What's the political climate like in the UK right now?
30 Mar 2019, 2:00 pm
The_Walrus wrote:
JohnPowell wrote:
I was right amongst it. The media didn't engage with the crowds. There wasn't a million at last week's protest and there was 700,000 at the one last year. The FBPE crowd lie about everything. No one hardly knew about the rally yesterday where as the one last weekend was promoted across the board.
What the hell are you talking about? Her deal keeps us in the Customs Union forever. Where do you get all this false info from?
Looks like you're right about the size of the crowd. I had heard that the police were supporting a figure of just under a million, but it looks like aerial photographs put the number at about 400,000. I had friends who attended and complained that they were stood around for half an hour after the official start of the march waiting for the movement to get to where they were stood. Contrastingly yesterday's protests seemed to be contained to Parliament Square and Whitehall - no spill out onto Marsham Street or Victoria Street, and even Parliament Square wasn't remotely as densely packed as the photos from Saturday show it. Nonetheless, that does bring the discrepancy between the crowds down to 40:1 rather than 100:1.
May's deal explicitly doesn't keep us in the Customs Union forever. The text is available online but it's really hard to understand, I had to read things three or four times to work out how the various clauses fitted together. I should also be clear that I haven't read the whole thing. I know one person who did, and he says he only understood about half of it. The differences between the Single Customs Territory (colloquially "the backstop") set out in the Withdrawal Agreement and the Customs Union may seem pedantic but some of them are substantial. For example, the UK regains full control of its territorial fisheries. It is also worth noting the various clauses requiring both Unions to engage in their best endeavours to come up with a new agreement that replaces the Single Customs Territory within two years.
Check out this paragraph for example:
"Paragraph 2 shall not apply in respect of Union goods that are carried by air and have been loaded or transhipped at an airport in the customs territory of the United Kingdom for consignment to the customs territory of the Union or have been loaded or transhipped at an airport in the customs territory of the Union for consignment to the customs territory of the United Kingdom, where such goods are carried under cover of a single transport document issued in either of the customs territories concerned, provided that the movement by air started before the end of the transition period and the movement ended thereafter."
Not exactly beautiful prose but there's a clear separation there between the UK's customs territory and the (European) Union's customs territory. This is in the context of what happens when the transition period ends, but this language is the language of hard separation. There is no commitment to a permanent customs union, to remaining in the EEA, or to "Common Market 2.0". Why would the House of Commons have tabled three separate amendments (four, if you count Labour's) to that effect if the Withdrawal Agreement already contained such commitments?
Yes but the march last week was promoted by the media where as yesterday's was mocked. There was the whole SNP, the Lib Dems, the independents and a lot of Labour MP's all promoting last week's march. Tom Watson was on LBC the night before promoting the march as well as other presenters. Loads of celebrities were promoting it. Quite surprising there wasn't more that turned up.
We need permission from the EU to leave the Customs Union. We will be held ransom by them, pay $39 billion for it and have less clout. I spoke to a woman yesterday who's read the whole thing and she agrees that May's surrender treaty is worse than staying in.
I think that could be the point. There's not a lot of difference but a new proposal doesn't have the stain. The one that got the most was proposed by Ken Clarke who loves the EU more than anyone. If his proposal passes Monday then May will link that to her surrender treaty and it could get through.
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"No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?"
30 Mar 2019, 2:10 pm
Mikah wrote:
Edit: https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk ... wards.html
Read this blog post of his to understand what he means by Marxism in the modern age.
Read this blog post of his to understand what he means by Marxism in the modern age.
This is another excellent one linked in the same article that I just have to copy in full. This was written in 2009 during the last days of New Labour, before Tony Blair admitted to being a Trotskyist in days past:
Why is it so hard for us to see what is right in front of our noses? Last week, the one-time Trotskyist and perpetual student Alan Milburn (he still hasn’t finished his PhD), in a ‘commission’ set up by Gordon Brown (a student hard Leftist himself), launched an apparently bone-headed assault on the professions and the great universities.
Can Mr Milburn really be as stupid as he sounds? Or is there another motive here? What sort of Government is this really?
Just days ago we learned that the latest Defence Secretary, in his 30s, attended an unknown number of meetings of the secretive, pro-IRA International Marxist Group, an episode he flatly refuses to discuss further.
Given that this Government did in fact grant ‘Victory to the IRA’, as the IMG demanded, it seems relevant to me. One of his forerunners, the menacing ‘Doctor’ John Reid, was an adult member of the pro-Soviet Communist Party.
