A Spectacular stock market? Or, Guy Debord finally gets his day in the sun!

The Economist published a fascinating editorial that, fortunately, I believe disproves itsself. The thesis of which is that the Situationists were right and political economy is now completely spectacular. 

The thesis, written in an offhand way in an article about overvalued markets, goes like this: On top of the already notorious spectacular politics, we have a spectacular stock market which provides only the illusion of a free market, but whose real purpose is to provide bread-and-circuses style entertainment and a way for ordinary people to feel as if they are participating and can even "beat the system" - as seen in movements such as /r/WallStreetBets.

Such a theory has consequences: It follows from this that in reality, the economy is completely divided up between the big corporations and politicians, effectively it is a planned economy, though not a socialist one. This not only isn't theoretical, it isn't even a secret - the economy is openly manipulated by governments and corporations - as we all know, the real conspiracies take place in plain sight.

Spectacular stock markets, therefore, are basically a safety valve, one which replaces Leftist activism and even improves on it by preventing people from thinking outside of the system and potentially making participants rich. 

Spectacular Leftism (as opposed to actual organizing, such as trade union activism) had a very real problem, in that, by definition, it must not only not promise to make most participants wealthy, it actively promises to make participants poor. 

 I used to hang around with crusties myself because I actually was poor, rather than a wannabe, and I can tell you from brutal experience that "activism" of this sort promises a penitents' life of cold water, abandoned buildings, and regular beatings while stockmarket "activism" (or just participation) promises to buy you a house, put your kids through college, pay for your granny's operation, etc, etc, etc.

So anyway: It's all a lie, the stock market is bread and circuses, they've done an end run around us, and blah, blah, blah. It's got legs, I guess.

However, if this were entirely true, it would not be in the editorial page of The Economist. People may conspire in plain sight these days, but they  do not like to admit certain things even to themselves, such as "our profession is a complete fucking joke and we are all being taken for fools by even more powerful elitists than ourselves."

Situationism / Debordism is all very well and good, but like a lot of left wing philosophy it has the potential of turning into a weapon of the system, a weapon against change. It has a self defeating core that says "Hey guys you're all actually in the Matrix, nothing you do can actually change anything, it's all the Spectacle, don't even bother" - that's a counsel of despair, and anyone who promotes despair is not your friend.

I mean, it was in The Economist!

Leftist failings and the possibility of Anarcho-Social Democracy

Some problems and a possible solution

OK, I know I'm always going on about this, but really...

WHY ARE OUR GUYS SO DUMB?

Take this article for example. Let me show you why it is a stupid article.

1. She allows herself to be photographed looking like she has just been sucking on a delicious lemon.

This really is a beginner's mistake. Presentation is vital; would you read anything written by someone who constantly scowls disapprovingly at you?

2. She mistakes privileges for rights and rights for privileges.

The title says it all (and yes, I have said the same thing on this very blog). But that is wrong. It is bad framing. Being alive should never be considered a privilege, and as soon as you do so, you lose.

Is there such a thing as "white privilege"? Well, yes, you could put it that way, perhaps, although it is grammatically incorrect, at least in white-majority countries. 

But it is not helpful to frame it in this way, especially when you are speaking in terms of life and death. I repeat: Being alive should never be considered a privilege; modern juristictions and successful activists speak instead of "human rights". This article mentions the phrase "privilege" 11 times. It mentions "rights" not at all. Although at the bottom of the page, it says "all rights reserved."

Perhaps it was  bad interview. If someone had printed an interview with me and it came accross like that, with its sour portrait and its endless scolding of an entire group of people, I would ask to have it taken down. If they refused, I would then approach a lawyer.

Claudia Rankine clearly isn't a stupid person. I am sure they don't hand out PhDs to morons. But intellectuals, especially American intellectuals, seem especially prone to behaving like idiots. It's as if their intelligence works against itsself; they get so wrapped up in signifiers and concocting new forms of jargon that have to be explained at length, that they forget that their function as activists isn't to show everyone how clever they are and flex their intellectual muscles, it's to help with "the work", to stop these horrific human rights abuses in their tracks.

