The course is set on hope
By: Paul Mason
Tags: Jeremy Corbyn, Brexit, poem, Politics

The course is set on hope

A letter to Mosquito Ridge readers on the eve of the UK election

In an election, the media forces us to focus on parties. The Labour Party has moved to the left; the Conservatives are having a dire campaign; the Libdems have disappeared. What’s obvious though, is that the real action is in the electorate.

For a while now, and catalysed by Brexit, a conservative near-majority has been emerging, aligning the obsessions of the selfish upper middle classes with those of racist and xenophobic poorer people in small towns.

The fact that this took the form of parties — the BNP with a million votes and then UKIP with four million — again tended to focus our minds on parties, not the social phenomenon itself.

You could see it last night, in the attitudes of the elderly white men who dominated the BBC Question Time leaders debate. They’d bought, without question, the lie that Corbyn supported the IRA; some seemed actively to want a nuclear war in their lifetime; they seemed to imagine pressing the nuclear “red button” would be like firing the machine gun on a Spitfire, not bringing the end of human civilisation.

Then there were the young “entrepreneurs”, complaining about their companies having to pay tax, or having to pay their workers the minimum wage.

The strategy of the left in Britain, whatever happens in this election, has to begin from the fact of this move to the right by people over the age of 60, the extreme unreality and nostalgic character of their ideas — and that, for now, they’ve been able to find expression in the Conservative Party.

So long as Conservatism can align this large group of old warmongers and racists to the interests of big banks, hedge funds and global corporations, the right can maintain single party rule in Britain.

The trajectory of the right, if the Tories win on Thursday, becomes clear: towards a hard nationalist Brexit; towards a victim narrative as Europe tells them to fuck off; towards voter suppression (remember May has not lifted a finger to encourage registration in this campaign); towards the demonization of all opposition as a “threat to national security”. Not long after, they will water down their criticism of Trump’s exit from Paris and accomodate to the new reality it creates.

All this will intensify as Brexit fails in its own terms. As the economy slows. As migration refuses to fall.

The election represents an opportunity to disrupt this process, reverse it and disperse the right back into its constituent blocks of liberal Conservatism, authoritarian populism and fascism. Faced with a project of total hegemony, that is all the progressive half of society can do: there can be no question of co-existence, of rotation in and out of office as in the neoliberal period.

But the opportunity may have come too early.

First, because Corbyn does not fully control the Labour Party nor command the PLP. Second, because Corbyn himself, and those around him, understand only half the problem.

Corbynism is the promise of a Nordic welfare state in a neoliberal economy. That’s why it feels revolutionary: because all the structures and norms of the economy are geared towards recreating the selfish, nationalist, militarist attitudes we saw as the red faced old men and money-grabbing low wage bosses hurled their bitterness at Corbyn.

The Labour manifesto has captured the imagination of the young who will turn out in large numbers. It has also enthused the surviving pockets of the small town, manual working class — even to the extent of recapturing up to 30% of former UKIP voters according to some local polling.

But Corbyn does not really understand what we are up against. To Corbyn, the basic principles of fairness, redistribution, nuclear disarmament, anti-racism and anti-imperialism are lifelong beliefs, which were always containable within the two party system; always allowed as long as Corbyn, Abbott, McDonnell etc functioned as an extreme check and balance within the system itself.

Despite all the accusations of “Marxism” — one of the strongest proofs that Corbyn is not a Marxist is his failure to understand the depth of the challenge his programme poses to the UK elite.

The UK elite is in fact heavily merged with, and the middleman for, a global kleptocracy. Its model is to squeeze value out of the UK economy and deposit that value in the offshore bank accounts of the global kleptocrats.

The reason there is no “magic money tree” for working class wages, the welfare system and the NHS is because the “money tree” is in the Bahamas. You shake the British economy, the fruit falls off, but never lands on the ground below. It lands in the offshore bank accounts of the rich.

Their project, from Thatcher to May, has been to atomise the British population through enforced precarity at work, dispersal of solidaristic communities, credit dependency and mind-numbing via talent shows and poverty porn. To make resistance impossible.

