The Samson Principle

I wrote this yesterday and got so depressed I couldn't finish or publish it. Today, the crazed fascists running Israel have launched a "pre-emptive" strike on Iran, so here it is. 

A person on X claims there’s an “Islamic Regime” that wants to “commit a Holocaust, the likes of which the world has never seen …finishing what Hitler and the Nazi Regime started."'

If he’s referring to a global Islamic threat, his claim is as absurdly reductionist and extremist as anti-Semitic claims of a monolithic Zionist / Jewish cabal that controls the world.  It ignores the many national, sectarian, linguistic-cultural differences in the two billion people who identify their religion as Islam – a religion that sprang from the root of patriarchal, monotheist Judaism, which also contains national, sectarian and linguistic-cultural differences that the establishment of the state of Israel and creation of an Israeli national identity attempts to gloss over.

But the truth of it is, he's referring to a specific country, and the “Islamic Regime” is code for Iran which right-wing Zionists claim is using Hezbollah, Hamas and the PLO as proxies to soften up Israel while it prepares to deliver the final, nuclear, holocaust.

It’s a short ideological step to the stark conclusion – “we must neutralise them before they build the capacity to kill all of us.” Israel's “final solution” to the “Palestinian problem" is justified by claiming to be defending itself against the “Islamic Regime”, the heart of which is in Iran.

In effect, this person seeks to justify Israel’s wholesale slaughter by fire, starvation and disease, of Palestinian non-combatants, the on-going theft of Palestinian lands, and the erasure of Palestinian identity by placing all Palestinians within the orbit of the evil “Islamic Regime", and uses the same insane argument to justify its illegal, deadly incursions into other countries.

Claims to "self-defence" are rendered unbelievable when the majority of those they are killing are small children, women, the elderly and the infirm; and when they destroy civilian infrastructure including hospitals and sources of clean water, and when they slaughter animals, uproot ancient trees, raze fields.

Those are not defensive actions; they are the indefensible actions of an out-of-control colonising power, in which a scarily large proportion of the population are in the grip of a sort of collective psychosis.

This angry fellow not only positions ALL Jews as being at risk of imminent annihilation by the “Islamic Regime”, he ignores the historical role played by Israel itself, and more so by its main patron, the US, in the emergence of Islamic theocracies, most pertinently in Iran, and in aiding and abetting Islamist terror cells across the world. 

He ignores or possibly is too ignorant to know how political Islam was used, cynically and cruelly, first to combat socialism and to break the Non-Aligned Movement, and latterly to replace the spectre of global and domestic communism, with the spectre of “Islamic Terrorism". 

Like communism, Muslim terrorism is ideologically positioned as a threat that is both within and without, which is useful in justifying external wars and internal repression. 

* * * *

To embed the need for a Jewish homeland in Israel into the Jewish psyche, the architects of the Zionist state first weaponised Eastern European pogroms and the wider canon of anti-Semitic tropes. 

Post WW2, they weaponised the Nazi holocaust, creating a deep soil of perpetual grief, fear and anger in which their right-wing Zionist ideology would grow fast and strong. 

It is surely one of history’s cruellest ironies, that the right-wingers who held sway in the creation of Israel, and whose successors still dominate the Israeli state, behaved towards the “enemies” they created much like the Nazis had towards Jews. 

The Nazis didn’t start out with the aim of exterminating all Jews – they built up to it. The processes of demonisation, dispossession, ghettoisation and political oppression all preceded and laid the ideological tracks to the death camps.

What is wrong with our world, what is the root cause of all the harms being caused to people and the planet, is that right-wingers, whose thought processes are governed by their amygdala, wield immense economic, military and ideological power – and nowhere more so than in Israel.

Common sense, logic and rationality struggle to survive in the intense heat of a fear and rage-driven emotional state. The far more easily incinerated emotions of empathy and a sense of common cause don’t stand a chance. 

 

The crucible of Zionist Israel has created a majority population that is as completely in the grip of an irrational Islamophobia as a majority of Americans were in the grip of an irrational anti-communism during the Cold War. 

There is no difference between the Americans who allowed their right-wing governments to commit war crimes in North Korea and South-East Asia in the name of fighting communism, and Israelis who allow their far-right government to commit war crimes in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon and Syria.