The most powerful Minister in the Government is Peter Mandelson, once a member of the Young Communist League. Tony Benn, who ought to know, maintains that the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling, was also an active Trotskyist and levels a similar allegation against Stephen Byers, once a prominent member of the Blairite inner circle.
None of these people has ever been frank about his Marxist past or apologised for it or explained it. Almost all of them would have kept it secret if they could (just as Anthony Blair dishonestly denied his membership of that KGB tool, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament).
None of them, in my view, has given up the radicalism of the past. They have simply discovered that they can use Parliament to achieve a revolution they once thought would need barricades and red flags. And these, I stress, are only the ones we know about.
Who knows how many others – MPs, Ministers, civil servants, judges, BBC executives, even Bishops – still treasure revolutionary aims? Now, there is one other recorded instance of a Marxist government coming to power legally in an advanced, law-governed parliamentary democracy with a strong middle class and independent professions. That is Czechoslovakia in 1948.
The parallels are not, of course, exact. The Czech communists had Russian tanks behind them and could move much faster and much more ruthlessly. But they concentrated their attacks on the police, the armed forces and the professions.
And they sought to drive the middle classes out of higher education, by deliberate discrimination against those whose parents were professionals themselves.
They also destroyed the savings of the middle class, attacked religion and the married family, used the schools for relentless propaganda and rapidly dismantled the constitutional protections against absolute power.
Remind you of anywhere? I said back in 1997 that New Labour was engaged in a slow-motion coup d’etat. Speed up the past 12 years (like that wonderful old film London To Brighton In Four Minutes) and you could easily see it for what it is.
But most of the media classes still moronically describe New Labour as ‘Right-wing’. Marxists have a term for them as well. It is ‘Useful Idiots’.
_________________
Behold! we are not bound for ever to the circles of the world, and beyond them is more than memory, Farewell!
30 Mar 2019, 2:20 pm
Hitchens is one of the only journalists left in the mainstream. I don't always agree with him but he will always challenge the establishment which is what journalists are meant to do. Where as most journalists now are the establishment.
_________________
"No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?"
30 Mar 2019, 2:26 pm
Mikah wrote:
Mikah wrote:
Edit: https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk ... wards.html
Read this blog post of his to understand what he means by Marxism in the modern age.
Read this blog post of his to understand what he means by Marxism in the modern age.
This is another excellent one linked in the same article that I just have to copy in full. This was written in 2009 during the last days of New Labour, before Tony Blair admitted to being a Trotskyist in days past:
Why is it so hard for us to see what is right in front of our noses? Last week, the one-time Trotskyist and perpetual student Alan Milburn (he still hasn’t finished his PhD), in a ‘commission’ set up by Gordon Brown (a student hard Leftist himself), launched an apparently bone-headed assault on the professions and the great universities.
Can Mr Milburn really be as stupid as he sounds? Or is there another motive here? What sort of Government is this really?
Just days ago we learned that the latest Defence Secretary, in his 30s, attended an unknown number of meetings of the secretive, pro-IRA International Marxist Group, an episode he flatly refuses to discuss further.
Given that this Government did in fact grant ‘Victory to the IRA’, as the IMG demanded, it seems relevant to me. One of his forerunners, the menacing ‘Doctor’ John Reid, was an adult member of the pro-Soviet Communist Party.
The most powerful Minister in the Government is Peter Mandelson, once a member of the Young Communist League. Tony Benn, who ought to know, maintains that the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling, was also an active Trotskyist and levels a similar allegation against Stephen Byers, once a prominent member of the Blairite inner circle.
None of these people has ever been frank about his Marxist past or apologised for it or explained it. Almost all of them would have kept it secret if they could (just as Anthony Blair dishonestly denied his membership of that KGB tool, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament).
None of them, in my view, has given up the radicalism of the past. They have simply discovered that they can use Parliament to achieve a revolution they once thought would need barricades and red flags. And these, I stress, are only the ones we know about.
Who knows how many others – MPs, Ministers, civil servants, judges, BBC executives, even Bishops – still treasure revolutionary aims? Now, there is one other recorded instance of a Marxist government coming to power legally in an advanced, law-governed parliamentary democracy with a strong middle class and independent professions. That is Czechoslovakia in 1948.
The parallels are not, of course, exact. The Czech communists had Russian tanks behind them and could move much faster and much more ruthlessly. But they concentrated their attacks on the police, the armed forces and the professions.
