TruXta
tired
Probably for another thread, but, really?
During the biggest crisis of capitalism of our generation, why is the UK anarcho-left not growing?
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Probably for another thread, but, really?
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
I meant the mainstream media. Any fool can write stuff on the internet, doesn't mean anyone's gonna read it.
GarfieldLeChat
fucking awesome but wrong
maybe and I'm not saying all you should look at where mainstream media bbc, sky nbc, cnn, newscorp, AP, reuters etc are sourcing the majority of their content from and come back to me on that...
what you need is not the method of production which you have access to but a method of advertising or publicising and distribution... this is hard to achieve but believe me you have access to the method of mainstream production and should you so wish a way of broadcasting...
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
Well, there are capitalist structures in those countries (the EU for example), but industrialisation was never as thoroughgoing, and rural smallholding etc is more prevalent in those countries than in many other EU sytates, France excepted. Capitalism isn't as prevalent or as in-your-face likely because capitalism can't derive the sort of benefits from such economies that it can from the likes of France, Germany and the UK.
GarfieldLeChat
fucking awesome but wrong
that would make you a louchetionary wouldn't it
TruXta
tired
Hmmm. As you were.
I don't think it is dead to be honest, there just aren't any political organisations that are suitable for promoting it in this day and age. Organisation always lags behind political consciousness, it took 50-60 years from the Chartist movement and the slow development of Trade Unions until we had a Labour party, and it might take decades for new organisations to emerge too.
What holds back the UK radical left, and I include trots anarcho's and etc in this, is that the organisations we have are the relics from the ideological battles of the 20th century, ones that the left almost uniformally lost. There's still plenty of left-wing sentiment about, and infact more now than there was only a few years ago, but there's no way to take that sentiment and make a practical impact on politics because of types of organisations that are around.
I also think there's a historical context, because since 1984 the left's been on a roll of defeats, and that's led to deep cynicism setting in, something you'll find plenty of evidence of on these boards. With a few exceptions, poll tax springs to mind, there's been no victories on the left for a very long time. We need a victory, even just a small one, to turn this tide. You never know, I have a feeling that all it would take is one strike to be victorious, to pick a random example, and it might lead to momentum gathering.
Every few years the left has some big demo or march, or even things like the student protests and so on, and I don't think I'd be alone in saying at those times there's often a sincere mood of optimism that follows it, like when we do have a big march and we feel the strength of our numbers it does wonders, and invariably after this that momentum gets squandered. Like after the students trashed millbank, there was genuine excitement, coz for the first time since the government got in there was a palpable sense of panic, and it had an effect on everyone I know.
A final point I wanna make, just coz I'm young enough to have noticed it, is that speaking to people who are like 15-18, just leaving school or college kind of age, they're noticeable more politcally aware and sympathetic than kids of my generation who grew up under Blair. My little brother's mates are all college age, and whenever they come round the house or I see 'em out and about they're always asking me questions about the economy, about why there's no jobs. That's a change that's worth mentioning.
What holds back the UK radical left, and I include trots anarcho's and etc in this, is that the organisations we have are the relics from the ideological battles of the 20th century, ones that the left almost uniformally lost. There's still plenty of left-wing sentiment about, and infact more now than there was only a few years ago, but there's no way to take that sentiment and make a practical impact on politics because of types of organisations that are around.
I also think there's a historical context, because since 1984 the left's been on a roll of defeats, and that's led to deep cynicism setting in, something you'll find plenty of evidence of on these boards. With a few exceptions, poll tax springs to mind, there's been no victories on the left for a very long time. We need a victory, even just a small one, to turn this tide. You never know, I have a feeling that all it would take is one strike to be victorious, to pick a random example, and it might lead to momentum gathering.
Every few years the left has some big demo or march, or even things like the student protests and so on, and I don't think I'd be alone in saying at those times there's often a sincere mood of optimism that follows it, like when we do have a big march and we feel the strength of our numbers it does wonders, and invariably after this that momentum gets squandered. Like after the students trashed millbank, there was genuine excitement, coz for the first time since the government got in there was a palpable sense of panic, and it had an effect on everyone I know.
