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Episode 16: UK and France Elections Special
165 Plays5 months ago
A conversation about the British and French elections,. Subjects touched on include: the collapse of the Tories after 14 years in power, the NHS good and bad, Labour and Tory Transphobia, Mogg blubbing, the rise of Starmer's Labour and its 'majority without a mandate', Starmerism as anti-left, the defeat of Marine Le Pen's far-right National Rally in France by the left-bloc in the second round of National Assembly elections, gains by the right and left in Britain, Farage and Reform UK, Galloway and the Workers Party, the rise of neo-fascism worldwide, and the hollowing out of the centre, and prospects for the future. With Simon Hannah, Rowan Fortune, and Jack Graham.
Music: 'Debunking' by Yuzzy.
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Transcript
Introduction and Context
00:00:00
Speaker
are Okay, welcome to this issue of anti-capitalist radio.
00:00:16
Speaker
This is a very special edition because it is the first one under a Labour government in the UK since 2010. So we will be focusing this podcast on the historic election campaign that we've just had, as well as looking over the channel to France and the recent battles going on there in terms of the assembly elections. what My name is Simon Hann. I'm the Secretary of Anti-Cavity Assistance. I'm joined by Rowan, who is with us in London, and also Jack, who is in non-London, giving an outside London perspective, maybe. Deep in the heart of Torydom. Yes, yes. I mean, someone's got to do it, Jack. Someone's got to do it.
The Tory Collapse and Labour's Non-Landslide Victory
00:01:06
Speaker
So I guess the first the first point to maybe start off the discussion is just to say the election campaign saw the most successful political party in history get absolutely crushed in terms of the returning number of MPs, a historic defeat. How happy did that make everyone? OK. Rowan, it's just to quickly give pronouns. I mean, i yeah I guess my views were were tempered by coming from the trans community and the fact that the incoming government is is unlikely to be considerably better and I think in terms of some of the forces within it is is probably more likely to be better organized and more sadistic rather than sort of the flailing
00:01:56
Speaker
cultural or hyperbole that we've become used to from the Tories. But I mean, I think like everybody, I definitely enjoyed watching Tory after Tory lose their seat, even if it was because the far right split the vote. It was certainly particularly fun to watch Jacob Rees' smog. a blubber a little bit, especially having remembered his interview with Aaron Jones a few years back where he claimed to never cry and I believe said that that it was a slightly new age-y thing to do that he had no truck with. So that was bemusing at the very least.
00:02:33
Speaker
I mean, it's it's been a long hold. I mean, it's it it did feel, especially in 2019, like the the Tory hold was impregnable. And it is nice to see that that isn't the case, but as has been numerously enumerated by some of the pockets of of more critical thought within the media. this was This was no real labour landslide. This was simply the collapse of the Tory vote into the far right without that split.
00:03:08
Speaker
the Labour Party would have won, but it would have been far less historic.
Rise of Far-Right and Lack of Left Opposition
00:03:12
Speaker
It would have been and would have been a small victory. And I think it is very much the case that Farage played a particularly strong hand because he was less either less concerned of what of the implications of a Starmer government than the implications of a Corbyn government when he backed down considerably in 2019 and avoided doing exactly this and splitting the right vote or miscalculated and decided that it made very little difference because the Tory party was in for a drubbing anyway and and there was no difference. My suspicion is that this is not the latter, it's it's that he actually is that he actually is less concerned by the implications of a ah Stama government
00:03:59
Speaker
and is looking to the possibilities of drawing in younger reactionary men under a stammer regime that may be not presenting us as as readily under the current Tory context, where the youth vote has a a unified enemy in the right, in the for in in terms of housing policy especially, which is actually quite long-sighted for a far-right demagogue like Farage. and I mean he said it himself that he was playing for the next election and not this election and I think that was that was probably true. I don't think it was a miscalculation but either way I think the result in that sense was quite terrifying watching so many seats have
00:04:47
Speaker
reform at second place. And irrespective of what we might say of the reform vote relative to previous elections and the reform strategy relative to previous elections, the narrative certainly that's been taken up is is that there was an overwhelming shift to the far right. And I think that's a narrative that's that's taken hold in in general public discourse. And I think that should frighten us on the left, especially when the opposition to that is in the form of Starmer et al., which is not a left opposition by any stretch of the imagination. And indeed, there isn't even a left opposition within that sphere because the Starmer Project has mostly been about annihilating that and has done a very effective job, at least within the Labour Party.
00:05:32
Speaker
I guess the slightly more optimistic news is the success of some independent candidates and Jeremy Corbyn as well because there is a splintering to the left and if that can be consolidated especially by the movements. I think we probably shouldn't be thinking primarily in electoral terms right now, but if that can be consolidated if that feeling can be consolidated in the movements, then hopefully that can be a counteracting force to the despair opened up by the the reform vote. and If we can make war with with the Starma government and gain some key critical victories, hold them to
00:06:16
Speaker
a certain sense of expectation around them similarly, but i think it's I think it's hit the ground running type situation. And just on the question of how it felt, it couldn't help but remind me, because I'm a very old man now, couldn't help remind me of 97, you know. And back then, I was the sort of person who would stay up all night and and watch the news coverage of the election, particularly that election for for reasons that are probably obvious. And, you know, as much as I had no enthusiasm at all for New Labour or Tony Blair,
00:06:54
Speaker
or really anything to to do with that. I mean, I wasn't even enthusiastic about labor per se, let alone new labor.
Labour's Campaign Strategy and Economic Focus
00:07:01
Speaker
Nevertheless, that was a thrilling night you know for for for a man in his 20s, 97, watching the the Tories being... good ah Effectively, it was the only form of government in Britain that I knew at that point, and they were absolutely absolutely detestable and vile and loathsome, obviously, and they were being removed from office, and it was incredibly exhilarating and satisfying and moving, etc. I felt nothing of that at all ah this this time.
00:07:31
Speaker
And I don't think it's just because I'm i'm that much older. I think, you know, Starmer and Labour now are a categorically worse prospect even than than Blair and New Labour were back in the day. I mean, as as ghastly as they were. So yeah, that's ah that's really my way into it. It's just just on the question of feelings. It was impossible for me to work up any kind of, you know, even seeing this bunch of Tories booted out after 14 catastrophic years of cruelty and sadism and staggering mismanagement. it it Just because the what's replacing them is basically almost exactly the same thing. And in some respects, as as you said, Rowan, potentially even worse. It just basically did nothing for me at all.
00:08:16
Speaker
I think it's interesting that the the continuity, because Starmer's Labour obviously emphasised that because they were intent on winning over as many floating, disaffected Tory voters as possible. And I think they centred that the that the Tories were weak after Liz Truss and had upset a lot of their voters, you know, really high mortgage rates, you know, affecting homeowners and, you know, and other parts of the population. And and and also, obviously, the sense that the Tory party had just become, well, they'd lost that key thing, which is their absolute go-to, which is that they're the ones that are valued for economic competency.
