Meditation on a Computer Game

The game:
Of a narrated narrator,

Who became the projected image,
Of an exploited exploiter,

Who became the alienated product,
Of a hunted hunter,

Who became the valorous victim,

Of a dreamer's dream,

Who become radioactive landfill.

Boris the Berserker

UK General Election last night. Interesting analysis by Professor John Curtice. Confirms the point made by the outgoing LibDem leader Jo Swinson that the old party loyalties are breaking under the pressure of Brexit for a rising tide of nationalist votes in Ireland, Scotland and England.


Despite Swinson losing her seat it seems she led her party to an increased share of the vote. Over-ambitious placement of her ex-Labour and Tory MPs in safe seats of rival parties led to her political downfall.


The Corbyn bubble seems to have burst. The 'principal contradiction' (re: Mao) is no longer the class antagonisms between working and upper classes. According to everyone but the Generals in Labour it now appears to be between nationalists and internationalists in a global capitalist economy.


The pro and anti-internationalist split probably still translates into a split in the organising rhetoric between public and private workers. Thus, what you hear locally on the park bench can be deceptive. From an Old Labour perspective it probably gets interpreted as a Stalinist v Trotskyist division. 


However, most private and public sector workers in the UK are now far richer than they were in the 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s or even 70s. The relative size of the middle class has grown in the UK and income inequality in the UK is far less than it is in many under-developed or developing countries in the rest of the world.


Thus, the real villain in the internal collapse of the Labour is not necessarily Corbyn and McDonnell but Len Mccluskey the leader of the Unite Trade Union. The most powerful socialist in Britain he may be, but an adept political strategist he most clearly is not.


Uncle Len has proven himself to be the worst of all revolutionaries, a failed one. He continues to be the proud owner of an outdated Soviet ideology, more rusty and leaky than a cold war submarine. He thought big, played big and lost even bigger. Time to pension him off to the Balkans me thinks.


'New Labour' was successful because it was a Nationalist and Centrist party that took its lead from the (ultimately victorious) dissident trade unions of the Soviet Union. 'Now Labour' needs to find its (post-modern, petit-bourgeois, guerrilla) identity again along with a similar rethink of its political strategy.


Blair, Campbell and Mandelson had one thing right: a democratic socialist party has to win elections to stay in business. And in the UK a political party can only win a general election by occupying the centre ground. That's a difficult ask if you have to stay mobile at the same time. 


Labour's current problems can be traced back to the 'class war' that erupted during the Miliband era. It was probably in response to the global financial crisis and the vicious attacks of austerity on the working poor. The party swung to Old labour to defend the vulnerable. It worked for a while, but the masses eventually internalised their aggressor. 


Now we can see that Corbyn's Old Labour was never fit for purpose; it was stuck in the banana republics and middle-eastern conflicts of the Seventies. Sure they had resonance. But founding a socialist revolution on the promise of borrowed capital from the international money markets inevitably involves an unsustainable contradiction.


It is time for something different and the electorate has chosen Boris the Berserker with his Nationalist, Centrist, and altogether Populist agenda. Labour must take note!         

Meditation on a Cloud

The clouds rise,
The lightning strikes,
The wind spoils,
The branch recoils,

The blood feeds,
The cell breathes,
The gene entrains,
The self remains,

The emotions rise,
The insight strikes,
The word spoils,
The heart recoils,