Full Marx

The scope of Tory graft and corruption is legendary - the modern Conservative Party is very much its spawn. It has run the racket with the seal of Empire and Crown since the days of the East India Company.

Richard Desmond sits in a long tradition of robber-barons using venal officials like Jenrick to enrich himself at public expense. The colonial capitalist system by its very nature concentrates dictatorial power in the form of brute wealth in the hands of the few - which Desmond used to opt out of his social responsibilities by dangling a £12,000 donation before the Tories. It is incredibly telling that private texts have shown that he wanted to make sure the "Marxists" of the local council didn't get "doe for nothing [sic]" - displaying an enormous condescention for working-class Londoners, as well as a dumb inability to distinguish between communism and the mildest civil social democracy. This sordid affair saved him an estimated £50m in property taxes, which would have been spent on vital frontline council services.

He must be torn down. The Tory Party must be torn down. Capital itself must be torn down.

We must grasp that the Black American voting bloc who routinely align with the corporate Democratic Right are not 'conservative' or 'the establishment' - it represents something altogether more complex and specific.

Partly are a layer of community leaders - often elderly warriors of the civil rights era - who have been successfully co-opted by the Democratic Right, buying into the notion that the Democratic Party represents the institutionalisation of the gains won by the near-civil war of the '60s, come hell or high water. This layer is buttressed by genuine material gains for their class: positions in local government, petit-bourgeois business interests etc. This class was itself left monolithic after the physical dismantlement of the Black Panther movement by the repressive institutions of state: having thinned the revolutionaries from the ranks, the remainder were more easily subsumed.

But far deeper (and I'd argue far more numerically superior) are the large numbers of African-American voters - particularly in Red states which see the highest levels of racist harrassment of young black men, the most obscenely skewed justice systems and the like - who are actively and consciously choosing the devil they know because the stakes are higher for them than we privileged intellectuals can comprehend.

The answer on how to reach those voters is quite straightforward - although monumental in proportion. Socialists simply must do better in offering security and protection for black working-class communities from state violence and victimisation. Not in the abstract or legal sense - the only way that those communities will have their fear broken is through independent class action: self-organised mutual aid societies, community defense organisations and activist opposition to racial injustices.

This isn't something that can materialise overnight, and it may well be something that is too large to be tackled in the course of one Presidential campaign. But the nascent 'political revolution' of Bernie Sanders can provide a springboard to unite all of the disparate struggles fought by black communities into a more coherent politics to put material, social form to the slogan 'Black Lives Matter'.

Liberalism requires believing both that the interests of financial aristocrats should heavily influence all policy decisions via the language of 'efficiency', 'stability' and 'viability', and also that the selfsame 1% is an unheard minority that needs defending at all costs.

The reason investors are panicking isn't because COVID19 is a particularly bad pandemic - that's only the proximate cause.

Capitalists have made their own bed. For decades, successive governments across the West have undermined universal welfare states by privatising, strangling funding and casualising working conditions - in pursuit of profits. At the same time, the political degeneration of stable neoliberal regimes into authoritarian managed democracies with tendency towards right-wing populism has promoted ill-equipped cliques to power who have little capacity for (or interest in) stable, effective government - cf. the Trump administration or the post-Brexit Tory Party.

When taken together, we have a beautiful cocktail: eroded, tottering public health systems led by uninterested, incompetent leaders, faced with a modest public health challenge.

No wonder governments have spectacularly failed the ruling-class' vote-of-confidence on their efficacy.

To whit: the compulsory requisition of productive property owned by corporations, banks and individuals whose estates profited from slavery and the trans-Atlantic trade, and its democratisation in service to poor black communities as an immediate measure towards redistributive reparations.

Socialist politics are really only 'divisive' between those who profit from human misery and those who don't.

The Parisian sans-culottes during the French Revolution were 'toxic'. They were mad as hell. The wanted to see the gutters fill with the blood of enemies of the Revolution. They'd have tweeted some pretty insane shit.