00:08:55
Speaker
you know it's the kind of It's the standard thing, which is often repeated. The Labour is known for defending the and NHS, and the Tories are well-known for economic competency.
Farage's Influence and Populist Right's Growth
00:09:04
Speaker
And obviously Labour sensed that they had a real opportunity to to steal that crown from the Conservative Party. But obviously under a kind of capitalist, you know hollowed-out neoliberal post-austerity society election, you you know you do that on the absolute minimum basis imaginable and you don't put forward any real. Policies or anything i mean question being radical really i mean the actual just just even standard policies were pretty but pretty non existent and i think it was about winning power based off of vibes. More than more than anything else.
00:09:40
Speaker
there was There was very few even specific demands. I mean i remember, I'm also old enough to remember 1997, although I was only a teenager at the time, and because I was growing up in a village in Dorset. The monumental aspect of the class battle over getting rid of the Tories and kind of escaped me at that point. But you know, there was a famous thing with Labour's five pledges, and you know and there was certain slogans and education, education, education, you know, there was like things that Blair had sort of managed to get into the mainstream, tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime. I mean, I still remember these things from 1997, 1998 kind of period. And but, you know, Starmer's very, very reticent to do anything like that. ah But I guess for as far as I can say, it worked. I mean, you know, they could say,
00:10:27
Speaker
you know You can be as critical as you like, but they've won a you know like a historic victory, although not as many MPs as Tony Blair got, and on a very low turnout, but of course, you know for these kind of quite you know like cynical, mainstream party political strategists, none of that really matters. i mean you can sort of you know you can make points about how weak the manifesto was or how low the turnout was but at the end of the day they've got the most MPs in parliament they've got a stonking majority and they can they can do what they want with it and i guess that's all they're really focused on i mean like just quickly on the kind of far right kind of reform makes it interesting i mean you get got 3.8 million votes in 2015 that's about 12 percent of the vote reform got 4.1 million votes so only about 300 000 more votes
00:11:12
Speaker
and 14% of the turnout. So the actual kind of the actual percentage of the vote that UKIP got in 2015 and reform got in 2024 isn't completely different. I mean, it's it's kind of still in the same ballpark, but obviously they've got this time around, they've ended up with five MPs. and a real sense of ascendancy, a real sense, I guess, because of the Tory crisis that, you know, I mean, like, you know, when Nigel Farage said, oh, I'm going to be Prime Minister after the next election. I mean, that's an incredibly bold thing to say, but he obviously feels he's got the wind in his sails in a way that, you know, that UKIP didn't even have in 2015. So I think it's interesting to think about how that works out in terms of the actual numbers of votes and then how that translates into their, you know, into their toe hole in parliament.
00:11:55
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, Haraj is, again, for all that he's despicable and and idiotic in many respects, he's a shrewd politician. There's simply no way to deny that. He has had an enormous impact on British politics, and in exactly the, more or less exactly the way that he wanted to as well, because politicians often have huge impact and in the way that they don't plan. He has had a huge impact on British politics. in exactly the way that he wanted to. He has achieved what, you know, a few years back, people thought, well, that's just not going to happen, you know, political wisdom. It's just not going to happen. And it has. And I think Rowan was very interesting talking about calculus, you know, from Farage and reform going into the election. I think Farage knew exactly what he was doing.
00:12:41
Speaker
I think he's ah he's he's a shrewd class warrior. He knows the difference he knows the difference between a Starmer government under and a Corbyn Labour government, if even if you know he pretends not to, or reactionaries pretend not to, he knows the difference. And he also knows how to, after this long he should, he knows how to play the Tories. And the Tories clearly know that he knows as well. I mean, I think he is kind of the answer to the great mystery of why this election happened now, which is that I think Sunak, I mean, I think Sunak is a rank amateur in politics, he's just bad at it.
00:13:15
Speaker
But I think he was his rationale for calling the election now was that he calculated that Farage would not be there. He would be too busy trying to help Trump in America. And Farage, of course, saw precisely what was going on and came back home. What do you both think is driving the, you know, the growth of the populist right, specifically in the UK? Obviously, it's a global phenomena as well. So there's global things being played out. But yeah, I mean, what is driving this, this, this, this particular growth of their ideas and their and their influence? I think there's like, I mean, I think there's definitely never one factor in something as complicated team in the two big driving forces.
00:14:00
Speaker
the global and the global economic crisis and other multiple crises that ah feed into that are caused by it or are incidental to it, but but nonetheless, a really short political, social policies all sort of running beneath the the enormous ecological crisis that none of those interlocking systems have any kind of response to. That's becoming increasingly obvious. And that's creating a desperate need for for answers that the sort of middle period of neoliberalism, the the the period that seemed to stabilize the the regimes that came out of Pinochet, Thatcher, Reagan,
00:14:48
Speaker
under Blair and Clinton, the politics around that have no answers to, and that that's become transparent that those politics can resume power under under the basis of just the incompetence of the far right. a Trump will take over and and do such a bad job that people will sort of accept Biden as a holding patent. And I think they very much accept Starmer as a holding patent. But there's no real sense of in the 1997 sense, things will only get better, et cetera, et cetera. There's no real belief that Stalin was going to turn things around. It's a way of avoiding having the catastrophic mismanagement of the Tories plaguing the country. And that's just as much true from the property classes viewpoint as the working class viewpoint. As you mentioned, Liz Truss did a lot of damage to the economy very quickly and more could be said on that.
00:15:43
Speaker
But I think the other major factor is is the is the notable absence of the left, which is linked to the success of the early neoliberal project in absolutely crushing the left and in restructuring politics and the economy in such a way that the left finds itself very, very unable to organize and to revive. It's not only that the left is being crushed, but that the way that workplaces are now organized and the way that politics has certain assumptions locked into place that aren't amenable to to any kind of democratic process, makes the left's task inordinately hard and and means that the old tactics don't really work and there's no real new tactics available. And so the left ends up in a sort of circular game of of
00:16:36
Speaker
everyone blaming everyone else for not being able to solve this this particular problem. And the absence of the left has created this create test thiss just vacuum for these these kinds of popular solutions. And I think it's why these solutions are so untethered to reality or to any sense of of proportion. you know You look at, that that especially the MAGA politics in the States, and I don't know how much of it is is just truly conspiracy theory, Mad Max driven. It doesn't even really pretend to be a politics of the future of hope in in the way that you could argue that historic fascism has at least superficially. It is like as if
00:17:22
Speaker
the weirdest factions of 20th century fascism like the futurists and the occultists were in charge of the show. And I think that's because they don't really have any need to offer a solution because they don't have any rival solution. to butt up against. No one really believes right now in in the dreams of optimism, of anarchism, of ah various forms of radical politics, even in more radical forms of social democracy, maybe even especially more radical forms of social democracy have almost entirely absented themselves from history. So there's an open playing field for the weirdest forms of despair.
