Month: April 2020

The Real Face of Labour

Posted on by wind65

It was the saboteurs in the Labour Party who delivered Corbyn’s Labour back to its blue faction. Now they will finish the job with Sir (soon-to-be Lord) Kier Starmer. One thing they must surely be examining is how to redress the balance of power that resides in the membership. An Ed Miliband experiment that went disastrously wrong, and had the media, the internal and external establishment, seriously threatened.

So the blue face of Labour swings into action invigorated by the end of the Corbyn era . Not hard for them to get into the swing of things as they have always controlled Labour HQ, even when not in office, as the recent LGLU report into antisemitism has shown. Well, you might ask, how could they have derailed the elected leadership while not actually in office? Simple, their apparatchiks were in senior posts controlling the electoral campaigns and managing Labour’s HQ, a fortunate happenstance for these opportunists, a gift from Labour’s fair-minded employment practices, which they lost no time in exploiting to the full, starving the elected membership and its democratically elected leadership of information resources and electoral data, but it went further, much further, they used every sly reversal trick in the book to make the sitting left wing of Labour’s broad church look as ineffectual as possible. Their best was sticking to Corbyn’s administration, of which they were an insidious part, false charges of antisemitism, and then leaking carefully selected bits of their own complaints procedures to the press weakening Labour’s effectiveness as an opposition and in elections.

Given that most of the bigotry originated from their own culture, as evinced from hundreds of emails and WhatsApp messages, this was no mean feat. They used mysogeny, slander, bullying and other forms of maliciousness, interspersed with cruelty and a total lack of empathy bordering on the psychopathic: in one now renown instance, sending the BBC’s Michael Crick to hound Diane Abbott because she had been found crying in a toilet and this would add to her miseries (who else, eh? but the blue-hearted in Labour).

Despicable as these tactics were, especially in a party which is supposed to be above such nastiness , these questionable antics and malicious slanders worked, but not before in 2017 Labour had come to within a hair’s whisker of electoral triumph, wiping the glib smiles off many in Labour, not least blue Labour MP Stephen Kinnock, as the exit poll showed that Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour had reversed Theresa May’s majority, entrenching his father’s electoral defeat.

But times have indeed changed, and blue Labour is almost back in control, so that even Len McClusky, Unite’s General Secretary, and former staunch ally of JC, writing in a recent article comes somewhat short of where he should in condemning Labour’s pathetic response to its own internal backlog of complaints and malfeasance. No-one, not even Len McClusky can be too careful as Labour shifts towards Sir Keir Starmer who has made unity the mainstay of his leadership.

With Sir Keir Starmer as leader, the blues in Labour have achieved after all their intrigues a not-quite-day-of-being-back-in-the-driver’s seat. The trouble is the Labour membership, who first need to be safely locked away in the labour juggernaut boot, fortuitously helped by the lockdown as CPLs can’t effectively organise or propose motions.

What will blue Labour do? First, they have to sit on the report that under no circumstances can be allowed to be proliferated. Step in the GMB union who have already come to their rescue, trying to have it quashed on the grounds that it names some of their members, bringing both them and the union into disrepute. Then they will try to single out the key voices in red labour. Slowly bringing them on-side with reasonable, sugar-coated offers, while sidelining any that don’t bite their bait hard, isolating them as fringe lunatics, fanatics or ‘trots’ (whatever that ubiquitous tabloid single syllable word actually means).

To do this, they will use their considerable reach and financial muscle, which go well beyond membership fees. The Labour party run in this way – corporate-sponsored Labour – moves inexorably towards its real blue intent, not as a mass party, but as a cynical institution of cross-networked and vested interests in a wider political and established institutional order.

Labour’s blue insiders play a nice little game, but we have discovered who they really are from the report into their internal workings, their undemocratic intentions – no matter the electoral cost! – and the schoolboy machinations to which they are prepared to stoop. And find ourselves right back in the full-blown toxicity and head-scratching days, post Gordon Brown’s humiliation, and election defeat to David Cameron and the Lib-Dems, when the shackled Ed Miliband rose to ignominy and further electoral failure. Those instantly disposable days of a media-muted Labour: in thrall to soundbite culture, one-liners and media gimmicks, served in small square blocks of diced pink protein, the barely palatable, carefully vetted and approed, cellophane shrink-wrapped morsels, shipped by Labour’s intense marketing machine to the masses for consumption and excretion.

To take on this cabal of schemers, the Labour membership must learn to use its teeth. To chomp through the brittle bones of blue Labour and spit them out. The next NEC election offers just such an opportunity.

Watch “The Fourth Industrial Revolution Full Version Subtitled” on YouTube

Posted on by wind65

Very glossy video by World Economic Forum about the fourth industrial revolution which, it states, will bring about unprecedented change. To give but one example, in a key interest of mine, it will allow us at long last the opportunity to explore our minds, using AI and brain scanning techiques to pierce our own Selves: the old dichotomy, for instance of the scratch board of the unconscious as Lacanians would have it; the layering of systems of cognition, one over the other, conscious over unconscious, so that its cloudy semiotic dissonances can be mapped. However, critical to this slickly produced and edited programme is that the fourth industrial revolution requires a new narrative to be created; one that moves away from neo liberalism and Marxism towards something that evolves beyond 19th and 20th century concerns to the present.

