I believe in class politics.
We all know that, even in a democracy, political power is not equally distributed. The few at the top, the ruling class, have the most power, and below them the majority have much less, diminishing with their wealth and status. In that social spectrum, a lot of the people in the middle have an allegiance to those at the top through systems of rewards and patronage, especially if they are paid to direct and influence others, like teachers, civil servants and journalists. Others in the middle class are tradespeople and small business owners who tend, literally, to mind their own businesses. Then there are the workers, the proletariat, the lower, working class, who are usually employed by the others and who enjoy few of their privileges by way of education or position but still may enjoy more or less prosperity, freedom and contentment according to their time, place and fortunes. As the most numerous class, the working class have the potential to exercise power over their own lives or politically through voting and collective action.
So much for my clunky conception. Class divisions and dynamics can be described in different ways, but their existence is not controversial. Plato saw a class society as a just society, an ideal. Marx believed class struggle was the driver of history that would one day lead to a classless society.
As individuals we don't always conform to classifications. My dad told me we were working class, and passed on to me a certain antipathy towards the middle class, like the snooty people we sometimes came across playing bridge at seaside holiday guest houses. Then I read The Road To Wigan Pier and was persuaded by George Orwell that as my parents were white collar workers owning a small house, we were lower middle class. A little disappointed at this, I retained a working class loyalty by identifying as "left-wing".
Being on the left has been a way for people of all classes to align with the working class, the less privileged, the less well off. Socialism tells us that the upper classes oppress and exploit the working classes, so we should fight for their liberation and betterment, even if it means forgoing some of our own privileges. The membership of the British Labour party consisted of working class trade unionists, concerned liberal professionals, and upper class types like Tony Benn (the former Viscount Stansgate). Oh, and me.
I was fairly at ease among left-wing people and in the Labour party, but in the last few years, it's all gone horribly wrong; as I have joked a few times, to nobody's particular amusement, I used to be the left wing one, but now everybody has joined in, and it's all got stupid. Everyone among my mainly London based contemporaries consider themselves left wing, as do the great majority of middle class people I encounter, directly or indirectly. But the working class have abandoned the left in droves. They inhabit a Tory voting hinterland that lies beyond the horizon and understanding of my mainly university educated class. Cross class solidarity under the banner of "the left" is over.
Voting for Trump, voting for Brexit, voting for successive Tory governments, the mainly white working class has been a ghastly disappointment to my old Labour comrades. The proletariat is now seen as a problem that has to be dealt with; they are a reservoir of ignorance and error that must be educated and corrected, and the malign forces that influence them must be silenced and defeated. I saw this expressed endlessly on social media until I could bear it no longer and deactivated my accounts.
Hateful speech, facilitated and amplified as it is by social media, is considered a modern day evil, but really, hate is considered perfectly acceptable by the left if it is correctly directed at the kinds of people they think deserve it. Until Covid, the two main targets for left wing hate were the white working class Tory voting Brexiteers (presumed to be racist) and (for the more ideologically committed) the "transphobic TERFs" who prioritise the reality of biological sex over the new idea of gender identity. Since the pandemic, a new category of bad guys has been added to the “out” group, the “anti-vaxxers” and people who are critical or resistant to some or all of the legally enforced Covid-19 measures.
Somehow, the default position of maximal intervention and legal compulsion to combat Covid-19 attracts the left like a magnet. With rare exceptions, they can be relied upon to support the most draconian actions, and are the most critical of those who defy or question them. A few who may not be so keen, like Jeremy Corbyn, remain largely silent. As Toby Green and Thomas Fazi rightly point out in The Left's Covid Failure, the dubious efficacy of some Covid measures, and their catastrophic impact on liberty, wealth distribution and worldwide global poverty, is not a debating point for the left. "Luxury communist" Aaron Bastani has backed every kind of Covid restriction: masks, distancing, green passes, booster vaccines for everyone, thereby aligning himself with authority figures from the Pope to the President of the United States; rulers who turn their patrician scorn on those underlings who resist their mandated Covid overkill.
 |
| Kindergarten kids, USA |
As an older and more vulnerable person I was happy to get whatever protection a Covid-19 vaccine could give me against this horrible disease, but Everybody Is Not The Same. Had I already had the disease, or if I was a lot younger, I might have chosen differently. Something strikes me as imprudent about getting everyone in the world to take new vaccines the long term consequences of which cannot be know. I took what I thought was a free choice at the time, but now, evidently, it is not. As I write, it is reported about two million unvaccinated Austrians are now confined to their homes, and compulsory vaccinations are on the way. An appalling mass attack on civil liberties, unthought of even a year ago, which has united European technocrats and American leftists like Noam Chomsky who nod their heads in weary agreement.
