Another day another hit piece on the Labour Party & it's elected leader, this time regular contributor to the white noise of hatred surrounding Jeremy Corbyn, & proud ex-member of the Labour Party Nick Cohen has unsheathed his pen (19/03), delivering a sensationalist prelude to Deputy leader Tom Watson's anti-Corbyn appearance on Sky News (20/03). This time, our bastion of centrist compromise, frequently writing to complain about 'the left' for the unapologetically right wing Spectator magazine, has graced the pages of the Guardian, to drive a stake into the heart of any remaining good will towards Jeremy Corbyn.
His issue is unequivocal, "get rid of Corbyn, the bearded old lefty has no chance! he lost us the EURef! He's a Russian Agent working for Iran to shake the hand's of Muslim terrorists! Corbyn is to blame for the rise of Trump & Pepe le Frog". Yes to quote Mr Cohen, "far from building a new consensus for previously unthinkable leftist
ideas, Corbyn’s victory has allowed the right to run riot."[1] Who could have conceived of a Donald Trump presidency without the appointment of Jeremy Corbyn to Labour leader? Who could have imagined UKIP's success was possible, without Jeremy Corbyn's leadership of the Labour party at the end of their decades long campaign to move British Politics towards ultra nationalism? Who would buy the Daily Mail if it wasn't for the specter of a marginally socialist Labour leader?
"On current polling, Labour will get around a quarter of the vote.
Imagine, though, how the Labour party will fare in an election campaign
when its leaders are Corbyn, John McDonnell, Emily Thornberry and Diane
Abbott, and its second XI consists of Clive Lewis, Angela Rayner,
Richard Burgon and Rebecca Long-Bailey." [1]
They will surely not do very well if their second XI consists of IV people, but what exactly is the criticism of these individuals which Mr Cohen's intimates? None is apparent, and this is a recurring trend, we're asked to take everything at face value about Corbyn's electability, the competency of his team, the validity of the polls, shown to be redundant at predicting the outcome of not only the EURef & Trump victory, but also the 2015 General Election. Imagining all this is true, the polls are correct, etc,. still one is left in the dark as to a concrete reason for his unelectability. Far be it from me to decide, but surely the point of Journalism is to understand the why's and wherefore's of a situation, to analyze causes rather than continually assert one's own prejudicial conclusions?
"The Tories have gone easy on Corbyn and his comrades to date for the
transparently obvious reason that they want to keep them in charge of Labour.
In an election, they would tear them to pieces. They will expose the far left’s record of excusing the imperialism of Vladimir Putin’s gangster state , the oppressors of women and murderers of gays in Iran, the IRA,
and every variety of inquisitorial and homicidal Islamist movement,
while presenting itself with hypocritical piety as a moral force."
Maybe Mr Cohen thinks he's also been 'going easy' with his constant repetition of Corbyn's tenuous 'links' to the Russian Defense Dpt, Iranian theocracy & Irish republicanism, maybe he also thinks the right wing media, BBC's Laura Keunsberg, the Government benches, numerous Grauniad writers, other members of the liberal intelligentsia, and every two bit blogger who feels aligned to the cause of centrist capitulation, have also been "going easy on him"? With their constant echoing of the above accusations, & endless recitals of the unexplained, unsubstantiated unelectability mantra, since day one of his original leadership campaign.
They certainly seem to have had little effect, at least among those who's confidence in the frequently irrelevant, increasingly impotent and entirely un-self critical mainstream media, has understandably declined in recent years.
But since Mr Cohen has been gracious enough to at least hint to an explanation for Mr Corbyn's supposed unelectability, let us at least weigh the evidence meagre though it is, & decide if these claims really do set Mr Corbyn apart as a truly unelectable politician.
Not only has David Cameron enjoyed a close personal relationship with Putin's gangster state in recent years, but Tony Blair has publicly stated that despite numerous questionable political assassinations & his aggression towards Georgia in 2008 & Ukraine more recently, the UK and America have "a complete identity of interest" with Russia & also the authoritarian Capitalist State of China, against Islamic fundamentalism.[2] Despite believable testimony of war crimes occurring in Chechnya, South Ossetia & Ukraine, many G20 Nations have maintained cordial relations with Russia, & the UK government continued to allow the production & distribution of Russian State media on British airwaves.
But hang on, we're not talking about shaking hands, and enjoying aperitifs with the Dictator of Russia, or as the Financial Times[3] suggests, selling off London's swankiest real estate to well-to-do Russians and Ukrainians who, "are trying to shift more
cash into London property ... amid indications that eastern European
oligarchs are using the capital’s housing market to conceal their assets
from international sanctions", because of the Conservative government's generous tax 'enforcement' policies.
Jeremy Corbyn's crime is having merely appeared a number of times on Russia Today, and though I am sympathetic to him, perhaps it's possible for us to entertain the idea, that offering alternative portrayals of British people & politicians on foreign media outlets, showing we don't all wear top hats, or sit on fortunes many global citizen's families were enslaved and exploited to create, is a productive thing to do?
Further it can't have escaped your notice just how stuffy British television actually is, particularly in regard to politics, compare ABC's excellent QandA to our own BBC's Question Time or Any Questions, there's something infinitely more free flowing and insightful about QandA, it feels like much more of a normal conversation than a reiteration of the last weeks newspaper headlines, there are frequently scientific advocates, religious thinkers, radical voices & a generally more inclusive feel. Russia Today despite many of it's obvious flaws, does offer a diversity of voice, opinion & agenda that is sadly lacking in the UK, and it's easy to see why somebody more or less reviled by the entire UK Media, would seek an outlet for what I personally think are important ideas, informing vitally important policies, elsewhere.
Not only is ex-Prime Minister Blair happy to cosy up to Russia in Syria, he's comfortable around a whole range of authoritarian dictators, he's met with Hamas, insists upon working with them to develop channels & bring about some kind of political process in the Israel Palestine conflict, he's a regular visitor in the gay hating and woman oppressing Kingdom of Saudi Arabia working at one point as an advisor for one of their State oil companies, he's known to be close to the dictator of Kazakhstan offering his services at $5million per year, the list goes on and on around the globe. He shook hands with the IRA, he was the face of the good friday agreement, but would any of his work there have been achievable without politicians like John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn, keeping channels open & working to encourage IRA operators to deal with the Labour Party? I imagine without their contributions the Queen would never have met and shaken the hand of former IRA member Martin McGuinness.
Surely this is exactly what politics is about? Working to bring diverse, disparate and often antagonistic interests round a table to communicate in a civil manner? Mr Cohen's thinking appears to have become very polarized in his old age. Or perhaps it was ever thus? I have less time to waste finding out than may be apparent.
But apparently not, Mr Cohen informs us politics is really about slapping the wrists, if not punching your political opponents, and he doesn't even mean literally, just cheap symbolic talking points & point scoring for the media to fawn over, his argument seems to be that "Corbyn's just not theatrical enough daaahling".
There's also considerable double standards at work here, "he and his hopeless frontbench have not forced one Tory minister to resign or even endure a sleepless night", I don't know of any politician who was forced to resign because of a few snarky comments from the opposition, it's usually a combination of consistent failures on the part of an incumbent, exploited by a rival politician often in the same party, underpinned by a deep wellspring of animosity in the Media, or just simple old criminality that causes resignations.
The effect of media coverage in the way it produces a coherent narrative of an individual's public image, clearly has a tremendous effect on the way it's consumers respond to that image. Sadly many people's entire political worldview is constructed by bits and pieces assimilated from 24hr media coverage, why else would legions of self described "moderates" take to the media with calls for their democratically elected leader to stand down? Why else would more or less every political party or movement employ PR firms or at least their techniques? This was particularly evident with the pre-Cameron Conservatives, when I.D.S & William Hague were chased out of office by a media establishment obsessed by appearances.
This obsession with the image & more or less symbolic role of leader has been and still is, in effect determining the parameters of political discussion. The standard of PR firms employed, the deceptive simplicity of policy soundbites and sloganeering, the ability to score cheap points, the way one eats a bacon sandwich, these have become the deciding factors in a political system almost entirely mediated by professionalized media, not the substance.
Perhaps we are edging towards an understanding of why exactly, the liberal intelligentsia are unable to explain their convictions about the unelectability of Corbyn. It has to do with the strange modern phenomena in which power is symbolically disavowed, not made a show of, occulted in pursuit of more power. In the case of Brexit we're told that Parliament has no control, that Brussels makes all our laws, we can't control our own borders etc. For Trump it was the "swamp of Washington" regulating all the power away from big business. In these two examples the winners portrayed themselves as challenging the power of a dominant ideological consensus, as powerless victims of the overreach of 'big government', of the lies of mainstream media, despite the very obvious reality of an increasing disparity between the actual power of business, & the ability of public regulation to contain it's worst aspects.
As the dominant political force Tories cannot explain his unelectability as that would imply revealing the numerous ways in which, through nudge theory; the false comparisons between national & home economics; fueling the SNP's rise; calculated appeals to base self interest; budget surplus laws; constituency boundary changes, etc,. they've been trying to make Labour in general unelectable. It would involve revealing the extent of power yielded by the interests they represent & who fund them, not to mention the ruthless machiavellian way in which they've used power to consolidate power & undermine democracy since 2010.
Those in the media who echo Nick Cohen's sentiments towards Jeremy, come under one of two designations, you have the manufacturer of right wing propaganda who simply doesn't have to explain Jeremy Corbyn's unelectability, merely assert it endlessly like a self fulfilling prophecy, claim he's best friends with Hizbollah etc,. & eventually bring about his rejection by osmosis. This is presumably who Nick has decided to imitate with his article & they constitute the majority, in terms of sympathetic outlets and potential reach.
The other are members of the Liberal intelligentsia, the reign of experts and technocrats the rise of populism is such an obvious rejection of. They are Labour members, ex-members, MP's, ex-MP's, journalists, academics & commentators, from Stephen Hawking to Owen Jones, they are Guardianistas & assorted yuppies. They supported Yvette Cooper, Andy Burnham & Liz Kendall, also Owen Smith, all unsuccessful in elections against the apparently unelectable Jeremy Corbyn.