For anyone that’s interested, beyond the current debate in the UK between the left and right, Corbynism was never about Marxism, but about a new economic and industrial momentum bringing a revolution based on a new green deal. The dream was that Labour would help this happen, and inevitably it will. As much by external events, such as the current COVID-19 crisis as by nature (the unconscious, Gaia theory, Thanatos, Eros, God or even COVID-19 – it doesn’t matter!).

The current crisis is a spur in that direction because it will help to bring about a new narrative. Governments, such as the current one, are archaic; the obfuscations and posturing around power and status seem utterly at odds with the scale of the challenges that face us, the dual-party system unable to mobilise efficiently before a crisis. Polarity, or democracy, as we know it, only creates ambiguity through polarisation. With each passing year of the 21st century all this becomes increasingly cumbersome as the pressure to adapt to this fourth industrial revolution becomes the central issue. The old models of socio-economic distribution simply cannot keep pace. We cannot go back, but going forward means changing the way we function to meet the challenges that come with enhanced technologies that make the old ways of doing things redundant.

The time is upon us right here, right now; there is, to repeat, no going back. The Fourth Industrial Revolution has started, the systems that cannot facilitate huge fundamental change will disappear (in some cases overnight). Growth seperated from social welfare, or people, as this vid. argues, is in the past as are dodgy government interventions that ultimately don’t work for people, especially when they are aimed only at those with tribal allegiances. We need, indeed demand, a new narrative, based on real needs, a sustainable and meaningful way forward that accepts responsibility for everyone, not only those promoted by the old neoliberal clichés: competitiveness, free markets, trickle-down economics, low wages for most, the scaling back of essential services, the conjuring stick of quantative easing, the accusatory finger disingenuously pointed at the so-called ‘profligacy’ of the poor, tough love, in other words, and so on. In some ways, socialism could counterbalance this, but can it? The great hulk of the labour movement, weighed by its own internal challenges, has been holed and is fast sinking, under the new leadership of Sir Keir Starmer, to the fathomless depth.

The last UK election showed that socialism, even updated with new ideas, was too vulnerable to the old distortions and media obfuscations. It could not provide the inspiration even though it advanced these ideas, the public did not believe it would do so as it had failed to do so before. But worse, it failed to inspire, chained as it is to the dualism of left and right. Anyway, these ideologies, socialism and neoliberalism, belong to bygone industrial revolutions, not the current  super-enhanced technological revolution now coming to the fore. The way ahead needs a new narrative, that fuses the past, present and, most importantly, the future. One that can rise above the tensions of two poles, Tory and Labour, and sweep all before it, that appeals to everyone – but even if it doesn’t – fortunately, it won’t really matter because change stands by for no-one, the horse has truly bolted; the old corrupt regimes will collapse from the pressure of these technologies, quantum computers, biotechnologies, super-fast internet, virtual realities, the list is endless, The fourth industrial revolution doesn’t require it be acknowledged by the status quo, it simply leaps over it into a world defined by humanity itself, the users, not pressed into ubiquitous global homogeneity by corporations or states hang up on ideology.

In such a world in which mobile technology and the virtual classroom, or any other system in which technology assists, the boundaries to knowledge are put aside, so with it the old power structures. At first, as now, slowly (the last dull 50 years!), but eventually completely, instantaneously, the next, more revolutionary, 50. The first quarter of the twenty-first century was a coming to terms, the next quarter will see those terms exploded into every sphere of life. As humans we see time through a narrow window and become reliant on the old ways of doing things, such as our over reliance on petro-chemicals, but the fourth industrial revolution is already heading off from fossil fuels. It is a revolution that will challenge all who stand before it, leaping over the heads of those who were entitled to benefit most from the old orders of progress.

Appended here as this article is not finished: Late for now as the membership have just voted in Sir Keir Starmer. It’s sad, but I think in some ways Corbyn peaked too early, or at least early enough, so  New Labour could upend him. It’s water under the bridge now. That said, I don’t believe it’s going to be that simple. Capitalism is waking to the shift that is irrevocably taking place towards human capital, energised by the Fourth Industrial Revolution which is what we the membership are after, grass roots decision making and responsibilty at the individual level. That   age is upon us, unlikely as Sir Keir Starmer is, and undeserving, he now has the reigns. If from Corbyn he has not learned to manage from the bottom up, but tries to rule in alliance with a cabal with their heads in the clouds, he will soon enough be brought down to earth by events. There’s no stomach in the age of innovation and communication for anything else. Even the current PM will fall into line, I believe. Trump won’t but that’s because the US needs to be brought down a notch as does Russia and China. They’re all too authoritarian and the age of mass communication supersedes all of that. Next the oligarchs and billionnaires. They too will come crashing in the next five years. Transparency and the end of neolibaralism will see to that.