A final point I wanna make, just coz I'm young enough to have noticed it, is that speaking to people who are like 15-18, just leaving school or college kind of age, they're noticeable more politcally aware and sympathetic than kids of my generation who grew up under Blair. My little brother's mates are all college age, and whenever they come round the house or I see 'em out and about they're always asking me questions about the economy, about why there's no jobs. That's a change that's worth mentioning.
No. On the other hand, he's summed up most of the Trot left rather well!
DotCommunist
So many particulars. So many questions.
UNISON leadership maggotry doesn't help-1 day strikes and swift cave ins, glossy do as your told leaflets for the reps, balloons and flags- not week long strikes, strike funds etc. Increasingly I'm starting to wonder how much part of the problem the big unions are. Not on the ground reps, fuck knows the most stinging critiscisms of unison I have heard are from reps, but those at the top are in the game.
You've hit the nail on the head there. The social democratic post-war settlement was based on being able to incorporate a huge section of the working class into capitalist society, in unionised, fairly well-paying jobs, with a welfare state as a support net. Rather than being the road to socialism, as the early social democrats imagined these kind of reforms would lead, it actually became accommodated within capitalism.
Post-1979 that's all been under threat, and if any sort of left-wing revival were possible, that's where it would likely come from. Once Britain's "Invincible middle-class suburbs" come under pressure from neo-liberalism, once these people who were relatively priviliged and had a stake in this, get the rug pulled under their feet, there'll be a backlash. Might not be a socialist one, there's all sorts of reactionary political forms it could take, but that's where.
Y'see from my extensive historical research and vast personal experience, it's not proletarian working-class people who tend to be the most revolutionary, but either the a) totally dispossessed and destitute or b) the relatively priviliged in danger of being losing status and being proletarianised. Most working class movements haven't been aimed at the revolutionary overthrow of the sytem, but pragmatic gains within the system, the "Trade Union consciousness" that Lenin whinged about is perfectly rational behaviour within the framework of our society. But when people who had good wages, were relatively autonomous in how they could work and had the ability to determine their own leisure time, suddenly face being stripped of that and made to work as wage slaves, who fight back. In british working class history, it was generally the artisans, not the factory workers, who were the most militant.
It isn't on the rise. However, if it was, here wouldn't necessarily be the place to look for the evidence.
Too fucking right. In Huddersfield, the November 30th strike was well observed, the demo was the biggest in town for 30 years, and this was repeated, up and down the country in other small towns in just the same way. There was loads of momentum directly after that, and they did FUCK ALL with it. Same after the big march last year.
Unison aren't alone in this, but their role has been disgraceful.
GarfieldLeChat
fucking awesome but wrong
you say that, as usual I don't agree!
thing is whilst it might not be intentionally shitty for people, there's always the freak occurrence. and we've had a few of those scales falling from eyes moments which have upset the delicate balance recent which has got more than just the average pinko chattering about how the systems fucked. as a consensious builder the banking crisis has to a certain extent woken a lot of people up to the inherant unfairness within the system... not all of them by any means have an answer or are making positive in roads to sorting it and quite a few are being devisive as hell but as we trundle on through the noguteens I think we'll see more of the arab sping type take downs globally... the trick however seems to be at present that these evolutions are being portrayed as revolutions which they are not.
What they are is the old table cloth trick where the cloth moves and the condiments remain in place... however the consiousness of more people particularlly within the upper middle classes is now at least aware of the issues.
Then all it takes is an unforseen event, natural or otherwise and the tipping point is reached.
so yes the system is designed to keep the restaurant at the end of the universe from falling into the abyss, however there's always an arthur dent around which can upset things and tip it over the edge without engines to pull it back again...
Just off the top of my head, I'd say that if we can have five years of the biggest crisis of capitalism in not only a generation but possibly in living memory, without a revival of radical anti-capitalist movements and ideologies*, it suggests that their historical moment has passed, and that capitalism, while affected by them to the extent that it had to adopt some of their proposed remedies for its own failings (and then constantly struggle to shed them), was able, in the case of social democracy, to comfortably absorb them or, in the case of Leninist state socialism, definitively defeat it in economic and military competiton. Meanwhile both of these wings of socialism were able to marginalise everything to their left-permanently (there are no signs of a revival of anarchism or libertarian communism etc, only incoherent and ineffective 'anti-capitalism'). Marxism remains the best way to analyse capitalism and its failings but no longer inspires movements capable of replacing it. The idea of the overthrow of capitalism seems to belong to history. All the signs exist to say that mass consumer capitalism will at some point destroy itself, but it is likely to have killed both the pyschological and material conditions for it to be replaced by something better.