Despite the fact that this socio-economic sphere would never consider itself an institution of class power or force for class repression, it undoubtedly is, and this is part of the reason for, as well as the reason why it's members lack the ability to accurately explain Jeremy Corbyn's unelectability.
They recognize that not only do overtly and committed rightwing forces dominate the cultural and political landscape, which is to say they have been & continue to be an ineffective force for progress, for advancing knowledge and awareness, but also that they themselves & their frequent readers aren't ideologically too dissimilar from those very forces.
One senses they would be better accomodated inside the Liberal Democrats, if the lust for power which has seen them colonize the Labour Party over the decades, didn't preclude that. They are people who are quite comfortable with conservatism, having usually a great deal worth conserving, and who live quite comfortably under a Conservative government, in a Conservative constituency on a conservative Island. It's the drive to conserve a Liberal Democrat Labour Party that sees them revile in horror at the current leadership.
By echoing the sentiments of the right, and expanding the reach of right wing propaganda, they confirm the biases of an audience being told from all sides, almost everyday, on radio, tv and in print, "Corbyn's unelectable".
With his lofty insights &
rigorously constructed arguments he tells anyone still supporting
Corbyn, to "stop being a fucking fool by changing your fucking mind." All we who value Corbyn's alternative political platform are asking is, please give everyone a moments peace, or better yet inform them! Of the pain and hardship people are forced to endure in the name of Corporatism, welfare reform and 'balancing the budget', that we may all begin to think clearly for ourselves about the direction we want to choose.
________
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/19/jeremy-corbyn-labour-threat-party-election-support?CMP=share_btn_tw
[2] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2611735/Make-friends-Putin-fight-Islamic-extremists-says-Blair-Former-PM-accused-simple-minded-analysis-comments-annexation-Crimea-not-prevent-cooperation-issue.html
[3] http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/9ddc9944-cbd3-11e3-a934-00144feabdc0.html#axzz312Ia6ZPp
Monday, 20 March 2017
Monday, 27 February 2017
On current events, people & their opiums...
The potential for knowledge, wisdom and understanding has never been greater than in today's world, where information is constantly being produced, recorded and consumed. Every home has at least a television screen if not also Internet access, through which global events are reported by numerous state owned, independent, amateur & professional media outlets. So why then are we witnessing an apparent decline in consciousness throughout Europe and America, a sort of regression to childlike simplicity, authoritarianism and an increase in the products of ignorance such as xenophobia, fear, irrationality & paranoia?
I. The explanation apparently favoured by the liberal intelligentsia, is the idea of 'Post-Truth' media and politics. The Oxford Dictionaries named the adjective "relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief,"[1] it's 'word of the year' for 2016, where political polarization & appeals to pathos were the defining characteristics of the EUref & US election. The phenomena is often attributed to the rise of 'independent' online media outlets, which are un-constrained by the running costs of professional media, being (overtly) usually only comprised of a small team for whom social media is a cheap, unregulated platform offering direct, intimate access to masses of people's lives, at any time, anywhere on the planet.
This is just the latest in a long line of self aggrandizing emanations, from an increasingly irrellevent political and media mainstream, in which they demonstrate a complete absence of self-reflection & their alienation from large swathes of the population. Adherents of the Fukuyamaist notion of 'History having ended' with the fall of the Berlin Wall, of this being a 'post-Ideological' world founded on the acceptance of the capitalist market, and liberal state as the foundational structures of a healthy economy, have had a rocky few years.
According to this pervasive ideology, liberal capitalist Democracy is the best of all possible worlds, only to be improved upon slightly by moderate reforms, implemented first by marginally Left of center Governments, favouring 'redistributive' social policies such as a 50% tax rate for the highest earners, to fund State run public services; investment in infrastructure; social welfare etc,.--- and then by marginally Right of center Governments, favouring 'free market' economic policies, such as a 40% tax rate for the highest earners; the introduction of the profit motive and competition into State run public services; selling off infrastructure etc,. The pendulum swing of policy making produced by this situation, often referred to as 'consensus politics', offers not only the illusion of Democratic choice, but also various investors the confidence that any changes will be marginal, their effects entirely predictable and in no way irreversible.
Until a few years ago, this was the accepted, dominant model of politics in not only the British, European & American democratic system, but having been exported, shaped and instituted by those Nations, in more or less every Democratic state in the World. In large part it's failures have been the cause of growing populist counter movements, and basis of numerous sensationalist critiques from extremes of both the Left & Right Wing.
This way of doing things while superficially avoiding conflicts & ideological antagonisms, repressing them through moderate, symbolic concessions to all sides, is apparently leading to greater conflicts and antagonisms both internally, and with other Nations further along the path of rejecting the Liberal Democratic consensus. Particularly those manufacturing more extreme forms of Autocratic absolutism, such as Russia under Patriarch Kirill and Vladimir Putin, Libya under Ghaddafi, Assad's Syria & Saddam's Iraq.
II. The explanation offered by those accused of employing these underhanded propaganda techniques, is surprisingly not too different. It runs something along the lines of: 'people are waking up to the lies and propaganda of mainstream media & politicians', we are asked to believe 'they support 'mavericks' who reject the mainstream narrative'. The President of the USA himself a supposed maverick, has accused many professional outlets of manufacturing "Fake-News", & consequently banned the likes of CNN & the BBC from White House press briefings. All it took were a few crowd pleasing slogans like "drain the swamp", & repetition ad-nauseum how 'anti-establishment' he is, for him to quickly assume the mantle of anti-establishment hero amongst his supporters, despite being very obviously a millionaire businessman more interested in his holiday privileges & personal advancement, than serving the interests of the American people, or upholding the Constitution. As he said during his election campaign; "I love poorly educated people."
It seems this rejection, the abstract, symbolic act in itself, whether of Hillary Clinton or the EU, is the motivating, determining factor in their apparent popularity, regardless of the alternative policies proposed, or lack thereof, potential repercussions etc,. In this sense as some have suggested, being based exclusively on action (the act of rejection) without any coherent theoretical aims or underpinnings, these movements do resemble fascism.
When the victors of the aforementioned popularity contests declare their respective campaigns as 'revolutions', or 'the people fighting back against the establishment', it is the bland, conformist Liberal democratic system of consensus politics they are encouraging the rejection of, in favour of a more radical conservatism. This terminology stolen from the Left obscures their radical counter-revolutionary, 'reactionary' nature, and is yet another example of the way in which Conservative forces have set about redefining the content & meaning of words, in order to weaponize political language for use in widescale psychological subversion. They bemoan the "state of the race" or Nation, & seek to 'repair the harm's' they perceive liberalism, Jews, Feminists, 'race-mixing', promiscuity, Homosexuals & Communists are doing. Roughly, the reversal of minimal progress they misrepresent variously as Marxist, Jewish, Feminist etc,. subversion, is what is meant by the empty slogan "make America great again".
So we see two diametrically opposed explanations, both seemingly designed to influence the thoughts and actions of what is treated as a passive, entirely impressionable mass, in relation to each group's general political opponents. While both generally agree that 'Leftists', assorted groups of feminists, radical activist networks & students or "SJW's", are to blame, in the case of centrists for the rise of the radical Right, & in the case of the radical Right for the effects of centrist policy over the last decade, the Liberal media is telling you the alt-media is lying, & vice versa, while Right Wing populists are telling you Liberal centrists are lying, & vice versa. Here at least, both appear to have a point.
III. Though we're told we've entered a 'post-truth' era, has there ever actually been a time in the history of the world, when those with the power to manipulate human emotions, thoughts & actions haven't done so? When people haven't made use of other's ignorance, fears and desires in order to further their own agenda? Or where institutions of power and control haven't provided numerous 'opiums' to shield their followers from painful realities?
We can read from around the time of the founding of the United States, when Thomas Paine rightfully rebuked the tendency towards melodrama "where facts are manufactured for the sake of show, and accommodated to produce, through the weakness of sympathy, a weeping effect."; through the propaganda techniques elaborated by the Nazi party in WWII; to the recent exposure of "sexed up" 'truths' in the case made for the War in Iraq, that we've actually never reached a state of universal, widespread, or even general veracity in everyday life.
Despite the progress made during & since the rational enlightenment, the large majority of human beings are still denied, by material circumstances, social status and the proliferation of ideology, either a rational or enlightened perspective on the realities they endure. The political framework which has sustained our "post-ideological" world is collapsing, and with it the framework which sustains definitions of fetishized concepts such as Democracy, progress & truth, to name just a few. Even the term enlightenment in the 21st century, is more commonly attributed to the solipsism of a Siddhartha Gautama, or sought in an Indian ashram, rather than the radical inquiries of a David Hume or Francis Bacon.
It seems as though one of many antagonisms within the Capitalist economic system is coming to fruition, it is despite all assertions to the contrary, a division within the establishment, namely that between traditionalists and modernizers; nationalists & globalists; romanticists & rationalists; high capitalists & aristocrats; monetarists & social Imperialists. It manifested recentley within the UK Conservative party, leading to the EUref as a means of salving such irreconcilable divisions, & consequent resignation of David Cameron & George Osborne. It also upended Margaret Thatcher's reign under similar circumstances decades earlier. These are emissaries of what one of the Trump movement's ideological father's, religious demagogue Pat Robertson, referred to as "The New World Order". Modernizing, free-trade policies threatening traditional bonds of Nation, Race, Monarchy & Church, bonds which have been loosened in Europe & which were severed in the USA, but which will now be strengthened there & accross Europe, as Nations begin to close their borders, emulate the primitive accumulation, & ultra-capitalist reforms enacted in Russia since the fall of Socialism.
Perhaps what we're witnessing is less the dawning of a new idea, than it is the declining relevance of an old one? The human face is being ripped off our capitalist Democracy, the Liberal political establishment's greedy bigger brother Capital, has stolen the facade and thrown it on a rubbish heap, where imperialistic & aristocratic values are using it to enhance the appeal of their decayed visage.
______________
[1] President Casper Grathwohl's statement.
