Political crisis, institutional decline, conspiracism, right wing radicalism: what's going on, where's it going, is there an answer?

[Pickman's model]

Always keep a copy on me for emergencies

 

[Sasaferrato]

The other factor has been authoritarian states, China in particular, demonstrating to elites that a growing market economy that feeds the super rich doesn't need the freedoms supposedly integral to the liberal/free market order, as the dominant discourse used to have it.
That might not actually be true but it's the sort of thing they want to hear so perhaps has added to their confidence that they can hollow out democracy still further.
Speak my branes there, but definitely interesting questions.

JimW

I keep reading that China's economy is far from well at the moment, particularly in terms of the property market. Is this in fact the case?

 

[LDC]

In the middle of watching this (sorry, I know it's Novara and Klein) which makes the point at about 28mins onwards about the right wing's plan, but that the left doesn't really have one. It's good at 'systems analysis' but without a workable plan that just makes people feel powerless.

 

[JimW]

JimW

I keep reading that China's economy is far from well at the moment, particularly in terms of the property market. Is this in fact the case?

It's a big question. It's a basket case by conventional economic measures but also proof of how little relation to the real world traditional economic measures bear, is my take.

 

[Brainaddict]

Yeah I think the extra-parliamentary/anarchist/activist left is 99.9% completely useless at strategy tbh, partly as an offshoot of being transcient and youth and sub-culture dominated. The row over the bookfair earlier is emblematic of that in part.

Some of what you say is like Malm's 'green/war communism' line isn't it?

I guess it leans more that way than I would have in the past, in that I think we need to be ready in a crisis to bypass existing power structures, but I think he'd be happy with a more authoritarian leftism than me. I certainly wouldn't use the term 'Leninism' in a positive way - and I don't really see why we keep having to refer back to past attempts at change when we're in a unique situation.

 

[Monkeygrinder's Organ]

, the issue is really the lack of scale of it (and partly the political confidence and power that would largely come along with that), not that it doesn't work.

I guess the question is whether there's anything inherent in there that prevents that scaling up. I mean it seems to me that if you asked for a good example on here of that sort of practice ten years ago or whatever, you'd likely have been told that the IWCA were doing good work on the Blackbird Leys estate. And if you asked now, you'd probably be told the IWCA did good work on the Blackbird Leys estate. Not to knock that sort of very local organising but I struggle to see how you'd build a health or transport system that way let alone take on wider systems etc. But if you try and scale it up, link in with other similar groups do you lose it's strength? And then even at that level when the group is very local is it maintainable or do people inevitably lose motivation - which seems to be what has eventually happened?

 

[Brainaddict]

it seems things like the anti-poll tax movement entirely passed you by. protests against roads might to you have been subcultural but to many other people was a broad-based movement of which the likes of swampy were a minority - it's the same with fracking, that lots of work's been done by people who haven't received the publicity they might from the press but that doesn't mean it's not been going on. you're always coming out with bollocks like this that makes me wonder how you've spent your time politically over the past couple of decades as you seem to live in a world with scant connection to the one everyone else lives in. there's a reason that eg anti-globalisation was not mainstream, and that's because perhaps the mainstream is capitalist. many many thousands of entirely ordinary people - ie not professional revolutionaries or the like - took part in the anti-globalisation movement around the world, as any observer keener-eyed than you would have seen.

Either dead ends or flashes in the pan. We should be ruthless about assessing the legacy of past movements and set fire to any nostalgia we have about them

 

[Pickman's model]

Yes, it's a big crisis and there are big changes coming, yes, they're mostly going to be bad.

Recently parts of the left have re-discovered grassroots organising and are trying to do it at scale, spread it around etc. But the absence of that from the 80s to the 00s was a disastrous error for the left.

Either dead ends or flashes in the pan. We should be ruthless about assessing the legacy of past movements and set fire to any nostalgia we have about them

you can't keep a straight line from one post to the next

 

[Sasaferrato]

European politics are definitely heading rightwards. AfD are possibly going to be the kingmakers after the next German general election. Italy is galloping rightwards, as to an extent is France (both countries having been well to the right in previous times). Hungary, bloody hell!



The darker the colour, the further to the right.

 

[LDC]

I guess the question is whether there's anything inherent in there that prevents that scaling up. I mean it seems to me that if you asked for a good example on here of that sort of practice ten years ago or whatever, you'd likely have been told that the IWCA were doing good work on the Blackbird Leys estate. And if you asked now, you'd probably be told the IWCA did good work on the Blackbird Leys estate. Not to knock that sort of very local organising but I struggle to see how you'd build a health or transport system that way let alone take on wider systems etc. But if you try and scale it up, link in with other similar groups do you lose it's strength? And then even at that level when the group is very local is it maintainable or do people inevitably lose motivation - which seems to be what has eventually happened?

