Fucking up the fuck ups

This was written a year ago!  "All very well to put out a string of populist policy announcements - end the pasty tax, free dentures for the long-term unemployed, fuel allowances for cabbies, new tramlines in Maidenhead, whatever - but this is just noise until it's part of a resonant 'vision'. And Labour just doesn't have a clue what its 'vision' is … Because not only does the Labour leadership love the smell of its own farts - so does the media chorus. Every time Miliband pops out another vaporous soundbite, the news - always desperate for novelty, fond of power, and particularly fond of right-wing Labour leaders - makes it sound as though he has written the Grundrisse. Now these thematics must be heavily focus-grouped and polled, yet I see no evidence that they catch the remotest echo in the popular imagination. And there's a reason for that. It's that they are utter, uninspiring, incoherent bollocks. It is not just that they do not represent any systematic alternative to the policies being pursued by the coalition. It is that, as with both 'Blue Labour' and 'One Nation Labour', these themes attempt to hybridise an extremely mild reformist language with a half-hearted co-optation of reactionary traditionalism, an ideological blend that neither pleases nor motivates anyone … What are we supposed to think? "Let's have compulsory apprenticeship schemes because We Are One Nation"? Or "Cap fuel bills to save the squeezed middle"? Who the fuck would go out and vote on that basis, much less - I don't know - form a picket line or mount a barricade? Of course Labour are going to lose the next election ... They are an opposition which can barely bring itself to oppose. They cannot even act intelligently, because they are structurally compelled by their investment in neoliberal accumulation strategies, to be stupid. They even fuck up the fuck ups. The Tories don't have to actively win it. They just have to play their hand in a reasonably smart way, placate their base, and wait for Her Majesty's opposition to defenestrate itself."
Richard Seymour -“Why are Labour going to lose the next election”, May 15 2014

What Democracy Looks Like

Ambrose Bierce, the 19^th century American journalist, short story writer, fabulist, and wit, said that politics is ‘a strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.’ This is the 'Politics' that you take up as a profession, with its Privy Councillors (yes it did start in the toilet) and, pardon the pun, Standing Orders; the Westminster 'Palace' full of Right Honourables who barrack and ridicule each other, then go off to have cosy lunches together. I remember being on a trade union rally 30 years ago in Hyde Park when one of the speakers called on us to march on Parliament. Someone grabbed the mike and said he wouldn't join it because he didn't believe in disturbing the dead. At one of the massive demonstrations against the Iraq war I was in Parliament Square as a young woman pointed at the people sitting on the grass as she shouted, 'This is what democracy looks like,' then her arm extended in the direction of Parliament. 'That's not what democracy looks like.' But I leave the last word to Milliband. “Of political parties claiming socialism to be their aim, the Labour Party has always been one of the most dogmatic – not about socialism, but about the parliamentary system. Empirical and flexible about all else, its leaders have always made devotion to that system their fixed point of reference and the conditioning factor of their political behaviour. This is not simply to say that the Labour Party has never been a party of revolution ... It is rather that the leaders of the Labour Party have always rejected any kind of political action which fell, or which appeared to them to fall, outside the framework and conventions of the parliamentary system.” Which Milliband wrote this? Ed, Dave? … no Marxist father Ralph. Have you ordered your copy of 'Left Field' yet? Publication has now been set for early 2016.