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@thearcadian1
An Internet Socialist
Once upon a time you had to be in a union.
I’ve never belonged to one.
Never been on a picket line.
I’ve got songs on my itunes about The Red Flag.
When I buy my big house I will put up a beautifully framed, period socialist poster in the living room over the mantle. Maybe it will be something from Spain, with evocative faded colors. ¡No Pasarán! Sometimes my wife and I will have parties there where good champagne will be served.
Hello. I am an Internet Socialist.
I used to live in London but live in India now, where my artificially inflated standard of living affords me luxuries like going to the gym and eating healthily. I have a wardrobe of good clothes. I have air conditioning. I have a very nice bed.
I left the UK aged thirty four without even a sniff of a career but before that I had worked on lorries, in supermarkets, in bookshops, as a teacher, an office temp, a TV extra, a barman, a floor manager in a cinema. I have two degrees and a blog no one reads. I don’t particularly claim to be working class, though describing myself otherwise feels dishonest too.
My history is far more complicated than you might imagine.
Trumpesque
Give Trump his due, he's the only political figure currently extant who could father an adjective.
Trumpesque (trəmpɛsk) adj.
1) A living gargoyle.
2) To speak in such a manner that one is both consistently heard and consistently despised by all mankind.
A Metaphor
A: Look, look I have a thing.
B: Oooh that's great, well done.
A: I'm SPECIAL I'M SPECIAL I'M SPECIAL.
B: Um...
A: EVRYONE SAYS SO EVERYONE SAYS I'M SPECIAL.
B: Well...
A: I HAVE A THING SO I'M SPECIAL.
B: Ok then, you're special.
A: I want the MONEY now. I want ALL THE MONEY.
B: Well maybe not all the...
A: ALL THE MONEY. I'M SPECIAL. (holds breath until face turns red)
B: OK BREATHE....
A: ALL THE MONEY.
Hazarding an answer to this and other imponderables will lead you to a crisp and insightful summation of the nature of responsibility, justice and so forth.
Well?
Selling Horsemeat
In 2013 a scandal erupted in the UK concerning the beef supply chain being infiltrated with horse meat from European vendors. The concern was not over the safety of the meat, which was produced to the exact same standards as beef, but it's nature; 'we're eating horse' clamored the press. Householders were filmed chucking portions of ready made lasagna into the bin in disgust.
When one of the suppliers of the meat was eventually tracked down and doorstepped he was bluntly asked whether it was true he produced horse meat for sale. 'Yes of course' He replied 'That's my business. You should try it, it's delicious'. I made a mental note to try it if I was ever on the continent.
Horse meat is lean, healthy and tasty. We won't eat horse or many of the other animals we posses in large numbers and routinely kill in the UK because of sentiment and cultural association. Meanwhile the impact of intensive beef farming is becoming one of our deadliest environmental challenges. If we continue to eat meat at all, and I think we will, then our tastes will have to diversify and change. But we won't eat horse because we won't because we won't.
For thirty years whenever the Labour party has been accused by the right of socialist economics it has responded thus; 'no not really, we're sensible' and then repeats to it's members that the British won't vote socialist because they wont vote socialist because they wont. And the taboo builds up and up on the island and our environment deteriorates. Until now.
Écoute et répète:
Yes of course I am a socialist. It's my business.
You should try it.
It's delicious.
A Working Class Hero is Something to be.
Can I talk about reality for a moment?
Yesterday Neil Kinnock, king of low expectations, complained about ‘malign forces’ on the left who he fears will hijack Labours electability. His message to the people of Britain is much the same as they’ve become used to hearing for thirty odd years: be patient, be realistic.
Well let me tell you what realistic expectations for a working class person actually are.
Neighborhood neglect and generational pessimism reduce your horizons to basically nil. You learn to fit in and speak the lingo to survive. Don’t be noticeable, don’t be different, don’t trust, don’t hope, don’t expect justice. Get used to going without, get used to being ripped off, get used to fighting, get used to being treated with contempt.
'Shut up, we’re tired of hearing about it, that’s life, sod’s law innit, get used to it.'
Meritocricy is something people with an internet connection like to talk about. In the real world if you can make it through school you’re already in the elite. Sure you can fight it all; the low expectations, the shitty environment, the anger, the despair, the constant self-immolating mutiny of the streets, the cynicism, the bullying, the hatred, the grasping hands of the tribe who want you down there with them and don’t you dare fucking complain.