I am not talking about the merits and risks of the vaccines, I am talking about power. For whatever reasons, vaccine hesitancy is much stronger among non-whites, and laws to sack those who don’t want to get jabbed will affect them disproportionately; it is systemic racism, by any reasonable definition of that term. Of these who have resisted mandates, some are prominent athletes and actors, but most are health and other frontline workers in the US and around the world, who, after risking their lives during the pandemic while their employers locked themselves away to "stay safe", are now putting their jobs and livelihoods on the line to defend their right to decide their own medication. This supposed stupidity is greeted with exasperation by their betters;
"Our patience is wearing thin," said President Biden.
But the patience of voters for politicians who presume on their fealty and obedience may also be at breaking point. Could talk of BLMs finding common cause with MAGAs against Biden’s Covid bullshit be true? I for one would love to see such solidarity emerging in the US to challenge Democratic Party overreach. Let’s go Brandon!
#TheResistance
The identification of the left with authority has been a long time coming, it's a process which has been slowly going throughout my lifetime, and has now come upon us in a rush in the last 5 years. In the second half of the 20th Century the left came to despair that the workers under capitalism were ever going to “do the right thing” and start a revolution, so Deutsche and Gramschi argued for a “long march through the institutions” and a “war of position” to transform society from higher up. Though there’s nothing in it for the left to admit it, “entryism” has been highly successful, a gradual and almost “natural” process where "progressive" ideas have been propagated in higher education and grow out from there to inform the attitudes and values of the professional and administrative class. As a result we now see just about every major institution and corporation, at least in the west, publicly committed to consensus positions on inclusion and diversity, gender identity, gender equality and every other equality, a focus on mental health, and commitments to fight white supremacy, toxic masculinity, nationalism, and climate change. Academia, the military, the security services, big tech, big pharma, the entertainment industries, charities, trade unions, members of the Royal Family and most of the news media unite together under a rainbow flag. International organisations like the UN and EU are also on message.
 |
| GCHQ, The UK Intelligence and Security Organisation, lit up with the colours of the rainbow |
Foucault's belief that power operates through institutionalised learned discourse was a guiding idea for the left that has been disingenuously forgotten now they are comfortably installed in most positions of influence. More rarefied, "queer" interpretations of his work are now preferred. With the exception of the police, the only forms of institutional power the left now appear to be strongly at odds with are the ones that get voted in against their wishes; the administrations of US Republicans and the evil Tories in the UK. It is these, the people who vote for them, and the media organisations who are seen to pander to them, who are the enemy, and the left-dominated institutions, public and corporate, are the vanguard party leading the resistance against them.
A central conceit among the left is that "we are the good guys". One of the many dangers with this mentality is that it makes your first commitment is to a set of ideas and the people who share them with you, not to a material class based social reality, to people. To disavow the left has become unthinkable for so many of a certain class and education because it is, for them, their primary loyalty.
During the lockdown last year, I came across this talk by Mark Fisher, The Slow Cancellation of the Future. I was inspired to leave a comment saying he was someone I would love to go and have a drink and a chat with, only to find, further down in the comments, that he is no longer with us. An early left accelerationist who had become disillusioned with the impact of cybertechnology on music and culture, Fisher was disgusted at the left-wing "call out culture" on social media and the bourgeois values that were ousting working class consciousness in favour of identity politics. His great crie de cour Exiting the Vampire Castle (2013) put the cat among the pigeons, made him a few enemies, and made many good points. But the flaw in his polemic is fundamental, in my view; he wanted to rebuild comradeship and solidarity within the left, when what is really needed is comradeship and solidarity with the working class. Fuck the left.