Yeah I work in healthcare and unless people are willing to give up on a bunch of treatments, research, quality of health and life expectancy, etc. I think there's going to be a need for some centralised and managed health system for a good while.

For me there's a number of similar structures that will need some kind of central management (2 others are power generation [nuclear especially for example] and food production/distribution, whereas some like housing and transport could be managed much more locally), so how might that be different to a State, and what would be the strategy for having control of that and managing it fairly given the scale we live at now? It's one of the reasons why I think the left has found the post-war years much harder, the complexity of the worlds and peoples' lives is vastly different to how it was in the 1930s, and many of us ideas (and what plans we have) haven't kept pace with this, unlike the right's.

 

[teuchter]

Absolute nonsense. My recent experience of the 'grassroots left organising' stuff you mention is that it's very effective at countering conspiracism, the issue is really the lack of scale of it (and partly the political confidence and power that would largely come along with that), not that it doesn't work. Thinking that The Guardian counters conspiracism is absolutely nuts.

That's a bit like saying that bailing out a sinking ship with a teaspoon is very effective - the only issue is the lack of scale.

 

[phildwyer]

There's been a lot of discussion of these subjects over various threads I thought it might be a good idea to have a new thread to try and tie it all together. I don't know if there's already a thread covering this but I had no clue what to search for or even what to call this one so let's see if this goes anywhere...

It seems like the crisis of 2007/8 is a key moment that perhaps fatally undermined the broad political/economic consensus of the post 70s era although we can definitely trace it back a lot further.

It might still be too early to say that 'centrism' is dead, but it has undergone a crisis of confidence and looks under threat pretty much everywhere.

Varying degrees of radical right wing tendencies whether capturing existing parties or forming new ones have become a major political force.

I think it's accurate to say there's been a general loss of hope in the future and faith in existing politics/institutions to deliver progress, at the same time there is little sign of a real transformative path out of this continuing period of instability.

So I suppose there's a few questions that come to mind. How deep is the crisis? Is it a turning point like the 20s-40s or the 70s-80s where we should expect to see a broad change of direction/are we seeing one already? Is it important or effective to defend existing institutions/democratic/political norms or whatever you want to call it against the radical right? Is the radical right capable of enacting significant change? What about the left (if that's even a meaningful question)?

Hopefully this isn't all too vague!

Who benefits when the radical right and the radical left just fight each other all the time?

 

[8ball]

European politics are definitely heading rightwards. AfD are possibly going to be the kingmakers after the next German general election. Italy is galloping rightwards, as to an extent is France (both countries having been well to the right in previous times). Hungary, bloody hell!

View attachment 393822

The darker the colour, the further to the right.

Are the Tories not right-wing in the publication you got this map from?

 

[BigMoaner]

I've no idea the solution, or even the extent of the problem. Post-truth seems an increasingly useful noun though for the sense i get from the "discourse", especially online., and from waht i pick up in every day life. I can remember when all the anti vaxxers were screaming during covid, and people on this forum expressing worry that that kind of gutter lunatic thinking would break out of small spaces into wider networks, and I think it has. I hear more and more of itIRL, mainly from the youngi lads i work with, but certainly not confined to them. Now there's always a counter to this being that "when has our thinking ever been sophisticated and not based on horeshit - especially the right?" - yeah, but this feels different. When you have millions online standing up for an alleged rapists because he's at "war with the deep state", or when andrew tate is worshipped by millions world wide, where Ulez is seen as some kind of shadowy deep state control method to enslave people, when someone like Trump gets elected and is seen as credible by millions, the whole anti vax covid deniying shit show which has real prominance on teh right, especially in the states, i do think yes, something is seriously broken. maybe it's not the march of fascism, i don't know, but somethign is up.

 

[phildwyer]

The only actual functioning thing we've got to counter conspiracist right-wing radicalism type stuff is the Guardian -.

Afaic The Guardian permanently disgraced itself when it jumped on the "Corbyn is anti-semitic" bandwaggon. And they got Nordstrom wrong too. I'd say they're a major source of disinformation, not a counter to it.

 

[phildwyer]

Afaic The Guardian permanently disgraced itself when it jumped on the "Corbyn is anti-semitic" bandwaggon. And they got Nordstrom wrong too. I'd say they're a major source of disinformation, not a counter to it.