[2] "As to the tragic paintings by which Mr. Burke has outraged his own imagination, and seeks to work upon that of his readers, they are very well calculated for theatrical representation, where facts are manufactured for the sake of show, and accommodated to produce, through the weakness of sympathy, a weeping effect. But Mr. Burke should recollect that he is writing history, and not plays, and that his readers will expect truth, and not the spouting rant of high-toned exclamation."
"As Mr. Burke has passed over the whole transaction of the Bastille (and his silence is nothing in his favour), and has entertained his readers with refections on supposed facts distorted into real falsehoods, I will give, since he has not, some account of the circumstances which preceded that transaction."
Rights of Man
I. The explanation apparently favoured by the liberal intelligentsia, is the idea of 'Post-Truth' media and politics. The Oxford Dictionaries named the adjective "relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief,"[1] it's 'word of the year' for 2016, where political polarization & appeals to pathos were the defining characteristics of the EUref & US election. The phenomena is often attributed to the rise of 'independent' online media outlets, which are un-constrained by the running costs of professional media, being (overtly) usually only comprised of a small team for whom social media is a cheap, unregulated platform offering direct, intimate access to masses of people's lives, at any time, anywhere on the planet.
This is just the latest in a long line of self aggrandizing emanations, from an increasingly irrellevent political and media mainstream, in which they demonstrate a complete absence of self-reflection & their alienation from large swathes of the population. Adherents of the Fukuyamaist notion of 'History having ended' with the fall of the Berlin Wall, of this being a 'post-Ideological' world founded on the acceptance of the capitalist market, and liberal state as the foundational structures of a healthy economy, have had a rocky few years.
According to this pervasive ideology, liberal capitalist Democracy is the best of all possible worlds, only to be improved upon slightly by moderate reforms, implemented first by marginally Left of center Governments, favouring 'redistributive' social policies such as a 50% tax rate for the highest earners, to fund State run public services; investment in infrastructure; social welfare etc,.--- and then by marginally Right of center Governments, favouring 'free market' economic policies, such as a 40% tax rate for the highest earners; the introduction of the profit motive and competition into State run public services; selling off infrastructure etc,. The pendulum swing of policy making produced by this situation, often referred to as 'consensus politics', offers not only the illusion of Democratic choice, but also various investors the confidence that any changes will be marginal, their effects entirely predictable and in no way irreversible.
Until a few years ago, this was the accepted, dominant model of politics in not only the British, European & American democratic system, but having been exported, shaped and instituted by those Nations, in more or less every Democratic state in the World. In large part it's failures have been the cause of growing populist counter movements, and basis of numerous sensationalist critiques from extremes of both the Left & Right Wing.
This way of doing things while superficially avoiding conflicts & ideological antagonisms, repressing them through moderate, symbolic concessions to all sides, is apparently leading to greater conflicts and antagonisms both internally, and with other Nations further along the path of rejecting the Liberal Democratic consensus. Particularly those manufacturing more extreme forms of Autocratic absolutism, such as Russia under Patriarch Kirill and Vladimir Putin, Libya under Ghaddafi, Assad's Syria & Saddam's Iraq.
II. The explanation offered by those accused of employing these underhanded propaganda techniques, is surprisingly not too different. It runs something along the lines of: 'people are waking up to the lies and propaganda of mainstream media & politicians', we are asked to believe 'they support 'mavericks' who reject the mainstream narrative'. The President of the USA himself a supposed maverick, has accused many professional outlets of manufacturing "Fake-News", & consequently banned the likes of CNN & the BBC from White House press briefings. All it took were a few crowd pleasing slogans like "drain the swamp", & repetition ad-nauseum how 'anti-establishment' he is, for him to quickly assume the mantle of anti-establishment hero amongst his supporters, despite being very obviously a millionaire businessman more interested in his holiday privileges & personal advancement, than serving the interests of the American people, or upholding the Constitution. As he said during his election campaign; "I love poorly educated people."
It seems this rejection, the abstract, symbolic act in itself, whether of Hillary Clinton or the EU, is the motivating, determining factor in their apparent popularity, regardless of the alternative policies proposed, or lack thereof, potential repercussions etc,. In this sense as some have suggested, being based exclusively on action (the act of rejection) without any coherent theoretical aims or underpinnings, these movements do resemble fascism.
When the victors of the aforementioned popularity contests declare their respective campaigns as 'revolutions', or 'the people fighting back against the establishment', it is the bland, conformist Liberal democratic system of consensus politics they are encouraging the rejection of, in favour of a more radical conservatism. This terminology stolen from the Left obscures their radical counter-revolutionary, 'reactionary' nature, and is yet another example of the way in which Conservative forces have set about redefining the content & meaning of words, in order to weaponize political language for use in widescale psychological subversion. They bemoan the "state of the race" or Nation, & seek to 'repair the harm's' they perceive liberalism, Jews, Feminists, 'race-mixing', promiscuity, Homosexuals & Communists are doing. Roughly, the reversal of minimal progress they misrepresent variously as Marxist, Jewish, Feminist etc,. subversion, is what is meant by the empty slogan "make America great again".
So we see two diametrically opposed explanations, both seemingly designed to influence the thoughts and actions of what is treated as a passive, entirely impressionable mass, in relation to each group's general political opponents. While both generally agree that 'Leftists', assorted groups of feminists, radical activist networks & students or "SJW's", are to blame, in the case of centrists for the rise of the radical Right, & in the case of the radical Right for the effects of centrist policy over the last decade, the Liberal media is telling you the alt-media is lying, & vice versa, while Right Wing populists are telling you Liberal centrists are lying, & vice versa. Here at least, both appear to have a point.
III. Though we're told we've entered a 'post-truth' era, has there ever actually been a time in the history of the world, when those with the power to manipulate human emotions, thoughts & actions haven't done so? When people haven't made use of other's ignorance, fears and desires in order to further their own agenda? Or where institutions of power and control haven't provided numerous 'opiums' to shield their followers from painful realities?
We can read from around the time of the founding of the United States, when Thomas Paine rightfully rebuked the tendency towards melodrama "where facts are manufactured for the sake of show, and accommodated to produce, through the weakness of sympathy, a weeping effect."; through the propaganda techniques elaborated by the Nazi party in WWII; to the recent exposure of "sexed up" 'truths' in the case made for the War in Iraq, that we've actually never reached a state of universal, widespread, or even general veracity in everyday life.
Despite the progress made during & since the rational enlightenment, the large majority of human beings are still denied, by material circumstances, social status and the proliferation of ideology, either a rational or enlightened perspective on the realities they endure. The political framework which has sustained our "post-ideological" world is collapsing, and with it the framework which sustains definitions of fetishized concepts such as Democracy, progress & truth, to name just a few. Even the term enlightenment in the 21st century, is more commonly attributed to the solipsism of a Siddhartha Gautama, or sought in an Indian ashram, rather than the radical inquiries of a David Hume or Francis Bacon.
It seems as though one of many antagonisms within the Capitalist economic system is coming to fruition, it is despite all assertions to the contrary, a division within the establishment, namely that between traditionalists and modernizers; nationalists & globalists; romanticists & rationalists; high capitalists & aristocrats; monetarists & social Imperialists. It manifested recentley within the UK Conservative party, leading to the EUref as a means of salving such irreconcilable divisions, & consequent resignation of David Cameron & George Osborne. It also upended Margaret Thatcher's reign under similar circumstances decades earlier. These are emissaries of what one of the Trump movement's ideological father's, religious demagogue Pat Robertson, referred to as "The New World Order". Modernizing, free-trade policies threatening traditional bonds of Nation, Race, Monarchy & Church, bonds which have been loosened in Europe & which were severed in the USA, but which will now be strengthened there & accross Europe, as Nations begin to close their borders, emulate the primitive accumulation, & ultra-capitalist reforms enacted in Russia since the fall of Socialism.
Perhaps what we're witnessing is less the dawning of a new idea, than it is the declining relevance of an old one? The human face is being ripped off our capitalist Democracy, the Liberal political establishment's greedy bigger brother Capital, has stolen the facade and thrown it on a rubbish heap, where imperialistic & aristocratic values are using it to enhance the appeal of their decayed visage.
______________
[1] President Casper Grathwohl's statement.
[2] "As to the tragic paintings by which Mr. Burke has outraged his own imagination, and seeks to work upon that of his readers, they are very well calculated for theatrical representation, where facts are manufactured for the sake of show, and accommodated to produce, through the weakness of sympathy, a weeping effect. But Mr. Burke should recollect that he is writing history, and not plays, and that his readers will expect truth, and not the spouting rant of high-toned exclamation."
"As Mr. Burke has passed over the whole transaction of the Bastille (and his silence is nothing in his favour), and has entertained his readers with refections on supposed facts distorted into real falsehoods, I will give, since he has not, some account of the circumstances which preceded that transaction."
Rights of Man
Friday, 24 February 2017
Three questions about jobseeking...
Do people grow up dreaming about "processing payment information to
tight deadlines using advanced excel knowledge and attention to detail"?
Do they wake up one day with an incredible urge to "give clients a positive experience as you work to minimise risk, manage data protection and ensure compliance"?
Or are they thrust by circumstances beyond their control & understanding, to sell the only thing they own, their time and energy, to people without the inclination or need to do these things themselves?
Do they wake up one day with an incredible urge to "give clients a positive experience as you work to minimise risk, manage data protection and ensure compliance"?
Or are they thrust by circumstances beyond their control & understanding, to sell the only thing they own, their time and energy, to people without the inclination or need to do these things themselves?
Wednesday, 6 July 2016
On anglocentrism in it's negative form....
Anglocentrism~ The practice of viewing the world from English or Anglo-American perspective, with an implied belief, either consciously or subconsciously, in the preeminence of English or Anglo-American culture.
Liberals, 'leftists' and naive 'anti-war' critics of the USA & other English speaking countries, appear to me to be one side -the negative detracting side- of anglocentrism.
There is no teary eyed, flag waving patriotism behind this antithetical, ideological position, nor any kind of self righteous chauvinism that can be easily discerned in anglocentrism proper, yet I don't think it can be denied that there is a likely unconscious, but nonetheless strong sense of Anglo-American culture's primacy on the global stage.