Again, America is a huge part of the problem. Americans have a really hard time understanding the concept of universal rights, "the Commons" - something we all share and all have as a birthright. Even though universal human rights were supposedly enshrined in their Constitution, that document is the oldest that I know of that confuses rights with privileges - notoriously, the right to have a gun is enshrined before the right to a fair trial, the right not to be enslaved, the right to vote, the rights of women to vote, the right to life itsself, and even the right to your own property, practically a religion over there, is not considered as important as the right to bear arms. Everywhere else in the world, having a gun is like having a car, it's a dangerous weapon and in the wrong hands can kill even the person who owns it, so they are subject to stringent controls and licensing. Not so in the USA.

Americans also don't understand the concept of wealth held in common, even abstract concepts such as human rights, because to them everything is private. They think that if one person gains, another must lose. Everything is a zero-sum game to them. So that explains that- the capitalistic culture of the US is a form of ideology, in the Slavoj Zizek sense, which tends to taint everything a person does. To use the language of the Social Justice activists, the problem is systemic and unconcious.

But that doesn't explain why the Left has been so stupid in the past.

I've been either a left-wing activist or a keen supporter or at least a sympathetic observer of the Left for thirty years. I went to my first protest in 1990; I went to my last protest in 2019.

Since then I've seen big wins - like the Poll Tax campaign, gay rights, and local victories for squatters and the homeless - morph into terrible, horrible losses.

I've watched the Left, or as they were then, the environmental movement, screw up in the 1990s. As a result, the environment is fucked.

I've watched the Left screw up the anti-war movement in the 2000s. As a result, the government can basically bomb the shit out of anyone they feel like.

I've watched the Left screw up the anti-capitalist movement in the late noughties and early 2010s. As a result, capitalism has, as Umair Haque puts it, gone full Soviet - the government spends endless amounts of cash propping up the stock market and big business while the people literally go hungry on breadlines.

Now the Left are screwing up on human rights and ethnic minority issues, as a result, the American police are a literal death squad and racist attitudes are entrenched at all levels of society, and not just in the USA. The news is grim for sexual minorities as well; even many Leftists of the previous generation are openly hostile to Transgender people, including people whom I know personally.

This isn't just an American problem - I've watched all this happen in the UK as well. I've watched as black activists framed their cause in terms of resentment for whites, I've seen anti-capitalism degenerate into a pointless conspiracy theory jerk-off, I've observed the anti-war movement rapidly turn into an anti-Semitic bandwagon of sympathy for terrorists, and I've been there when environmentalists sat around and got stoned, got in peoples' way, or just smashed things up for the cameras.

It has driven me to despair. I no longer believe the Left will be relevant in my lifetime except as a straw man for the Right to knock down, a sort of controlled opposition.

I think the only hopeful strategy remaining is to elect social-democratic and liberal parties (which the Left also oppose unless they're in charge of them). We can then leverage our protests to get what we want from them, as they are more likely to resort to reform than the Right (who simply repress protest with brutal violence).

ANARCHO-SOCIAL DEMOCRACY

This is the meaning of Anarcho-Social Democracy. "Anarcho-", which means "going to demonstrations, drinking a lot, listening to punk rock and dressing all in black", means you're not confined to any particular leftwing party or ideology. This decentralization has disadvantages, but the great advantage is that it is hard for any one group or party to monopolize power. It also means that anyone, anywhere, can join in, from liberals to socialists to sympathetic capitalists (depending on the issue of course). Anarchism is, generally speaking, inclusive.

Social democracy, because, well, you have a vote, it's the only formal power you have, so you might as well use it to elect a somewhat more sympathetic government than we would have otherwise. It's not much, granted, but it exists and you'd be stupid not to excercise this right.

What should the Left do?

When you're a whining critical arsehole like me, you get asked a lot: "What would YOU do then?" It's a fair question.

While personally, I like to think well of Long-Bailey, and as such I think she made a mistake rather than actually being an anti-semite - (after all, it wasn't her interview, most of which was about how much the Tories suck) I can also see that clearly, some house cleaning has to be done on the Left.