*The organised left may be growing in some parts of Europe but has little chance of either being elected into government or inspiring an anti-capitalist uprising-and if it did, taking on responsibility for the capitalist crisis would soon see it hounded from office or power even by a section of its erstwhile support base-not least because the all-pervasive international media would be against it from the start.
*The organised left may be growing in some parts of Europe but has little chance of either being elected into government or inspiring an anti-capitalist uprising-and if it did, taking on responsibility for the capitalist crisis would soon see it hounded from office or power even by a section of its erstwhile support base-not least because the all-pervasive international media would be against it from the start.
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
what you seem to be saying is that five years of the biggest crisis of capitalism without effective opposition means that the historical moment of effective opposition has passed and we're all fucked.
All I'm saying is that the fact that such a crisis can take place without any serious opposition emerging (serious in terms of being able to form an effective challenge to what's happening) suggests that the idea of an alternative to capitalism is dead in the water. Instead, anti-capitalism, in all its forms, seems to have declined into a mere safety valve for capitalism's failings.
I concede that I may yet be proved wrong by events
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
a load of auld bollocks.
It strikes me that you could could've said that about Britain in during the recession of 1857. Why, during a serious recession, was there no movement akin to the Chartists, responding to it?? Where was the outbreak of militancy? Marx was confounded by this as it was unfolding. Socialism actually went into decline during this period. Or how about 1890's, the long Depression, the most severe recession in capitalisms history, and yet, it took years to even form a Labour party, trade unionists and socialists still clung to the liberals despite their ineffectiveness, eventually it took decades to dislodge the liberals after the first world war! Socialism has been through declines that are much more severe than today, even during times of crisis, which is worth bearing in mind.
I also think you need to consider how the UK left is only likely to play a marginal role in the global fallout from the 2008 banking crisis. Elsewhere in Europe, where the affects of recession have been more acute, left-wing political groups are growing. On top of this, class conflict in the global south will be more important than what goes on here.
And although the left hasn't grown organisationally, I don't share this pessimism, because left-wing idea's and principles still have an audience, and this government's cuts program definitely has raised class awareness. Frankly, it's pretty much impossible to make sense of what this government does if it weren't for class. So that's a start.
Unlike you, I'm not in the forefront of the revolutionary uprising (sitting in front of one of the library computers.) That's why I may have got it wrong.
I have to go offline in a short while, but all I'd say to that is that present conditions, as others in the thread have noted, are totally different than those to which you refer.
I don't dispute that left wing ideas still have a significant audience, as is being proved in many parts of Europe and elsewhere-it's just that, as I said, the movements they inspire seem to play the role of safety valve as opposed to forming a serious challenge to capitalism. A class analysis will always be relevant, but it in no way follows that it will inspire an alternative to capitalism.
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
no, you've got it wrong because you suggest that five years of anything shows that something else may have passed. what's five years in historical terms? fuck all.
It may be fuck all, but in the mass media age, five years counts for more than it did in the heyday of working class struggle (or any other era), and the current (entirely predictable) lack of impact of anti-capitalism, in all its forms, tells its own story.
I think your characteristically angry but completely content-free response to any suggestion of 'pessimism' also tells its own story.
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
you know you're talking shit.
your point is that if something hasn't arisen when you expect it to arise, then it won't arise because its 'historical moment' (whatever that is) has passed. history isn't like that, things don't arise or fade away when you think they should. as for calling my post 'content-free', that's just because i haven't felt the need to present example after example, believing - clearly wrongly - that by presenting the general point you might have the nous to see the error in your argument.
You seldom present examples of anything, preferring instead pointless pedantry or abuse for its own sake.
Haven't you noticed that history constantly speeds up?
Anyway, until tomorrow-if I can be arsed.
DotCommunist
So many particulars. So many questions.
Millipede has been doing my nut as well, refusing to back any strikes at all yet having the gall to turn up at Durham Miners Gala.
I mean really. Having it both ways.
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
provide examples? when you haven't provided examples of what you claim to be the case? why the fuck should i when you can't be fucked to?
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
Ayatollah is masturbating. He can only reach the vinegars by denouncing others.
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