And they sought to drive the middle classes out of higher education, by deliberate discrimination against those whose parents were professionals themselves.
They also destroyed the savings of the middle class, attacked religion and the married family, used the schools for relentless propaganda and rapidly dismantled the constitutional protections against absolute power.
Remind you of anywhere? I said back in 1997 that New Labour was engaged in a slow-motion coup d’etat. Speed up the past 12 years (like that wonderful old film London To Brighton In Four Minutes) and you could easily see it for what it is.
But most of the media classes still moronically describe New Labour as ‘Right-wing’. Marxists have a term for them as well. It is ‘Useful Idiots’.
But we haven't gone left. We've gone right. I don't think it will last, we seem to be happiest staggering drunkenly
in the middle.
I voted remain, does anyone else think that this step to the right and leave might actually have saved us from a
much bigger step to the right in the future? It's very clear that a lot of people are unhappy with how things were
going. I'd rather we have a messy leave together than even though it is going to be hard than half the country
feeling left out and frustrated.
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30 Mar 2019, 2:33 pm
fluffysaurus wrote:
But we haven't gone left. We've gone right. I don't think it will last, we seem to be happiest staggering drunkenly
Yeah that was written in 2009, almost a different era but the march was ever leftwards until very recently when the bills started coming due from things like mass immigration. Cameron wasn't much of a departure from it either (he legalised gay marriage remember). He was just treading water. As the migrant crisis peaked in 2015 the public took a huge swerve to the right yes, but politics hasn't really caught up yet. We still have "Equality and Diversity" May and co in power and old student revolutionaries peppering both parties.
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Behold! we are not bound for ever to the circles of the world, and beyond them is more than memory, Farewell!
30 Mar 2019, 2:58 pm
Mikah wrote:
Yeah that was written in 2009, almost a different era but the march was ever leftwards until very recently when the bills started coming due from things like mass immigration. Cameron wasn't much of a departure from it either (he legalised gay marriage remember). He was just treading water. As the migrant crisis peaked in 2015 the public took a huge swerve to the right yes, but politics hasn't really caught up yet. We still have "Equality and Diversity" May and co in power and old student revolutionaries peppering both parties.
what is 'the migrant crisis'?
30 Mar 2019, 3:00 pm
Raised By Wolves wrote:
what is 'the migrant crisis'?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_migrant_crisis
_________________
Behold! we are not bound for ever to the circles of the world, and beyond them is more than memory, Farewell!
30 Mar 2019, 3:28 pm
Also. Regarding 'Tommy Robinson'. I think idiots like that are used by the establishment to divide people. He's just after money. How do people hold him up as some kind of hero when he kicked one of his ex partner's in the face and is basically just a football hooligan thug?
_________________
"No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?"
30 Mar 2019, 8:11 pm
Hitchens is a former Marxist himself, of course. Should we write him off as a rambling old radical despite all the evidence of his conservativism?
I must admit I'm struggling to see the parallels between Soviety Czechoslovakia and Britain in 2009! None of the examples he gives of radical developments there occurred under New Labour.
If New Labour were Marxists then why did they stay so far away from Marxist policies? Why did they abolish Clause Four? Why did they take such great pains to appeal to social conservatives on issues like crime and punishment? Why did they continue to pursue a liberal market economy with low taxes? Why did they introduce tuition fees? Why were the actual Marxists in the party, like Corbyn and McDonnell, totally marginalised? It just seems like the only way you can possibly support that notion is by being extremely selective with your evidence. It's like calling Cameron and Osborn fascists when they're boring old liberal conservatives. Blair and Brown governed as moderate social democrats, not Marxist revolutionaries. Even Brown's big "legacy" ideas were mostly technocratic reforms rather than sweeping revolution.
30 Mar 2019, 9:46 pm
The_Walrus wrote:
If New Labour were Marxists then why did they stay so far away from Marxist policies? Why did they abolish Clause Four? Why did they take such great pains to appeal to social conservatives on issues like crime and punishment? Why did they continue to pursue a liberal market economy with low taxes? Why did they introduce tuition fees? Why were the actual Marxists in the party, like Corbyn and McDonnell, totally marginalised? It just seems like the only way you can possibly support that notion is by being extremely selective with your evidence. It's like calling Cameron and Osborn fascists when they're boring old liberal conservatives. Blair and Brown governed as moderate social democrats, not Marxist revolutionaries. Even Brown's big "legacy" ideas were mostly technocratic reforms rather than sweeping revolution.