'Do you belong here? Do you really belong? Think fast and choose your answer carefully because we can tell. We can always, always tell.'
You can fight it all and spend your life fighting it. You can go to Uni, mortgage you future, live on your wits and get on the conveyor belt. You might make regional manager, do fifty years and retire.
Feel the meritocracy as it slams its fist into your windpipe and says; 'get on yer knees and say thank you, you fucking peasant and you may have your shitty fucking car.'
So Corbyn stands up in front of an auditorium and says ‘actually we could do things differently’ and the crowd erupts. Do me a favor and don’t tell me, or them, to be more realistic. I done thirty five years of being realistic and in the end I had to leave the sodding country to survive.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njG7p6CSbCU
Disowning Hitler (a brief rant in the informal mode)
Right. Let me kill this. The only people who should blithely accept that fascism was 'neither left nor right' are right wing patsies and libertarians. It was a right wing philosophy whose major thrust was killing the left off, entrenching the economic might of the petit-bourgeois and promulgating extreme conservative moral and social values.
Before I hear the usual internet comeback of 'mmnehhhh how come they called themselves the national SOCIALIST party then, fna fna hur hur *happily farts into seat cushion* ' Hitler and other fascist drones promulgated a hollowed out 'socialism' as a gambit to steal political oxygen from the actual left and as a largely successful entryist ploy to uproot left wing organizations, as with Hitler’s gutting of the Socialist German Workers Party to which he insidiously added the National. This nasty little rhetorical ploy has successfully muddied the waters for seventy odd years now, just as the cunning bastards intended.
This is what happened when they took power according to (politically conservative) historian Michael Burleigh:
'They purged Socialists from the police, schools and educational inspectorates and, in Thuringia, introduced an enabling law used to make cuts in the state bureaucracy'
Those who called themselves Socialist and understood what it meant, like Orwell who fought the fascists in Spain during the Spanish Civil War and then broadcast allied propaganda during WW2, opposed Fascism in all its forms and were either assassinated or silenced in Fascist countries and joined or supported the army in Allied countries.
Germany under fascism was a laissez-faire nightmare in which state control was (wait for it) deliberately minimized; a chaotic, crypto-Darwinian political free-for-all in which he who shouted loudest was likely to carry the day, glanced over in a glazed and uninterested manor by a Fuhrer who seldom made administrative decisions AT ALL. It reduced unemployment by removing Jews from the unemployment statistics and floated its economy on debt. State authority was dissolved to the maximum possible degree and its specious boasts of collectivism reside on myths promulgated by Nazi propaganda.
'Hitler promoted building the autobahn for the jobs it would create, but in reality autobahn construction never employed more than a small fraction of the millions of German unemployed. Before the war forced the Nazis to abandon all autobahn construction in late 1941, Russian prisoners of war were doing much of the work.' http://german.about.com
As to this weak-ass jive about Fascism being anti-capitalist this is only true to the degree that capitalism could be equated in the Fascist imagination with 'Jewish'. Fascism did NOT collectivize. It smashed the unions and handed economic power to the Randian industrialists and gentlemen farmers who levered them into power in the first place.
Pretty much the same story can be written for Mussolini's Italy, Franco's Spain and every other country that has fallen under right wing control ever since.
It is my intention to inflict lasting damage on the consensus view endemic to modern capitalism that regards fatalism and quietism as modest and sensible and derives its quasi-mystical world view from the notion that human nature is essentially, irredeemably bad. This is not a rational perspective any more than a belief in god is rational, and it has replaced theism as the theoretical organizing principle of society. It thrives on toadying, false controversy and an endless succession of internal and external bogymen, all to protect a morbid, unstable and desperately unjust system for the slender reason that we cannot think of any alternative and distrust anyone who proposes one and (in its purest interpretation) anyone who demonstrates any kind of critical or constructive social thought at all.
New Credulity Index Revealed
87.5% of people will believe ‘any old crap’ as long as it is accompanied by a statistic and the words ‘a study revealed today’ revealed a study today. ‘Dawkins pays my mortgage’ added a bored looking delinquent in a lab coat with a name badge reading Dr A. Scientist.
‘These idiots would eat glass if I told them to in the New Scientist alongside a pie chart and a picture of a baby.’ He remarked ‘It does't have to be a baby. A sheaf of wheat or a really big close up of a strawberry will do nicely.' Before adding '87.5% is a far higher number than 67.8% Our findings suggest you should lend me twenty quid’.
