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Eric asks: âI am after finding myself in a political stand off with someone who is libertarian. Any good points? I was defending socialism and he keeps trying to call it communism.â
Dear Eric, thanks for getting in touch. The trick here is never to get yourself into any kind of âstandoff.â A standoff suggests a stalemate in which you and your opponent are equally matched, resulting in neither one of you being able to get the upper hand. This is the sort of debating and political campaigning idiots do. Sun Tzu says, âVictorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.â
Always ensure you know exactly what it is you are defending and how to defend it before you saunter on out into the political wild west and start gun slinging. More importantly than this, know what your opponent is trying to defend and make sure you know how to rip it to shreds and how to make the person defending it look stupid in front of all their little girlfriends.
It is not good enough that someone should win, victory is all the sweeter when someone loses.
Libertarianism is the half-baked political ideology of class warriors. It is the class politics of the rich in their class war against workers and the poor. This is the most important detail of the definition of libertarianism. It is not a single political philosophy, but an ad hoc answer to the questions posed by Marxism and the various socialist movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. That would explain why the little shit deliberately confuses socialism and communism. He imagines - or wants you to image - communism as a bad thing, and so confusing it with socialism mere advances his agenda.
Libertarianism establishes itself on the notions of maximum freedom of the market and minimum interference from government. This, they say, makes all competition fair. This is a lie. It means that the poor begin poor and the rich begin rich - ensuring that the rich will always have a head start in the economy. Libertarianism is about justifying the injustice of wealth inequality and using political and social structures to inflict overwhelming damage on working class people.
The following video will help explain the point:
Socialism - on the other hand - is the class politics of those who do not have wealth and power, the majority. It is the idea of mutual help and combined effort to gain the most benefit for the most people. Communism is a state form of socialism where everything is owned in common (the âcommuneâ of the -ism) by the state in the name of the people. Stalinism in the USSR was of course the epitome of state totalitarianism, but we must remember that this was not the communism Marx preached. I do not accept that communism is inherently bad. Done well it certainly offers more to you and I than selfish libertarianism.
Every capitalist is a libertarian until he needs a government bailout.
News is never simply a transmission of the facts. There is always some agenda, usually a state-corporate agenda, behind a story. All news will therefore present information with its own spin, a slant that will direct the consumer to a desired opinion or set of conclusions. It is in this the news most effectively lies. Do your homework on every person interviewed, read the original reports, studies, and documents cited, and reflect on the context into which the story is being inserted. Pay particular attention to what is emphasised and what is downplayed or omitted. With Google and other online search engines available there is no excuse for not doing this.
âThe Worst are Full of Passionate Intensity, while the Best Lack all Conviction.â - W.B. Yeats
There just isnât enough room on a Tumblr post to answer this question. All we can do is to set out a few very general observations. Before we can set these out, however, we must first state what it is that we see to be wrong with the world. This is the easy part. It all appears to have gone to shit.
With Brexit, following the recent possibility of a Greek exit and various uncertainties across southern Europe, the pillars of the European Union look to be shaking. Mass migrations of refugees and various other migrants from Africa and the Middle East are heightening social and political tensions within the EU, leading to a sharp rise in racist sentiments.
In Russia we are seeing similar pressures having markedly different results. There President Putin is shoring up his power base, boosting exteme nationalist feeling. Violence against out groups including non Russian racial and ethnic minorities and homosexuals has skyrocketed. Around Putin himself a cult of personality has developed, with many seeing him as a quasi-divine saviour of Russia.
Donald Trumpâs election in the United States has deeply divided the country and sparked an upsurge in racial tensions and violence. The âalt-rightâ - whatever that is - largely sees in him a license to act out. He has gathered to himself in the White House his own clan of close family and tycoon business associates - not to mention his reliance on generals. Since coming to the office of POTUS he has antagonised North Korea to the point of an open nuclear standoff between the two countries.
Leaving aside events in the rest of Africa, South America, and Asia - admittedly a very occidental overview - this is a limited synopsis of how things stand geopolitically at present. What we now must ask ourselves is how this all came about.
The economy, I believe, is the root of the problem. Or, more previously, the boom-bust economic cycle brought about by neoliberal capitalism is at the heart of what is happening. Of course we can reach back further - into the foundations of the western economic system, that this would be the work of a far greater investigation.