Thus if, on the doorstep, you sometimes find blank faces; people with no aspiration, no idea of what they want the government to do; no demands on their MP; but instead a bewildered fatalism, that is a function of what the economy has become.

The state delivers so little for the ordinary person, and yet so much to the hedge fund, the global infotech company, the arms dealer or the property speculator, that it is no surprise to find the latter heavily engaged with politics, yet the general population passive.

Karl Marx had an explanation for this, summed up in the proposal: being determines consciousness. The way we live affects the way we think.

Inadvertently, Corbyn’s programme threatens to disrupt the whole shebang. To change thinking and living at the same time. It has given people — mentally for now, physically if he wins on Thursday — a material stake in politics for the first time in a generation.

Slashing university fees from £9,000 a year to zero. School dinner money form £9 a week to zero. School budget cuts from £100,000 tomorrow to zero tomorrow — these are real things. So is confiscating the wealth of speculators to the tune of £5bn.

Reversing the corporation tax cuts will do more than bring in £20bn to spend on health and social care. It will change the model of British capitalism. Because low company taxes encourage investment in low-productivity businesses with low wages.

The classic young Tory entrepreneur runs a coffee bar, a tourist hostel above a pub, a security firm, a construction work agency, a company servicing property speculators. Innovation is not required, unless it be finding innovative ways to make your workforce register themselves as “self employed”. The tech startup, with its risks, hard work, collaborative culture — that’s for dummies.

A Corbyn victory would begin the physical reversal of this atomisation, stagnation and exploitation. It would incentivise the risk taking tech innovator and penalise the rent-seeker and the speculator. And it’s no surprise to find, among the new converts to Corbynism, hundreds of tech innovation types.

If Corbynism succeeds, we would then expect a revival of interest in politics; a revived civil society. The red faced old man, cursing foreigners and wishing for nuclear Armageddon, would be eclipsed by the intelligent, prudent, restrained, educated person, at home in a globalised economy of ideas.

That is why they have to stop us.

The Tories are learning fast that repeating lies works — because the broadcast media has no defence mechanism against fake claims. It just treats them as valid and balances them off against refutations. Thus the claim that Corbyn “sided with our enemies” or “backed the IRA”. The closeness of key media decision makers to the elite itself ensures they are not exactly busting a gut to refute the lies (with Channel 4 and the Guardian as exceptions).

If Tory “terrorism and security” smear against Corbyn were literally true, he would be in jail, not a member of Her Majesty’s Privy Council. It is a metaphor, a gesture, a knowing ruse, a rhetorical device. But it’s the kind of rhetoric that got Jo Cox MP killed.

It is diluting the quality of our democracy. But the elite are fighting for survival.

Their strategy in the next five days is clear. Throw every slander possible at Corbyn, in the knowledge that a section of the population is highly susceptible to believing it. And let’s understand why.

It took guts for figures like Corbyn to stand up for human rights in Northern Ireland in the 1980s, when the Catholic population — and Irish Catholics in mainland British cities — were being stigmatised and placed under surviellance for their sympathy with Republicanism. Likewise it took guts for people like Diane Abbott, Paul Boateng and the late Bernie Grant to stand up for black politicians’ right to be different, defiant, uncompromising: to refuse to play the institutional game; to harry the Met Police even as the latter infiltrated their campaigns’ and to demand the police stop standing by as young black men were murdered.

The reason Corbyn and Abbott can be so easily “otherised” in conservative-minded small towns is because so few politicians in the 1980s did step outside their comfort zone — on the issues of human rights and anti-racism. They were not “terrorist sympathisers”: they were extraordinarily brave in standing against a stream of abuse, prejudice, secret service surveillance and disruption. But yes, they were very unlike your normal do-nothing Labour MP of post-war tradition. That’s why they look and sound different. That’s why the elite despises them.

But here’s the probem.

I have repeatedly warned the Labour left that, though our economic programme feels fairly moderate to us, to our adversaries, it feels revolutionary. They will treat us as revolutionaries. And that’s what’s happening

To support Corbyn’s Labour is to open yourself up to accusations of supporting terror, threatening national security, advocating communism and sabotaging “the will of the people”.