Auden and Humanity
As a precocious, wordy young man Auden liked to describe his self constructed moral philosophy as 'austere humanism'. We are all a type of crude moral philosopher as children, deeply exercised by questions of fairness and truth and our place in the world. We chuck up the house that will be our life long shelter from the stuff we happen to find around us, on the foundations we are provided. It is easy enough to make minor adjustments to it, adding or subtracting bits here and there to fit our circumstances, but for anyone to change the fundamental structure is rare, since to do so is to risk its total collapse.
Auden held to his 'austere humanism' until his later years when a noxious combination of personal pain, ideological disappointment and voguish, hegemonic fin de siècle philosophy drove him towards a morally exhausted religiosity. While still labouring to keep the walls up he wrote the following in his long, tense pre-war poem, 1st September 1939:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
For someone with the cataclysm of the First World War at his back, the cataclysm of the great depression all around him and an unknowable cataclysm in front, it’s a modest and sensible remark. Like it or not the mayhem in our nature is always our undoing and if love is life then love is law. After the total collapse into animal barbarity that was the Second World War, a monument to the higher law of human life, the U.N, was duly erected.
What emerged as the most horrifying aspect of Fascism was not the addled bigotry, the mawkish self pity or the sheer perversity but the mechanical disregard for the intrinsic value of human life. It’s the most deeply horrifying aspect of violent regimes, the idea that that human life can be reduced to and manipulated like numbers, that it may even be sensible to do so. This vacuous crap was at the heart of the Fascist ethos and appeal; they were modernizers, rationalists, sensible men making tough decisions without the impediment of sentimentality. It bought them tolerance at home and abroad, let them sit at the same table as the great statesmen of the day, gave them time and space to build their arsenal.
In my life time I have had it explained to me that those unable to work will eventually die off and that universal human rights are simply unrealistic. Of all the elements of fascism we have tried to suppress, lack of respect for human life is the most intransigent and common and the one we have done least to effectively combat.
In his dotage Auden amended the last line of the above stanza to read ‘we must love one another anddie’, an empty little phrase worthy of the fatuous nihilism of Michel Houellebecq or Gaspar Noé. The editors of his life’s work chose to ignore it. By this point his walls had collapsed and he made no effort to rebuild them. Why did he give up on humanity? He was assailed by anger, dishonesty, disillusionment, betrayal, stupidity, arrogance; all the weak and nasty behaviour this weak and nasty species is prone to.
You can let your humanity collapse as easily as folding a hand of cards; just stand there and watch the idiot monkeys surrounding you knock it to its foundations. We can let the higher law whimper out and go back to isolated village life, let the spaces between us grow wild and dangerous again. I’m not saying we shouldn’t and there is a chance some of us might even survive that way for a while, as long as we can get our heads together for just long enough to avoid nuclear war. It massively increases our risks, it devalues our lives and cheapens us, but if we are truly unable or unwilling to conquer our fears then perhaps it is the best we can hope for and the most we deserve.
The split in the modern mind
Nature vs nurture (i.e whether human behaviour is biologically or socially determined) is the scientific question (I think) of our present time and, while it has been a key dilemma in western thought for centuries, it has become a focal point in current debate and is linked to a ill-natured dispute over the attribution of blame for the historically defining 20th century atrocities of the holocaust and the gulag. The naturists (popularly voiced by Pinker, Dawkins et al) blame 'social engineering projects' (Pinker) and thus the nurture project. The nurturists point to Eugenics and scientificised racism and thus the nature project.
Anthropology is the meeting point (and battleground) of these two paradigms but this deeply acrimonious schism is played out throughout the sciences and humanities, not to mention in classrooms, living rooms, cinema lobbies and over the internet.
This debate has been hijacked by politics since 9/11 with the naturists parsing their agenda into a more general attack on theism which they elide with all non physicalist theory. They argue that all theses not based on positivistic data are contingent and thus dis-empower criticism, retard progress and tend to support illiberal and regressive social policy.
This creates great alarm in the nurturist camp who argue that they are the bastion of cogent social criticism and that without a theoretical assumption of innate human nature any kind of attempt to fend of the depredations associated with laissez-faire social policy will be ruled out of court. They also argue that all science is ideologically permeated, that positivism leads to false certainties and that without an independent critical view of it's ideas science is at the mercy of existing power structures.