As the economy shrinks social tensions increase. Wealth, in a shrinking economy, does not simply disappear. It is concentrated into the moneyed class; the investors and the wealthy elite. As there is then less wealth to go around people get poorer. As life gets harder for ordinary people the hunt begins for scapegoats.
Every social movement antagonistic or threatening to the state will attract as a matter of course the attention of the state. There will always be some level of surveillance and infiltration. As social movements, by their nature, are led by various affiliated groups rather than by a single group or organisation, state security will exploit this decentralised organisation by infiltrating certain hubs of the movement. In some cases the hub or persons within the hub will be compromised and thus act as agents of the state, and in other cases certain differences in opinion or ideology will be exploited - making the hub or persons within it act, wittingly or not, as agents of influence.
In the case of Common Space, a new/alternative media outfit broadly aligned with the Scottish independence movement, there are signs that it has become an agent on influence for the British state. Kezia Dugdale, the leader of the unionist Scottish Labour Party, accused Stuart Campbell of the pro-independence Wings Over Scotland blog of homophobia over a tweet in which he said:
Oliver Mundell is the sort of public speaker that makes you wish his dad had embraced his homosexuality sooner.
On the surface, while mentioning the fact that Scottish Conservative and Unionist MSP Oliver Mundellâs father - David Mundell, the Secretary of State for Scotland - came out as a homosexual, this is a comment suggesting it would have been better had Oliver Mundell never been born. Other pro-independence blogs including Wee Ginger Dug and Random Public Journal have roundly rejected the accusation that this was a homophobic sentiment, yet Common Space - in the face of widespread criticism within the movement - went ahead and published an opinion piece by Jordan Daly urging people in the movement to âback Kezia Dugdale and send Wings Over Scotland packing.â
The result of this was days of infighting across the movement with Common Space taking serious flack from thousands of independence supporters on social media. Common Space is closely aligned with the National, Scotlandâs only openly pro-independence newspaper, which is a subsidiary of the Herald, a overtly unionist London-owned daily.
What is exposed in this are the many avenues by which Common Space may have been compromised by the British state. Be this the case or not, it is clear that its actions have sown discord in the movement, benefiting the union project in Scotland. It certainly did not help matters when Angela Haggerty, editor of Common Space, published a column in the Sunday Herald - the Sunday edition of the London-owned Herald - suggesting Stuart Campbellâs intended legal action against Dugdale was âdirtyâ and âdivisive.â
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We mustnât be afraid of propaganda. Over a century of the use of weaponised language the western state media has poisoned our understanding of propaganda, leading to the false impression that this is an instrument of dictatorships and unfree totalitarian regimes. Indeed it can be and often is exactly this, but it is western propaganda masquerading as ânewsâ that has taught us this. The western liberal democracy uses its own propaganda to convince us of the goodness of its own instruments of power and the wickedness of other ideas.
Freedom and democracy are, like other concepts of government, only ideas, but they are ideas that have undergone an apotheosis - becoming the blanket over corruption and greed, thus obfuscating the criminal nature of western governments and elites. Our defence against this is our own propaganda; the words and ideas we can use to speak truth to power, and the tools we must use to proclaim this message. We are all propagandists in the information age, but the choice we are forced to make is which side we are on.
Although in general it is rare, it is by no means unheard of that a working class person can mingle unnoticed among the more affluent and privileged members of society. By no means is this the result of âsocial mobility,â which is - at least in my own experience a mythical concept used by economists and sociologists to ease their social consciences. It is rather the result of various accidents and confusions that create in the minds of members of the middle class the impression that the proletarian interloper is one of their own. I have become one of those people.
Education
Through the 1980s and 90s I grew up in a housing estate in the south west of Scotland where I was very much shaped by the work ethic of an industrial working class family and the left-leaning politics of trade unionism. At the young age of 16 I entered junior seminary with the hope of going on to study for the Catholic priesthood. On finishing school at 18 I was sent off to a Pontifical university in Europe to read philosophy and theology. It did not work out and so I returned to a community to which I had become a stranger.
This is a world in which names and reputations still mean a great deal.
In my early 20s I made the decision to leave home for Dublin at the time of Irelandâs economic boom. After a few years I returned to education, entering Irelandâs top university on the back of my perceived academic pedigree. This is a world in which names and reputations still mean a great deal. There I graduated with an bachelors degree and went on to complete a masters in conflict studies in the school of Sociology.