00:18:07
Speaker
I think what what we're looking at is the rise of fascism.
Global Neoliberalism and Political Shifts
00:18:11
Speaker
And obviously, it's not fascism like it was in the 20s and 30s, because it's not it's not happening in the 1920s and 30s, it's happening now. But it's essentially the same thing. It's a form of akin politics, which is being structurally generated. by this by the same sorts of things. I mean, the original fascism was generated by massive blockages in in the the ah reproduction and and the flow of capital in the early 20th century, we have ah ah leading to political deadlock. we have more or less exact you know in In very broad outline, we have more or less exactly the same situation situation now in the early 21st century. We have, albeit for
00:18:46
Speaker
I mean, the underlying distal course is the same. it's It's capitalism because it always is. But lots of lots of the details of how it's happening and what exactly is happening are different, but the fundamental pattern is is ah is ah is just a continued systemic, chronic failure of the reproduction and and thus the flow of capital and thus the reproduction of functioning politics. So that that's essentially why it's happening. But the fascists are kind of out of a future as well, as as you're saying. they don't They don't have the dream of the new man any anymore. So it's this weird... it's ah It's mass politics like fascism always is, but it's this weird sort of esoteric, nihilistic, hopeless form of the same thing. And
00:19:30
Speaker
It's you know at the risk of sounding like I'm falling into horseshoe theory. It's it's mirroring what's happened what's happened on the left, essentially. The left don't believe in its future. in the future anymore, although the left future anymore, any more than the right can believe in the and the right future anymore. And it's it's tempting to see that as just, you know, that the crisis has been has been so attenuated, it's gone on for so long now, and neoliberalism just completely failed to do what it was supposed to do. I mean, neoliberalism is structurally generated as an attempt to deal with the chronic failure of of of capitalist and value production, essentially, you know, ah adequate levels of value production.
00:20:06
Speaker
And it just continued, you know, it did a good job of sort of pretending to deal with that for it for a while, but it but ultimately failed. So it just feels like it feels like we're watching essentially the same process, but stretched out as it were on a rack. Obviously, we'll we'll we'll have to come and talk about France in a little bit. I mean, the success of far-right populist formations and movements and demagogic leaders, you know, from Argentina to Hungary to Italy to obviously Modi in India.
00:20:38
Speaker
And and but people haven't taken power yet, but are but are you know increasingly looking like they're going to be able to. I mean, Trump will probably win again. And obviously, you know, the situation in France and other countries, and that is indicative of not just sort of like accidental things that are happening. like as you As you both have pointed out, it's a structural issue. And I think we have to name the two drivers which which have created the situation, which is neoliberalism and also austerity. And I think that's really what's turbocharged these movements to to you know to go from, you know I mean, like in in in Argentina, I mean, you get these political leaders who you've never heard of, no one's heard of them, and they they just decide because they're super rich to to enter politics. Next thing you know, they're the president and like they just come out of nowhere and you know and they manage to win all these
00:21:33
Speaker
these votes and they start to dismantle the public sector. But like I think particularly when we talk about the material basis for it, I think neoliberalism has obviously you know eroded the social basis of of society. It's you know obviously all the all the standard criticisms we know about you know exalting the individual over the collective, but rolling back the public sector, rolling back the idea of kind of a civic sense of purpose, even under capitalism, creating these incredibly super rich billionaires which you then get these weird cults of genius around like Elon Musk and and you know the idea of even the idea of this is all capitalist ideology you know the idea of kind of like you you know what's good for General Motors is also good for America and you know the idea the corporation would
00:22:22
Speaker
you know, like, as long as you're a good worker, you know, you'd be richly rewarded, you get a good pension, you get a nice house, you always kind of think, well, that's completely gone. And capitalism is much more kind of cynical and ruthless, well, openly cynical and ruthless now. and And then obviously, the austerity agenda has, has just deepened all of that. And, like you know, and I think that the people that are most frustrating, all these liberal and center ground politicians who made all these things happen, who voted for all of these policies and and and and advocated for them and enacted them and now they're all shocked and stunned that people like Trump exist or people like the pen might win the election and so obviously the capitalist class doesn't fundamentally care because as long as they get to ensure the reproduction of their own capital and and maximize their profits they don't really mind if
00:23:10
Speaker
capitalism takes a horrible authoritarian turn that you know rides over the the skulls of a whole bunch of people that these far-right populist, quasi-fascist decide aren aren't worthy of existing in the social space. like The capitalist class don't care about them. They also ultimately don't care about these centigrade politicians that have been loyal servants of the the capital order for the last however many decades are now being replaced by these you know awful, awful demagogues. Yeah, and I guess that's the real crisis, which is that you can see it most clearly, like in the USA, I think the USA, as you know, the kind of leading capitalist country, I mean, the crisis of the Democrats, and the fact they can't find anyone to replace Biden, the fact that, you know, Biden is so old, the fact that, you know, they can't, you know, they can't provide any meaningful resistance.
00:24:05
Speaker
to so the far right, because they're part of the problem. And, you know, so I'm always cautious about even some socialists who are sort of saying, oh, we you know, we need to vote Biden to, you know, like stem the tide or at least provide a bit of a breathing space, you know, like against Trump, like I'm I'm not sure how kind of operative that is on the ground because you know because Biden himself is is obviously not someone that can could prevent these things in a way that Macron couldn't prevent the rise of
Contrast with France's Left Block
00:24:32
Speaker
Le Pen in France. ah ah Ultimately, it was you know it was the kind of popular front coalition that managed to temporarily halt their advance in the assembly.
00:24:41
Speaker
And I think it's worth noting in ah in a very dark way, it's worth noting that like America and unlike France, we don't have anything like a left block in mass politics that is going to have any chance of stemming that rise of of of mainstream and popular far-right government, like what just happened in France was, you know it was only it was only possible. United Front politics, essentially, is only possible when you have a left to unite. you know and they They don't have that in America and as mass politics, and and we simply don't have it here in Britain either.