But this wasn't just some mass hysteria that struck from the blue. The sans-culottes knew that the Revolution was all that was standing between them and either their families' literal starvation, or their slaughter at the hands of the monarchical armies invading France from all sides. The only way they could see to guarantee their very existence was through grim support for a repressive government determined to stamp out internal dissent.

Those who whine about 'civility', seeking to confine political resistance to forms acceptable to elite sensibilities, fail to apprehend the stakes - often deliberately so, in order to vilify dissent. We should be less concerned with policing the tone of political discourse than fully engaging with why the system drives people to express themselves negatively out of sheer terror for their futures.

Every ruling-class which has not known when to trade a little of its wealth for a little security has been crushed: the English feudal aristocracy before the English Civil War, the French ancien regime, the Tsarist empire. When historians look back on the early 21st-century, the single biggest factor in the downfall of the neoliberal capitalist class will have been their suicidal belief that the most modest of social-democratic redistribution is indistinguishable from communism. Prolonged, such a belief becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

'Unity' has become the death of politics.

It had a purpose once.

'Democratic centralism' - broadly, maximum democratic debate followed by binding unity of action - was imported into the broad cross-class social movements of the late 19th- and early 20th-centuries from the societies of socialist brotherhood operating underground before the liberalisation of labour laws. In its comparatively benign form, 'unity' as a concept underpinned the alliances between moderate labour unions and the bourgeois workers' parties; it permitted stable social-democratic social contracts - like the postwar consensus in the UK, or the New Deal in the US; albeit often explicitly to exclude more radical working-class factions.

These 'unified' movements were effective because they were able to extract redistributive concessions from ruling-classes: be it through the militancy of other contending groups forcing moderates to the table (cf. black civil rights in the US), the militancy of the movement itself (cf. the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa), existential threats posed to the system (cf. the NHS in the context of the burgeoning Cold War). But in the 21st-century, progressives championing 'unity' require us to observe the circuses without the bread. The redistributive fruits of government - on the back of 40 years of institutionalised neoliberalism, an historically weak working-class movement only able sporadically to project its power, and with the hollowing of state mechanisms by systematic tax avoidance which has allowed the elite to opt out of any social obligation - no longer provide compelling reason to contend in common for limited reform.

In this context, the idea of 'unity' has degenerated. It has become for centrists a performative Shibboleth entailing lowest-common-denominator neoliberalism, justifying censorship of critics and minorities. It is wielded in service to demand compliance as an objective end in itself, rather than as a means of a movement welding over its diversities for the sake of common purpose.

Thus, unity must go.

We must take careful stock of those with whom unity is possible, and of those with whom unity requires the bending of our aims to such an extent that we no longer recognise them as ours. In concrete terms, that will mean the immediate reassessment of some of the deepest parts of the labour movement's history: for example, in the UK, the 120-year-old 'progressive' alliance between bourgeois intellectuals, the left-wing of capital and trade unions which underpins the Labour Party.

There is no quiet way to do this. Political realignment and the emergence of a new pole of working-class interests will be messy. But it is urgent, and must be carried out with concomitant urgency. To have the revolution, you must have the revolution.

So I say:

For uproar! For dissent! For Reformation! For a thoroughly Disunited Kingdom!

In seriously courting Michael Bloomberg, the DNC is effectively signalling that their politics' only means of beating Trump is to become Trump. The final decrepitude - like the Directory enabling Napoleon's coup in Brumaire 1799, it'll be their last act.

NOTE: if you want more comment and content, you’ll find plenty of extra real-time Marxist analysis and awful dad jokes on my Twitter feed - @FullMarxPodcast

 ~ FM

Can you imagine if the Labour leadership candidates had announced today the launch of a mass anti-racist street movement to combat far-right attacks on Jewish communities? Would do a whole lot more for British Jews than giving support to war crimes against Palestinian workers.

Seeing the Labour leadership contenders all fall over one another to declare themselves to be ‘Zionist’ themselves or ‘supportive of Zionism’ demonstrates the paucity of well-meaning liberal internationalism. When faced with an intractible conflict in the Middle East, which is inherently entangled with Western imperialist regional ambitions and complex ethnic history, establishment candidates and ‘socialist’ insurgents alike have chosen to select Zionism (and a narrowly defined elitist Zionism at that) as a surrogate for the entirety of Jewish opinion, allowing unelected, unscrutinised, elite voices to predominate and dictate policy.

Zionism and self-determination for the Israeli people are not the same thing - and neither encompass the wide spectrum of opinions within the Jewish working-class movement. Senior Labour figures are under enormous pressure to carry through performative ‘reassuring British Jews’ - this seems to consist largely of ceding to conservative Jewish groups’ demands, and very little, for example, in building a mass resistance to the huge rise in anti-Semitic hate incidents brought about by Tory triumphalism and a permissive atmosphere enabling violence against oppressed minorities.

Colluding with attempts by JLM and the Board of Deputies to paste right-Zionism as the moderate, default position for British Jews throws the ghettoised Palestinian populace and socialist Jews under the bus both.

The single idea that really unlocked Marx's ideas for me was that Marx never talks at the level of individuals, but at the level of classes.

An individual might, even in the course of one day, play a role in a number of different classes and class interests: as a wage labourer in their day job, they get home and invest some of their earned cash in a stock portfolio and exercise some bourgeois power, before settling down to their self-employed side hustle eBay business for a few hours in the evening.

Each one of these is, within the individual, dialectic; they might conflict and pull the individual one way or another over decisions such as who to vote for or whether to go on strike etc. But what matters at the social level - what drives and motivates deep historical change - is that each of the roles that that individual might play in a day coalesce and co-mingle with the other such roles played by other similarly mixed individuals; that the classes which the individuals are the conduit for, each with their own set of durable, distinct interests and impetuses, are what dictate and condition society, and which themselves thereby rebound and reflect back onto the actions and impetuses of the individual.

When understood in this way - classes as impersonal, emergent, abstracted but nevertheless real and powerful forces expressed diffusely by the array of roles played by individuals - it gives us a far more nuanced approach, directing our energies past 'bad individuals vs good individuals' towards attacking the structural underpinnings of capitalist accumulation.

The level and complexity of repressive and ideological forces arrayed against movements for the advancement of working-class interests means that we are forced - out of sheer necessity - to adopt more and more fundamentally revolutionary means of overturning the vested interests of the ruling-class; like the gardener whose quest to tame the encroaching ivy casts by necessity their eyes ever further down to the roots.

The only difference between a reformist and a revolutionary is that one possesses the courage to implement their beliefs with the ferocity that the logic of the situation demands.

It is very concerning that all candidates for the UK Labour Party leadership have uncritically accepted the Board of Deputies of British Jews' programme for tackling anti-Semitism within the Party.

It gives the Right firm foundation to fabricate anti-Semitism accusations. It gives political cover for the trend of genuine cases of Anti-Semitism being sidelined and factionalised. Perhaps most importantly it seeks to weaponise the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism to censor dissenting socialist Jewish voices.

The anti-Semitism that exists within Labour (as it exists within all political parties; anti-Semitism is a pervasive social problem) will not be touched by these pledges, since the cynical continuity-Blairites have no interest in anything other than throwing British Jews under the bus for their own ambitions. This sorry battle exists as the latest in a long line of centrist liberals seeking to use the Jewish community to solve its own political problems. The (belated) scramble to 'reassure' British Jews is taking place in an atmosphere of fear largely created by the far-right and the gutter press, and it has been applied by the unscrupulous to the Labour Party for political gain. Nobody should feel reassured that the socialist Left is in the process of folding - again - to those would would neuter it as an anti-racist and pro-working-class political force.