Much of this was covered in the first link. I'll copy it to the forums. I'll bold relevant parts to the questions asked above.
For 15 years now, I’ve been trying to explain to left-wingers what ‘left-wing’ means. It is strange that, while many of these people have a clear grasp of modern technology, can ‘get’ references to TV programmes, films and rock bands of which I have never heard, and are, how shall I say, more fashionably dressed than I, they still approach politics as if it hadn’t altered since 1945.
They still seem to think that nationalisation of industry is a major aim of the left. They still approach Marxism, if they approach it at all, as if Soviet Communism was the end point of Marxist thought, and nothing has happened since. Many imagine that Marxism was defeated utterly in 1989-91, when the Soviet empire fell. Likewise they still view the USA as the arsenal of reaction, a highly-conservative country at home and abroad.
No wonder that, stuck in these categories, they are clueless about the real nature of New Labour and of the Tory Party which has embraced New Labour’s policies (without understanding their aims and origins).
To me, dealing with people so utterly out of touch with modern political developments is much like meeting a male person who still wears detachable cellulose collars, sock-suspenders and vests, plasters his hair to his head with brilliantine, uses a typewriter, and still listens, via some electronic time-warp, to the Home Service and the National Programme on his wireless.
Nationalisation, for instance, was always rather marginally connected with socialism. It existed before socialism . Leaving aside the armed forces (the earliest state enterprises) King Charles II nationalised the mails, Stanley Baldwin nationalised the BBC, Neville Chamberlain nationalised electricity distribution, Dwight Eisenhower nationalised America’s highway system.
The question of whether, say, the railways, are state-owned or not is a practical one, not an ideological one. Long before Harold Wilson came to lead the Labour Party, nationalisation was dead as a real left-right issue in this country.
Roy Jenkins’s 1959 book ‘The Labour Case’ and Anthony Crosland’s ‘Future of Socialism’ correctly identified the left with moral and cultural revolution, and with dogmatic social egalitarianism. The lasting achievements (like them or not) of the 1964-70 Labour government were not economic or in the field of state ownership. They were : comprehensive schooling, an egalitarian political project of huge power, adopted (despite its utter educational failure) by the Tory Party as well. This issue is the true litmus test of modern politics, and is not merely Labour’s real Clause Four, but has become David Cameron’s Clause Four as well; the array of legal changes summed up (by a resentful Jim Callaghan) as ‘ the permissive society’ - simple, swift unilateral divorce, the de facto decriminalisation of cannabis (actually enacted, using a Labour template, by the Tories in 1971), the removal of the principle of punishment from the criminal justice system, the keystone of this being the abolition of capital punishment for heinous murder; the introduction of what rapidly became abortion on demand. This last would be followed by the prescription of contraceptive pills first to the unmarried and then to those under the legal age of sexual consent without the knowledge of their parents.
These vast changes, described and explained in my books ‘The Abolition of Britain’ (1999), ‘A Brief History of Crime’ (2003) and ‘The War We Never Fought’ (2014) utterly transformed private life and the nature of British society, and have been continued and reinforced, never reversed or moderated, by subsequent governments of all parties. One major result has been the transformation of the police force from a locally run, conservative consensual enforcer of the public will into a highly-politicised (and nationalised) exercise in social engineering, with a hilariously slight interest in actual crime or disorder.
They were accompanied by an increasing willingness to permit large-scale immigration, and a decreasing willingness to insist on the integration of the new arrivals. This aided the process of diluting and replacing the former conservative, Christian culture of the country, which came to be seen as ill-mannered towards the new citizens. Thence came multiculturalism, and the insistence on‘Diversity; and ‘Equality’ eventually enshrined in the Equality Act put through Parliament by Harriet Harman with the qualified but definite assistance of Theresa May.
The surrender of law-making powers to the European Union (whose original directive the Equality Act, among many similar, transforms into British law) made all this much easier, and assisted in the general denaturing of what had formerly been a very particular and unchanging society.
The name ‘Equality Act’ concealed the fact that its aim wasn’t so much equality, but the de-privileging of various institutions and ideas which had previously been considered supreme. The married state became one of many equally respected positions, thus losing its privileges. Protestant Christianity, likewise, became one among many competing beliefs, none to be regarded as more favoured than any other. Whether you like this or don’t like it, it is impossible to pretend that it is not a profound change.
Abroad, the USA (especially after the Clinton Presidency) became the arsenal of political correctness – both in its own domestic affairs and its policies overseas - and liberal globalism. Meanwhile Russia, having thrown off Communism became the most socially conservative major country on the planet. Eurocommunism, the original basis of Blairism, grasped that political and social radicalism could readily exist alongside economic liberalism. It also saw that regulation was easier to achieve - and in many ways easier to exercise - than nationalisation, and that the old models of Moscow socialism were utterly outmoded. It is beyond comical that anyone imagines that Vladimir Putin’s Russia has anything in common with the USSR. On the contrary, it’s a violent reaction against it. You just need to look, to see. But people don’t look.
It’s hardly surprising that children of the Cold War have found all this hard to grasp. Right is left and left is right. It is full of paradoxes and of things and people trading under aliases.
Yet they should have tried harder. More credit should be given to my late brother, Christopher, for correctly identifying the modern USA as the most revolutionary power on the planet, opposed to crabby conservative concepts such as national sovereignty, sweeping away the tedious restraints of migration controls and protective tariffs. It’s this economic liberalism - allied with the personal liberalism of ‘Nobody can tell me what to do with my own body’ which has somehow become identified with the British Conservative Party and the American Republicans, even though it’s not in the least bit conservative.
This is why Owen Jones’s reference to Alan Milburn’s private enterprise activities in his article http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfre ... t-59164209 misses the point so totally. The left no longer has the slightest difficulty with business or wealth. It’s utterly relaxed. Peter Mandelson and Deng Xiaoping , both educated in Marxism, both concluded that to get rich is glorious. Did they cease to be revolutionaries?
I don't think so.
Hasn’t New Labour revolutionised Britain? Isn’t China revolutionising the world, far more than it did before Deng let rip with the capitalism? Did Mr Milburn?
What Owen Jones should be more interested by is Mr Milburn’s incessant ( and well-publicised and well-received, not least by the Blairite Tories) calls for greater egalitarianism in our society
See http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/ ... -poor.html and
http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/ ... s-ago.html
and
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/artic ... diots.html
Right wing? I do not think so.
Neoconservatism’s Trotskyist origins aren’t accidental. It’s a revolutionary project, cunningly adapted for our times, by people who never ceased to be revolutionaries but learned that the old methods would never work. The teenage leftists of the 1970s have not become conservatives. They have become radical, revolutionary liberals a thousand times more effective than they can ever have hoped to be. If Owen really doesn’t like the ‘political consensus that combines free-market economics with social liberalism’, then he has a very tough epiphany ahead of him.
Or he can do what almost all my generation did, and sink comfortably into the liberal consensus, where every slogan of their college days is now conventional wisdom, and men in their 60s still struggle into their jeans and attend Rolling Stones concerts, marvelling at how funky they still are.
The_Walrus wrote:
Why did they take such great pains to appeal to social conservatives on issues like crime and punishment?
They lied to win votes, shocking - I know - in modern politics. Whatever they said, New Labour were very much in the "poverty causes crime" camp, not the "hang murderers" camp. The myth of New Labour being somehow right-wing still persists to this day. Later in the day when Corbyn arrived on the scene there was an interesting article that I can find later if you are interested, where a New Labour insider cheerfully admitted that the New Labour project was exponentially more radical than anything Corbyn/McDonald are putting forward.
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Behold! we are not bound for ever to the circles of the world, and beyond them is more than memory, Farewell!
31 Mar 2019, 6:16 am
SaveFerris wrote:
Always worth listening to.
_________________
"No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?"
31 Mar 2019, 3:48 pm
I have no problem with the claim that New Labour are left-wing (particularly if "centre" is affixed). They're certainly more of the left than of the right.
To me, Marxism is the ideology of Karl Marx. It seems to me that by using "Marxism" to refer to centre-left attempts to secure equal rights, Hitchens is committing a version of the fallacy he accuses his opponents of. The issue isn't that everyone except Hitchens is stuck in 1945, it's that Hitchens is the only person stuck in 1945. Sensible people look at Marxism, look at Blairism, notice all the gaping differences, and conclude that they're not the same thing. Peter Hitchens looks at Marxism, looks at Blairism, notices that they both have some commitment to equality and don't look to the church for authority (!), and thinks that they are the same thing. It's the equivalent of the edgy fifteen year old calling David Cameron a fascist and maybe justifying that with a reference to benefit cuts and support for a united Europe. There are more than two ideologies.
31 Mar 2019, 4:29 pm
The_Walrus wrote:
I have no problem with the claim that New Labour are left-wing (particularly if "centre" is affixed). They're certainly more of the left than of the right.
To me, Marxism is the ideology of Karl Marx. It seems to me that by using "Marxism" to refer to centre-left attempts to secure equal rights, Hitchens is committing a version of the fallacy he accuses his opponents of. The issue isn't that everyone except Hitchens is stuck in 1945, it's that Hitchens is the only person stuck in 1945. Sensible people look at Marxism, look at Blairism, notice all the gaping differences, and conclude that they're not the same thing. Peter Hitchens looks at Marxism, looks at Blairism, notices that they both have some commitment to equality and don't look to the church for authority (!), and thinks that they are the same thing. It's the equivalent of the edgy fifteen year old calling David Cameron a fascist and maybe justifying that with a reference to benefit cuts and support for a united Europe. There are more than two ideologies.
To me, Marxism is the ideology of Karl Marx. It seems to me that by using "Marxism" to refer to centre-left attempts to secure equal rights, Hitchens is committing a version of the fallacy he accuses his opponents of. The issue isn't that everyone except Hitchens is stuck in 1945, it's that Hitchens is the only person stuck in 1945. Sensible people look at Marxism, look at Blairism, notice all the gaping differences, and conclude that they're not the same thing. Peter Hitchens looks at Marxism, looks at Blairism, notices that they both have some commitment to equality and don't look to the church for authority (!), and thinks that they are the same thing. It's the equivalent of the edgy fifteen year old calling David Cameron a fascist and maybe justifying that with a reference to benefit cuts and support for a united Europe. There are more than two ideologies.
It seems that you may have failed to notice the distinction, which to me seemed quite clear, that Mr. Hitchens makes between Marxism and neo-Marxism; the latter philosophy is in many ways quite radically at odds with the form of Marxism devised by Marx himself. In particular, having presumably realised the failure of the Marxist model of economics, neo-Marxism, which grew out of France in the fifties and sixties, as well as the Frankfurt School after its exile in America, following Gramsci (cultural hegemony) and Marcuse, emphasised the cultural means by which the bourgeoisie supposedly kept the proletarian in a position of subordination.
There is almost nothing economic about Marxism in its contemporary form and, indeed, it was pointed out as early as the sixties that the neo-Marxists were playing directly into the hands of the economically and politically exploitative practices of the bourgeoisie. This is quite right, the prime example of its truth being the fact that the multinational corporation, whose executive staff surely represent the contemporary incarnation of Marx’s exploitative bourgeoisie, are so keen to, among other things, introduce mass uncontrolled immigration into western states so as to keep wages low (in Marxian terms, a "reserve army of unemployed"), using the language of neo-Marxist cultural relativism or political correctness as the surface justification.
31 Mar 2019, 5:11 pm
The_Walrus wrote:
To me, Marxism is the ideology of Karl Marx.
You are compartmentalising. The failures of the Soviet system and the fact that it would never be accepted in the Western world as it was, was obvious to some Marxists as early as the 1920s, but that didn't mean they gave up on the dream. All the various ideologies, including Trotskyism, Eurocommunism, Blairism, neoconservatism are direct offshoots of the Marxist dream. Gramsci's writings are of particular interest and relevance to modern Marxism and the modern world as it is. Vanilla Marxism itself was a fairly bland offshoot of the French Revolution. It's a branched continuum of ideologies all with approximately the same vision and endgame.
The_Walrus wrote:
Peter Hitchens looks at Marxism, looks at Blairism, notices that they both have some commitment to equality and don't look to the church for authority
No, no it's not. It isn't something he "noticed", it's something he took part in, believed in and fought for. Read the neo-Marxist thinkers, their plans and ideas regarding social, moral and cultural revolution being a precursor to the real revolution. They wrote it all down for you to read. Then they did it.
As an aside:
The_Walrus wrote:
particularly if "centre" is affixed
The "centre" is nonsense, it doesn't exist. At it's best it's a way to smear your opponents as extremists. At worse it's deception to cover up true motives. I found that article I mentioned earlier. A New Labour insider outright says:
New Labour was not intended merely as a short-term electoral fix after 18 years out of power and four crushing election defeats (though that would not have been a terrible thing), but as a radical new force in British politics. The “project” was infinitely more revolutionary than anything proposed by Jeremy Corbyn or his supporters.
This is absolutely true, yet now Corbyn is supposedly the "left wing extremist". New Labour is centrist and the Tories are right wing, oh and up is down and left is right... war is peace.... freedom is...
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Behold! we are not bound for ever to the circles of the world, and beyond them is more than memory, Farewell!