How, who knows - or if it's even possible, considering just how quick the British Left is to blame Israel for everything, even when it's literally on a different continent to the problem at hand, I would say it is definitely systemically anti-semitic - yet there's always hope.

I don't know how to get there, the journey would have to involve some kind of period of long, sober reflection, but I know what the end product should be.

So what should a New New Left look like? What should the Left do?


* The Left is nothing if it isn't ultimately about economics - cold hard cash.

 So the New New Left would be laser-focussed on economic matters. The anarcho-capitalists are right, money really does unite us all, we all need more, and we are all being robbed blind by the same system. Without in any way wanting to detract from wider social justice struggles, which can (and should) belong to the wider society, the Left should be more about money, about prosperity and why that prosperity isn't being shared.


* The Left should of course support social justice, environmental, and minority rights struggles. But it should not, and MUST NOT attempt to monopolize or hijack them.

We've seen it time and again, on the one hand with miserable Trots like the SWP hijacking these issues for their own purposes, and on the other with Leftists generally taking their eyes off the prize of economic redistribution and latching onto increasingly obscure issues such as the endless conflict in the Middle East, which has become a toxic running sore beloved of racists and arseholes the world over.

The Left should cut through that nonsense and issue general memoranda of support for peace where the problem is complicated and intractable, as with Israel / Palestine, and issue specific statements in support of no-brainers such as BLM, where the problem is simple but not directly related to the wider economic issues.

Again, the focus must remain on the distribution of wealth in the wider society. Don't get caught up in the Right's culture wars, they are designed to divide people, not unite them.


* The Left must change its own culture.

From one where those it supports are patronized as victims, to one where the proletariat are genuinely supported and lifted up, emotionally as well as economically, as those who actually do the work in society. Nobody likes to be told they are a loser, and right now the Left poisons its support base with a patronizing narrative in which the poor, pathetic working classes are patted on the head and told they deserve more handouts, rather than shown how they too can gain real concrete results for themselves.


* Leftist discourse must be about bringing people up, not pulling them down.

Leftist discourse has also become poisonous in the way it treats people generally - The classic example is how Twitter leftists are constantly pulling each other down, or trying to bring down celebrities who have in some way trespassed. Policing public morality is not our job. Our job is to gain political power and facilitate the transfer of power and wealth towards to the proletariat. It's not supposed to be about "cancelling" people we don't like and bringing people down - it is supposed to be about bringing people up.


* The Left MUST STOP supporting causes and organisations that actively harm it.

There are two obvious examples - the aforementioned poisonous and intractable Middle East conflict, and (to a much, much lower degree), its obsession with defending the BBC. Everything that can be said about the Middle East has already been said, so I'll talk about the Left's relationship with the BBC, which is a good example of this phenomenon but without the emotional baggage of the miserable, horrible Israel / Palestine debate.

The BBC is a State broadcaster. As such, it is a tool of the government of the day. If the Tories really do want to shoot themselves in the foot by doing away with it, that is their mistake to make - do not, under any circumstances, defend that gang of propagandists. They aren't your friends, they certainly aren't journalists, they are a tool of government - and you will have to treat them every bit as roughly as the Tories do if you ever gain power.

This is not to say, don't be media savvy - you must be media savvy. But don't spend hours and hours going on about how much you love the licence fee - remember, the TV licence fee is a regressive tax which is levied on rich and poor alike so as to benefit a giant corporation, and therefore profoundly and intrinsically reactionary. It should be abolished anyway.

A critique of the Left, from a Leftist perspective

I come here not to bury Leftism, but to critique it. You may not like what you are about to read, but you need to understand what you are doing wrong so you can do it right. So here's my critique of Leftism, from a Leftist or at least Left-sympathetic point of view... it's UK-centric I'm afraid, so note that, for instance, our SWP is not necessarily the same as your SWP.

I may update it as others critique my critique, in order to make it better. This isn't "changing history" so I can "win", I don't want to "win", this isn't about me personally - I want to help improve leftist discourse because I want the Left to win. Sincerely!  So, let's get into it...