On paper I had become indistinguishable from the Irish middle class graduate. Few people from working class backgrounds in Ireland are afforded the opportunity - dues to various problematic social factors - to study at the countryâs premier academic institutions. Those who do are always recognised by their working class voices, fashions, and attitudes and so - given the class prejudice still so alive in this country - are never fully welcomed into the bosom of the society of the privileged. After graduation they do not have the same network of contacts - not typically, but there are exceptions - and so lack the same avenues into what might best be described as elite professional employment.
Society
As a foreigner my accent - simply a Scottish accent to the Irish listener - did not betray my class origins, and as a near foreigner - English speaking and white - I was more easily welcomed into the company of middle class people who merely assumed my sameness with them. Before I had matured enough to reflect on the significance of any of this I was being taken for a member of a class I neither understood nor felt at ease within.
As a foreigner my accent did not betray my class origins, and as a near foreigner - English speaking and white - I was more easily welcomed into the company of middle class people who merely assumed my sameness with them.
So complete was this cloak that when I went to volunteer in an adult education initiative run by the Jesuits in a disadvantaged working class part of the city I was subjected to a lecture by the director on how poorer people did not always appreciate the presence of privileged little rich kids - like me - coming into their community and lording their fancy book learning over them.
Here was a private school educated, middle class clergyman and professor assuming I was another green behind the ears newbie out to atone for my wealth by doing good, rather than a working class lad coming into a community in which I felt entirely at home. His observations of working class attitudes were correct, but his assessment of me could not have been more wrong.
Political landscapes are shifting. The decades old political status quo of centrist right and left power dynamics in the West has been seriously challenged and compromised. Already in the United States and the United Kingdom a new populism has upended the old guard conservative order, responding to the passionate politics of the classes rejected by and created by neoliberal globalism. Perhaps more closely resembling the politics of the 1930s, mass movements have emerged further to the right and to the left of the political spectrum.
All nations and states have their truths, the ideologies and narratives that provide the basis for social cohesion and so forth. This cohesion has always been the bedrock of the state as it simply is not possible for a power to hold the state together if there does not exist a majority or a culturally strong near majority that subscribes to the shared narrative of statehood and belonging. In ages past, when this cohesion has been weakened, states could rely on brute force, but in the age of information cohesion is maintained by deception and lies.
Scotland
The use of lies to hold uncooperative segments of the state together is by no means limited to the United Kingdom, but given its current set of constitutional crises it serves as a good example. It is now obvious that the direction of travel in Scotland is towards separation from the UK, and in 2014 it was clear that the British state was on the back foot regards keeping Scotland in the 300 year old Union. When force was not a viable option the UK resorted to lying.
In the beginning these lies took the form of a series of threats relating to the future of Scotland had the electorate opted for independence. With absolute dominance over the media - the BBC and other establishment media outlets - the suggestion was made that Scotland was economically too small to survive as a state separate from the rest of the United Kingdom. Scotland was told that its North Sea oil and gas was running out, and that the price of oil on the international market was too volatile to be depended upon.
With absolute dominance over the media - the BBC and other establishment media outlets - the suggestion was made that Scotland was economically too small to survive as a state separate from the rest of the United Kingdom.
Scots were told they would not be allowed to use the British pound after independence, that inflation would drive up the cost of living, borrowing, and house prices. They were told that their UK pensions could not be guaranteed, that it would not have automatic membership of the European Union, and that continued access to the EU single market depended on remaining part of the UK. In Scotland this phase of the stateâs strategy came to be known as âProject Fear,â a tactic that was later used unsuccessfully during the June 2016 EU referendum and against Sanders and Trump in the United States.
Threats inevitably catalyse a backlash and so at some point in the process the nature of the lies changes from threats to promises. Scotland was promised âSuper Devo Max,â what was described as Home Rule. It was promised federalism, and extensive new powers for the devolved Edinburgh parliament. On 18 September 2014 the people of Scotland voted to remain within the United Kingdom and the threats and promises all soon transpired to be cynical and deeply manipulative lies.
Threats inevitably catalyse a backlash and so at some point in the process the nature of the lies changes from threats to promises.
Modern liberal democracies cannot easily deploy overt violence against their own populations. Instead what they rely on is enough adherence to the state-national ideologies and narratives. When these fail, the state will use the machinery of state bureaucracy and the media to intimidate and cajole the people into accepting the power of the state.
Protestant Orangeism in Northern Ireland and over the United Kingdom explains itself as an expression of a particular communityâs tradition and culture, that its symbols and rituals have been handed down to it from the past and that these things shape the modern character of the community. All of this is true, and so - no matter how offensive it may appear to others - there is little to be gained by denying that Orangeism is indeed a culture. The question rather has to be on the usefulness of these customs and traditions in twenty-first century Britain.
The Orange Order is well known for its anti-Catholic sectarianism, going so far as to constitutionally ban its members from attending Catholic church services - including the weddings and funerals of friends in a regulation which states: âYou should not countenance by your presence or otherwise any act or ceremony of Popish worship.â This ruling has been challenged in the past by high ranking members of the Order. The Assistant Grand Master, the Reverend Mervyn Gibson, has said this rule âharked back to a different era,â and he is right. The rules and position of the Loyalist Orange Order towards Roman Catholicism are rooted in the earliest origins of the society.
Change may be in the air, but the fact remains that the Order is, and by its own regulations, an anti-Catholic sectarian institution. Yet while this is the official institution there has developed around it a culture which has and continues to inform an entire community. Good and sincere people enter the Order out of a sense of tradition and social belonging. It would be wrong entirely to suggest that only dyed in the wool bigots become members of the Orange institutions. Here the danger is that member ship of an openly sectarian organisation can shape the attitudes and behaviours of its members, and - having said this - its members can change the institution.
The delusion in this is that it is wrong to assume that anything is is good or wholesome by virtue of being a tradition or a culture. Some traditions and cultures are harmful and destructive. Orangeism is one of them. Aside from the anti-Catholicism the Orange Order makes certain ideological and political demands on its members which also hark back to a different era. It insists, for example, on a certain settlement of the British monarchy. While this too is sectarian in nature it stems from an time when monarchism was the norm. It no longer is, and thus the Order becomes a force not only resistant to change but to natural political development.
It uphold a political idea - the idea of Great Britain - to the point of its apotheosis, when in reality nation states themselves are subject to chance and decay. Orangeism therefore finds itself unable to defend itself and its own community against the changing winds of Britain. It would rather suffer harm at the hands of Westminster than defend itself if that defence meant undermining the idea of the union of the United Kingdom. In this regard âLoyalismâ finds itself loyal to an idea and a set of institutions that are very different from those it declared its loyalty to in 1795. Here we can see the delusion.
This is the great tragedy of the Orange Order. It has become trapped in its devotion to a memory of a king who is long dead in a world where the monarchy and Britain are continually changing, and where the idea of monarchy itself has become redundant. How the Orange Order can address this is ultimately a matter for the Orangemen and women themselves to decide, but it is clear that it has become stuck in the past and in danger of losing the ability to remain relevant and politically useful to its own members.
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Every society which conforms to the socio-economic and political norms of global capitalism accepts the costs of this system. Capitalism and the effects it creates is responsible for the deaths of more human beings than Nazism and Soviet Communism combined, yet the governments of the developed economies of the world justify its continuance as a necessary evil in the name of progress.
At its core Capitalism is an economic philosophy of greed. It insists that a person has a right to accumulate wealth and so accrue privilege and status even when this leads to the suffering and death of others whose just share of the worldâs wealth has been taken from them by the workings of the system. This effective robbery of the poor and powerless happens as much on the individual level of society as it does at the community and national levels.
The overwhelming majority of people all around the world are victims of this system, with only a minuscule fraction - no more than a single percentile - being the winners. Wealth accumulated by capitalismâs winners translates to power and access, in all forms of government, to the halls of power. In turn this creates a power deficit in which the poor and all the systemâs victims have no power while all the power to defend and perpetuate the ststem is kept in the hands of the few.
We cannot ignore that it is this system that is our enemy, and it is against it that we must always be struggling. Capitalism is responsible for the stratification of social class and the innumerable social conflicts this creates. It is responsible for the creation of the industrial working class and the precariat that has been produced in the wake of the destruction of the proletarian class.
Before we can entertain any condemnation of violent anti-state or anti-capitalist demonstrations we must first recognise that both the state and capitalism are inherently violent. The use of violence against the violent, while remaining violence, is mitigated by common sense and the law. It is the state and the various apparatusâ of the state that hold the monopoly of âlegitimateâ violence. It uses its power to coerce people into obedience and uses force - sometime brutal and deadly force - to correct the disobedient. No one has the freedom to opt out of the state, and states are not always good for their subject citizens.
