Tag: left wing

Where Did We Go Wrong?

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Is it possible to talk about anything else right now? Covid-19…Palestine…god forbid people remember Brexit is just around the corner…the spectre of climate change looming around the other. Our newsfeeds have been taken over by the finals of some political sports tournament which has forgotten to include a referee in the rules. The people have been given the honour apparently but we all know the fallacy behind that. It’s ticking along though. Georgia has just swung for Sleepy Joe, others will likely follow. This was always going to happen as the Democratic heavy postal vote count was done. It feeds into The Donald’s narrative but nobody except his support take that or him seriously. Unfortunately his support is seventy million people but lets not think about that. Actually we probably should.

It’s good to start on the point that even though Biden is on something like seventy-three million it doesn’t mean the country is split fifty – fifty. It’s not even my country but it has such a reaching influence we treat it as such in these moments. Of course not everyone with a political opinion votes and voter suppression is very real. Trump himself has been quoted as saying that if the entire country voted it would likely be the end of the Republican party. That doesn’t say much for conservative values, in fact it suggests these values are held by an active minority. The same accusation applies to the UK as we endure our own version of Trump with our departure from the EU. An unknown future of extreme neoliberalism, not that the EU isn’t neoliberal because it very much is, and tax haven UK. Not paying taxes sounds great until public services become underfunded and it’s never the lower or middle earners who ever really benefit from tax cuts.

But seventy million people believe he has done well. That is serious. To break it down some will just not like Biden, some the Democrats, a large number who have simply voted Republican for generations, some through economic hardship are desperate and of course those who see The Donald as some cult like demi-god. Regardless of their reasons, they’re still willing to vote for someone who is perplexing in his corrupt self-serving lies. I don’t think highly of centrist politics, of Democrats like Biden or Clinton, but Trump? How do you get in the head of people willing to support him to understand where the left have gone wrong. Because ultimately it comes down to that. Biden scraping over the line against someone like Trump isn’t a success, it should be the bare minimum. Has it got so bad we’re willing to celebrate the bare minimum as some kind of great success. Is that all we have left?

In the UK working class Labour heartlands are switching to a Conservative party that will only ever look after it’s own. Where have the left gone wrong, because they have. We have Trump and Brexit as proof of that. Yes the media are corrupt and capable of manipulating, think Sanders and Corbyn, and while they have the money to get their message further, maybe we just need a better and new message to counteract that. Something is not working. We need to find out what this is otherwise it will just repeat itself, or likely next time be far worse.

An Ideological Art Attack

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Starline Social Club in Oakland has gone up for sale. I have never been to this venue, and likely won’t ever set foot in Oakland let alone this club. I only know it is up for sale because it’s sale was shared by a friend of mine on Facebook. Why this is worth mentioning is because it is yet another venue in the long list of such places that have already closed and others that will. Pubs are struggling but can invariably stay open. Numerous clubs, live music venues, theatres to name but a few examples are likely to go bust if this continues much longer. People’s safety must come first of course and a solution without some kind of financial assistance is far from clear. What the arts do need though is some kind of support.

Rishi Sunak the British Chancellor recently suggested that artists and musicians who couldn’t find work should retrain. There wasn’t any suggestion that they should be supported through this crisis, they should simply become something else. Here he is below doing his best impression of Will from The Inbetweeners.

He may as well have just uttered the ‘get a real job’ statement because clearly he was thinking it. Who needs artists when they can design images for adverts or musicians when they can be creating songs for adverts or playwrights when they could be writing scripts for adverts. How is capitalism going to function successfully if people refuse to exploit others.

More concerning is how this is playing out in the culture wars. I read recently that while the right won the economic war, the left won the culture wars but clearly both are still being doggedly fought. It is telling though that if you were going on probable likelihoods, the arts would predominantly be a theatre for left wing ideals. Are we seeing right wing governments in both Britain and the US intentionally allowing the music and arts scenes to go bust. Is this lack of support and funding simply an ideological attack? It doesn’t need too much of an imagination to make that leap. How better to attack your opponents by watching them struggle, hindering their chances of attacking you in the future.

There is one thing they seem to miss though. You can lose clubs, theatres and art venues but people will always be able to find a way to express themselves. If you try to take away their means of doing so they will simply come up with other ways. They are creative, they will be creative. And most importantly by attacking this scene they are simply entrenching anti-Conservative or anti-right wing capitalist ideals for at least another generation. People don’t forget. If pain brings out the creative, the grassroot streets are going to become a scene of colour before too long.

Politics In A Mad World

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Let’s be honest I’ve ballsed up again. Fresh from a lovely nap I picked up my phone and discovered the world is falling apart. The Tories have refused to take the NHS off the negotiating table in the trade deal with the US, despite categorically insisting it wasn’t for sale during the election. Current Labour leader Keir Starmer’s party have paid out a load of money to his cronies / whistleblowers who were part of the Panorama documentary that tried to further paint the anti-racist, anti-apartheid, and pro-Palestinian campaigning former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn as a racist anti-semite. Machiavelli would be proud. There are even rumours Starmer is going to withdraw the Labour whip from Corbyn and kick him out of the party. This would be remarkable. It would also be the final nail in the coffin for the Labour party and any pretence of a socially conscious respectability. To think they were once the party of the people. Starmer was supported by the media and put in place with one express purpose, to be nothing like Corbyn and he’s doing a fine job, not just in the ways he thinks or hopes.

The fear is that the world is falling apart. The reality is that I really don’t know whether it has always been this bad and we’re just getting more coverage of things if we take time to read independent media. I’m just bemused at how people don’t recognise how self-serving our politicians are. Or they do but see it as part of the job. Perhaps they think most are but not the few they support. That could describe my support for Corbyn and few else of course but the evidence really does suggest otherwise. I look at Boris and wonder how anyone could think he possibly stands for them but if they stand for leaving the European Union, closer ties to America, privatisation and the eradication of the welfare state then he does stand for them. As my friend, who doesn’t like Corbyn, said at the last election, “If I didn’t give a shit about anyone other than myself and my immediate family I would vote Conservative for the benefits it would bring me economically”. I paraphrase slightly but that was the gist. It is very easy to be self-righteous and left wing but that’s simply because the other side make it so easy and hard not to be. It’s just concerning that so many people seem to follow the King Turkey when Christmas is on the agenda. I’m confused because I don’t see why people think like this, the only thing that makes sense is that people genuinely believe they can rise up a ladder and claim some of these promised benefits for themselves. They just don’t notice the big glass ceiling let alone any of the other glass ceilings in between. At least Boris has left them a big sack of fools gold on the bottom rung for them to squabble and be divided over.

BR#9 – Accidental Death Of An Anarchist

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Another new playwright has crossed my path. Dario Fo wrote Accidental Death Of An Anarchist in response to the 1969 death of an anarchist in police custody Milan. He had been accused of the bombing of the Agricultural Bank which had resulted in the deaths of sixteen people. While in custody he, according to the official account at the time, committed suicide by jumping out of the window on the fourth floor of the police headquarters. Ten years later three fascists were convicted of the crime, some of whom were agents of the secret police, and in court proceedings it was determined that the major actors behind the bombing had been senior ministers and Generals who were condemned before being acquitted. The state once more protected it’s own while allowing those at the bottom who actually committed the act itself to go down for it. The play was written prior to this final outcome and was partly in response to a dearth of reporting from both sides of the political spectrum, the right-wing for obvious reasons and the Communists because they’re little more than power hungry political stooges themselves.

The play is set one week after the event and Fo uses the character titled Maniac to highlight the ridiculous nature of the police account of events, their incompetence and as a vehicle to get his political message across. I’m sure there’s a name for this type of character in a play but I forget what I learnt in school. While serious and dry approaches to storytelling always have their place, there is a particular way satire manages to express an idea and create an understanding in the audience. It is more accessible, despite it being on a serious topic comedy allows people to take it in without feeling they need to immediately react in a serious manner. Fo does this expertly and through his use of the Maniac manages to create a situation in which the police expose their own corruption and the left wing reporter her own hypocrisy.

To quote the Maniac in one of his more lucid moments;

“Why not ask yourself, Miss Feletti, what sort of democracy requires the services of dogs such as these? I’ll tell you. Bourgeois democracy which wears a thin skin of human rights to keep out the cold, but when things hot up, when the rotten plots of the ruling class fail to silence ours demands, when they have put the population on the dole queue and squeezed the other half dry with wage cuts to keep themselves in profit, when they have run out of promises, and you reformists have failed to keep the masses in order for them; well then they shed their skins and dump you, as they did in Chile*, and set their wildest dogs loose on us all”

*While events in Chile happened after the original was written, the text I read from was translated and adapted in the 1980s hence the reference.

The Right Attack

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In an entirely predictable move the civil war in the Labour Party reared it’s ugly head once more. Rebecca Long-Bailey the Shadow Education Secretary was sacked from her position today by the Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer after she retweeted an article which suggested the Minneapolis police had learnt the method of kneeling on someones neck to subdue them, from seminars in Israel by the the Israeli Defence Force (IDF). This was not the entirety of the article but was a point made within it. This reignited the anti-semitism debate within the Labour Party and Sir Keir was quick to show he wasn’t like the previous Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn who the British Press spent years smearing as anti-semitic. This being Jeremy Corbyn the anti-racism and anti-anythingthatdiscriminatedagainstanyone campaigner. Rebecca Long-Bailey was the main challenger to Starmer in the leadership race and represented the left wing of the party. Her position on the Shadow Cabinet no doubt being an attempt to placate those who didn’t support him and an attempt to present himself as a unifying force. Her sacking was always only ever going to be a matter of time.

It is impossible to cover everything in the space of five hundred words. This is an enormous issue. Sir Keir represents the right of the Labour party, or as is more apt the Tory-lite element. He has barely challenged the government on their negligent attempt at doing anything worthwhile in the fight against the coronavirus. The press now all of a sudden seem to have no problem at all with the Labour party after being positively terrified of them for the last few years. The Board of Deputies of British Jews who are a right wing group with connections to the Conservative party and who the British press decided represent the whole of British Judaism have decided they like him. Perhaps his politics is not that far from theirs? And not to mention the fact that they managed to get the definition of anti-semitism rewritten to include criticism of Israel. Which is ultimately all she did. I don’t know whether the Israelis trained the Minneapolis police but it doesn’t matter. The story can be factually inaccurate but she’s not been sacked for that. Various far right groups may use criticism of Israel as a thinly veiled excuse to attack the Jewish people but it’s pretty obvious when that is happening. This was not that. This was the silencing of any criticism of the Israeli State, and the culling of a political opponent in the process.

The problem with British politics is that it currently offers few differing options, the same as in America with the Democrats and Republicans. Ultimately they represent the same thing, as do the Tory Party, the Liberal Democrats and now Labour under Sir Keir. Whether you agreed with Corbyns politics, at least he offered a different approach and attempted to hold a corrupt government to account. That cannot and I doubt ever will be said of Starmer who is proving to be nothing more than another establishment stooge. I was devastated when Corbyn lost, like many were, but I won’t be voting for Labour at the next election. I most likely won’t be voting for anyone. You’re not voting for change when they’re all offering a continuation of the same thing, the very thing which is the actual problem in the first place. Today’s events merely underline this. It appears we’re back to the great fraud of Democracy.

The Gutter Of Moral Superiority

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There are times in life in which we must criticise our own side. For those who really see themselves as having a side this is a rare occasion but for those who cringe at the idea of picking a side to immortalise over others then this is probably just another day. I’m always somewhere in the middle and I don’t see why this would be any different. I call it the curse of seeing, although not necessarily agreeing with, both sides of the argument while others would suggest it is more about being indecisive when the opposite is required. In this instance I’ll just suggest I’ve seen something I find hypocritical.

I am referring to this article and this one too. In one the Independent newspaper talks about an advert from The Lincoln Project, a Republican group who have dedicated themselves to preventing the reelection of Donald Trump, which suggests he is ill and falling to pieces. The other article suggests similar and uses some quotes by a neurologist to suggest Trump has neurological problems. While both articles reference a few different things they both mainly use the example of his struggling to walk down some ramp at a military parade the other day. Now fair enough he did look like he was struggling a little, the man is seventy-four years old so it’s not impossible to imagine he’s not fit and healthy anymore but both articles are in my opinion lazy. I remember a few years ago when Donald Trump and Theresa May met for the first time, there were photos of them holding hands as they walked down some steps and it was explained that he had some disorder which made going down things difficult, that it was a balance thing hence the hand holding, and that this is something he had had for years. It was supposedly not serious but was explained non-the-less. I can’t help but feel his inability to walk down a ramp is related to this. If I know this of course then there’s no excuse for a political correspondent for a national newspaper not knowing it.

The reason I take issue with this is not because he is a defensible man in any way but because we on the anti-Trump and his ilk spectrum of society and politics scream foul of immoral, corrupt and lying elements on the other side of the fence. We behave outraged at the lies and the deceit, and justifiably so, see politics and society as being in the gutter. The right wing are in many ways hugely responsible for that but it’s very easy to look through our partisan eyes and not see the hypocrisy of our own actions and spokespeople. The reality in this situation is that with stories like this we are being played just as much as the supporters of Trump or Brexit that we decry as manipulated idiots. I want my people to be in the right to such an extent that they don’t need to lie or blur the facts of a story. If my people need to manipulate me to believe an argument then they’re not my people and it’s not my argument. I’m not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, I believe it’s okay to be human and fallible, but to manipulate people is different. I expect nothing less of those idiots I feel I’m fighting against but I’ll always come down harder on those professing moral superiority and failing to deliver. At that point we find ourselves in the very same gutter and we must always be better.

BR#6 – Red Rosa

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Dr Rosa Luxemburg, what a woman. She would have definitely put me in my place. I mentioned about a week ago about revolutionary left wing men in the first couple of decades of the twentieth century all looking like intellectual accountants, well this was her time, and these were her men. Rosa Luxemburg was of Jewish Polish decent but it was in Germany and the Revolutionary Socialist movement of the time in which she is most remembered. This was a remarkable time for change while also being a frustratingly impotent one too. It’s littered with the ‘what if’ moments that seem to be a constant in social movements, and which ultimately suggests they failed in their objective of removing the bourgeoisie from power and liberating the workers in the process. It is also important though to remember we’re not working fourteen hour days, for what it’s worth we have a vote and although it’s not perfect we do seem to have gained a certain degree of liberty and protection under the law. On the other hand that liberty and that protection can be taken away from us at any time, as the late great George Carlin said;

“Rights aren’t rights if someone can take them away. They’re privileges. That’s all we’ve ever had in this country, is a bill of temporary privileges“

But enough of that this is about Rosa Luxemburg and the graphic novel on her life I have just finished called Red Rosa. She was a fighter, and she had a profound understanding on the nature of capitalism, imperialism and power. She was a revolutionary but had she lived long enough would likely have been horrified by what unfolded in Russia in the name of communism and the people. She also challenged the ideas of Marx which was for many a major taboo, although others saw her as adding to and evolving his ideas. She spent virtually the entirety of the First World War in prison because of her anti-imperial beliefs and was murdered shortly afterwards as the new faux-socialist SPD Party, of whom she had once been a leading member, cemented it’s position in the new republic by removing those who challenged it’s power and tried to bring about any real change.

The graphic novel itself is aesthetically impressive, the images expressive and the ideas put forth insightful. This is not just a picture book but one telling the life of someone justifiably revered. Her beliefs and ideals are explained in an easily understandable way, as is a general explanation of anti-capitalism and social movements generally as well as in relation to modern times. I imagine it would probably be a great book for a teenage girl as it has the potential to be incredibly inspiring. As I don’t know any I’ll put it in my book stack and give it away when the moment comes. The graphic novel is an incredibly enjoyable format and this a powerful and important story to tell. Neither are let down here.

Generic Male Intelligentsia

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I’m reading a graphic novel on Rosa Luxemburg at the moment. I won’t go into it too much because I’m not finished and will write a piece on it when I do. There is just something worth mentioning now and it is the way Socialist intellectuals of that time look and are portrayed. There is a recurring theme in images and film that they all look a little like Lenin and Trotsky combined. For context Rosa Luxemburg lived at the beginning of the twentieth century and was deeply involved in the left wing intelligentsia of Germany and Poland. Possibly more places but I haven’t got there yet and my knowledge of her is not detailed enough yet to go out on a limb and make too many statements. Mixing in this world when it was really beginning to come to life with genuine importance she must have mixed with many ‘Lenotskys’ as I shall call them.

The look then is Lenin’s slightly round face, balding hair and goaty mixed with a little hair to signify Trotsky, similar facial hair and his glasses. Perhaps more of a Lenin but with glasses and a Trotsky air to him. That feels closer. Regardless there always seems to be this same character, it’s like the stock image graphic artists go for when they want to represent the archetype left wing intellectual. Of course this just could be how people looked at the time, and Lenin and Trotsky were merely fashionistas of the age, early twentieth century revolutionary hipsters if you like. The glasses would probably have been a style, the hair can’t be help and the goaty like the glasses could be a fashion. The soft accountant like look because they weren’t working men toiling in the field and under the sun. Maybe it’s not as straight forward as I’m trying to portray it.

One of the reasons I enjoy this image is that I have met a few people who looked arguably similar in features and style who also happened to be left-wing and saw themselves as intellectuals. Probably less Lenin but Trotsky has certainly captured the attention of those trying to style themselves on someone but that could just be because nobody wants to style themselves on a bald middle aged man. There’s definitely something less romantic about that than a revolutionary hero who died with an ice pick through his skull. It was a remarkable time in history, makes life seem rather mundane by comparison. Even if it did look like there were accountants everywhere.