For instance, this rather varied subgroup within Western societies, usually found in universities or on social media echo chambers of righteous socialist views, are frequently the most vocal critics of any military operations considered by UK or US Governments. All of these planned operations, no matter how benevolent or well intentioned, are described by this subgroup as "Imperialist Wars", which is to say resource grabs to sustain a non-existent Angloamerican Empire. Of course this is patently stupid, the language they're using here is probably a century or more out of date and barely corresponds to the situations they attempt to describe, still, their opposition to "The West"[1] is clearly more important than a genuine appraisal or understanding of modern situations.
The reason I think there is a anglocentrist attitude at work here, is because I catch glimpses of it while in disputation among these people, I will show a few examples, my interest is not in the factual accuracy of the claims, the substance of the arguments or lack thereof, but in the hints each position gives of a stunted, atrophied, simplistically dualistic and myopic view of the world, which represents a flip side, a self flagellating version of anglocentrism.
Firstly Iraq.
I often hear that Saddam Hussein was "put in power" by the West, that he was armed by the West, and supported by the West during his war against Iran. This I think is patently anglocentric, although implicitly so, as though these dark skinned sorts from the desert have neither the capability or desire to establish and run totalitarian State systems on their own behalf, that they couldn't plan or fight a war for their own interests or by their own initiative.
If you ask any average repeater of words to this effect, they will generally be ignorant as to the participation of German and French Governments and private companies, of Soviet Imperialism in arming and supporting the regime of Saddam Hussein, but more tellingly they will 9times out of 10 demonstrate a very tangible ignorance of social and economic conditions within Saddam's Iraq. The typical ignorance expected of a consumer of exclusively English speaking Media information? Or the kind of naivety, comfort and lack of empathy expected from people who grow up coddled in developed and democratic societies, and who assume in typically anglocentric fashion that elsewhere must be more or less the same. Perhaps they should read Kanan Makiya's book "Republic of Fear", maybe they'd begin to understand that fiction has barely yet conceived of a State as brutally sadistic, and arbitrarily violent as that of Saddam's Iraq?
So why do they still so vehemently oppose his removal? Maybe to their mind all 'evil' must originate, all negativity must be attributable to "The West", all examples of the West acting must be a manifestation of this evil acting against the 'poor hapless victims' they portray totalitarian dictators like Assad, Hussein or Qaddafi as?
I accept the West is far from covered in past-glories, but have these people stopped to consider that actually there are worse places, and that some of these might be inhabited by people fundamentally opposed to Western ideals of Liberal Democracy rather than acting on it's behalf?
Syria.
This was the most recent case of the West planning to go to War, sadly for the Syrian people, coming post Iraq and Libya, UK participation was put to a vote and was met with cumulative and most widespread resistance. The situation is familiar, rebellion of an oppressed majority seeking change and democracy, met with brutal repression at the hands of an authoritarian dictatorship, while the UK sits and watches (Kosovo & Bosnia, Yemen), but in this case it was popular sentiment which swayed our non-participation rather than cynical real-politik. The British public decided, and spent much of the week of the vote, demonstrating that Syrian people's lives are less important than the lives of a few hundred underused British military personnel, that it was more important to subsidize Western consumers', than support global aspirations towards democracy. How can British isolationism be anything other than anglocentric, regardless of how well intentioned it's advocates claim they are?
But there is further and similar accusation here to the case of Iraq, perhaps originating in foreign countries or Syria itself but certainly willingly adopted here, namely that the mass uprising of Syrian people was a "Western" intelligence operation, that these rebels and warriors for freedom were merely automatons, acting under the influence of Western Media and various Western seductions proliferated through the digital commons. This view seems to discount the Arab Spring, that this came as part of a series of public uprisings in the region against authoritarian, family dictatorships, in favour of democracy. Why were people reluctant to believe Syrians wanted democracy, if they do believe the mass of Syrians wanted democracy, why were they reluctant for their Government's to support this struggle? I feel that beneath answers to both these questions lies a feeling that maintaining our peace here, is more important than facilitating their peace there, and perhaps the idea, though I've never heard it formulated as such, that Democracy is a European system, and any adoption of it in other lands is evidence of "Western Imperialism"?
ISIS.
A few years in to the conflict in Syria a new force began to distinguish itself by it's brutality and antipathy towards any forms of Western or non-Islamic culture, the now infamous Islamic State. Emerging from the post Ba'athist rubble in both countries IS could draw on a wide base of angry, experienced and driven, anti-Western Jihadists. The emergence of IS, incidentally shows the failure of a non-Imperialistic approach to invasion by the US and UK in Iraq and Libya which is still in a very chaotic state. By destroying the dictatorship and leaving everyone pretty much to their own devices, "the West" loosened the chains of oppression on destructive forces as well as the average freedom loving Iraqi, this inevitably gave rise to the conflicts, sectarianism, power struggles and divisions, which were prevalent throughout the Saddam regime, though strongly repressed by means disavowed in the emerging, western aligned democratic governments.
I've heard many theories, for instance that ISIS is a reasonable response to Western actions in Iraq, Libya and Syria; that ISIS is the inevitable response of a 'War against Islam'; that ISIS is a CIA and Mossad front conducting war games to destabilize Syria and establish "Greater Israel"; or that IS represent the most active force in a fight against "Western Imperialism" in their region.
The conduct genocide, they have conquered land putting it's people to the sword or worse forms of punishment, they have a flag, a currency, extremely vicious and sexually repressive laws, media outlets and are called "a state". They actively seek to cleanse the World of unbelievers, launching pogroms against Zoroastrian Yazidi tribes, Shi'ite Muslims and the Kurdish people of Norther Iraq, yet the accusation of Imperialism is never directed at them? Infact many of the criticisms of them, besides those listed above, are dismissed as Islamophobia or predictable Western propaganda.
Nor is any criticism directed towards Putin's Russia, who's propaganda arm of the State Department; Russia Today, actively works to reinforce these kinds of inverted, self flagellating concepts among those seeking to escape the 'lies' of the Western Media, while the Russian military actively supports their client Dictator in Syria, destroying infrastructure that will require prolonged and extensive participation of Russia's State owned corporations to rebuild,
That many young people in the West are deeply suspicious of State owned media like the BBC, but deeply aligned with the terminology and perspectives offered by foreign State owned media like Iran's Press TV or RT, seems on it's surface very un-anglocentric, but it should be noted that neither of these outlets depart from English language presentations, nor the general format or subject matter of well established Anglo-American media outlets. They seem to operate in order to undermine the West in as most subtle a way as possible, and of course by basing all of their positions in opposition to the 'West', the negative anglocentric view within various political subgroups finds an echo of it's sentiment, and an ally in their productions.
The evidence is, that among those who use the term Imperialism as a slur, the word has lost more or less all value, and instead expresses, on one hand a code for them & those who would deceive them, used to refer to Western Foreign policy, no matter how un-Imperialistic, and on the other the delusion of anti-Imperialist's who watch Russia and ISIS conducting their respective operations, yet struggle to find the adequate word to describe what it is they are engaged in; namely the construction, or reconstruction of former Empires.
______
1. This term "the West" when used in the West, tends to refer exclusively to the US and UK, rather than Mexico, Canada, Spain, Latvia, Italy or the whole of Europe, unlike the General term mid-East or Far-East.
Liberals, 'leftists' and naive 'anti-war' critics of the USA & other English speaking countries, appear to me to be one side -the negative detracting side- of anglocentrism.
There is no teary eyed, flag waving patriotism behind this antithetical, ideological position, nor any kind of self righteous chauvinism that can be easily discerned in anglocentrism proper, yet I don't think it can be denied that there is a likely unconscious, but nonetheless strong sense of Anglo-American culture's primacy on the global stage.
For instance, this rather varied subgroup within Western societies, usually found in universities or on social media echo chambers of righteous socialist views, are frequently the most vocal critics of any military operations considered by UK or US Governments. All of these planned operations, no matter how benevolent or well intentioned, are described by this subgroup as "Imperialist Wars", which is to say resource grabs to sustain a non-existent Angloamerican Empire. Of course this is patently stupid, the language they're using here is probably a century or more out of date and barely corresponds to the situations they attempt to describe, still, their opposition to "The West"[1] is clearly more important than a genuine appraisal or understanding of modern situations.
The reason I think there is a anglocentrist attitude at work here, is because I catch glimpses of it while in disputation among these people, I will show a few examples, my interest is not in the factual accuracy of the claims, the substance of the arguments or lack thereof, but in the hints each position gives of a stunted, atrophied, simplistically dualistic and myopic view of the world, which represents a flip side, a self flagellating version of anglocentrism.
Firstly Iraq.
I often hear that Saddam Hussein was "put in power" by the West, that he was armed by the West, and supported by the West during his war against Iran. This I think is patently anglocentric, although implicitly so, as though these dark skinned sorts from the desert have neither the capability or desire to establish and run totalitarian State systems on their own behalf, that they couldn't plan or fight a war for their own interests or by their own initiative.
If you ask any average repeater of words to this effect, they will generally be ignorant as to the participation of German and French Governments and private companies, of Soviet Imperialism in arming and supporting the regime of Saddam Hussein, but more tellingly they will 9times out of 10 demonstrate a very tangible ignorance of social and economic conditions within Saddam's Iraq. The typical ignorance expected of a consumer of exclusively English speaking Media information? Or the kind of naivety, comfort and lack of empathy expected from people who grow up coddled in developed and democratic societies, and who assume in typically anglocentric fashion that elsewhere must be more or less the same. Perhaps they should read Kanan Makiya's book "Republic of Fear", maybe they'd begin to understand that fiction has barely yet conceived of a State as brutally sadistic, and arbitrarily violent as that of Saddam's Iraq?
So why do they still so vehemently oppose his removal? Maybe to their mind all 'evil' must originate, all negativity must be attributable to "The West", all examples of the West acting must be a manifestation of this evil acting against the 'poor hapless victims' they portray totalitarian dictators like Assad, Hussein or Qaddafi as?
I accept the West is far from covered in past-glories, but have these people stopped to consider that actually there are worse places, and that some of these might be inhabited by people fundamentally opposed to Western ideals of Liberal Democracy rather than acting on it's behalf?