00:25:23
Speaker
Yeah, you can really see that in Britain, I think, in terms of how the left is likely to come out electorally of what's just happened. You've got a tiny runt left in Labour who I i you don't want to speak too well of but I think are essentially completely impotent like they're not going to be doing anything of any of any value or meaning and then you've got what are really just exemplary cases of like independence winning and and how they're going to either unify or disunify and as far as I can see I mean electorally there's only really two
00:26:03
Speaker
games in town. There's Transformed, who cards on the table I am a member of. I have my criticisms of their electoralist approach, but I think they're the best and most viable such approach. They certainly won't be my focus, which will be on the movements going forward. And I think they've held themselves in good stead by by adopting a strategy that is non-sectarian, where there's no principled reason to not be. And then more sinisterly, and I think this is another example of schism in action, the Workers' Party, who who threatened to bring left the-electoralism into a red-brown
00:26:46
Speaker
type situation and I think would damn any kind of agency from that avenue. And I think as much as they did actually get quite a drubbing in this election, they did not do well and that was another very good thing to come out of of this that they did not manage to have any kind of reform type moment. they'll still be very well placed within the spheres of especially the sides of the left that are most likely to look to electoral solutions. I think anybody who's in contact with the the Labour left and and and those who have moved out of it will see that a distressing number of
00:27:26
Speaker
former comrades have been pulled in that direction. And and while that's not like the case of of having any kind of electoral meaning, it definitely has it definitely has a meaning in terms of how the left is going to organize itself, and especially how that side of the left is going to organize itself. And I think the question I would want to pose more than anything is because I think there's always a danger with the standard analysis that comes out the sort of Mark Fisher School of Capitalist Realism. I think a lot of those ideas have been echoed in our discussion so far. the We kind of accept our own total lack of agency and in in the unfolding story, that we kind of accept that the left's demise is just inevitable and well, certainly the forces against us are profound.
00:28:17
Speaker
you know, I definitely like to resist that kind of defeatism. I don't have it. Obviously stand by the ACL position or build the movements. I think that if anything is going to arise that will change the political landscape, it is likely to be through the consolidation or even I think the wholesale invention of some of the social movements.
Building Left Movements to Counter Right-Wing Populism
00:28:40
Speaker
Because I think when we talk about the the queer movement in this country or the women's movement, what we have is really a disparate assortment of often quite brave admirable activists operating in small clusters, that I in no way critically sayness of those individuals, but I don't think can be meaningfully to described as a movement in the historic sense.
00:29:04
Speaker
So in an often case, I think it's not just so much focusing on the movements as looking into and what are the impediments to the formation of these movements today. And we need that base more than ever if we're going to come up with any kind of new solutions, even electoral ones. yeah I want to agree very strongly with that. I've heard people on the on the left, on the on the further the left, you might say, talking about this election or seeing them writing about it. And a repeated refrain that I've noticed is the idea of, well, we need to build a left. I mean, who could argue with that? We need to build a left and we need to build it on the level of an electoral force
00:29:44
Speaker
beyond isolated movements. and a lot of what I mean, yes, as far as it goes, I often find hidden in that. This is this is my sense of this. Anyway, a hidden inside that is a kind of a disdain for the social movements, but for the grassroots grassroots movements. Gramsci said, don't disdain those movements. We absolutely shouldn't. If we're going to be involved, if we're going to do electoralism, it has to be not as an end in itself, but as part of building social movements. And yeah, it's movements by their very nature are based on individual issues. That's not a that's not a bug. It's a feature. It's not a problem. It's the point. The point is joining them up.
00:30:31
Speaker
And, I mean, I want to echo what you said about the Workers' Party as well. I find them extraordinarily concerning. One of the things that I sense on the horizon is some kind of, because I think they're just basically a fascist party. I think they're a combination of statist, old old-labor-esque economic rhetoric with really under the surface hard-line reactionary social and cultural attitudes. I find that deeply sinister. I don't think it's any exaggeration to call that ah ah a fascist group or a proto-fascist group. and One of the very concerning developments I see possibly on the horizon is some sort of join-up between them and Reform UK.
00:31:16
Speaker
or whatever reform UK turns into because it's a, you know, from UKIP to Brexit party to reform UK, what we're dealing with here is obviously a sort of a constantly mutating creature, whatever that turns into, I can very easily, I mean, not least because there are already links between Galloway and Farage and both of them are linked with Russia, you know, one doesn't want to be conspiracy brained about anything, but they they both have links. with the the the Putin dictatorship, and that is now the global, in terms of funding and and influence, it's now the global fountainhead of of the neo-fascist movement. You know, there are material links here, so I think that's very dangerous. And that is very definitely a pole that sort of disaffected, left-labor people might be drawn to through, I think, flaws in that kind of politics, flaws in that version of anti-imperialism.
00:32:03
Speaker
that i think you see very strongly even in you know people who have good politics in other respects on the labor left or adjacent to the labor left, they have a deeply flawed version of an anti imperialism which draws far too much on sort of boardwalk narratives like realism, And you know then then you get into things like, essentially, conspiracy theories. And that is just that is just a direct funnel from the left to the right. That is what it looks like to me, just like ah just like a ah slide, you know like snakes and ladders. just you You fall down the snake, there you are on the right, the far right.
00:32:36
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, there's obviously massive problems on the on the left, like in terms of the response to things over the last few years. And I do feel also, i not you know, I said the main problems have come, neoliberalism and austerity before, but also the response to globalization, I think, is crucial, because which is obviously all wrapped up in those things. i mean These aren't completely separate categories. But, you know, that that bit of the left that wants to just kind of go back to the 1970s and, you know, sort of like seize, you know, sort of, oh, we if only we had parliamentary kind of independence again, we were own we were our nation again, and then we could bring back industry and we could reopen the mines and we could but you go back to, you know, obviously, you know, I'm not saying completely the same, but, you know, kind of families, you know, the way they used to be, you know, when it was good and everything made sense and the world was structured and ordered and... Yeah.
00:33:32
Speaker
And obviously like that's very appealing to a whole whole section of society and obviously a lot of those people on the left who advocate that would would would absolutely you know resist the accusations that they were in any way spiritually entering into some kind of similar terrain as some people on the far right. are advocating, but I mean, you can definitely see, in like you know, there was that there was that famous photo of George Galloway and Steve Bannon meeting and, you know, having quite a sort, you know, but like almost hugging each other. and and And I think you're right, Jack, to point out about the, you know, the the issues with that wing of the left, which is incredibly soft on Russia and also arguably incredibly soft on the CCP in China, because
00:34:19
Speaker
That is not only, you know, sort of like some of the, you know, the most crude bits of the old left in terms of, you know, what we call campism, I just seen the world in terms of geopolitical divisions, not class divisions, and then, you know, saying because the US And Western imperialism is the most dangerous and most powerful. That means anything that rivals it is a good thing. And therefore that is a very short slide, as you said, towards actively endorsing Putin and you know actively sort of saying actually the invasion of Ukraine was a good thing and authoritarian moves in China are a good thing, like anything that kind of challenges the West. And and so like I think there's a real danger of that metastasizing on the left into something which is you know which is even more dangerous.
00:35:03
Speaker
but i do also think we have to be cautious of course because you know millions of people in the uk are really happy that labor won the election and the torries were defeated. You know the combined votes of the political parties that are not on the populist right if you put a pin in reform and the torries on c. you know Don't quote me like in terms of things out of context, but to be fair to the Tories, not all of them were on the populist right, but obviously the kind of the liberal Tories who are like like a diminishing force. You know, like the combined vote of people that rejected that outlook and that politics was was was was very strong.