This X-man’s appeal is to his counterparts in the west – those who are in their own throes of rage and revulsion against “immigrants”, be they Muslims, or the wrong sort of Catholic. 

He dives deep into the stinky barrel of far-right tropes and comes up railing against liberal governments, university administrators, Jewish fellow-travellers, the woke left, the silent majority … in truth, pretty much everyone who won’t listen to him and back Israel in the war it wants to wage on Iran.

In keeping with his inflamed state of mind, he either doesn’t know or doesn’t care that such a war could well usher in a third world war and given the fragile state of the planet, it may well signal the end of humanity. 

I suspect far too many Israelis and their zealous supporters suffer from the Samson Psychosis – if they cannot dominate, they will bring it all crashing down.

  

 

What is a Woman?

Oh yes, it is that issue again. This was inspired by a Facebook post by a woman whose feminist scholarship I admire who was expressing her concerns about the recent UK supreme court judgement on what constitutes a woman for the purposes of the UK Equality Act (2010).

It’s a pretty narrow and forensic judgement about the meaning of "woman" as stated in an omnibus law, which is being hailed by the various women’s rights groups as a huge victory, and by trans rights groups as the latest salvo in a fascistic, Trumpist style attack on pretty much everyone who isn’t right, white and heterosexual.

The trans rights advocates and allies seldom address the fact that gender identity theory and praxis was embraced initially by global corporations, by centre-right, corporate-enabling governments all over the west, by state organisations and enterprises, NGOs, Trade Unions, the media…. 

It was the Tories in the UK who threw the “dead cat” of the Gender Recognition Act reform into the political arena. Gender identity was wholeheartedly supported by the US Democrats whose liberal wing is only left in the context of the right-wing mess that is US electoral politics. While Biden was enabling Israel’s genocide in Gaza, his administration wholly embraced GI.

In unstable, unnerving conditions many socially conservative people will cleave to the known and to leaders who appear to be strong. 

The same conditions may encourage socially transgressive people to push boundaries beyond sustainable limits, i.e. to the point where the moderating influence of the centre on both extremes is weakened and popular opinion starts to slide towards the conservative pole.

Anyone who knows anything about the politics of diversion and division could see how much utility this could have for the right. It was obvious, or it should have been, that the way the trans rights movement developed would be weaponised by the far right and by religious and secular ultra conservatives. It was never a case of if, but when and in what ways. 

This isn’t a criticism of the cause, but it is a criticism of the air-headed, myopic strategies deployed by some trans-activists. That air-headedness may have been inevitable when you consider how individualistic and individualising an ideology it is, and how fragmented it quickly became as a political movement – made more so by how rapidly the trans umbrella grew to provide cover for a mass of gender identities, not to mention how reliant it was and is on media that can easily be manipulated by malign or vexatious agents.

For me, the clearest warning signal about the direction it was likely to take came in 2015 when an influential INCEL posted a video on his You Tube channel calling on his supporters to claim to be “transgender lesbians” online to mess with feminists and the left.

Trans rights also had and has utility for those liberals and leftists who’ve done nicely out of neo-liberal capitalism’s hyper-commodification and who have a place in its well remunerated, high status buffer class.  

It's a cause which:

- Supports a tiny minority whose demands pose no threat to the economic status quo and which even contain some market opportunities. 

- Doesn’t put your job at risk because your bosses support it also. 

- Assuages guilt about relative privilege and the abandonment or continued disregard of the great unifying theories and praxis centred around class, race and sex.

- Lets you believe you are on the right side of history without having to actually confront the social and natural chaos that’s looming because of the very socio-economic system from which you are benefiting. 

- Allows you to forget for a time, the child slaves in the Congo, Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the proxy war in Ukraine, the heating up of the new Cold War against China, the accelerating and mutually reinforcing global issues of climate change, species extinctions/habitat loss, chemical and particulate pollution.

- Allows you to self-soothe, secure in the knowledge that you're fighting the good fight on at least one narrow front. 

What worries me is the GI issue being stretched beyond breaking point between, a) the notion that being a woman is an essentially subjective, empirically unprovable state of mind, and/or a costume drawn from stereotypes that feminists fought to break; and, b) the narrowly deterministic notion that “a woman is an adult human being with no Y chromosome”.