Syria.
This was the most recent case of the West planning to go to War, sadly for the Syrian people, coming post Iraq and Libya, UK participation was put to a vote and was met with cumulative and most widespread resistance. The situation is familiar, rebellion of an oppressed majority seeking change and democracy, met with brutal repression at the hands of an authoritarian dictatorship, while the UK sits and watches (Kosovo & Bosnia, Yemen), but in this case it was popular sentiment which swayed our non-participation rather than cynical real-politik. The British public decided, and spent much of the week of the vote, demonstrating that Syrian people's lives are less important than the lives of a few hundred underused British military personnel, that it was more important to subsidize Western consumers', than support global aspirations towards democracy. How can British isolationism be anything other than anglocentric, regardless of how well intentioned it's advocates claim they are?
But there is further and similar accusation here to the case of Iraq, perhaps originating in foreign countries or Syria itself but certainly willingly adopted here, namely that the mass uprising of Syrian people was a "Western" intelligence operation, that these rebels and warriors for freedom were merely automatons, acting under the influence of Western Media and various Western seductions proliferated through the digital commons. This view seems to discount the Arab Spring, that this came as part of a series of public uprisings in the region against authoritarian, family dictatorships, in favour of democracy. Why were people reluctant to believe Syrians wanted democracy, if they do believe the mass of Syrians wanted democracy, why were they reluctant for their Government's to support this struggle? I feel that beneath answers to both these questions lies a feeling that maintaining our peace here, is more important than facilitating their peace there, and perhaps the idea, though I've never heard it formulated as such, that Democracy is a European system, and any adoption of it in other lands is evidence of "Western Imperialism"?
ISIS.
A few years in to the conflict in Syria a new force began to distinguish itself by it's brutality and antipathy towards any forms of Western or non-Islamic culture, the now infamous Islamic State. Emerging from the post Ba'athist rubble in both countries IS could draw on a wide base of angry, experienced and driven, anti-Western Jihadists. The emergence of IS, incidentally shows the failure of a non-Imperialistic approach to invasion by the US and UK in Iraq and Libya which is still in a very chaotic state. By destroying the dictatorship and leaving everyone pretty much to their own devices, "the West" loosened the chains of oppression on destructive forces as well as the average freedom loving Iraqi, this inevitably gave rise to the conflicts, sectarianism, power struggles and divisions, which were prevalent throughout the Saddam regime, though strongly repressed by means disavowed in the emerging, western aligned democratic governments.
I've heard many theories, for instance that ISIS is a reasonable response to Western actions in Iraq, Libya and Syria; that ISIS is the inevitable response of a 'War against Islam'; that ISIS is a CIA and Mossad front conducting war games to destabilize Syria and establish "Greater Israel"; or that IS represent the most active force in a fight against "Western Imperialism" in their region.
The conduct genocide, they have conquered land putting it's people to the sword or worse forms of punishment, they have a flag, a currency, extremely vicious and sexually repressive laws, media outlets and are called "a state". They actively seek to cleanse the World of unbelievers, launching pogroms against Zoroastrian Yazidi tribes, Shi'ite Muslims and the Kurdish people of Norther Iraq, yet the accusation of Imperialism is never directed at them? Infact many of the criticisms of them, besides those listed above, are dismissed as Islamophobia or predictable Western propaganda.
Nor is any criticism directed towards Putin's Russia, who's propaganda arm of the State Department; Russia Today, actively works to reinforce these kinds of inverted, self flagellating concepts among those seeking to escape the 'lies' of the Western Media, while the Russian military actively supports their client Dictator in Syria, destroying infrastructure that will require prolonged and extensive participation of Russia's State owned corporations to rebuild,
That many young people in the West are deeply suspicious of State owned media like the BBC, but deeply aligned with the terminology and perspectives offered by foreign State owned media like Iran's Press TV or RT, seems on it's surface very un-anglocentric, but it should be noted that neither of these outlets depart from English language presentations, nor the general format or subject matter of well established Anglo-American media outlets. They seem to operate in order to undermine the West in as most subtle a way as possible, and of course by basing all of their positions in opposition to the 'West', the negative anglocentric view within various political subgroups finds an echo of it's sentiment, and an ally in their productions.
The evidence is, that among those who use the term Imperialism as a slur, the word has lost more or less all value, and instead expresses, on one hand a code for them & those who would deceive them, used to refer to Western Foreign policy, no matter how un-Imperialistic, and on the other the delusion of anti-Imperialist's who watch Russia and ISIS conducting their respective operations, yet struggle to find the adequate word to describe what it is they are engaged in; namely the construction, or reconstruction of former Empires.
______
1. This term "the West" when used in the West, tends to refer exclusively to the US and UK, rather than Mexico, Canada, Spain, Latvia, Italy or the whole of Europe, unlike the General term mid-East or Far-East.
Monday, 4 July 2016
A response to Jess Phillips...
It's clear now is not a great time to be a politician, particularly a Labour Politician, so I sympathize with Jess Phillip's current anxieties when attending to her role in public service, but surely she must recognize that now is also not a great time to be Labour member, despite her lack of sympathy for the many thousands of labour members who voted for Jeremy Corbyn to lead the party 10months ago?
Making good use of her public profile by writing a further explanation for the Huffington Post, as to why she decided to quit Jeremy Corbyn's shadow cabinet, Ms Phillips begins in surprisingly confrontational fashion (for somebody complaining about her anxieties over confrontation), ridiculing the object of her ire, and dismissing the general discontent I assume has been directed at her over the past week or two, as coming from; "people who, I can only assume, think that the moon landing was a hoax and that Lord Lucan is currently sunning himself in a mankini sat with Anastasia and Rasputin on at a hedonism resort in Jamaica...."
When arguing or attempting to defend a position, misrepresenting all criticism is a common tactic employed by a party who knows they are on weak ground, in-fact the range of public resignations by Labour Mp's who've quit the shadow cabinet in the last week, demonstrate various attempts to avoid giving any substantial or honest explanation for their actions, from playing for sympathy, to the argument from authority, to the argument ad populum. I doubt the majority of criticisms or critical questions received by Ms Phillips represent a fringe paranoiac mentality as she asserts,but this is what she chooses to focus on when defending her position and perhaps justify her own sense of persecution, and paranoia.
Incase this portrayal of her 'detractors' as paranoiac loons is not enough of an explanation, Ms Phillip's adds rather patronizingly; "It is so easy to think about this whole episode in the Labour Party as binary, where one side is good, another bad." , but is this not a complete misrepresentation of an actual concrete division within the Labour Party? I.e that between radical socialist innovators and radical liberal conformists, or Blairites and assorted Leftists behind Corbyn? And does she not to some extent attempt to institute such a dualistic view as those who have exercised their freedom of speech to her?
I think people can deal with things in a good or bad way, generally the way the PLP have responded to the left turn of the wider party is bad, the way they have dealt with the democratic election of Jeremy Corbyn less than a year ago is appalling, they've essentially broken a Labour leadership which for the first time in decades was seen as being "in touch with people" in this country.
She goes on to say about fighting for the NHS and securing funding for refuges; "you have no chance of achieving those things because the vehicle you are using to do it is faulty."
If this is so, it really begs the question as to whether Jeremy Corbyn has been able to drastically alter the operation of "the vehicle", while maintaining his public schedule over the past 10 months, or whether the vehicle she refers to is not the Labour party but the Parliamentary system itself, overseen by the type of liberal conformist, establishment MP's who currently make up the majority of the Labour back benches and participants in this rebellion.
The kind of people who lost Scotland to the SNP, oversaw the European project and Global banking industry in the decade prior to the last big crash, were wrong about European Union, and who failed in the period of New Labour to institute an attitude of civic pride that would have made defending the institutions currently under attack a lot easier.
If these "rebel's" from conformity insist upon establishing Jeremy Corbyn's unelectability as fact through repetition, at some point they are going to have to explain why it is so, perhaps Jess's "parliamentary democracy is broken" is the closest explanation as to his unelectability we've had yet. If only she had similar concerns about the ideologically charged media outlets that permeate and underpin public discourse, contributing to his unelectability, perhaps she wouldn't be seen as a mediocre, conformist irrelevance, and her resignation would be taken as more than what was expected of just another butthurt, self indulgent liberal.
Making good use of her public profile by writing a further explanation for the Huffington Post, as to why she decided to quit Jeremy Corbyn's shadow cabinet, Ms Phillips begins in surprisingly confrontational fashion (for somebody complaining about her anxieties over confrontation), ridiculing the object of her ire, and dismissing the general discontent I assume has been directed at her over the past week or two, as coming from; "people who, I can only assume, think that the moon landing was a hoax and that Lord Lucan is currently sunning himself in a mankini sat with Anastasia and Rasputin on at a hedonism resort in Jamaica...."
When arguing or attempting to defend a position, misrepresenting all criticism is a common tactic employed by a party who knows they are on weak ground, in-fact the range of public resignations by Labour Mp's who've quit the shadow cabinet in the last week, demonstrate various attempts to avoid giving any substantial or honest explanation for their actions, from playing for sympathy, to the argument from authority, to the argument ad populum. I doubt the majority of criticisms or critical questions received by Ms Phillips represent a fringe paranoiac mentality as she asserts,but this is what she chooses to focus on when defending her position and perhaps justify her own sense of persecution, and paranoia.
Incase this portrayal of her 'detractors' as paranoiac loons is not enough of an explanation, Ms Phillip's adds rather patronizingly; "It is so easy to think about this whole episode in the Labour Party as binary, where one side is good, another bad." , but is this not a complete misrepresentation of an actual concrete division within the Labour Party? I.e that between radical socialist innovators and radical liberal conformists, or Blairites and assorted Leftists behind Corbyn? And does she not to some extent attempt to institute such a dualistic view as those who have exercised their freedom of speech to her?
I think people can deal with things in a good or bad way, generally the way the PLP have responded to the left turn of the wider party is bad, the way they have dealt with the democratic election of Jeremy Corbyn less than a year ago is appalling, they've essentially broken a Labour leadership which for the first time in decades was seen as being "in touch with people" in this country.