00:35:43
Speaker
it's obviously divided, but it is there. And I do think that in terms of the left's response, I mean, obviously, one of the things that will be the biggest barrier to the left being able to take advantage of the situation is if the left has a kind of demoralized response to it and it. And this kind of, like, mechanistic feeling, oh, well, kind of, you know, the dice have already been rolled, really, you know, there's not much we can do in this situation. But but You are right to point to the need for a strategy and also the need to kind of focus resources, like because the left is, I mean, I think the organised socialist left is smaller than it was when I joined, no when I became active around the year 2000. I mean, that was the anti-capitalist movement.
Left's Economic Ideas and the Role of Democracy
00:36:23
Speaker
and mean had the anti-war movement around Iraq, I mean the the kind of socialist organized left was much bigger then and now it's much more smaller and also much more fragmented so and there's no easy solutions to that but yeah we have to think about like how do things realign under the new situation and how do we avoid the dangers of kind of inadvertently through a left populist framework ending up kind of sharing very similar ground with right populists Yeah, and I think being overly pessimistic is is an easy way to to end up there. i think you I think everything you said is absolutely right. And I think regardless of the essential worthlessness of the new Labour government and their extreme lack of popularity, they are as Richard Seymour said, and he's written the best thing that I've read about this, his article in Sidecar.
00:37:09
Speaker
they're a majority without a mandate. that it's It's very important. so But regardless of the worthlessness of the replacement, the Tories are gone. That is a material fact, and that is worth you know pouncing on and and pouncing on popular relief and and the the fact that the country did reject them, etc. that's all That's all good stuff. And I think just very briefly, One of the things about the situation in France is that it shows that the situation read the rise of fascism and or the or the rise of the populist right, if you know you want to be a bit broader about it.
00:37:39
Speaker
it it is not I want to be very careful how I put this, but I think like ah i think the media narrative about the rise of the right ah helps them out. like it it It normalizes it, even even the narrative about the concern. I mean, we saw this with the Trump election in 2016. The media was constantly, sort of the American media particularly, they had their cameras focused on him with this sort of air of bizarre, grotesque fascination. What is this? look at him. Isn't he appalling? Isn't he terrible? But the constant concentration upon him, and we've seen our own version of this in this country very much with Farage, the media's fascination with Farage, the fact that they platform him constantly and they do this to him with these various parties, they're they're going to do the same with reform now. Even that sort of gaze of horrified fascination, it helps them out. It makes them into an established political fact.
00:38:32
Speaker
And it it is ah still, I think at this point, an overstatement. It's a media narrative which overstates and helps us. And I think we've seen that in France because one of the obviously part of the gamble, part of Macron's gamble with the going forward, after the after the first vote, the first round of elections, was the the the old French tactic of the, yeah what do they call it, the Republican front, you know? And there was worry in quarters that, well, that's not going to work this time because, you know, the far right in the in the form of the the national rally, they've just they've made too many gains, they're too powerful now. And there's too many people in the center who would prefer to prefer them to the left block. And that there's too many people on the left.
00:39:14
Speaker
block, who would refer them to the center, prefer them to the centrists. That's not what happened. What happened was they came third in the second round of elections with the left block first, regardless of all the media narrative around it. Yeah, I'd strongly echo that. I mean, I think going back to like where the left can go wrong and the dangers of dismissing the fact that they there are avenues for for popular left, for a left that actually does gain mass appeal still. I think that the the pessimism of these wilderness years and of the disorganisation especially of the far left, the fragmentation of the far left, the danger that this presents
00:39:58
Speaker
is is that we come to to substitute, in the worst case, ourselves for the working class and sort of see our own organisations in grandiose and and unjustifiable terms. and in the best case start to look to social movements that are actually nascent or are are only representing partial if important interests as potentially substituting for that mass base rather than seeing the mass basis as
00:40:30
Speaker
when it's organised correctly, owing its loyalty to those partial movements and and its loyalty to those particular concerns. and I think I see this a little bit even in in the way that the better sides of the left regards trans organising sometimes as ah as a kind of a vector for for hope that is often not really justified by the profound defeats that the trans movement has actually faced over the last few years. I think that's a particularly extreme example of substitutionalism because it is so ridiculously unjustified in in the weight of defeat and in the weight of um of just how difficult a situation ah that that movement faces. but
00:41:16
Speaker
i think I think that kind of substitutionalism starts to run right through a left that no longer has any kind of hope in in the pop in in any kind of mass political formation. And that's certainly not mirrored back to us by the far right right now, who really do believe they can beat they can unify and soldier those forces together. and And then they find plenty of echoes, as as Jack rightly says. for that in the media. And in the media's confection of a sort of fantastical enemy out of these figures, they've become a kind of nightmare figure. you know it's It's often commented it just how unfunny, for example, the centrist humor is around Trump, sort of just presents him as this sort of fantastic grotesque.
00:42:05
Speaker
But there's very ready rarely any kind of joke there. It's just it's just their kind of nightmare presented over and over again. And the laughter kind of feels like a nervous laughter more than ah and an actual in any actual kind of mirth. I think in that sphere, we should very much step in to mock and to and to and to recontextualize these forces as what they are, as a sort of desperate cloying in Trotsky's language, human dust, that is hopeless and is actually on the face of it ridiculous. and the The offer that's being sold to young reactionary men by people like Nigel Farage is is ultimately the offer of of the sort of manosphere
00:42:54
Speaker
cult leaders who are, if they're not professed pessimists, who offer really only just blanket despair with a sort of side of misogyny, are bizarre fantasists who sell sort of get-rich schemes and and hedonistic lifestyles that are pretty unappealing even if they were achievable. you know it's it's Damning of as if we ultimately can't sell a better vision of life than that. Yeah, I think this is one of the key things that the left needs to get better at is is not just focusing on the problems and also defensive struggles. We have to be able to articulate a vision of a better world. And that's really, I think, what's been lost in the last few decades. And obviously, it was kind of lost because the Soviet Union collapsed. And even if you're someone who's a socialist who never thought the Soviet Union was particularly socialist,
00:43:52
Speaker
you know the idea that you can have a big you know global challenge to capitalism and to and to neoliberalism, and like I think that's what's been lost. And since then it's kind of more, you know I think on the left it feels more like guerrilla actions to kind of fend off the inevitable. and like And that psychology on the left is what has to be challenged as well, particularly in the context of the climate crisis. Because I think Naomi Klein was right you like in her book, she's written on the climate crisis. It can go one of two ways. It can either go towards a horrible authoritarian, violent nationalist militarized borders, climate denial, you know horrible Mad Max vision of the future, or it can go to
00:44:32
Speaker
and an eco-socialist world in which we see our our species as having to work collectively and collaboratively to overcome the problems that capitalism has inflicted on us and you know like I think we have to be clear about that narrative and I think the right road and mean if you look at say you know like Ben Shapiro a few months ago was just saying things like oh you know you should like we should just abolish retirement like no one I know wants to retire you know retiring is boring you should work till you die you've got people like Andrew Tate you know saying incredibly weird things to young men about whether they should have sex and who they should have sex with and it's it's really sort of you know i mean obviously unfortunately some of these ideas are quite popular but they completely conflict with what it is to be a you know to be a human on the planet and sir and to live anything approaching a quote unquote normal life i hope you like a life in which you can
00:45:22
Speaker
you know be part of society and engage with other people in a way that you know isn't kind of parasitic or pathological and you know the left has got a positive vision of humanity and i think that's what has to be foregrounded in a much more kind of bold and ambitious way and i do think it points to some of the some some of the things that i think that we also need to get better at on the left which is that the far right and very good at this kind of like major itarian politics you know obviously that's the whole point of them being popular since they, they try and create a vision of society where, you know they started as the silent majority oh we're saying the things the majority are willing to say about race and you know some gender and you know whatever and then i'll see but they're trying to turn that into majority viewpoint,
00:46:09
Speaker
And they're trying to speak to the greatest number of people by attacking minority and marginalized groups within within any nation or you know kind of more generally across the world. And I think the left you know can also think about the way that we can put forward a universal concept of society and humanity, which includes people who are marginalized under capitalism. but in a kind of positive way, which also doesn't sort of ignore the the issues that you know people are having, like like more generally, i mean because there's this kind of constant thing that goes on where people say, because they live in small towns, and they say, oh, the left's abandoned us, the left doesn't care about us, like we live in a small town in
00:46:52
Speaker
you know kind of like Northumberland or you know just Herefordshire somewhere and and yeah the left doesn't speak to us it doesn't you know and obviously that's partly because maybe there aren't that many socialists active in those towns at the moment but also maybe there's a problem of us articulating what like what we're trying to say to you know to people in those areas like what's our vision of the economy like what's our vision of how we could improve things. And I think this does mean a challenge to some mainstream left thinking, which is just effectively Keynesian, like it's very narrow and and and limited. And I totally get why people on the left fixate on Keynes and the kind of the idea of a mixed economy or like new things like modern monetary theory.