I get worried when people haul intersex issues into the debate around trans rights with no regard for the fact that those with any form of DSD are a hugely diverse population many of whom don’t want to be used as political pawns. 

I get worried when those who use intersex issues as political pawns have no regard for the very real possibility that DSDs (in number, type and severity) are increasing because of the chemical soup we’re being forced to live in by the same corporate and state drivers that have supported the GI orthodoxy.

I get worried when the World Health Organisation publishes information about intersex issues and makes the claim that there’s such a thing as a “Y monosomy”, and that ludicrous claim is repeated by influential people in defence of GI rights. 

I get worried when no one asks whether there is a political-commercial imperative behind the current emphasis on the idea of “sex being on a spectrum”, and whether this process of normalising these deviations from the reproductive norm into something natural and therefore palatable is because, like the global epidemic of obesity, there is something that needs to be hidden. Something like the vast number of endocrine disrupting, DNA damaging chemicals in the environment, perhaps. (1) 

I get worried when I see trans activists demanding the right to medically transition with apparently no regard for the implications of becoming one of the most medically surveilled and pharmacologically dependent groups on a politically and ecologically unstable planet – let alone considering the hellish nightmare of the interactions of pharmaceuticals with the mass of chemicals we cannot avoid ingesting, inhaling, absorbing.

All this and much more is why I dislike and distrust both extremes of this argument. It has yet again diverted the time and political energies of those best placed to demand and get positive change in respect of the constellation of horrors facing us. 

In the time it has taken me to type this  … how many innocents have died or been maimed and/or traumatised?  

As to looking back on this in five years, as one commenter on the post said she planned to do, the planet is in a state of accelerating social and natural disequilibrium; it may already be at the point where equilibrium cannot be restored, in which case all bets are off because chaos will ensue. 

That’s what worries me most.

(1) When researchers were looking for an endocrine disrupting chemical that might be implicated in the global increase in precocious puberty, they tested 10k before finding a likely culprit… a cheap synthetic scent. 10k sounds a lot but that’s a tiny percentage of the total released into the environment in various ways over the last half century. Endocrine disrupting, DNA damaging, carcinogenic chemicals that we cannot avoid; the adverse effects of any given one on any given organism at any given stage of its development is hard enough to determine; their interactions, as I’ve said repeatedly, are a nightmarish unknown.

The Slippery Slope Into Barbarism

A Facebook "friend" keeps posting stuff about transgenderism and how right people like her were/are to have been supportive of the likes of Trump because he is rolling back those "trans rights" which impact on women's rights.

I look at this way; prior to and concomitant with the rise of neoliberal (global corporate) capitalism, there was a radical shift of political theory and praxis to the right which meant that the popular perception of a “centre ground” – the fulcrum point if you will – shifted significantly to the right. 

Accompanying, and in fact aiding that was the rise, first of interest group, and then identity politics.

Instead of great national and international movements aimed at achieving and sustaining systemic change, there was a proliferation of smaller “issue”, latterly “identity” based movements. 

The old "red left" which aimed for foundational socio-economic change – not just accommodations within capitalism –  lost ground, especially with the demise of the USSR and the Eastern Bloc.

Social democrats and socially liberal people shifted rightwards with the fulcrum point, adjusting their ideas and expectations of what being "left-wing” meant. 

For many of them it was simply not being “right-wing”. In the weird world of US politics, it was the patent absurdity of the Democratic Party being "left”.

For socially and politically liberal centrists – having abandoned all hope of socialism (if they ever had any) and with that class-based theory and praxis –  the focus on interest group, and then identity politics, was palliative. 

Attachment to movements that merely sought accommodations from Neo-liberal compliant states – but which in no way threatened the economic status quo – soothed their liberal hearts and minds as they benefited materially from neoliberal capitalism’s intensification of economic exploitation which was accompanied by an increased oppression of workers – somewhere.

For me, the big issue with transgenderism as political theory and praxis is that it is both individualistic and individualising. As such it dovetails perfectly with the right’s aim of breaking all great political-social combinations which challenge capitalism – not just into competing interest groups, but right down to the level of the “aspirational individual”. 

