Keep It Dense, Keep It Futile, Yeah?

Recently, Guardian writer Rafael Behr wrote a piece which, in a contrived manner, all but states that Jeremy Corbyn is the reason he had a heart attack. Also contained within the tiresome mire of his spiel is the accusation that Corbyn and his supporters wanted to enact a pogrom upon Jews.  “At least we are finding out who would have hidden us in their attic,” one Jewish friend said to me. We laughed because it wasn’t even a joke.  - Rafael Behr, The Guardian It is laden with outrageous, insulting statements and various insinuations, such as above, which is obscured by a thin veneer of respectability, the bits about his heart-attack, which literally bookend the article. Forgive me for being defensive and insulted by the notion that anyone on the left would want to violently eradicate anyone else, especially Jews. It's absolutely antithetical to socialism and our outrage toward Behr is entirely justified. Behr, of course, took offence to people rightfully defending themselves f...

You've all heard it before - "Corbynism is a CULT!", "The cult of Corbyn strikes again!". We've all been called cultists, zealots or acolytes at some point. It's a boorish and trite accusation that has followed mass political movements for change throughout history. I want to explore where these accusations come from and why they are made, and hopefully dismantle the narrative well enough for others to be able to defend themselves in the face of these ridiculous claims.   Back in 2015, a certain back-bencher with 30 years of experience behind him was nominated in the Labour Party leadership contest after Ed Miliband's disastrous result in the general election. The aforementioned back-bencher was nominated purely on a diversity ticket, a crusty old "Bennite" socialist, a dinosaur living out of his time in the modern land of Blair's Third Way politics. That backbencher was Jeremy Corbyn. He was nominated simply to maintain the illusion th...

I think we should all be taking a long, hard look at what is happening in the Labour Party right now and attempting to draw some wisdom from it. Please hear me out... The Labour Party is a "big tent" party, a party that is supposedly politically diverse and allows a wide range of discussions. In reality, this means that you end up with factions within the party that amount to disagreements over policy and direction, and these factions usually end up vying for supremacy. For example, within the Conservative Party, you have One Nation conservatives and Thatcherites who disagree with each other superficially. One Nation conservatives believe that the wealthy should do all they can to support the poor and lower classes (which coincidentally, does not happen), whereas Thatcherism emphasises individuality and an ethos of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. But we can learn more by observing what they have in common, which is unwavering support for capitalism; they are unified b...

"So you think people should have kids if they can't afford them?" I'm tired of this argument, I'm sick of how morally derelict it is.  Let's just dig a grave for it right now. What is it with people who espouse this argument? They appear to be far more concerned with what they think ought to be, grounded in their own authoritarian power-fantasy, rather than what actually is. Their ideals have been sold to them a thousand times over by a system that, only by chance, works for them. "I'm alright, Jack!" doesn't even need to pass their lips, it's always implied.  They make long drawn out moralisations over those in poverty with children as if that in itself somehow magically changes their circumstances. Money, to them, is the reason you should not have children, spoken as if you can simply override biological imperatives and the innate desire within us to procreate and nurture. It's as if the basic drives of nature itself have never matt...

Leftists in the UK are in a historically unusual position, they have no real voice within Parliament bar a handful of backbench Labour MPs, mostly those of the Socialist Campaign Group. The problem is that the Labour party, since the time of Kinnock, has only made perfunctory gestures toward a meaningful transformation of democracy and the economy, and has only had a single truly left-wing leader, Jeremy Corbyn.  It's not that we don't have enough left-wing parties in the UK, far from it, it's that those parties have no chance of acquiring even a snifter of power due in large part to our electoral system of first past the post.  This system is badly in need of reform for the following reasons: Minority rule - Despite getting only 43% of the vote, the Conservatives have 56% of the seats.  Political diversity is suppressed - 57% of people did not vote for the Conservatives in 2019 and hence they are denied the representation of their choosing.   Not all votes are ...

A while ago I posted a video on my page which, I didn't realise at the time, was actually cut from a Labour election video from 2019. I didn't know this because all the pro-Labour bits had been pruned from the video. This is by the by, though, and not really the point of this article.  Whilst most comments and shares praised the content of the video, there were a couple that I found amusing until I further considered the implications. One read "Utter Marxist bollox", the other "We need UKIP as there [ sic ] for England". These attitudes are unfortunately by no means uncommon and are representative of our modern and highly polarised political spirit. So what is it that has turned people to this position? "Marxist bollox"? Most of those reading this will have a good idea of what Marxism actually is and how it is rhetorised by figures such as Farage to mean something else. But let's cover those points anyway. Firstly and basically, what is Marxism...

Recently, I posted an image on my Facebook page from IWW which included the following text: "You can't be pro-worker and anti-immigration. Immigrants ARE workers. Don't be fooled by dog-whistle racism. Immigrants aren't driving down wages, bosses are." I thought it might be pertinent here to illustrate some different perspectives on this as in my original post, I only focused on the socialist perspective within a capitalist system. So first up, here is (near enough) what I originally posted. The Socialist Perspective (Of A Capitalist System) Employers drive down wages and here's a simple explanation of why using the basic economic concepts of supply and demand. In an employment situation, the labour-force is the supply and the capitalist/employer is the demand. When supply outstrips demand, the capitalist/employer uses "market saturation" or "cost-cutting" as a pretext for their behaviour which is usually to slash wages, other work benefits...