 

[Elpenor]

Are the Tories not right-wing in the publication you got this map from?

It’s defining European as countries in the EU was my thought

 

[BigMoaner]

The Really Real, > The Real > The Spectacle

 

[phildwyer]

In the middle of watching this (sorry, I know it's Novara and Klein) which makes the point at about 28mins onwards about the right wing's plan, but that the left doesn't really have one. It's good at 'systems analysis' but without a workable plan that just makes people feel powerless.

How does she think Bannon's going to get back into the White House? Trump won't bring him back, Trump kicked him out.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

It’s defining European as countries in the EU was my thought

Yeah perhaps. If so, it's done so very badly as it has EU countries with centre-left govts like Spain and Portugal the same colour as non-EU countries like the UK, Switzerland, Belarus, Norway, various Balkan states, etc.

 

[Yuwipi Woman]

the police are the frontline of enforcement against social and economic deviants - the travellers battered at the battle of the beanfield were not assailed by the likes of norman tebbit or alan clark.

There's a whole framework of policies to keep people in line. In the US, the health insurance system is there to keep you working as long as possible. Health insurance being tied to employment isn't an accident. I suspect if you gave a 50-year-old access to Medicare, many of them would leave the workforce. Also, lack of a coherent national retirement plan keeps many people working until they drop. And if you're younger just being unemployed and too poor to buy food will drag you back sooner or later. For those unable to comply with that regime, there's homelessness, where you become a poster child of what can happen to you for the middle class. Failing that there's the prison industrial system that awaits anyone who falls too far out of line. You will be a profit center one way or another, whether you like it or not.

 

[The39thStep]

I might be taking back the remarks that I made about the replies to the Bookfair Twitter statement

 

[Pickman's model]

There's a whole framework of policies to keep people in line. In the US, the health insurance system is there to keep you working as long as possible. Health insurance being tied to employment isn't an accident. I suspect if you gave 50-year-old access to Medicare, many of them would leave the workforce. Also, lack of a coherent national retirement plan keeps many people working until they drop. And if you're younger just being unemployed and too poor to buy food will drag you back sooner or later. For those unable to comply with that regime, there's homelessness, where you become a poster child of what can happen to you for the middle class. Failing that there's the prison industrial system that awaits anyone who falls too far out of line. You will be a profit center one way or another whether you like it or not.

yes, it's the same here - there's a range of disciplinary bureaucratic bodies like the department of work and pensions as well as the police. the one lot you won't see on the frontline are the members of parliament.

 

[inva]

I might be taking back the remarks that I made about the replies to the Bookfair Twitter statement

Well all I can say is I'm pleased to have done my bit to raise the reputation of British anarchism

 

[The39thStep]

Well all I can say is I'm pleased to have done my bit to raise the reputation of British anarchism

Cant give you credit for the replies though, sorry.

 

[Sasaferrato]

Are the Tories not right-wing in the publication you got this map from?

Europe swings right — and reshapes the EU

Italy, Finland, Greece have recently moved. Spain could be next. The shift will affect everything from climate policy to migration.

www.politico.eu

I was thinking that myself.

I don't know the site, can't comment on its overall accuracy, the map was all I took from it.

 

[8ball]

Europe swings right — and reshapes the EU

Italy, Finland, Greece have recently moved. Spain could be next. The shift will affect everything from climate policy to migration.

www.politico.eu

I was thinking that myself.

I don't know the site, can't comment on its overall accuracy, the map was all I took from it.

Ah, gotcha. Elpenor called it - the graph is entitled "The Right in the EU".

 

[Cloo]

I guess one has to hope that this is the last convulsion of dying patriachal, white supremacist dominance, but the worry is will they take the rest of us with them when they go down?

I am grimly fascinated by how both political 'wings' are coming full circle with conspiracy, uniting under an 'anti-establishment' flag which nonetheless often manages to be curiously 'establishment' in its impact on the general public (ie, causing more deaths among the least educated, favouring oil and gas by waving away climate change, propping up misogyny and racism etc)

 

[BigMoaner]

Genuine question because I haven’t been following it at all. The war with Russia, is there a large and active loon element to the debate? If so what are their “theories”? The war is a good lighting rod for seeing how much of this stuff is in circulation, so it’s interesting to me.

 

[BigMoaner]

I also do have sympathy with the idea “don’t call anyone you disagree with a consipirqcist”. I get that. But that can only really work with real and true experts and proper journalism, which I really think is deciding people’s views less and less.