She goes on to say about fighting for the NHS and securing funding for refuges; "you have no chance of achieving those things because the vehicle you are using to do it is faulty."
If this is so, it really begs the question as to whether Jeremy Corbyn has been able to drastically alter the operation of "the vehicle", while maintaining his public schedule over the past 10 months, or whether the vehicle she refers to is not the Labour party but the Parliamentary system itself, overseen by the type of liberal conformist, establishment MP's who currently make up the majority of the Labour back benches and participants in this rebellion.
The kind of people who lost Scotland to the SNP, oversaw the European project and Global banking industry in the decade prior to the last big crash, were wrong about European Union, and who failed in the period of New Labour to institute an attitude of civic pride that would have made defending the institutions currently under attack a lot easier.
If these "rebel's" from conformity insist upon establishing Jeremy Corbyn's unelectability as fact through repetition, at some point they are going to have to explain why it is so, perhaps Jess's "parliamentary democracy is broken" is the closest explanation as to his unelectability we've had yet. If only she had similar concerns about the ideologically charged media outlets that permeate and underpin public discourse, contributing to his unelectability, perhaps she wouldn't be seen as a mediocre, conformist irrelevance, and her resignation would be taken as more than what was expected of just another butthurt, self indulgent liberal.
Saturday, 2 April 2016
The mainstream media's pseudo-concern about anti-Semitism...
During the Labour leadership election, it became pretty apparent early on, that the accusation of anti-Semitism would feature heavily in the Right Wing's defense of austerity were Jeremy Corbyn ever elected to lead the party. Many people like me who campaigned for Liz Kendall, could see his links, no matter how spurious, to various anti-Semitic campaigners against the State of Israel, or Stop the War Coalition -which takes an obviously biased and paternalistic position on the question of Palestine- would make Corbyn, "the Left" and therefore the Labour Party an extremely easy target and worrisome distraction, for the ideologically conservative media establishment to use as the predictable effects of austerity and inevitable popular dissatisfaction, began to translate into Labour support.
We knew old Tory mouthpieces like the Spectator, Mail and Telegraph, the likes of Rod Liddle and massive media conglomerates like Sky News would make much political capital out of this specific issue, spreading fear amongst the electorate about Jeremy Corbyn's various meetings with people who's melanin content seems 'suspisciously un-British', but I personally did not believe that certain individuals on the Left would be so happy to make it this easy for them, to help their enemies change the focus of public debate away from Corbyn's valid and valuable criticism's of austerity, towards incessant accusations of anti-Semitism and his apparent sympathy for openly terrorist organizations like Hamas or Hezbollah.
The BBC must have been rubbing their hands with glee when such a clearly unhinged 'spokesman' for 'Socialism' as Gerry Ruddy, agreed to answer charges of anti-Semitism on national TV. The Conservative party have a get out of jail free card to play at any point they fear Corbyn's humane message may be gaining traction, and a large number of opportunistic, self-promoters to draw upon who are willing to say any old bollocks to get their fifteen minutes of fame. Educational standards being what they are in the UK, it should come as no surprise to find a few glaring examples of idiocy among any gathering of a considerable size.
It's no coincidence these 'revelations' come hot on the heels of a number of recent polls, showing a surge in Labour's popularity after numerous favourable media appearances by Corbyn and Mcdonnell. Almost a year in, the suggestible morons who voted for them are waking up to the horrors they helped unleash, as the Conservative party's mask of concern for the state of the Nation begins to slip, and they start to concentrate on the important business of ripping each other to shreds over the UK's membership of the EU. It's unsurprising that the source of these attacks is, among others, tweed suited attack dog of the Conservative Party & wider Right Wing; Paul Staines.
It may be good for Labour to get these accusations out of the way early, though I doubt this will dissuade sections of the establishment from making use of them incessantly, for eternity, but in my view as somebody who has studied anti-Semitism in many forms and engaged with many of it's most rabid proponents, it's actually hindering a genuine and honest undertaking to recognize the mentality which gives rise to it and other forms of racism, while ignoring the problematic fact that it's been a staple of British 'intellectual' life, particularly amongst conservatives, since long before George Orwell wrote about the problem in 1945.
Another source of recent attempts to tarnish popular Left Wing resistance to Conservative austerity, is columnist for the Spectator, author, and Blairite opinion monger Nick Cohen, the poor man's Christopher Hitchens. Cohen's favourite personal axe to grind comes down on anyone identifying themselves politically, as to his Left. Granted he has been rightly attacking the anti-Semitic tendency intermittently for decades, but only in so far as it can be used as evidence to justify his personal position, whether on the invasion of Iraq or in opposition to Leftist students, organizations, critics of Israel, politics and politicians, in short anyone who he, as a pro-Israel; anti-Left centrist, disagrees with.
I actually agree with much of what Nick writes and has written in the past, although I think he's perhaps slightly more morally biased and conformist than he is nuanced. I'm not sure he's ever written a bad word about Israel, or the extreme Nationalist and religious elements within Israel's settler movement, who currently hold the ear of the Nations Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The absence of a Hitchensesque, nuanced criticism of everything currently existing there, has contributed to a polarization between two fairly superficial, emotionally charged sides the pro-Israel and pro-Palestine dialectic, both ignoring the validity of the other sides claims and reinforcing the belief that this ongoing conflict is un-resolvable until one side or the other has been annihilated.
Neither side really seeks truth in the historical records, or analytical, balanced journalism, as much as they seek confirmation in the emotionally charged propaganda and validatory opinions of either side.
Furthermore, in his 'Panglossian' defense of Liberal Democracies you will not hear Mr Cohen criticize the various forms of structural violence inherent to their existence, while he decries various symptoms he defines as anti-Americanism, anti-Semitic, "pro-Fascist Left". Consider the death of numerous disability benefits claimants forced into work assessment programs, or wrongly found fit to work then sanctioned for being unable to attend interviews; the dramatic increase in homelessness since many of the safety nets put in place under New Labour were removed; the encouragement of competition between workers, competition in schools and the National health service, competition between owners, bosses, political factions and countries.
Doesn’t a boss hope for their own benefit to see their competitors die? And don’t all businessmen reciprocally hope to be the only ones to enjoy the advantages that their occupations bring? In order to obtain employment, doesn’t the unemployed worker hope that, for some reason or another, someone who does have a job will be thrown out of his workplace? Those enacting these extremist reforms don't have to walk over the homeless people their policies create, they've never had to live on or below the breadline, nor do they have to live in a resource rich, infrastructure poor country, ravaged by warfare, corruption, industrial pollution and the rape of multinational corporations.
Nor does Mr Cohen seem any longer to want to write about the Iraq War, apparently deserting the Women, ethnic minorities or Christians, he so passionately argued we needed to 'save' through intervention, who arguably suffer there now far more than they did. This is a cause he passionately supported, writing about it's opponents in terms like: "how did the left come to defend fascist regimes". Maybe he knows if there are any Christians left in 'the best of all possible' Iraq's?
That Mr Cohen's writings about anti-Semitism are limited by the position of comfortable alienation that confines his attention to whatever he encounters at trendy dinner parties, on a screen, hears about in print or more accurately wants to hear about [2], is not a personal flaw of his exclusively but part of a wider process affecting more or less everybody in his position.
These various liberal media outlets and their teams of salaried writers, needing to turn a profit while in competition with various free and self produced forms of expression and analysis, are forced by the prevalence of competition to pander to popularity and safe markets or go out of business. The trend of 24hr rolling News is toward superficiality, with the need to cover everything 'Journalists' are not doing journalism, they are merely offering safe opinions which echo the perceived sensibilities and tastes of the potential audiences beneath them, on subjects we are already aware of. In their comfortable separateness from all they write about they can only formulate retrospective explanations and justifications for what has already happened, they can only colour and interpret events everybody is already aware of.
The internet is rendering such hierarchically alienated explanations of events irrelevant, through numerous expositions of lived experience, which sadly in a class ridden society such as the UK include a great deal of paranoia and speculation about powerful and wealthy hidden forces pulling the strings of finance, government and the media.
Of course these individuals and media outlets are right to be worried about anti-Semitism, but misrepresenting the reality of it's existence as confined to one political party or ideology to advance their own political ends, is fueling the cynicism which leads to such ideologies accepting anti-Semitism as a means of explaining their failures, shortcomings or persecution. One might even go so far as to say that the current mainstream discourse, though not unwarranted, by it's limited scope and the elitist, metropolitan political and socio-economic sphere that it comes from, actually serves to reinforce such, already widespread, paranoid fantasies as: "Jews have too much power in the media".
[1]
Didn't the Scottish pro-independence debate consist of doing exactly what the mainstream Political and Media discourse prohibited? The fact of the whole British media and mainstream political parties supporting the in campaign, on account of their perceived past, and ongoing 'transgressions'; their pro-English; pro-conservative biases; corporate favouritism, etc., was one of the foremost motivations many Scots needed to vote for Independence.
Ignoring the rational causes of this irrational conspiracy theory, using the mainstream media to attack and suppress anyone who's theories conflate Israeli policy with the ambiguous term Zionism, or who are critical of Zionist history in regards to Palestine, may have unintended negative consequences, in the same way that David Irving's books never suffered from negative publicity or official censorship.
In the way the current media discourse treats the problem as inherent to, or exclusive to "The Left", I wonder whether they actually are worried about anti-Semitism at all, or are merely feigning interest in the subject while it's easy for them to look up 'twitter leftists' and catch an example or two they can attribute to the critics of austerity & associate with Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party.
The most recent research I can find on the subject [1] implies that there are merely marginal differences between Labour and the Conservatives, unsurprisingly Paul Staines isn't bothered that the Libertarian and Xenophobic Right Wing party UKIP attracted more anti-Semitic voters than the rest. The fact more Conservative voters than Labour answered in agreement with anti-Semitic statements, implies this problem is more common to the political "Right" as we would expect, but where is the media outcry about this? Where is the balance in the media discourse which itself seems to be promoting an anti-Jeremy Corbyn agenda?