In the transgenderist orthodoxy that takes the form of a focus on the right to a bespoke sex/gender social and legal “identity” with an accompanying bespoke physical appearance.

Anyone who supports/promotes “Trumpism” because of the political right’s and ultra-conservatives’ opportunistic coat-tailing of feminist opposition to the transgenderist orthodoxy, is either a rightwing ideologue or some variety of useful idiot.

What annoys me about both extremes of this debate is the level of social and political myopia and a self-centredness that risks tipping into full-blown narcissism. It’s maybe why both extremes are drawn to Trump .. like attracts like. 

The social and natural worlds are in states of intense and worsening disequilibrium. Fact.

Marx warned that there was no inevitable progression of the social world beyond capitalism and into socialism / communism; if the hands of the hyper-exploiters and oppressors are not wrested off the controls, we could see the social world tip into barbarism. 

Women who are cheerleading for the likes of Trump need to look outside the imperial bubble and the smaller bubbles of relative privilege which bounce around inside it, and place all their hyperbole about the threat to women of transgenderism, against what is objectively threatening women in the rest of the world – and who and what is behind those threats. 

More to point; they need to stop exaggerating and catastrophising as much and as risibly as the most ardent of transactivists ever did, and ask who and what can stop the slide into barbarism? 

The Vendors of Violence

There’s a lot of hypocritical cant pouring out of the western alliance (WA) via its compliant legacy and social media, about the operation of the Wagner Group – the corporatised private army that has been contracted by the Russian state to advance its interests in various parts of the world. (1)

The problems posed for the Russian state by Wagner were very likely exacerbated by its owner's personality and personal ambitions. Once Yevgeny Prigozhin came out of the corporate shadows, he began to act as though he was a national hero and an experienced military leader and tactician. His public profile, and allegations of Wagner’s brutality, compounded the civil-legal problems created by the use of a large and visible military contractor in Ukraine once the Donbas region was formally incorporated into the Russian state.

It’s also very likely that he stomped on the toes of both career politicians and high ranking members of the Russian military. 

As always with its propaganda, the WA, and the US especially, act as though they never use such tactics, let alone acknowledge they were initiators, and are still the key enablers of the privatised military industry which has emerged over the past half century.

The WA’s propaganda – the dissemination of which is enabled by a largely compliant legacy, and easily manipulated social media – obscures the fact that since the end of WW2, its vast military-industrial complex has expanded into the creation of cohorts of powerful private contractors, used by governments or corporate entities, to carry out military-style activities inside other nations. 

The propaganda machine also obscures the fact that those activities always benefit the WA’s (and especially the American) vast military-industrial complex.

In truth, this is not new, it’s a step back into the overt use of violence in pursuit of private or corporate profit, and it flows from the demented logic behind corporate capitalism’s drive to commodify everything. From intangibles like debt and influence, to pornography and prostitution, murder and mayhem – everything can be turned into a commodity to be bought and sold in the global marketplace.

The modern state

The modern bureaucratic state is a relatively recent form of governance, and it was a necessary component of the rise to dominance of the capitalist mode of production. Although capitalism grew in tandem with the nation state, initially it controlled the direction the state took, ensuring that it essentially acted as an enabler. 

However, as the power of the various institutions of the state grew, and as it democratised in various ways and degrees, it also served as a brake on capitalist excesses and abuses of power. 

Neo-liberal capitalism, led by US corporate and finance capitalism, needed to rein in the state and return it to its essential role of protecting and enabling capitalist enterprises, whilst maintaining the appearance of democracy and protection of formal rights and civil liberties. 

The first step was to remove state controls over the movement of capital in order to freely shift investment to economic zones where profit could be maximised through more intense exploitation of labour and extraction of natural resources, and the weakening or removal of laws governing environmental hazards. 

Working class and other great liberatory movements and collectives came under heavy attack. (2)

The public’s trust in state owned and run enterprises and institutions was undermined in order to ensure the cementing in of the myth of the greater efficiency, effectiveness, and economy of the private sector. 

Most crucially, the monopoly of the state in the control of coercive agencies such as the military, the police, and prison service – had to be broken.