Screeching mainstream commentators now say this openly — such as the former Bank of England economist Andrew Lilico, who tweeted that if 38% of Brits even support Labour in the polls then we “do not deserve democracy”.

My advice was always: do the left economic programme first and forget any systemic challenge to the military, diplomatic and security status quo; the economic programme it is radical enough, and resistance to it will be so strong that it will take an entire 5 year parliament to enact.

That’s what Alexis Tsipras understood in Greece, when he removed all the criticism of NATO from Syriza’s programme, refused to dismantle key parts of the Greek secret state, refused to take on the Orthodox Church.

If you are going to dismantle the economic power of the elite, do not simultanteously try to disrupt their institutional, diplomatic and geostrategic certainties. In fact, the Greek experience shows that — in order to effect strategic economic change — the left has to align itself with parts of the national story and take parts of that apparartus with it.

The problem is, for large numbers of radical young people — including left nationalists in Scotland, Greens and people in Momentum — dismantling Britain’s ability to repeat Iraq and Afghanistan, and repress protest movements and stigmatise minorities, is what they came into politics to do. And so did those most closely identified with Corbyn.

So we go into this final week as the classic British motley army Shakespeare wrote about in Henry V. Traditional Labour centrists, prodded out of their sulk by the sudden realisation we have momentum and hope; Greens lending us their vote; the Guardian’s metropolitan liberals grudgingly accepting that a form of radicalism can work. The bright techocrats of Momentum, trained in horizontal activism. Northern working class bruisers, male and female, from the PLP; Welsh Labour, determined to do it their own way; plus a regiment of new converts who don’t fit into any existing category of the left. Moving through us on the eve of battle with zen-like calm, is the white-bearded, snaggle-toothed MP for Islington.

And the battle is coming.

The elite and the billionaire owned media will throw every dirty trick and smear at us for five days. If you have only understood politics as a kind of ping-pong game with a known set of rules, get set to be shocked. All we have on our side is momentum, hope and the massive voter registration of young people that just happened.

If we win the elite will say “WTF just happened?”. So will we.

But here’s the point. If we lose, we will do so possessing all the momentum in British politics. I’m told it’s certain May will be replaced within a year — but who by? There’s scant appetite in the Tories for austerity. They’ve understood the deep positive reaction to Labour’s break with austerity.

That the Tory party drops austerity is likely; but whether it can kick the habit of economic nationalism and xenophobia is a different question. Given the influx of ex-UKIP types, the Tories will probably emerge from a post-May leadership battle as a conservative English nationalist formation.

The only certainty is: win or lose, Labour must become a more democratic party. We’ve had to fight this election with MPs we could not choose. The HQ remains an unwilling participant in the Corbyn project, as does much of the regional apparatus.

The single most valuable weapon in the whole campaign — the manifesto — was a product of party democracy. The second most valuable thing — the leader — was a product of democracy. Yet beyond that there is no democracy.

To find a better way to fit the Labour Party’s different factions and intellectual traditions — this too needs a deeper democracy, so that all can feel they have ownership of the strategy, tactics, slogans and priorities. Democracy means above all stopping the PLP from blocking left candidates in future; having the right to re-select MPs, and ending the system of ad-hoc bans, suspensions and time limits that are strangling opposition to the HQ bureaucracy.

The polls show we can win if we can do three things:

Convince the 18–35 age group that voting matters

Convince people that money in your pocket; a home for your kids; and saving the NHS is more important than a cultural war against the EU, migrants and Muslims

Assure people that the Britain will be a safer place, in a very unsafe global situation, if it has a more cohesive society. And that the British state will be safer in our hands than those of the kleptocrats, amateurs, bullies and buffoons in the Tory cabinet.

All week, as we’ve been facing this rising verbal violence from the right, alongside the dazzling possibility of finishing off neoliberalism in its birthplace by Friday (!), the words of a poem by anarcho-Marxist and perpetual refugee from repressio Victor Serge have been going through my head. Here’s the last lines: