Will ‘Your Party’ fall to IdPol? Ask Mr Pye!

“In just 200 years we’ve progressed all the way from expecting our leaders to slaughter brown skinned people while saying racist things, to expecting our leaders to slaughter brown skinned people while condemning racism” – Caitlin Johnstone

I opened a post four days ago – Paul Mason: crack-smokingly inaccurate – by describing my step daughter as very bright and much loved, “despite the IdPol conditioning she shares with my birth daughters”.

The post being about my erstwhile Trotskyite comrade’s opposition to the launching by Jeremy Corbyn and Zara Sultana of a left alternative to the Labour Party. Paul’s gripe, predictable to all who know the furrow he’s been ploughing for years, is borne out neither by psephological fact nor, beneath a surface plausibility, basic logic. But my post drew a comment from Dave Hansell raising the more credible danger of this alternative party, though guided by a moral compass long lost by Labour, subordinating class analysis and a meaningful economic challenge ¹ to the fragmented politics of intersectionality. ²

Dave also posted a five year old gem from the comedy diamond mine known as Jonathan Pye.

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1. One problem for Zara, Jezza and the 600k and rising who, like me, have signed up is the absence of any public discourse acknowledging the depth of Britain’s (and Europe’s) plight: due not to immigrants, Brexit, ageing populations or even the hikes in arms spend – though they come closer – but to decades of having the global south make our stuff and feed us (because a rentier elite chose that path) coupled with comprador willingness – touched on in Road to WW3. Part 3 – to make its peoples and economies expendable assets in the fight by US elites to reclaim unipolar supremacy. That expendability, a taboo subject for Europe’s (and Britain’s) liberal order, media no less than politicians, places us economically no less than militarily in a far worse place than we need be. It debars “Your Party” from any convincing alternative to ‘austerity’ and will continue to do so until this new entity breaks decisively on the one hand with Washington dominance, on the other with the notion, economically illiterate if we’re being kind, that an economy with a fiat currency can validly be likened to a household, a business or a local government. Finally, that lack of coherent economic alternatives will fuel and be fuelled by the dominance of the identity politics lamented by David and (tee-hee) Jonathan.
2. Not all who bewail IdPol – its internal contradictions bringing civil war to a dizzying array of constituent elements – yearn for a return to the economism of pre-feminist, all-bread-and-no-roses workerism. Sexism, homophobia, and racism are both moral failings and poisonously divisive. At issue is a perspective, not only limited but distorting, that ignores – or crassly tacks onto its list of The Oppressed (related to but not the same as Exploited) – the realities of capitalism’s life negation.