Furthermore where is labour journalism in the mainstream media discourse? Why don't we hear about international industrial relations, ongoing disputes over working conditions? Where are the pro-working class voices talking about working class issues? Only by providing the evidence of who is running these tax avoiding multi-national corporations, and what countries they use to avoid taxation; that exploitation is a matter of class and not nationality or ethnic heritage, will you be able to dispel the myth of 'Zionist' over-representation at the highest levels of Capitalism. Only when the actual reasons for national dis-unity, social antagonisms, ever expanding financial inequality and the dominance of capital are sought, will the causes of anti-Semitism be excavated, enabling us to transcend this paranoid and ignorant state.
Until such insightful and worthwhile journalism exists in the MSM discourse, the void will be filled by various online peddlers of the oldest lies in the Western Hemisphere, and people will be drawn to them by their opposition to a worthless, 'co-opted' liberal intelligentsia that treats the lower classes with scorn.
____
[1] Survey report.pdf by Campaign Against anti-Semitism
[2] Anything negative about Jeremy Corbyn, leftist students, trotskyists or whatever Islamic group or pro-Palestine faction has offended the sensibilities of the chattering classes this week.
We knew old Tory mouthpieces like the Spectator, Mail and Telegraph, the likes of Rod Liddle and massive media conglomerates like Sky News would make much political capital out of this specific issue, spreading fear amongst the electorate about Jeremy Corbyn's various meetings with people who's melanin content seems 'suspisciously un-British', but I personally did not believe that certain individuals on the Left would be so happy to make it this easy for them, to help their enemies change the focus of public debate away from Corbyn's valid and valuable criticism's of austerity, towards incessant accusations of anti-Semitism and his apparent sympathy for openly terrorist organizations like Hamas or Hezbollah.
The BBC must have been rubbing their hands with glee when such a clearly unhinged 'spokesman' for 'Socialism' as Gerry Ruddy, agreed to answer charges of anti-Semitism on national TV. The Conservative party have a get out of jail free card to play at any point they fear Corbyn's humane message may be gaining traction, and a large number of opportunistic, self-promoters to draw upon who are willing to say any old bollocks to get their fifteen minutes of fame. Educational standards being what they are in the UK, it should come as no surprise to find a few glaring examples of idiocy among any gathering of a considerable size.
It's no coincidence these 'revelations' come hot on the heels of a number of recent polls, showing a surge in Labour's popularity after numerous favourable media appearances by Corbyn and Mcdonnell. Almost a year in, the suggestible morons who voted for them are waking up to the horrors they helped unleash, as the Conservative party's mask of concern for the state of the Nation begins to slip, and they start to concentrate on the important business of ripping each other to shreds over the UK's membership of the EU. It's unsurprising that the source of these attacks is, among others, tweed suited attack dog of the Conservative Party & wider Right Wing; Paul Staines.
It may be good for Labour to get these accusations out of the way early, though I doubt this will dissuade sections of the establishment from making use of them incessantly, for eternity, but in my view as somebody who has studied anti-Semitism in many forms and engaged with many of it's most rabid proponents, it's actually hindering a genuine and honest undertaking to recognize the mentality which gives rise to it and other forms of racism, while ignoring the problematic fact that it's been a staple of British 'intellectual' life, particularly amongst conservatives, since long before George Orwell wrote about the problem in 1945.
Another source of recent attempts to tarnish popular Left Wing resistance to Conservative austerity, is columnist for the Spectator, author, and Blairite opinion monger Nick Cohen, the poor man's Christopher Hitchens. Cohen's favourite personal axe to grind comes down on anyone identifying themselves politically, as to his Left. Granted he has been rightly attacking the anti-Semitic tendency intermittently for decades, but only in so far as it can be used as evidence to justify his personal position, whether on the invasion of Iraq or in opposition to Leftist students, organizations, critics of Israel, politics and politicians, in short anyone who he, as a pro-Israel; anti-Left centrist, disagrees with.
I actually agree with much of what Nick writes and has written in the past, although I think he's perhaps slightly more morally biased and conformist than he is nuanced. I'm not sure he's ever written a bad word about Israel, or the extreme Nationalist and religious elements within Israel's settler movement, who currently hold the ear of the Nations Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The absence of a Hitchensesque, nuanced criticism of everything currently existing there, has contributed to a polarization between two fairly superficial, emotionally charged sides the pro-Israel and pro-Palestine dialectic, both ignoring the validity of the other sides claims and reinforcing the belief that this ongoing conflict is un-resolvable until one side or the other has been annihilated.
Neither side really seeks truth in the historical records, or analytical, balanced journalism, as much as they seek confirmation in the emotionally charged propaganda and validatory opinions of either side.
Furthermore, in his 'Panglossian' defense of Liberal Democracies you will not hear Mr Cohen criticize the various forms of structural violence inherent to their existence, while he decries various symptoms he defines as anti-Americanism, anti-Semitic, "pro-Fascist Left". Consider the death of numerous disability benefits claimants forced into work assessment programs, or wrongly found fit to work then sanctioned for being unable to attend interviews; the dramatic increase in homelessness since many of the safety nets put in place under New Labour were removed; the encouragement of competition between workers, competition in schools and the National health service, competition between owners, bosses, political factions and countries.
Doesn’t a boss hope for their own benefit to see their competitors die? And don’t all businessmen reciprocally hope to be the only ones to enjoy the advantages that their occupations bring? In order to obtain employment, doesn’t the unemployed worker hope that, for some reason or another, someone who does have a job will be thrown out of his workplace? Those enacting these extremist reforms don't have to walk over the homeless people their policies create, they've never had to live on or below the breadline, nor do they have to live in a resource rich, infrastructure poor country, ravaged by warfare, corruption, industrial pollution and the rape of multinational corporations.
Nor does Mr Cohen seem any longer to want to write about the Iraq War, apparently deserting the Women, ethnic minorities or Christians, he so passionately argued we needed to 'save' through intervention, who arguably suffer there now far more than they did. This is a cause he passionately supported, writing about it's opponents in terms like: "how did the left come to defend fascist regimes". Maybe he knows if there are any Christians left in 'the best of all possible' Iraq's?
That Mr Cohen's writings about anti-Semitism are limited by the position of comfortable alienation that confines his attention to whatever he encounters at trendy dinner parties, on a screen, hears about in print or more accurately wants to hear about [2], is not a personal flaw of his exclusively but part of a wider process affecting more or less everybody in his position.
These various liberal media outlets and their teams of salaried writers, needing to turn a profit while in competition with various free and self produced forms of expression and analysis, are forced by the prevalence of competition to pander to popularity and safe markets or go out of business. The trend of 24hr rolling News is toward superficiality, with the need to cover everything 'Journalists' are not doing journalism, they are merely offering safe opinions which echo the perceived sensibilities and tastes of the potential audiences beneath them, on subjects we are already aware of. In their comfortable separateness from all they write about they can only formulate retrospective explanations and justifications for what has already happened, they can only colour and interpret events everybody is already aware of.
The internet is rendering such hierarchically alienated explanations of events irrelevant, through numerous expositions of lived experience, which sadly in a class ridden society such as the UK include a great deal of paranoia and speculation about powerful and wealthy hidden forces pulling the strings of finance, government and the media.
Of course these individuals and media outlets are right to be worried about anti-Semitism, but misrepresenting the reality of it's existence as confined to one political party or ideology to advance their own political ends, is fueling the cynicism which leads to such ideologies accepting anti-Semitism as a means of explaining their failures, shortcomings or persecution. One might even go so far as to say that the current mainstream discourse, though not unwarranted, by it's limited scope and the elitist, metropolitan political and socio-economic sphere that it comes from, actually serves to reinforce such, already widespread, paranoid fantasies as: "Jews have too much power in the media".
[1]
Ignoring the rational causes of this irrational conspiracy theory, using the mainstream media to attack and suppress anyone who's theories conflate Israeli policy with the ambiguous term Zionism, or who are critical of Zionist history in regards to Palestine, may have unintended negative consequences, in the same way that David Irving's books never suffered from negative publicity or official censorship.
In the way the current media discourse treats the problem as inherent to, or exclusive to "The Left", I wonder whether they actually are worried about anti-Semitism at all, or are merely feigning interest in the subject while it's easy for them to look up 'twitter leftists' and catch an example or two they can attribute to the critics of austerity & associate with Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party.
The most recent research I can find on the subject [1] implies that there are merely marginal differences between Labour and the Conservatives, unsurprisingly Paul Staines isn't bothered that the Libertarian and Xenophobic Right Wing party UKIP attracted more anti-Semitic voters than the rest. The fact more Conservative voters than Labour answered in agreement with anti-Semitic statements, implies this problem is more common to the political "Right" as we would expect, but where is the media outcry about this? Where is the balance in the media discourse which itself seems to be promoting an anti-Jeremy Corbyn agenda?
Furthermore where is labour journalism in the mainstream media discourse? Why don't we hear about international industrial relations, ongoing disputes over working conditions? Where are the pro-working class voices talking about working class issues? Only by providing the evidence of who is running these tax avoiding multi-national corporations, and what countries they use to avoid taxation; that exploitation is a matter of class and not nationality or ethnic heritage, will you be able to dispel the myth of 'Zionist' over-representation at the highest levels of Capitalism. Only when the actual reasons for national dis-unity, social antagonisms, ever expanding financial inequality and the dominance of capital are sought, will the causes of anti-Semitism be excavated, enabling us to transcend this paranoid and ignorant state.
Until such insightful and worthwhile journalism exists in the MSM discourse, the void will be filled by various online peddlers of the oldest lies in the Western Hemisphere, and people will be drawn to them by their opposition to a worthless, 'co-opted' liberal intelligentsia that treats the lower classes with scorn.
____
[1] Survey report.pdf by Campaign Against anti-Semitism
[2] Anything negative about Jeremy Corbyn, leftist students, trotskyists or whatever Islamic group or pro-Palestine faction has offended the sensibilities of the chattering classes this week.
Friday, 1 January 2016
On the Internet and the Real World....
The success of platforms such as 38 Degrees shows how the free association of individuals on the internet can give rise to mass participation in lobbying, petitions and tangible change in the real world, as well as igniting the enthusiasm of huge groups of people for causes and ideas frequently overlooked and ignored in mainstream discourse.