The redrafting of key clauses in the social contract and selling it to the masses was enabled by the numerical expansion and increase in the power and status of a managerial-professional class – the coordinators and system adjusters whose stake in the economic status quo ensures that most don’t see or acknowledge, let alone question, its rotten core.

This social and economic buffer zone has been crucial in the creation and implementation of the ideology of the aspirational individual, and the promotion of interest groups within the left’s collectives. Latterly this has taken the form of the promotion of groups loosely bound together by identity, moving steadily towards the zenith of hyper-individualism, the ideology of gender identity. (3)

The Vendors of Violence

Given there’s always the possibility that even a fully corporate-compliant state may not act as quickly or decisively enough in the desired direction, coercive and violent services can now be purchased openly from corporations in the form of land, sea, and air militarised forces, and/or security in suits. 

This is not a new phenomenon, like neo-liberalism’s move to the use of contracted out labour, it is a return to older arrangements. 

The idea of the armed forces of the state fighting in common cause against a common enemy is both a heavily mythologised, and a relatively recent, phenomenon.

In feudal Europe, aristocrats or wealthy merchants provided the manpower for their own battles and their ruler’s wars, from among men who owed them fealty of some sort. The most hapless of these feudal conscripts usually wore their own clothes with some sort of token to distinguish them as being on one side or the other. 

Until the agricultural and early industrial revolutions there were practical limits on how many men could be wasted in battle, or how long they could be away from the land or other vital enterprises. It took major advances in both primary and secondary production to “free up” labour, and to create the wealth needed to provide uniforms, arms, and training. 

Prior to the formation of fully state-funded and controlled standing armies and the move to functional battle dress in the twentieth century, most soldiers wore their aristocratic master’s colours, which are still seen in regimental dress uniforms in Europe. 

The precursors of the English navy were privateers, pirates who preyed on Spanish treasure ships and were granted license to so by the English Crown. In effect these privateers carried out acts of undeclared war which the Crown and state could disavow if necessary.

The men who massacred unarmed people at Peterloo in 1817, were a mix of a relatively new state controlled army and private militias formed by landowners and business owners. 

The English and Dutch East Indies companies were the organisational and ideological precursors of the transnational corporations which now dominate the globe. They operated almost completely independently of any state. In pursuit of private profit, they deployed their own armies and navies,  minted their own money, made their own laws, and employed their own bureaucracies to govern the lands they had stolen. 

With the rise in the power and reach of the state, and the use of state funds to maintain standing armies, navies and, latterly, air forces, the operation of organised private armies was reduced, although mercenaries still operated as individuals and small groups.

The end of the cold war 

The principle that the state ought to have the monopoly on coercion i.e., the armed services, the police, and prison, has been under steady attack since the 1970s. These days, nation states, international organisations, corporations and individuals increasingly rely on a wide range of privately owned and controlled military and security services. 

The existence and rapid growth of this industry has been normalised in part by propaganda offensives and in part by the successful embedding of core facets of the Neo-liberal contract culture.

From the end of WW2 there was a drive to pour all direct government to government aid into the development of infrastructure that would not only make extraction of natural resources more efficient, it would enable the movement of armed forces, either of the state or private “security” agencies, to protect the activities of companies hoping to benefit from the infrastructural improvements.

With the shifts in the balance of power that followed the end of the Cold War, and the rise of the digital era and increasingly mechanised warfare, often involving civilian specialists, there was a reduction in the global numbers of military personnel, several millions in total, and a sell off of massive amounts of military hardware. 

As the neo-liberal era also resulted in a reduction in wider employment opportunities in the global north, corporate sharks, especially in the military-industrial complex, seized the opportunity to fill the gap in the market. 

The result was a rise of corporatised armed forces, literal vendors of violence, sometimes presenting as security services wearing civilian kit and bearing only side arms, and sometimes as full scale military, providing a wide range of land, sea, and air services to both government and private entities.

These corporate entities operate openly as legitimate businesses in an international market, most deploying the same sort of opaque financial arrangements that characterise other sorts of global corporations. Some are subsidiaries of larger public companies; some are branches of corporations within the wider military-industrial complex. 