00:47:35
Speaker
you know, I think people on the left kind of fixate on that because obviously it's it it's way better than neoliberalism and austerity, which is totally understandable, but it's still kind of pro-capitalist economics and it's a pro-capitalist economics that exists in a very specific period after World War Two. And I guess this links back to the point that, you know, we were talking about with the workers party and and like other people on the left who have a quite nostalgic view of the way that, you know, we can move society backwards. I think those people on the left that also advocate for, you know wouldn't it just be great if we had the mixed economy back? Wouldn't it just be great if we you know had these kind of left Keynesian kind of policies? I mean, that was the product of a very particular crystallization of class forces, a very particular point in capitalism. And so I'm kind of always a bit reticent just to say, oh, wouldn't you know like that's what we should be aiming for. We probably need to be thinking about new things and new ways of
00:48:25
Speaker
looking at economics arising out of the specifics of globalization and neoliberalism. For instance, decommodification of some aspects of the economy, for instance, you know fighting for an idea of universal services, and all these things kind of exist in embryo, but they're you know they're not really talked about on the left because they're still just ah you know there's kind of an old like an older way of seeing things and an older paradigm, which obviously doesn't speak to people anymore. And I don't even think if it speaks to people on the organised left that much. It's not very inspiring as a way of trying to trying to articulate politics. I think that with the talk of sort of majoritarian and and and the left, I think the danger with the left and how it handles majoritarianism is always false universalities.
00:49:12
Speaker
to be a big ah bit too abstract. But what I mean by that is is precisely, as you say, a universe obviously that brings with it every viewpoint, including minority viewpoints, including the the interests of of groups at the margins of of capitalist society, as well as actually quite large groups that are that are marginalized by capitalism, and including majorities that are marginalized by capitalism, and particularly obviously women that are not always included in and left majoritarianism and I think that's how you end up with a kind of communitarian right far right type politics of the Workers Party gaining a stranglehold often with a sense that that is the majoritarian viewpoint and you know all of us trans people and queer people and and such are
00:50:06
Speaker
Busy buddies annoyingly getting in the way of left progress. We're the impediment to to a united left. And if we can just get rid of all of the trans people or so and so forth, then then the unified left would be easy. And I think that's always made the rights game quite easy, that that the left will also fall into. prejudices across society because they exist in the same social setting. But I think there is there is an instinct that can be appealed to. I am, you know, enough of a Russonian to believe that humanity's new social instincts do do do tend to win out.
00:50:46
Speaker
and and that there is there iss a kind of universal sense that can be tapped into, you know, as in, you know, I mean, Gramsci's already been mentioned and his notion of good sense as opposed to common sense, I think, is is directly relevant here. The common sense of capitalist society is is the is that kind of majoritarian viewpoint of the right and sadly too much of the left. And I think that you social instinct, that universal instinct, that emerges through the course of struggle is is what we want to tap into. And it requires a focus on our own agency and unwillingness to be easy on ourselves or just being victims of capitalist realism, which is our and a difficult game
Socialism, NHS, and Labour's Technocratic Approach
00:51:34
Speaker
to play. And I think the current moment, which is very bleak,
00:51:39
Speaker
you know, especially for anybody on on the receiving the end of a focused oppression, but I think probably for the whole of the left is a very bleak moment in terms of the sense of our ownlessness against what's happening, in the sense of there's a spectators in the selection, which I think is an overwhelming one in terms of how we we all experience that, you know, our concerns like ecology, And the concerns of a great number of people as well. you know it's it's not It's not a minor concern in terms of the the general British population. We're barely raised, I felt, in this election. Climate change or global warming, I think is the better way of putting it, is
00:52:24
Speaker
barely even came up it felt like except as a sort of like small policy issue that was a minor inconvenience around spending. I don't think that reflects how most people think and feel about the situation around the world. Yeah, parenthetically, one of the things that I did find satisfying about the election we've just had, apart from Galloway being booted out in Rochdale, was the fact that candidates who put transphobia and and turfism very front and center in in their worldview and their campaigning, they did very badly.
00:52:58
Speaker
as a rule in this election. that was That was very nice to see. I don't want to sound like I'm being complacent about you know the transphobia that that is rampant in in our society, but it was nice to see transphobia fail as an electoral strategy. Yeah, i i always to to me, the the the absolute heart and centre of socialism is democracy. That's the whole entire point of the whole thing. and it's at the heart of every single one of our ah aims, and it's at the it's at the heart of every single strategy. It's why the working class economic equality is is about democracy fundamentally. you know it's not an It's not an end in itself. it's and It's something that we aim at because we're aiming for democracy, and it unites that sort of economic
00:53:47
Speaker
priority with the priorities that people think of, that people shunt off to one side as being to do with culture and identity and stuff like that. We we care about women's rights, women's equality, LGBTQ plus rights and equality, the rights of people of color, decolonization, anti-imperialism, etc. All of this. It's all fun that when you get right down to the heart of it, it's all about democracy. And I think that that is what people are fundamentally hungry for. there is this i mean you know and they are You said about how climate change, barely mentioned in the election, it took place on the 4th of July. I don't know how it was where you were on the 4th of July, but it where I was, and I live in the country, as I say, I live in the heart of Torydom, it was almost unbearably hot.
