ALB
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Another organisation has claimed that the new party has usurped their name. I don’t think the victims of this will get anywhere with the Electoral Commission as they are not a registered party. But what a silly name the renegades have chosen. That won’t get them very far. Another seven-day-wonder party, as if there weren’t enough useless, reformist parties led by professional politicians (even though after the next general election most of this party’s MPs will be forced to change profession).
I was at a meeting last night at which one of the speakers, James Heartfield, billed as a writer for Spiked magazine, put the case for Lexit, i.e a leftwing Brexit. His arguments were based on the sovereignty and self-determination of “nations”; the EU could never be democratic as it was an artificial political entity not an organic nation and had no right to impose its will on nations such as Britain was. He defended the view that, despite capitalism being a global system, it was still possible to establish “socialism (although he no longer liked that term) in one country”, with subsidies, control on capital movement, etc. Basically, the sort of “reformism in one country” that Corbyn used to embrace. He also claimed that Theresa May didn’t really want Brexit but was working to betray it. This, coupled with the concept of an organic nation, suggests that Lexit might equally be called Rexit. I am sure he and Rees-Mogg would find they have much in common.
The irony is that she singled out Jeremy Corbyn as a “cultural Marxist”:
“I’m very aware of that ongoing creep of cultural Marxism which has come from Jeremy Corbyn.”
So, while some accuse Corbyn of being an anti-Semite, she accuses him of being part of a Jewish conspiracy. Neither is true of course.
The other thing is she comes from a group which played a similar role in East Africa as Jews did in eastern Europe, the “Kenya Asians” — traders who were unpopular with the local peasants whose prejudices were exploited by self-serving politicians and who as a consequence were persecuted and eventually expelled from both Kenya and later Uganda (by the notorious Idi Amin) and who were not welcomed here. In fact the then Labour government introduced race-based immigration controls to try to make it difficult for them to come (still in force incidentally, British overseas citizens still have no right to come to live in Britain unless their father or grandfather was born here):
You’d have thought she that instead of indulging in anti-Semitism she might have had some empathy with Jews. But there could be a simpler explanation: that she is simply a fool who picked up the term from US conservative stuff she had been reading without realising its connotation.
Yes, you live and learn. I hadn’t heard of this conspiracy theory either.
If she really persists, and she seems to be digging her heels in, I wonder whether she’ll be referred to some disciplinary committee such as the Tories would want Labour to do if she’d been one of their MPs. And to think that she was until recently a minister (in the Ministry or Brexit, of course).
Maybe Marcuse, Fromm etc were on the wrong track in adding Freud to Marx to try to explain why workers support capitalism, but they still made some good points (Fromm especially).
Yes, freedom to move over a wider area was an advantage for the working class of the UK belonging to the EU, probably the only one. But it works both ways. Those who voted Brexit to “keep the Poles out” probably didn’t realise that one consequence of this would be a restriction on their own freedom to work and settle in other parts of Europe.
It’s about t happen again. A group of MPs have proposed the following absurd and dangerous definition of “Islamophobia” which is going to allow bigoted Muslims to denounce any criticism of their religious ideas and practices as “islamophobic”:
Islamophobia is rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness.
This is problematic for two reasons.
First, this assumes that Muslims are a “race” whereas all sorts of people are Muslim, including “Europeans” from Albania and the former Yugoslavia and Islam is a non-racial, universalist religion.
Second, what on earth is this horrible newly-inverted word “Muslimness”? Bigoted and obscurantist Muslim clerics and activists are bound to have a field day with it. We’ll be tarred as “islamophobic” for our criticism of Islam as a religion (as part of our criticism of all religion)
L.B., have you seen this video against UBI that someone posted on our Facebook page? It shows that it wouldn’t work as intended (it would be a subsidy to employers leaving most people no better off as their income from employment would fall) and that, if we want to go down this road of breaking the link between consumption and work, we might as well have free access to the plenty that we have the technology to produce:
You raise a deep question of Marxist political theory there ! What is the relationship of the exploiting class to its state? How do they control it?
It’s not the case that they control it directly either by occupying themselves the top positions in it or by giving direct orders to those who do. One reason for this is that the capitalist class is not a monolithic block but there are different groups of capitalists each with their own sectional interest which might conflict with that of other groups.
Parliament evolved as the arena where these sectional interests confront each other and where either one section gets its way or some solution is found in the general capitalist interest, the so-called “national interest”. In other words, the capitalist class controls the state through its political representatives who don’t have to be capitalists themselves and who, today, are chosen for them by the votes of the people, the great majority of who are members of the working class. This gives the political representatives some leeway (including to pursue their own careers) and why they might not necessarily do what the dominant section of the capitalist class might want. For instance, it is quite clear that even the Prime Minister is putting the interest (preventing a split) of her party before the “national” capitalist interest.
The Tory party used to be the party of big business, but it now seems to have been taken over by representatives of small provincial businesses producing for the home market and so not directly concerned with customs unions and overseas markets. Ironically perhaps, it now seems that on this issue the Labour Party is representing the interests of big, exporting businesses better and it may be that their support, with that of those Tories who still remain committed to the interests of big business and of the Scottish nationalists representing small businesses there, will see Big Business win in the end in the form of a “softer” Brexit that retains unfettered access to the single market. We shall see. The internal argument within the capitalist class, via their proxies in parliament, has not been settled yet.
It is interesting (perhaps) to speculate on how a minority of Socialist MPs might be instructed to vote on the various indicative options MPs could be called to vote on next week. Bearing in mind that the criteria are how any measure might further or harm the interests of the working class and/or the socialist movement and that the issue at stake is the trading arrangements of the capitalist class, how about:
Revoke Article 50: doesn’t really matter except that this could be seen as undemocratic (overturning a referendum result) even if not unconstitutional (the referendum was in law only indicative). Express concern, but not actually vote against?
Second Referendum: this would inconvenience the working class by involving them in arguments about a purely capitalist issue. So, not support. Abstain rather than actually oppose? Wouldn’t matter if it passed because it would provide an opportunity to run a campaign for a mass write-in vote for world socialism.
Leaving without a deal: this would quite unnecessarily inconvenience the working class even if only temporarily. So oppose, maybe even vote against it if there was a chance of it being carried?
Theresa May’s deal, Norway Plus, Common Market 0.2, (re)join EFTA, Canada + and all the rest. Couldn’t care less which one the other MPs choose on behalf of the capitalist class. Irrelevant, so not even take part in the vote, just go fishing? Or maybe make a speech saying this (and advocating world socialism) and then conspicuously leave the chamber?
Five members were out leafletting this. Obviously they ran out of leaflets. One took a photo of this reply to Theresa May’s notorious declaration at the 2017 Tory party conference that “if you believe that you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere”.
Here is Twitter’s reply. It is what we expected:
Hello, We’ve investigated the reported account and have determined that it is not in violation of Twitter’s impersonation policy. In order for an account to be in violation of the policy, it must portray another person or business in a misleading or deceptive manner. Read the full policy here: https://support.twitter.com/articles/18366 Thank you for your report, and please note that any documents you may have uploaded will be deleted. Twitter Support
Indicative votes. We’ve got them too:
“This conference resolves that from 2014 indicative votes of delegates at conference shall be recorded in the conference report for all instructed resolutions and amendments.”