I am sorry comrades, but I am done. I will never vote for a party that would put a male sex offender in a women's prison. Not just because it is a terrible thing to do, but also because it clearly shows how far from reality these ideas have taken people. And it's not as if I've really got a choice about this, either. Time after time Labour party spokespeople make it clear that there is no place in their party for people like me who disagree on the issue of gender identity. To remain in the party I would have to pretend not to disagree, and though others must manage somehow to do this, I have neither the will nor the wit.
Anti-capitalism has been a mainstay of socialist thinking. What of that? Surely this demonstrates the left's anti-establishment, anti-corporate commitment? Only ten years ago the Occupy movement attempted to "stop" the global capital markets of Wall Street and the City of London, and had pro-democracy, anti-globalist sentiments, but Brexit, for one thing, sent the left running in a different direction. A recent video interview with Aaron Bastani (sorry, him again) robots are going to take your job, and that’s a good thing, is interesting. Does the "luxury communist" want to bring down The City or the great monopolies like Google and Amazon? He does not say so. What are his differences with the Great Reset proposed by the World Economic Forum (WEF)? Not a lot, that I can see.
The WEF have come out in favour of Universal Basic Income (UBI), something the left have been pushing for a while. To be fair, Bastani is lukewarm about UBI, his focus is more on the provision of basic services (UBS) through state ownership and investment. He points to the success of Chinese state investment in technology, now putting them ahead of us here in the west. That we should do what the Chinese do because communism is proving more competitive than capitalism is argued without irony.
Bastani presents communism and capitalism as just two different techniques to achieve necessary progressive outcomes that neither he nor the other side question. Communists and capitalists accept a future of increasing worker powerlessness and technocracy. Both agree that AI and technology can bring an era of “post-scarcity” where few need to work but everyone can be provided for. Both think the fundamental problem for humanity is how to maintain and increase abundance without destroying ourselves with climate change or some other calamity. Neither question the assumption of constant and necessary technological expansion into every thing and every body.
Where do people come into this? What say do they have about what is to come? Can they say no? No! There can be no "no", not even a "hang on a minute!" What people might actually want, or how people might have a democratic (or any other kind of) say over the direction of our future, is not of interest. Under capitalism or under communism, whatever residual powers people may now have to direct or "own" their own lives will be gently but firmly removed from them. By 2030 “You’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy,” predicted the notorious World Economic Forum video. It sounds rather like communism to me, but without workers. But hey! That’s a good thing.
In truth, anti-capitalism is probably done for because, quite simply, capitalism is done for. What we have now is a zombie capitalism which, since the banking collapse of 2008, has been maintained by banks printing money which inflate stock market values unrealistically because the money has nowhere else to go. The real business world now functions in an environment dominated by a few tech platforms (Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc) which are in the control of a tiny elite who have personal authority over what we can see, say and do. Yanis Varoufakis calls the present situation technofeudalism, but his theory that capitalism is kaput is disliked by none more so than the left: Varoufakis explains:
"We leftists grew up with this ambition that we would bring capitalism down, and here I am telling them that, you know what, we are out of time, capitalism has brought itself down, and to be replaced by something far worse, not by socialism. The left do not want to listen to that, they really loathe that message."
The left loathe the message because it negates their principle reason to be, and they have a morbid attachment to that which they claim to be against.
Though leftists in the US and beyond like to conceive of themselves as #TheResistance, in reality they are the mainstay of a ruling progressive consensus which consistently uses the language of crisis and emergency as precepts for authoritarian measures like lockdowns, vaccination mandates, surveillance, and media censorship to clamp down on "misinformation", "harmful speech" and whatever other evils they have made it their business to defeat.
And it is also possible that most of our problems are not caused by those who resist the grand plans of the powerful, they are caused by the actions, industries, solutions and arrogant follies of the powerful themselves.
Ethics in Action
Why might a big corporate entity want to embrace progressive politics? Could it be altruism, or might there be something in it for them? Take banks, for example. Most banks are now publicly on board for the good causes of the day. Every month my own bank sends me an “Ethics in Action” newsletter. This tells me about the worthwhile things the bank supports. In September, it covered Manchester Pride, a £10,000 Dragon’s Den competition they were running, Amnesty International’s work in Afghanistan, and a warning about internet scams. It didn’t say anything, however, about how it applies ethics to its banking, or how it treats its customers. Again recently, it urged me to complete quite a long online questionnaire, which (not to my surprise) asked me a lot about MY political interests and values but next to nothing about what I thought about their banking services. There was no question about branch closures, for instance. There was no opportunity for me to complain about how they had declined my request for a bank reference a few years ago, costing me lost letting agency fees and a desperately needed move to a better home.