As fully legal commercial entities, the corporate private armies of the twenty-first century enter into formal contracts with their clients and openly advertise their services, all prettied up with the requisite corporate jargon. These include combat and combat training, logistics, and post-conflict resolution, and might include a range of extra-judicial actions such as abduction, arrest without warrant, imprisonment without trial, or assassination.

Neo-liberal capitalism’s commodification of violence, and the positioning of the vendors of violence as legitimate businesses, are logical outflows of globalisation, out-sourcing, asset-stripping the public sector, and returning the state to its core role of enabling and protecting private corporate, profits. 

This is now a huge industry which openly markets and profits from violence and its existence and its increasing power should be giving all sane people pause.

The infamous Leopold II of Belgium privately purchased a vast tract of Africa, and brutally policed its indigenous people with a private army comprising for the most part, thuggish mercenaries. How much moral distance is there between his vile actions, and those of the latter-day vendors and purchasers of violence?

Ultimately, this shift back to the operation of privateers leaves open a number of huge moral-legal questions.

Who monitors them; who regulates and controls them; who ensures the civil-military balance in respect of public policy; who can and will take steps to rein them in, or to punish transgressors?  

What price human rights and international law in such a market place?

 

NOTES: 

1)The brutality of some of the Wagner operatives has been used by the WA in anti-Russian propaganda which, as always, is breath-taking in its level of both gall and dishonesty.

2) There is a contradiction at the heart of the labour-capital relations – the legal right to enter into an employment contract rests on the existence of the individual person operating freely in the employment market. However, that freedom always was, and remains, highly conditional, and never more so than when the might of capital confronts one worker or a small group of workers. In arguably the greatest of all power struggles – that between capital and labour – the more powerful the former, the weaker the latter becomes. To get any sort of balance of power, labour has to organise collectively and the wresting of all labour advances from private employers, and from the bureaucratic state itself, has come as the result of mass collective action. The promotion of individually negotiated employment contracts and the use of fully contracted out labour are retrograde steps aimed at undermining working class collectivism and rolling back labour advances. 

3) Whilst collectivism was the only viable response to the embedded power of capitalism, it exists in tension with the “free” individual created by capitalism, and with the struggles to establish, extend and protect the legal rights of the individual, and of groups of individuals with commonalities. It is no accident that over the past half century – as working class and other great liberatory movements and collectives have been under attack, and the role of the state in moderating capitalist excesses has been rolled back – the ideology of the individual, aspirational self, has been heavily promoted. Like finance capitalism itself, the attendant political movements, have been made possible by the digital revolution.  Like all that capitalism does, this promotion is short-termist – there is no long-term vision; all capitalism cares about is the maximisation of profit and the entrenchment of power, in the here and now. How far the identity politics pendulum will swing and how much damage it will cause on its inevitable return arc, depends on forces that the hyper-exploiters and their compliant minions have probably not calculated as they believe they will be able to manage the outcomes to their benefit. After all, not only have they destroyed, or divided and distracted their only viable opposition – working class collectivism -– they also have compliant state machines at their disposal across much of the globe. Gender identity ideology drags political action into loose and shifting coalitions of individuals who are bound together only by a subjective sense of self. Ahistorical, metaphysical, ineluctably individualist and individualising, gender identity ideology, and much of its praxis, is neo-liberalism’s creature. 

 

 

Low hanging fruit

I recently listened to a poet on Tik Tok skewering the UK's equivalents of Clinton's "deplorables" – the "gammons" with their narrow obsessions about celebrities and "woke"– aka politically correct – politics.

He was very clever, and correct in many ways but I couldn't help but wonder, why choose such an easy, low hanging target?

Why not aim at the nexus of entrenched power and all those who serve and protect it?

The creators and beneficiaries of the globe's ever widening economic rifts – those who force vast numbers of people onto narrow and perilous life paths, a fall from which is seldom recoverable. 

The system adjusters who are so focused on the retention or expansion of their delegated power and privilege, they either don't see the looming abyss, or believe they'll be spared by the grace of god, or their talents and hard work, or simply because they're worth it.  

The system manipulators who curate the appearance of democracy, and those who control a mass media that feeds a constant stream of toxic froth and propaganda aimed at distracting people from the very existence of the abyss. 