00:54:40
Speaker
where I was that day. And that affects everybody. Everybody is having to deal with that, together with rivers filled with sewage and crumbling infrastructure and stuff like that. And that is, of course, on the top on the top level, that is about failure of services, inconvenience, difficulties, pain, etc. But on even on the even that, on the deepest level, it's about democracy. It's about the inability of people to do anything about it. And that is what people all across the country, that is what people are feeling and chafing against. And if we can communicate on a mass basis, the idea that standing up for, for instance, trans people, that's about your freedom as well as there's standing up for fundamental economic change, fundamental changes in how we
00:55:30
Speaker
arrange and plan the economy. That's about your freedom as well. That's about your access to power and the struggle that is involved in getting us to that point. That's about democracy too. That your involvement in that struggle is about you carving out from this great edifice of powerlessness that we're confronted with. That's about you carving out a bit of democracy. I think if we can join it up like i mean <unk> it's an incredibly huge task i don't want to make it sound like we just go around and say but democracy people is gonna go alright got it okay i'm with you. That's not gonna happen obviously but i think that is the that is the fundamental you know that's why we're here that's why we're socialists. It's about as much democracy as we can possibly have.
00:56:14
Speaker
And we can have a hell of a lot more than capitalism has allowed us to have for its own you know purposes. And I think we can get that across. That that is that is the glue that joins the whole thing together. And it also shows you the the power of, obviously, the 2019 Tory triumph, you know, take back control, because that does speak to the feeling of dissatisfaction and disaffection and alienation that so many people feel. And and obviously, the Tories... That's why they zero in. I mean, from them, it's a false promise and ah and ah and a cynical strategy, but that's what they're zeroing in on. They get it. They get that people have that feeling of powerlessness.
00:56:52
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, totally. And obviously, that is something again, that I think the left is going to roll back on because I mean, like a good example is the NHS, you know, there's lots of defend the NHS campaigns and and slogans, obviously, that's an absolute go to, because the and NHS does represent a de commodified healthcare care system, which is really excellent you know it like as a as a concept the idea of universal provision of health care is a is a fundamentally socialistic concept but the nhs is also in a real state is incredibly bureaucratic has covered up the death of trans
00:57:30
Speaker
ah young people, you know as you know like you know then like there's all kinds of problems with the and NHS. So I think, again, like like that speaks to to like a socialist argument around that. It's not just defending the gains of post-war social democracy. it is like It's about like a revolutionary defense in the sense we you know we want to protect it from the capitalists and the far right and the you know and the authoritarians, but we want to we want to improve it and make it better. Because I think that was also... The key is communicating to people that we talk about when we talk about democracy, we're we're not talking about the kind of democracy that you already know and that has already screwed you over. yeah We're talking about, you know, the but democracy that we have, bourgeois democracy, is better than fascism, absolutely. And it's worth fighting to defend it from fascist incursion. But it's not the best we can do. We can do better. So don't sort of look at the state of the world now and say, well, I'm done with democracy because we've barely had any. We can have more than this.
00:58:28
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. Like I think when people think about more democracy, like it's the Brenda from Bristol sort of response to the general election, you know, no, not another one, which obviously is the, the sigh of the oppressed in the sense of like, Oh, I mean, like more democracy just sounds like more work. And it's also just, ah you know, electing another bunch of like hooligans who don't really, you know, like represent any kind of fundamental change. like If you think about the one demand from the chartists that the that was never won, the idea of annual parliaments, I think some people would find that absolutely horrific as ah ah like as a demand today because it would just mean you know constant elections, you know all these kind of things. so I think there's you're totally right, Jack. I think there's a real
00:59:09
Speaker
desire for more control social control economic control more personal control more kind of personal say over your life or you know your your family and in an extended sense like for you know your community but then there's always this jarring thing where the democracy we have under. under the kind of capitalist system like a scene like there's more of that it just like i think it just alienates people so i guess having discussions around revolutionizing the concept of democracy like it's not just more parliamentary elections it might probably wasn't even involve parliament like as we understand it today.
00:59:47
Speaker
and yeah And workers, workers cancel sounds like a lot of work, but then think about how much work you already do, and how fulfilling you find it, or rather you don't find it, how much of it is just a drain on your time, and comparing contrast. and I mean, I think to to pick up on that point about the NHS, because I think that's a really important one. And I think it's illustrative of ah this point of democracy agency, I think is a really good way of framing it, you know, giving people a sense of agency. I think under the democratic forms that we currently have, people, as as mentioned, feel like they're spectators at a theatre. They have no presiding control. I didn't try mean, even my my choice to ruin my ballot and my own
01:00:29
Speaker
in my constituency was very much informed by this that I knew 100% that the candidate that was going to win was going to be Labour in my area. I didn't particularly like my candidate and so I had the slight privilege of of being able to um to to to just write free Palestine trans liberation across my ballot. was emotionally satisfying, and I they thought that the form candidate might get in, I obviously wouldn't have had that ah leeway. But to to pick up on the point about the NHS, the point about the covering up of um the deaths of trans children, but way before that, the the you know the brutal do not resuscitate orders that were placed on on so many
01:01:15
Speaker
disabled people and and also the treatment of the and care homes in terms of the social care sector. it's it all It still astonishes me that there isn't a phenomenal public anger about what happened in terms of what I would characterize as the mass slaughter of disabled and elderly people. over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. One of the most horrific instances, I think, in in and contemporary British history of of social murder to use Engel's concept. And I think where we can build a ah sort of better and ah majoritarianism, a a genuine universalism that picks up on on that point that you know Jack made around
01:02:01
Speaker
How trans freedom is cis freedom, how how these two are not indistinguishable, is to see how the demands of the oppressed directly link to the forms of democracy that we would want and how that that can play into an alternative to these kinds of electoral spectator events. And and and in in this instance, you know the way to to transform what is a purely defensive movement around the and NHS into, I think, a radical one is is to make the demand for a co-productive model for the NHS.
01:02:37
Speaker
but It's a term that I think has sadly been sometimes co-opted into forms of quite meaningless politicking, but a genuine co-productive model for the NHS where the ah most relevant stakeholders have control over the structuring and constant restructuring of the institution. And I think that undercuts this idea of like council communism as something that's boring. I think it's very hard to say that allowing patients, in wards, patients, yeah who people who depend on on long-term health provision that kind of say over what is matters of the basic dignity of their lives, never mind life and death.
