My last post was over two months ago. This is pathetic.
I actually find it genuinely difficult doing this, which isn't a good look for someone who wants to do this and thinks he's good at writing. But that's the nature of mental health and how it can affect people. It doesn't inhibit their aspiration, but their function. When that fact goes up against the prevailing culture, it's values of effort and particular work ethos, there is a disconnect. This doesn't help.
Anyway, if you're reaidng this then I'm very grateful.
Where are we now? Something big just happened, what was it again?
Oh that's right. Britain and the world continues its shift to the right. The collapse of capitalism seems historically commensurate with the rise of fascism. Or fascism and crisis are intertwined. A simplistic analysis to be sure, but one look at the Guardian video of Owen Jones' encounter with the Brexit Party shows this. Unfortunately Owen handles this poorly: he's easily rebuked (by idiots, to be sure) and doesn't really ask any insightful questions. Louis Theroux (or even Louis Thorough) he is not. But that's not really the issue: I'm pointing to the attitudes of these people. Their sense of oppression and highly emotive angular responses point to the same kind of attitudes you saw in Germany. Perhaps we aren't quite that bad, but the point is made. These people see 'the left' as a monolith, they all but use the phrase 'cultural marxism' (a code for anyone opposing their views). They feel beleaguered. The EU wants to do them down. The left wants to do them down. They can't speak their mind (say racist/regressive shit)?
These are not reasoned positions, they are the product of propaganda and coercion. The Brexit Party campaign was based around hysterical tropes, and the Brexit campaign was fought using lies and racism. There's no easy way out of this, but surely we don't have to support and give succoour to these deeply embedded roots. This very English racism.
I see this as a new start. Not perhaps in the positive way one normally associates with that phrase, but something has shifted. Not perhaps Brexit itself, which is still a monorail to disaster. I don't think we can realistically leave, despite recognising how dis-empowering the EU is. It's a bosses club - but look who we give power to if we leave. Look who it will be now that professional scarecrow and compassion-free reactionary, Theresay May, is on the way out; her demise greaased by a sudden, uncharacteristic moment of tears. Something must have gotten into her withered eye sockets, dust in a Dalek's eyestalk, because she found nothing similar when working class people were burned to death, nor at the plight of child poverty, nor Windrush. You get the (horrific) picture.
It's a new start, hopefully for this blog, and me. That's weird, but I'm trying to put words to a feeling. It's a bit like turning off the main road and coming on to the motorway. The final stretch you mght say. I'm alluding to Brexit, but also, perhaps, the demise of not just the Tories (please god), but our horrific political system. Something has shifted with these election results and it may get worse before it gets better. The centre is evaporating (which is amusing if you're a CUK schadenfreude enthusiast like me). Unfortunately though that does mean, it seems, an emboldening of fascism, of the rise of the far right.
It's happening in Italy it seems (where the EU has fucked over their budget, the sort of politics that plays into fascist notions of sovereignty and oppression). Here it manifests with the darkly fascinating rise of the Brexit Party. Specifically, who is funding them. I have no doubt Farage is being funded by some throughly dodgy specimens, one of which we surely know about, Arron Banks. A grotesque little tyrant. The sort that can only exist under capitalism.
We must resist. We must recognise that neither Westminster nor the EU are desirable options, and we must not give our power over to tyrants from either side. It's only the working class - the people - who can save us now. I think what Labour needs to do is fight for working class internationalist interests, a lexit. A second referendum will not produce a decisive result and further deepen an already wounded working class.
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