Our solutions have to be new ones: bringing back all the manufacturing jobs that have been outsourced is not a realistic goal.
Reminds me – neo-reaction does often support ideas like the citizen’s income, oddly enough. But as a very sparsely worked out corner of corporate monarchical city states I hasten to add. Moldbug suggests it during a digression on “what to do with sociology professors”.
]]>god knows (ha!) I’ve been wondering about the evangelical right recently – what’s happened to those guys? (at least partially the same diversity that has happened to most of the traditional right – but how *does* one square discipleship with Trumpism. So that’s something else that I now want to dig in to….
]]>Yes, I have been one of those tedious little prats all my life. Not sure I’m ready to stop just yet..
]]>We are on the same page. The leftist parties need to get much more agile and much better at working together at all levels (our electoral system doesn’t help here). My worry is that there is less and less room for local victories, and if we wait for them to build a movement we may wait a long time. Where I live, the tendency is to the hyperlocal: get out of the money economy by growing your own food or investing in a community wind turbine, or buying shares in a community building project. For well-resourced communities these solutions can work, and they support our better instincts in a society of consumption and competition. But these are not solutions for the desperate and the left behind, and they are being held up by the current government as a reason for dismantling the ‘public’ services that genuinely redistribute opportunity.
Our solutions have to be new ones: bringing back all the manufacturing jobs that have been outsourced is not a realistic goal. The workplace will never be the same again. Class will never be the same again. Things that unite the underprivileged, such as the welfare state, are being dismantled. If there is a group of people that can organise for genuine change it is probably young people (it was the old that voted for Brexit and Trump). Solutions that have come from the young in recent years: we are the 99 per cent; occupy; yes we can (podemos); another world is possible… Is there hope here?
I share the chill, especially now that I have followed you into some of these ‘radical’, ‘anti-establishment’ spaces. The question is how we differentiate left and right radicalism – and ensure they are differentiated in the mainstream media, which loves to equate them. I suggest we need to
(a) Defend the institutions of the liberal democratic state. We can be critical but we can’t be equivocal at this point in history. That means not only defending universities, but institutions like an independent civil service (e.g. Office of Budget Responsibility) and the High Court (euch!), because if we end up with a populist authoritarian government we are going to need them. Reformists are floundering because they thought that winning the cultural arguments (left liberalism) and keeping the welfare state tottering on would be enough. Revolutionaries never thought this was going to be enough. We have an analysis of capitalism in crisis and how it needs to pay for the crisis – so we are actually better placed to defend the economic gains of reformism than the reformists are (and we must work with them).
(b) Continue, as you are doing here, to trace the historical roots of reactionary ideas (neo or otherwise): whose interests have they served, how they have used the popular vote when they have managed to achieve it, what have the outcomes been for the poor, the unemployed, the left behind, the displaced? Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
(c) Build connections between people’s local grievances and struggles, and a big picture critique of late capitalism. This isn’t easy and it needs organisations that have local roots as well as international links, that persist over time, that have an ongoing analysis and sense of history. I’ve been back in the Labour Party since the last election. Critically (and equivocally), but it’s better than twitter.