The truth is all banks are much the same and their services and not open to scrutiny. Customer decisions are embedded in systems; your data goes in one end and their decisions come out the other. There is next to no scope for human intervention or discretion. Elite firms like Coutts, the Queen’s banker, are perhaps exceptions, but for the rest of us, banks seek to distinguish themselves now by advertising “values” which they think will reflect favourably on them, and which serve to distract us from what they actually do, which they don’t want to talk about.
Crazy Like Us?
Progressive causes are attractive to big corporations and major institutions not only because they offer a distraction from their core business, but also because they give them new things to do. It is the imperative of capitalism to make everything that is not already an industry, into one. It is the imperative of industry to always seek to do more, not less. Business as usual ultimately entails idleness and redundancy, so it is the role of the educated and the creative classes to dream up new avenues for growth; new opportunities to be exploited; new products and services to be consumed; new ways of doing things. One way to do this is to persuade people that it is better that they get someone else in to do what they used to do for themselves.
This is happening on a grand, global scale in the name of "mental health". We are encouraged to seek professional help and all kinds of therapies and pharmacological interventions for problems we all, until quite recently, usually managed and dealt with ourselves. Every day, without fail, we are told by journalists, doctors, politicians, employers, entertainers and sports personalities that we need to think and talk about our mental health, that we must break down "the stigma" of mental illness, that there is a "mental health crisis", that we must put mental health on an equal footing with physical health, that we need to "pour money" into mental health services, and so on, and so on.
Whether this progressive, modern mental health mission is making us happier and healthier than before, or how, indeed, that could even be objectively measured and quantified, is a good question, but it is rarely asked. That it is self evident that we should “do” more about our mental health is simply the conventional wisdom of the day. A century after Freud, has our “knowledge” about mental health brought a mental health dividend, in terms of greater happiness and wellbeing? By what metrics could such a question even be answered?
Critical thinkers in the 20th century associated with “anti-psychiatry”, Szatz, Laing, and, again, Foucault would all have appreciated the power dynamics and a certain absurdity at play here; our ideas and experiences of mental health, madness and reason, are socially constructed and shaped by culture, politics and economics. Our experience of “mental health” exists in symbiosis with our discourses about it. In short, mental illness is "talked up" into being. The left “know” all this but have conveniently forgotten it because the opportunities for their own class to exploit mental health narratives are too good to pass up. The more awareness there is about mental health, the more people come forward to be "helped", and the more can be "done" for them. The more patients there are, the more of a problem mental health is demonstrated to be, and round it goes. As more "unwellness" is identified, the industry flourishes.
The mental health industry may be a sisyphean enterprise, but that is no bad thing for the growing army of middle class professionals who are employed in it, be they therapists, clinicians, journalists or administrators of the multiple "not for profit" organisations and charities that have sprung up which seek to raise awareness and deliver mental health and wellness to everyone under the sun. These mental health entrepreneurs are clearly profiting, if nobody else is.
And this legion of mental health interventionists do not confine their psychological wisdom, rooted in cultural paradigms of western individualism, only to their own culture, they enthusiastically and uncritically export it around the world, with no regard or respect for local and ethnic traditions and ways of coping, as the case studies in Ethan Watters book Crazy Like Us: the Globalisation of the American Psyche have chronicled.
Because our educated classes now know not to be "white saviours" and are well schooled in condemning the evils of colonialism carried out by their class equivalents in bygone days, but they are quite oblivious to how they continue in similar ways to assume their ideas and solutions are appropriate and welcome wherever they go. This applies as much to their new theories about gender, race and whatever else as it does to mental health. Western class assumptions of entitlement are still intact and fully functioning, and are exercised as much through our existing progressive ideas, as despite them.