Considering the opportunities they've had of late, I find it bizarre how much the Left keeps getting it wrong.

Oh come on, Ron. You knew this was coming.

 In street demonstrations for example, they either go for organized violence to such an insane degree that they lose public sympathy, as in the Black Bloc, or they just sit there and let the cops beat the shit out of them. Or march from A-B in a despondent, miserable fashion while Black Bloc'ers smash up a few shops so the media can have their daily dose of riot porn, changing nothing.

As I've said before, this isn't a good look.

In the past the understanding was that demonstrations were to be peaceful but if the authorities started something, people have a right to defend themselves, but now there's no sense of proportion or reality, it's all pure ideology - you're either out to riot or you're out to get beaten up / wander around miserably. But whichever it is, the choice is always completely self-defeating. Or like the Corbyn campaign last year... it's as if the Left are afraid of winning.

No! Really? Say it isn't so!

Consider the case of renewable energy. For decades, Left wingers have been enthusiastic boosters of renewables, yet today they have begun to talk down success stories and wallow in defeatism. What's with that?

Wikipedia describes self-defeating personality disorder as "a proposed personality disorder... never formally admitted into the (DSM-III-R) manual."

Here's a pretty good Knowing Better video on the subject:

(Why yes, I do recognize myself in this description!)

A diagnosis would have needed at least five traits... here are six traits which Leftists and the Left exhibit time and time again, with examples:

1. chooses people and situations that lead to disappointment, failure, or mistreatment even when better options are clearly available (EG: Specifically allying with Muslim religious fanatics and terrorists in the 00s, this went far beyond sticking up for religious minorities and well into the territory of collaborating with extreme reactionaries. This isn't just a Western thing either - they did it in Iran in the late 70s with predictable results)
2. incites angry or rejecting responses from others and then feels hurt, defeated, or humiliated (EG: Consistently making fun of working class people, despite same being their traditional constituency and indeed the whole point of Marxism)
3. rejects opportunities for pleasure, or is reluctant to acknowledge enjoying themselves (EG: Corbyn's aseticism, the misery and anhedonia which comprise the majority of SWP demonstrations)
4. fails to accomplish tasks crucial to their personal objectives despite having demonstrated ability to do so (EG: The way Corbyn and Sanders both failed at the last hurdles, and how Corbyn's chosen successor, Rebecca Long-Bailey, also failed miserably - precisely because Left-wing Labour members refused to vote for her!)
5. is uninterested in or rejects people who consistently treat them well (Example:  the constant abuse and harassment of left wing activists by left-wing activists, a problem brilliantly dissected at length by the YouTuber Contrapoints discussing her own "cancellation" in this video).
6. engages in excessive self-sacrifice that is unsolicited by the intended recipients of the sacrifice (A classic example of this is the Lefts' consistent rallying around Palestinian nationalists, despite same being utterly uninterested in Socialism and Socialism being an overtly internationalist, working class ideology. Another is their die-hard support of the BBC, a rightwing State broadcaster dominated by political conservatives.)

I say again, I come here not to bury Leftism, but to critique it - society needs the Left's ideas, their commitment to fairness and decency, their optimism about the human future... but we don't need their self-defeat, their misery, their palling up with utter bastards. We don't need Tankies and Trots, TERFs and SWERFs - we need something that has not been seen before, at least not recently... and I think we're going to get it.

I do think the Left will get better. Many of my earlier comments already feel dated to me (mainly cos I gave up on demos a couple of years ago and don't know what's happening now), and there is a new generation of people who grew up in the 21st century, a hardscrabble, tough time, totally unlike the self-indulgence of the late 20th, particularly the 1960s. They're willing to ask tough questions, including of themselves - OK, the endless agonizing can get a bit much sometimes, but they're good kids and they are facing far worse conditions than we (GenX) did.

There are new leaders as well - in particular I see a lot of potential in young women like Rebecca Long-Bailey and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who represent that new generation. This ain't over... but it does take time to fix something that's broken, and I'd say to a lot of people in the old guard, myself included, sometimes you have to know when you're part of the problem and butt out. 

Which I have done by and large, apart from whining screeds like this one :-D