Violence then is, at times, a legitimate form of anti-state and anti-capitalist resistance, and in fact this right to violent resistance is enshrined in international law. Regardless of the law, bearing in mind that the law is itself an instrument of the power of the state, the use of violence is not always a bad thing. What we have to consider then is the question not of violenceâs legitimacy but of its usefulness in context. When protesters employ violent tactics against the police the police will respond with violence, and the question then is which side has the most resources and the better training.
Before we can entertain any condemnation of violent anti-state or anti-capitalist demonstrations we must first recognise that both the state and capitalism are inherently violent.
In almost every context the state will be better prepared and more powerful than the protesters, ensuring that the outcome of any clash is a foregone conclusion. Ultimately the police will always win, and when they are in danger of losing the state has the power to escalate the counter-revolutionary violence by calling in the army. Such a situation becomes infinitely more dangerous for those engaged in the struggle against the state.
There are, however, a number of scenarios where the use of violence will benefit the protest and damage the state. Here the most obvious is state failure, where the state itself - for whatever reason - is so damaged or weak so as to make effective defence impossible. This is rare, but is the most opportune moment for the revolutionary or protest movement to use violence. Another is strategically targeted violence in which well organised flash attacks are directed towards well defined objectives, striking and dispersing before the state can mount a response. Lastly there is desperation. This is the least desirable for any movement. It is when the protest, under violent and existential attack, has no option but to strike back.
What is clear is that violence cannot be used in every situation. Responding to the violence of the state and capitalism is necessary, but frequent and disorganised violence benefits no one. This is a question of picking our battles, and we can only afford to take on those battles we know we can win.
At the extreme edge of political resistance and protest the idea of the black bloc has emerged in recent decades. State establishment and corporate media have invariably treated the black bloc as a movement or a gang, nihilistic in its hooliganism, vandalism, and pursuit of wanton destruction, but this is a misunderstanding or a misrepresentation of the black bloc. The black bloc is a tactic used by leftist demonstrators, typically anarchists, as a means of protecting themselves from the police.
This was a method of protest that began in West German squatter movement in the late 1970s and developed through the 80s, but which has now become a common and recognisable feature in ant-capitalist demonstrations worldwide. While black bloc protests are known for their more militant and violent tactics, this is not the primary function of black bloc as a tactic.
Anonymity is the priority of the tactic, making it more difficult for police and other civil and state authorities to isolate and identify individuals within the protest. In an age of ubiquitous surveillance this strategy has proven to be effective in protecting people from arrest and police harassment. The idea is quite simple. Everyone wishing to be part of the black bloc, rather than sign up to an organisation or a set of shared values, dresses all in black and uses a face mask to protect his or her identity from the police.
I will admit that I have not always been the most comfortable with the idea of covering the face during demonstrations, but after having had personal experience of police intimidation after a protest I am now satisfied that this is the only sure fire way to disemplower the authorities. Moreover the police - in the deployment of public order or riot squads - have a long tradition of masking their own identities. Thus, in many respects, the black bloc is merely a mirroring of the tactics that have been used by the powers that be to keep the dominated under the control of the state and its corporate masters.
Anti-capitalist demonstrations, as the established media is calling them, are taking place in the German city of Hamburg in response to the G20 summit. As the âGroup of Twentyâ is a forum for governments and central banks to discuss policy pertaining to the promotion of international financial stability it stands to reason that it would be the focus of anti-capitalist attention. Uncharacteristically the mainstream media has presented these protests not as a singular protest but as a multitude of different anti-capitalist interests, hence âprotests.â
Violence has been widespread and often intense, but has not been the tactic of the majority of those protesting. More, as the German Chancellor has said, have come to protest peacefully, but an âextremeâ element of the left has become violent and has caused the police considerable heartache since the demonstrations began.
Those being identified as the groups responsible for the violence are those calling themselves Antifa and the Black Bloc. All indicators would suggest that demonstrators representing these group have come from elsewhere, from Europe and North America. What this makes clear is that the G20 is the focus not only of localised German anti-capitalist protest, but global anti-capitalism. Many identify the G20 the hub of globalised capitalism, where decisions are made that will impact on the rest of the world.