Effecting change – or blowing off steam?

Believe me, I get how frustrating the selective stupidity of brainwashed humanity can be for we who see that we are ruled by criminals, lied to by our media on stuff that matters, and led down the garden path by populists who purport to oppose both. I’m most focused on liberal stupidity, this being the dominant form in my social milieu, but am mindful too of the form it assumes in those who look to a Trump or Farage for deliverance from sufferings all too real.

Neither constituency is innately stupid; simply blinded by idealism and individualism, ¹ and on both counts unable to look beyond power-serving narratives to grasp power-serving realities not so much hidden as filtered out by worldview. But in the face of political stupidity, whether of liberal or ‘deplorable’ stripe, we need constantly to question our own motives. I know that, in my growing frustration with liberalism and identity politics …

… I can slip into the language of frustration – not at my true enemies but those they one way or another dupe – rather than that of winning friends and influencing people. I see the impulse, a lifelong demon, and try to renounce it by asking: what do I want to achieve here?

I don’t say I always succeed. I don’t always even try. But not at my self-defeating snarkiest could I put out the like of this …

… not sober I couldn’t. I’ve no gripe with its take, earthy but accurate, on Nigel Ferrari. But this is either spectacularly bad salesmanship or the work of folk more interested in blowing off steam and feeling righteous than effecting change.

Lot of ’em around.

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1. I refer to idealism not in its everyday sense of holding unrealistically high expectations of human motivation, but in the epistemological sense of seeing ideas, rather than material forces, as history’s primary drivers:

   I don’t doubt that Lord Shaftesbury was genuinely horrified by children in coal mines; Charles Dickens by the street urchins he immortalised in Oliver Twist. Nor that such widely aired moral outrage expedited parliamentary action. But insofar as it marched in step with more material drivers of change, it pushed at doors already opening. Humanism is blind to such realities, inclining us to a rose-tinted reading of modern history as the onwards and upwards march of Enlightenment values. Does this matter? Yes. It leaves us wrongfooted by the reversal of gains made under one set of material circumstances – which under capitalism equate to the needs, some more direct and obvious than others, of profit.

   As the context of those words shows, the material drivers of the changes I had in mind – Factory and Food Adulteration Acts, Child Labour/Education Acts as the 19th century progressed – were the need of the capitalist state to raise longevity. Growing industrial sophistication demanded greater investments in human capital than in industry’s infancy when, provided they bred copiously, an unskilled proletarian lifespan of thirty-five years, most of them productive, had sufficed to reproduce the conditions for extracting surplus value valorised in the market place as profit. In this the importance of materialist analysis has never in my lifetime been greater, since completely absent from public discourse – though not, we can be sure, from deliberations at Davos – are the irreconcilability within capitalism of two facts. One, a high and rising proportion of Westerners are now – due to automation and the offshoring of industry – economically superfluous. Two, welfare costs are soaring …

   … while, no less important, a materialist perspective is vital  for looking beyond the noble rhetoric to grasp the true drivers of wars.

   And I refer to individualism in its sense of overstating the influence, benign or malign, of Great Men and Women – a Barack Obama, say, or Vladimir Putin.