Medical Nemesis
General medicine itself has been ever expanding throughout the modern industrial era, and this expansion is now assumed to be an unmixed blessing across the political spectrum. At the last general election, the Conservatives pledged to build 40 new hospitals, and the only political debating point about this was whether they would be good to their promise. Since then, the pandemic has provided an unprecedented opportunity for a quantum leap in extending the existing medical technostructure still further into our daily lives, to the point that the individual is left with little or no choice but to acquiesce. Is it possible that we could ever have too much medical care, to the point that it disfigures our lives and imperils us?
In his 1974 book Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health, Ivan Illich argued passionately that we had already well and truly reached that point. Lauded and famous in his day as an early environmentalist thinker and advocate for deschooling, Illich is largely out of fashion and forgotten, but his thundering critique of the juggernaut of industrialised medicine has never been more relevant. "The medical establishment", he said "has become a major threat to health". His argument was partly that overzealously administered medicine itself causes multiple new forms of disease and death, a phenomenon he called iatrogenesis. This claim he supported with examples and references which take up half the book. But more than this, modern medicine separates people from their socially evolved knowledge and methods of coping with health, illness and death (cultural iatrogenesis) and surrenders us to an unreliable medical clerisy which holds dominion over our lives (social iatrogenesis).
The assumption that science and medicine can and should seek to overcome every disease and cause of death is prevalent in modern society, and morally hard to challenge. The Transhumanist Declaration, which envisages humanity “overcoming aging, cognitive shortcomings, involuntary suffering, and our confinement to planet Earth” suggests the technological transcendence of mortality is within our grasp. This would have been anathema to Illich. Rightly, Illich argued that sickness and death are not tragic, but the social and scientific project to escape them most certainly is. He wrote:
"The technical and the nontechnical consequences of institutional medicine coalesce and generate a new kind of suffering: anesthetized, impotent, and solitary survival in a world turned into a hospital ward. Medical nemesis is the experience of people who are largely deprived of any autonomous ability to cope with nature, neighbors, and dreams, and who are technically maintained within environmental, social, and symbolic systems."
Illich saw this in the early 70s, how much more true is it of the world today?
It might surprise some that his arguments were taken seriously at the time, but as a fairly recent academic appraisal by the Journal of the Royal College of Physicians in Edinburgh points out, the book was much debated by the British Medical Journal which ran three separate reviews and an editorial on it. Many of Illich’s examples of medically induced illnesses and vain interventions are no doubt out of date; pointless tonsillectomies are a thing of the past, and many treatments for cancer are surely more effective than before. It will comfort us to think medicine and science is "better" now. In some ways yes, it will be, but in others, no. From my own family’s experience, intense consumption of free state medical care in the UK over the decades has brought benefits and longevity but has many troubling and questionable aspects. In the wider world, perverse and culturally driven medical practices abound, like giving speed to troublesome children, or puberty blockers like Lupron to the gender confused. The age of quackery is far from over.
And since the advent of Covid-19, the reckoning of medical science's costs and benefits must now be radically reconsidered, taking the concept of iatrogenesis to a new level.
"We Made the Coronavirus Epidemic"
Did Covid-19 originate "in nature", or was scientific research responsible; a "lab-leak?"
A single and salient article, published by the New York Times in January 2020, We Made the Coronavirus Epidemic almost answered the question for itself, but not quite. "It might have started with a bat in a cave" it correctly observed, "but human activity set it loose". What kind of human activity? "a perilous trade in wildlife for food" is mentioned, as is the great abundance of highly mobile human beings, going to far flung places, picking up new viruses and moving them around the globe. "We invade tropical forests and other wild landscapes" it goes on, "we disrupt ecosystems, and we shake viruses loose from their natural hosts [yes, my italics]. When that happens, they need a new host. Often, we are it."
The article, almost drowning in a sea of it’s own cognitive dissonance and unconscious irony, then asks what is to be done to prevent a disastrous pandemic?
"Fortunately, current circumstances also include brilliant, dedicated scientists and outbreak-response medical people — such as many at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, EcoHealth Alliance, the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (C.D.C.), the Chinese C.D.C. and numerous other institutions. These are the people who go into bat caves, swamps and high-security containment laboratories, often risking their lives, to bring out bat feces and blood and other precious evidence to study genomic sequences and answer the key questions."
That this is a full admission of conducting risky research, disrupting ecosystems, shaking viruses loose from their natural hosts, and moving viruses around is not acknowledged by the article's author David Quammen, writer of Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic. Interviewed in the article is Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance, a central protagonist in the 15 year long US/Chinese collaboration on this kind of research activity. Knowing what we know now, we might fairly ask what Daszak and his colleagues actually achieved to ameliorate or prevent the deadly coronavirus pandemic that started in the same busy metropolis where their US funded coronavirus lab was located. To be fair, a 2017 study they did, mentioned in the article, tells us something worth knowing: 3% of people tested in the area of Yunnan in southern China where they gathered virus samples carried SARS related coronavirus antibodies, whilst among people in Wuhan at that time, used as a control group, they found none.
"“We don’t know if they [people in Yunnan with antibodies] got sick. We don’t know if they were exposed as children or adults,” Mr. Daszak said. “But what it tells you is that these viruses are making the jump, repeatedly, from bats to humans.”"
True enough. But this study also indicates that the viruses had never made the 2000km jump from Yunnan to Wuhan until Mr Daszak and his band of coronavirus hunters came along.
 |
A month after this article was published, Daszak acted decisively to crush any ghastly speculations that his research had anything to do with the origins of the disease. He gathered senior scientific colleagues together to write a letter to The Lancet condemning suggestions of a lab leak as a conspiracy theory, and being the well respected, well connected "go to science guy" on the subject of pandemic prevention that he was, most of the mainstream media bought into this story, and generally put it about that lab leak claims were misinformation, right-wing and racist.
In the great vastness of China, the coronavirus pandemic somehow started where the coronavirus research was taking place. The extreme unlikelihood of this coincidence being just a coincidence is obvious to anyone with common sense, though evidently not obvious to a lot of scientists, politicians and journalists
To call lab leak suspicions a conspiracy theory is not just an insult to our intelligence, it is an assault upon it. To go back to Illich's thesis, the "crime" of iatrogenesis is not just that it can sicken and kill us, it is also that it undermines and disables our competence to understand and to know, reducing us to a state of helpless ignorance or confusion. Dismiss Ivan Illich as an outdated catholic crank if you like, but his is a very similar idea to that which underpins the rightly admired Adam Curtis's documentaries for the BBC. In our postmodern cyber-world of competing narratives, psyops, multiple media and global politics, we find ourselves more misled than ever and less sure of our own ability to understand anything at all.
But despite the best efforts of some, we have not yet been parted from their ability to follow a line of enquiry, gather evidence, and put two and two together, as the internet sleuths of DRASTIC have shown. There are some notable exceptions out there among professional journalists, including the BBC Beijing Correspondent John Sudworth , who investigated valiantly until he and his family were hounded out of China in March 2021, but the norm, sadly, is for media outlets and their journalists to let their allegiances and politics decide what is worth investigating and reporting, taking pronouncements from favoured authority figures on trust.
The probability that the all too human project to conquer disease has brought greater disease upon us stares us in the face; blinking and incredulous, we stare back. Information removed, redacted and hidden may yet come to light to prove research activity caused the pandemic, but even if, as the BBC now prefer to put it, “we may never know”, it is clear that it could well be so, at the very least. Has this inspired a radical rethink on such dangerous virus research which was controversial even before the pandemic broke? Not at all. Not so far. Huge new investments into pandemic research and prevention are part of Biden’s Build Back Better plans. The “scientific community” are lobbying strongly to prevent any restrictions to these activities. Efforts to do that which did no good before, are likely to be redoubled. So while us ordinary folk are under orders to change our ways under the “new normal'', our scientist saviours are set to continue their dangerous but profitable businesses according to the old normal, but more so.
The political will of the establishment and the media and their supporters on the left to protect their friends in the field of science is strong. Their desire to actively investigate and explore the possible origins of the greatest calamity of the 21st Century are weak. The reason for this is simple, they do not want to discover that blame for the pandemic rests with the same men of science who are telling us what to do now. Follow the science, they say. THEY ARE HERE TO SAVE US, NOT TO KILL US!
Join Our Club
The orchestrated “lab-leak” denial gives every appearance of an old fashioned “gentlemen’s understanding” being entered into by people of status and position who enjoy mutual respect and trust, think they know best, and who have each other’s backs.
Because being a member of a privileged class is rather like being a member of a club, is it not? You pay in, you agree to the rules, and you stay loyal to your fellow members. You don’t always have to agree with everyone, but don’t upset the apple cart, and spoil things.
The liberal-left tribe (to lift a term and idea from Ben Cobley's book The Tribe: the Liberal-Left and the System of Diversity) is like an extensive club or association which links together through social media likes and follows to advance political objectives and, in particular, the interests of identity groups who are deemed to be the most in need of support. The club is open to all from those prioritised identities (LGBTQ+, non-whites, feminists, the Muslim community and others) but if you are not from one of those you can still be an "ally" and earn kudos and the status of belonging that way. Identity group representatives and allies (who make up the "us" of the club/tribe) come together to make political demands within institutions and through political organisations like the Labour Party, united in the name of social justice and intersectionality.
In the Labour Party class politics has been replaced by this kind of identity politics. Class politics campaigns for a limited set of economic and social aspirations that can be shared across a multiplicity of groups, faiths, ethnicities and sub-cultures. Identity politics advances the demands of specific prioritised groups, with the assumption, or hope, somehow, that the demands of one group will align with those of the others. But there is no magic to ensure that this will always be so. The real interests or values of people represented by the association may vary and conflict (between faith groups and LGBTQ+, for instance) but this underlying reality is glossed over in a performance of solidarity. Politically, it doesn’t matter if you have misgivings as long as you don’t say so publicly. Keep quiet, and you can continue to retain your membership and keep getting your benefits and the status of belonging. If you break ranks, however, as the radical feminists did when they rejected gender identity, then you are OUT.
And being OUT is NOT where you want to be. Then you are not one of "us", you are one of "them".
And, let’s face it, you may, on the quiet, think that the hounding of Kathleen Stock from her job at Sussex University is a bit off. You may even think her criticisms of the prevailing gender identity thinking is actually quite reasonable, but you are not going to say so in public, are you? Because... well, that would be letting the side down. Bad form. Not to say downright SILLY.
The Conspiracy Theory Conspiracy Theory
People who have little power may indeed make things up to explain what is happening to them and the world around them. Their conspiracy theories may be unhelpful and untrue, sometimes dangerous, more often just silly (like the 9/11 controlled demolition), but they prosper at least partly because the voice of authority is unreliable, duplicitous, manipulative, sometimes absurd, and, crucially, comes from a place of power that has the most potential for harm. While my left wing friends may now rail against anti-vaxxers and the like, I think it is the forces of authority and untruth, which seek to present themselves in the guises of "consensus" or "the science", which pose the greater threat, has the greater potential for evil, and is the real class enemy. We should not be focusing on relatively powerless people and ignoring those who own and have mastery over much of our world, and are reaching out in plain sight to grab more.
People like me who sometimes question the prevailing narratives of the day are apt to be described as conspiracy theorists. I think this is a bit rich. I noticed even the Mail on Sunday was doing this the other day, speculating that a number of footballers hadn’t been vaccinated because they had “been pressured by their wives [!], while others are thought to have swallowed conspiracy theories.”
Ironically, blaming vaccine hesitancy (or anything else, for that matter) on “conspiracy theories” can itself be.. a conspiracy theory! A generalised way of looking at things that enables us to ignore what people's real motivations may be and attribute their thinking to the vague spectre of dark, malign forces at play in the world, that have the power to mislead those people, but not us.
“Conspiracy theorist” now often denotes a general tendency, rather than anything specific. It is a catch all slur thrown at wrong-thinkers who depart from established wisdom. I have recently been denounced on Twitter as someone who has “gone down a conspiracy drain hole”. The conspiracy theory I was supposed to believe in was not specified, but I will happily admit to one; it is the one where the ruling class works in collusion with the bourgeoisie and their lackeys to shore up their own interests, deny responsibility and cover their arses while they shit on everyone else... Yes, you know, that theory. Certainly, m’lud. Handcuffs. I have more than a little sympathy with that one.
Don’t you?
Comments
Post a Comment