01:03:20
Speaker
it's pretty hard to frame that as boring. And it's actually not particularly a far cry away from what all council communists would actually be dealing with on a day-to-day matter. You know, these aren't actually particularly trivial things, even if they also encompass trivial things. They're they're matters of all everybody's everyday dignity and well-being. And I think it's a very bold and actually powerful vision. I really dislike, remember, when Zizek was characterizing exactly these terms in a quite Stalinist manner, like now we actually just want bureaucrats to take over and do all of this for us because we want to live these like nice decadent lives where we don't have to take care of all of that. And I think it really betrays a profound lack of imagination to to characterize that. kind of social autonomy in in those terms. Yeah, agreed. Yeah. Yeah. Any talk of increased democracy or worked like in order to make sure institutions and so society and and and so on works for the for the great majority. Well, what works for everyone has to include some very basic demands around reducing the working week and
01:04:35
Speaker
increasing adult education facilities. I think there's a whole series of things where, like again, to go back to the kind of sense that there is a degree of alienation about about democracy, which you know which I think is where the sort of ah sweet spot that the far-right populist quasi-fascists play in, because they talk about control and they talk about sovereignty and they talk about you know like these things, but at the same time they are speaking to people who are i think quite disaffected from it all and actually would like a strong man to come along or in some cases a strong woman or you know and i'm just gonna just sort the mess out take take power you know you know and and and i guess ah like that's also a danger because when people feel exhausted and and depressed and and and this is such as is it working.
01:05:23
Speaker
for them then yeah like if someone promises to come in and just sort out the problems for them then you know that's quite powerful. So I think part of part of the working class struggle has to also be about you know being able to increase people's capacity as human beings to be able to think and feel and engage and connect and learn and participate and that all points to some pretty basic things around reducing the length of the working week and and you know making sure there's better a better distribution of work-life balance, and because we'll need to another thing, we'll need kind of work-life politics balance, because hopefully the idea is everyone takes part in political decision-making to a degree, whether it's in your local community or like on a in your workplace or on another level, because at the moment people don't really do politics, you know unless you're like quote-unquote an activist, or a counsellor, or an MP, or whatever.
01:06:19
Speaker
you like politics is something that where you just go and vote every so often, like for most people. So being able to reconceptualize that way of thinking about kind of life balance and the amount of energy and time that you have for things is obviously going to be a big, yeah, that like there has to be a big part of like a discussion on how about how we create a new vision of humanity and and how we exist on the planet. I think it's very telling that what you get from Starmer is this rhetoric of, like well, the great virtue of our government is going to be that we're just going to be we're just going to leave you alone. What's the phrase? you know Politics that treads likely on people's lives or something. The great boast is that, well, everything's just going to be normal again, and you can just forget about it. You can just not worry about politics. that's
01:07:03
Speaker
that's like the great promise that he offers the British public is, you can stop worrying about the Westminster soap opera and just leave it just leave it to us, it's fine. it works you know And that's that's not just insulting, it's it's insidious and sinister. you know It genuinely is, because what he's essentially saying is, you know just just just don't think about it. it very technocraic It's also a continuation of neoliberal thinking because obviously the whole point is to is for us not to be active in politics, just to be atomised individuals who occasionally vote. And then the you know the politicians and the technocrats and the capitalist class just get on with running everything. and
01:07:48
Speaker
And obviously, Stalmer can't and doesn't really want to break free of that logic. I think he wants to probably challenge some of the more egregious aspects of neoliberalism. And he said there's going to you know there can be no more austerity, which as somebody who works in the public sector sounds good to me. But but unless you actually fundamentally change you know the way that neoliberalism has restructured both the economy And the way that people think about themselves and think about the economy and think about society more generally, but it's not my guess is go back to the beginning of the conversation is not going to be able to stand the tide of the growth of these populist rights, anti-democratic forces, because of course, they were cutting with the same grain of bourgeois society. They're just doing it in a slightly different way.
01:08:32
Speaker
And Starmer's project of persecuting and expelling the Labour left is is perfect. you know It's not just class warfare. It's perfect evidence that he doesn't want that kind of active actively engaged politics. That's the last thing he wants. you know He wants the passive he wants the the electorate to be this this passive mass that just accepts the handouts you know from the beneficent technocrats. And really, I mean, yeah, you can say there's no more austerity. And that's lovely. And going we're not going to call it austerity anymore. We're still looking at comparatively tiny spending commitments and just PFI. Again, and that's that's really what we're looking at from this forthcoming government.
Impact of Activism and Conclusion
01:09:09
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think in terms of that continuity, it's more than just a continuity within neoliberalism, it's a continuity within the worst aspects of Kantianism as well, that technocratic element. And I think that kind of brings us also sort of back to that point about mass forces and that point about, you know, how we activate those frustrations because, you know, people do actually find these technocratic systems far from being the the deliverer of some kind of seamless competency that makes life just go by becomes a sort of impenetrable object to to achieving their own goals and and to living their own lives. I mean, I think that's acutely the case if you have ever faced the wrong
01:09:56
Speaker
sort of nastier face of the NHS and seeing just how impossible that is to navigate. But that you know is obviously acutely true for someone in my situation. But it's also acutely true for more and more people who are trying to access mental health services that are virtually non-existent. And I think one of the ways that we undercut that is to see where it's already happened. And I think it's happened immediately with the start of the government. We can see in the concessions around around Gaza and you know the changing tack on that, which is obviously not organic to those people since their initial response makes makes their own values and their own
01:10:39
Speaker
opportunism very apparent. That's a response to the the victories of the independence and and the erosion of votes in in certain areas and the mass feeling expressed over and over and over again by those demos that simply have refused to end and to disappear despite overwhelming pressure, political pressure. to to to limit them. So i think that's ah and I think that's what we should take away from this, that you know we've already seen in a very, very particular instance, and and by no means far enough, the movements gaining a a small limited degree of traction over this administration, where that administrative order shows cracks.
01:11:29
Speaker
right away. That's not through an alternative electoral project, that's through the movements and through movements that express very broad solidarity, bringing together a huge number of of different social interests in a very unified form.
01:11:54
Speaker
but That was a very interesting and obviously wide-ranging discussion and raises a lot of very useful kind of topics to think about going forward. and I think it like it was good that we managed to also consider some of the kind of ways forward and the way the way that the the socialists left can begin to navigate these these complicated times. I will just finish on a plug for the Eco-Socialist Revolution Manifesto that ACR has recently published, which is our contribution to what we're trying to do is ah as an organization in terms of connecting with the climate crisis and also the crisis of late-stage capitalism and the rise of the far right and all the things we've been talking about on the podcast tonight and trying to find ways to
01:12:44
Speaker
put forward some ideas strategically, as well as some slogans and campaign ideas for how ah how we can try and turn turn this ship around before before the fossil capital-driven ecocide gets too much, and then and then and then we are in that kind of Mad Max. the first movie scenario, which obviously is one of the things that we're that we're trying to avoid. So we'll just finish on those comments. I want to say thank you to Jack for joining us on the podcast today and also Rowan. And we will leave you there. Thank you very much. Thank you. Bye. Thank you.