1065233167852937216

It's a weird take: capital hates borders, capital's extremely powerful, you know, and yet, and yet, there are huge restrictions on the movement of people. How does that work? The EU's a bosses' club and it has hard, murderous external borders.