In a social order increasingly devoid of mass action, communication, shows of popular unity or political will, those looking to the internet see a means of reviving democratic ideals lost in an age of social atomization, rampant individualism and the commercial domination of public space.
However if we consider the innovative potential of millions of diverse and creative people with the means of participation at their fingertips, petitions, protest or lobbying groups begin to appear actually rather unambitious.
Global initiatives raising money for good causes through crowdfunding -ensuring those with a desire to work for the common good of humanity aren't financially restrained from doing so- are doing exactly what a Government should do, putting money and resources to use where they are most needed to alleviate hunger, poverty, ignorance and human suffering, but in a superior way which is to say directly, anyone who experiences a lack or observes a need can immediately and independently publicize it and appeal to the human instincts of potentially huge global audiences.
You will notice that real world societies do not treat such examples of lack, poverty and degradation in the same way, sure isolated acts of kindness take place, but they are few and insignificant enough to make no difference whatsoever.
Things were a little different in the past when wealthier inhabitants of regions still felt a degree of communal responsibility, enjoying the freedom, time and concentration of wealth to fund philanthropic initiatives such as Bourneville and New Lanark among other model villages. [1]
It was exposure to the new ideas of Utopian Socialism, the rational application of religious ideals, and the optimistic belief that a new world of peace and prosperity could infact be obtained in this life which served as a catalyst for the great social reformers of the 19th and early 20th century. All information available to us today but apparently shrouded and incomprehensible to the passive voyeurs of the information age.
Today those with a desire to cooperate to improve humanities collective lot are still in a minority, a situation requiring a cultural shift that the Internet as it is increasingly colonized by the brutish banalities of the real world and vapid consumerist culture, becomes less and less able to effect, and which politics and the media appear never to have been able to.
Representing the people as helpless beneath the heel of speculators, profiteers and as slaves to their own self interests, the public's only established means of securing the general interests of all; the Government in their myopia and pandering sycophancy to financial interests, seem more and more to serve only as an obstacle to people responding to and improving the general conditions of their society.
By refusing to alleviate social and individual alienation and the sale of one's labour as a commodity, encouraging dependence on money rather than facilitating freedom from it; the Goverment in allowing the general population to be treated as a prize dairy cow and milked for all they're worth, is complicit in diverting human ingenuity and industry away from the immediate problems which demand our attention, towards the dead end of self absorption, conformity and self obsession that is destroying one of our last free spaces.
Rather than co-opting and exploiting the Internet for their own ends; politics, media and the real world more generally should learn from the horizontal nature of large social media networks, digital public platforms, independent blogs and obviously the internet more generally, by considering the freedom, diversity, creative & democratic potential inherent to them but sorely lacking in the real world.
More or less everybody now has access to the information, software, hardware and means of producing and publishing, even marketing whatever they like, whether artistic, musical, nonsensical, intellectual or materially useful, everybody has the ability to reach the kind of large audiences formerly reserved for television and print media outlets and those able to procure it's use.
Of course this has not gone unnoticed by the media and political establishment, not content with telling us what to think, care about, do, buy and support all day everyday in the real world; exactly where all our problems reside and stem from-- the agents of mainstream mediocrity have ventured forth with their university diplomas, media careers and dedicated followings to colonize, homogenize and reproduce the real world's flaws in our newest public space; the digital commons, using their mundane doctrines in order to distract us all from the project of self realization, autonomous actions, unrestrained artistic creation and borderless, unmediated communication.
In fact it can be worse, now causes utterly disdained in the real world, by the magic of film making, PR and exclusively favourable self promotion; through the freedom of the internet can grow into large potential fifth column's existing subterraneously in modern Democratic societies.
Anti-Semitic, conspiracy theorists, neo-fascism, neo-nazi, white supremacist, terroristic, misogynist and backwards groups of all kinds, use their particular representations of the real world to enthrall and captivate audiences who are primed for passive consumption online.
______
[1]
In 1893, George Cadbury bought 120 acres (0.5 km²) of land and planned, at his own expense, a model village which would 'alleviate the evils of modern, more cramped living conditions'. The Cadburys began to develop their factory in the new suburb. Loyal and hard-working workers were treated with great respect and relatively high wages and good working conditions; Cadbury also pioneered pension schemes, joint works committees and a full staff medical service.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bournville
New Lanark, with its social and welfare programmes, epitomised Robert Owen's utopian socialist principles. In Owen's time some 2,500 people lived at New Lanark, many from the poorhouses of Glasgow and Edinburgh. Although not the grimmest of mills by far, Owen found the conditions unsatisfactory and resolved to improve the workers' lot. He paid particular attention to the needs of the 500 or so children living in the village and working at the mills, and opened the first infants' school in Britain in 1817, although the previous year he had completed the Institute for the Formation of Character. The mills thrived commercially, but Owen's partners were unhappy at the extra expense incurred by his welfare programmes. Unwilling to allow the mills to revert to the old ways of operating, Owen bought out his partners. In 1813 the Board forced an auction, hoping to obtain the town and mills at a low price but Owen and a new board (including the economist Jeremy Bentham) that was sympathetic to his reforming ideas won out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Lanark
In a social order increasingly devoid of mass action, communication, shows of popular unity or political will, those looking to the internet see a means of reviving democratic ideals lost in an age of social atomization, rampant individualism and the commercial domination of public space.
However if we consider the innovative potential of millions of diverse and creative people with the means of participation at their fingertips, petitions, protest or lobbying groups begin to appear actually rather unambitious.
Global initiatives raising money for good causes through crowdfunding -ensuring those with a desire to work for the common good of humanity aren't financially restrained from doing so- are doing exactly what a Government should do, putting money and resources to use where they are most needed to alleviate hunger, poverty, ignorance and human suffering, but in a superior way which is to say directly, anyone who experiences a lack or observes a need can immediately and independently publicize it and appeal to the human instincts of potentially huge global audiences.
You will notice that real world societies do not treat such examples of lack, poverty and degradation in the same way, sure isolated acts of kindness take place, but they are few and insignificant enough to make no difference whatsoever.
Things were a little different in the past when wealthier inhabitants of regions still felt a degree of communal responsibility, enjoying the freedom, time and concentration of wealth to fund philanthropic initiatives such as Bourneville and New Lanark among other model villages. [1]
It was exposure to the new ideas of Utopian Socialism, the rational application of religious ideals, and the optimistic belief that a new world of peace and prosperity could infact be obtained in this life which served as a catalyst for the great social reformers of the 19th and early 20th century. All information available to us today but apparently shrouded and incomprehensible to the passive voyeurs of the information age.
Today those with a desire to cooperate to improve humanities collective lot are still in a minority, a situation requiring a cultural shift that the Internet as it is increasingly colonized by the brutish banalities of the real world and vapid consumerist culture, becomes less and less able to effect, and which politics and the media appear never to have been able to.
Representing the people as helpless beneath the heel of speculators, profiteers and as slaves to their own self interests, the public's only established means of securing the general interests of all; the Government in their myopia and pandering sycophancy to financial interests, seem more and more to serve only as an obstacle to people responding to and improving the general conditions of their society.
By refusing to alleviate social and individual alienation and the sale of one's labour as a commodity, encouraging dependence on money rather than facilitating freedom from it; the Goverment in allowing the general population to be treated as a prize dairy cow and milked for all they're worth, is complicit in diverting human ingenuity and industry away from the immediate problems which demand our attention, towards the dead end of self absorption, conformity and self obsession that is destroying one of our last free spaces.
Rather than co-opting and exploiting the Internet for their own ends; politics, media and the real world more generally should learn from the horizontal nature of large social media networks, digital public platforms, independent blogs and obviously the internet more generally, by considering the freedom, diversity, creative & democratic potential inherent to them but sorely lacking in the real world.
More or less everybody now has access to the information, software, hardware and means of producing and publishing, even marketing whatever they like, whether artistic, musical, nonsensical, intellectual or materially useful, everybody has the ability to reach the kind of large audiences formerly reserved for television and print media outlets and those able to procure it's use.
Of course this has not gone unnoticed by the media and political establishment, not content with telling us what to think, care about, do, buy and support all day everyday in the real world; exactly where all our problems reside and stem from-- the agents of mainstream mediocrity have ventured forth with their university diplomas, media careers and dedicated followings to colonize, homogenize and reproduce the real world's flaws in our newest public space; the digital commons, using their mundane doctrines in order to distract us all from the project of self realization, autonomous actions, unrestrained artistic creation and borderless, unmediated communication.
In fact it can be worse, now causes utterly disdained in the real world, by the magic of film making, PR and exclusively favourable self promotion; through the freedom of the internet can grow into large potential fifth column's existing subterraneously in modern Democratic societies.
Anti-Semitic, conspiracy theorists, neo-fascism, neo-nazi, white supremacist, terroristic, misogynist and backwards groups of all kinds, use their particular representations of the real world to enthrall and captivate audiences who are primed for passive consumption online.
______
[1]
In 1893, George Cadbury bought 120 acres (0.5 km²) of land and planned, at his own expense, a model village which would 'alleviate the evils of modern, more cramped living conditions'. The Cadburys began to develop their factory in the new suburb. Loyal and hard-working workers were treated with great respect and relatively high wages and good working conditions; Cadbury also pioneered pension schemes, joint works committees and a full staff medical service.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bournville
New Lanark, with its social and welfare programmes, epitomised Robert Owen's utopian socialist principles. In Owen's time some 2,500 people lived at New Lanark, many from the poorhouses of Glasgow and Edinburgh. Although not the grimmest of mills by far, Owen found the conditions unsatisfactory and resolved to improve the workers' lot. He paid particular attention to the needs of the 500 or so children living in the village and working at the mills, and opened the first infants' school in Britain in 1817, although the previous year he had completed the Institute for the Formation of Character. The mills thrived commercially, but Owen's partners were unhappy at the extra expense incurred by his welfare programmes. Unwilling to allow the mills to revert to the old ways of operating, Owen bought out his partners. In 1813 the Board forced an auction, hoping to obtain the town and mills at a low price but Owen and a new board (including the economist Jeremy Bentham) that was sympathetic to his reforming ideas won out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Lanark
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