Note to self: use video shorts more often. They’d help balance my own output, described by a very bright step daughter I love dearly, despite the IdPol conditioning she shares with my birth daughters, as “hard to understand”.
Huckleberry Finn: the statements was interesting but tough.
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Two days ago I joined those signing up to the yet to be named party launched by Jeremy Corbyn and Zara Sultana. I’m not wildly optimistic – the history of ‘parliamentary socialist’ alternatives to Labour is paved with tombstones 1 – but as with “Jezza’s” election as Labour Leader, the mere possibility of an alternative to Extreme Centre neoliberalism (and for that matter Atlanticism) is a wake-up call for those who mistake the apathy of resigned cynicism for consent.
Early summer saw me trading takes with SC, a fellow escapee from the Trotskyist sect, Workers Power, on a third and somewhat better known member of the gang:
Me: Paul’s bonkers, no? He’s gone way beyond the standard rightward drift of ex-Lefties who ‘grew up’.
SC: Not bonkers. I don’t agree with him but there’s a logic to the path he’s taken. He sees the biggest threat in the West as the rise of the far-Right, and seeks to build the broadest possible alliance against that.
My friend spoke true but, as the saying goes, if our only tool is a hammer we tend to see every problem as a nail. We make assumptions unwarranted by the available evidence, draw historic analogies whose inaccuracy may be revealed in under six minutes of hard scrutiny.
Over to My Left Eye, and its 353 second takedown of Paul Mason.
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- Writing in Naked Capitalism two days ago – Will Voters turn to Corbyn over Starmer’s Big Finance Love-in? – Yve Smith notes that American socialists:
… might understandably be inclined to dismiss Corbyn’s efforts to seek leadership via a new party as quixotic. But things have changed since his last big. With Gaza genocide even more visibly horrific, it’s harder to make “pro Palestine = anti-semitic” stick … Early UK voter reactions indicate that Corbyn will be a force to be reckoned with, as in even if he does not become PM he could command a big enough block of seats to lead a coalition essential to forming a government and hence influence policy.
While I don’t put quite as much stock as Yve or Jezza in parliamentary democracy, I deem this a valid point. In any case the link is worth following since, as usual with NC postings, the BTL comment is of a far higher standard than that of most Alt-Media.
Occasionally, for a bit of a laugh, I take a look at Paul Mason’s witterings. Never fails, he talks such utter bollocks, with what appears to be a total lack of embarrassment, shame or self awareness, and a total failure to grasp reality. He talks of Starmer in such glowing terms, lists his “achievements” and doesn’t seem to have spent a moment reflecting on why the man is so hated by so many.
I used to actually quite respect his views. Oh dear, sad really.
Yes, sad. I recall him as intelligent and hard working, qualities which saw him elevated to the dizzy democratic-centralist heights of Workers Power’s National Committee. But becoming a household name after retraining as a journalist may have turned his head. Being bright and industrious is all very well but, in the grip of obsession, neither quality is proof against crack-smoking inaccuracy.
I should add that, as is depressingly typical of the titling of YouTube videos, this one is way off target. It is scurrilously as opposed to crack-smokingly inaccurate to say Paul likens Corbyn to Hitler. Rather, he likens Corbyn to a German Communist Party whose sectarianism saw it refusing to forge an alliance of expedience with the Social Democrats, thereby allowing the Nazis to win in 1933.
On this he’s wrong, as the video clinically shows, but unaccustomed as I am to leaping to Paul’s defence, the kindest response to that title is to ask whether its authors know arse from elbow.
Or do they do it on click-bait purpose?
Yes I noticed that he didn’t liken Corbyn to Hitler. Hard to miss if you’re paying attention. But as you point out, Paul Mason is still wrong. I think we can rely upon him to be wrong about everything going forward.
Hope you have a good day.
I’ll try Margaret – same to you.
The devil might be in the detail of the constitutions of such alternatives. They need to be able to resist infiltration and the tendency to turn into one man shows. There could be a lot to learn from the history of the SNP on that score.
Interesting. Could you say a little more Johnny?
Seconded.
I know I’m not the only one (no names, no pack drill) who, whilst signing up to receive information etc, is waiting to see whether this will be based on a return to class based politics or whether it will succumb to the parasitic post-modernist intersectionalist virus which, as Jonathon Pie outlines here,…….
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5TVLEaqqdI
…..Salami slices and divides people into smaller and smaller groups in a manufactured hierarchy of oppression.
One clue will be whether or not it accepts the Supreme Court Ruling on biological reality.
No, you’re not the only one.