All those whose cynical and self-serving designs, in the context of rapidly accelerating time scales of interconnected social and natural disasters, make any sort of meaningful position to the power nexus slide from difficult to virtually impossible. 

Why is it just the soft, low hanging, about-to-fall fruit and the windfalls that this poet chooses to macerate?

 

 

 

Striking a pose

 You can be sincere and still be stupid.” 

― Fyodor Dostoevsky

 

Back in the day, Thatcher's bully boys in the right-wing British media coined the phrases loony Left and PC madness. They used them to label and to demonise left-wing local authorities, feminist, and anti-racist organisations, and the trade union movement that was fighting to protect jobs and services. 

The motivation was to weaken opposition in advance of the ravaging effects of the disinvestment and privatisation being ushered in by neo-liberal, global corporate capitalism.

The first thing the Thatcher government did was to remove the controls on the export of capital. That signalled the start of a massive flow of investment to places in the world where corporations could extract more profit by paying less for labour and have the bonus of being able to pollute and spoil to their heart's content. 

They did not invest to improve the lives of workers in those regions. Like the first wave of transnational corporate investment and its associated governmental aid, neo-liberal corporate investment was purely in the pursuit of profit. 

The first wave of investment had been aimed at developing infrastructure to facilitate the extraction of natural resources; the second was aimed at the exploitation of “human resources”. (1)  

Neo-liberalism has been in the driving seat for almost half a century. During that time there has been an explosion in digital technology and a dramatic rise in the living standards, choices, and expectations of the buffer class. 

The price for that is a massive increase in energy consumption, the development and use of tens of thousands of toxic chemicals, the dumping of billions of tonnes of toxic waste, along with galloping species’ extinctions and accelerating climate change. 

The threat posed by AI is yet to be fully grasped. 

Arguably neo-liberalism’s greatest harm is also its greatest ideological success – the virtual destruction of the belief in the possibility of foundational economic change. 

In this on-going process, its media game has become more subtle.

The second-wave feminist idea that structural change needs to be accompanied by attitudinal change, has been transmogrified into the idea that attitudinal change alone is sufficient to bring about such structural change as is necessary.  

For neo-liberalism’s well-padded buffer class, whose members are the most heavily invested in identity politics, what constitutes necessary structural change is radically different from that demanded by the traditional left operating in the interests of the working class.

Underlying much of identity politics (rhetorical flourishes on Twitter bios notwithstanding) is the acceptance that a radical change of the economic base is either not necessary or is unachievable.  All that needs to be, or all that can be achieved, are some accommodations for those who are disadvantaged and belong to one or more of the categories on the current list of approved oppressed-minorities. 

This locates the adherents of identity politics as the progressive wing of neo-liberalism, or the neo-liberal Left. It does not make them left-wing in the original meaning of the term. 

What worsens the situation is that for some of the neo-liberal left,  all that is needed to bring about attitudinal change is attitudinising. As a result, posturing on social media often becomes the measuring stick of what is progressive.

That attitudinising has been deemed by the Right to be left wing and the older, discredited right-wing slurs of PC madness and the loony left have been replaced by woke, the radical left, or hard left.

The neo-liberal left falls into the trap set for them by not questioning why it is that demands which question arguably one of the most universal and foundational of human understandings – that there are two sexes  – are not just accepted but are actively promoted by neo-liberal governments and the giant corporations whose interests those governments serve. 

Their narrow focus effectively privileges demands for extensions of, or even entirely new, formal rights within a politico-economic system that is either perpetuating or deepening gross inequalities and injustices in other spheres.  

Those on both sides of the Identity Question who fail to look beyond the labelling and the rhetoric, are helping to fuel the most recent iteration of capitalism’s campaign to keep divided the constituent parts of a global movement which could bring about foundational change.  

  
(1)   Human resources is a phrase that speaks to the dehumanisation of the process ­­– ­­ living human beings reduced to a factor in an economic equation aimed at increasing the obscene wealth of a ruling elite.
 
 

 
 

America, America ….

We hear a lot about American exceptionalism – what they lead the world in, what they think they lead the world in, and their unshakeable belief in their god-given right to do so.  

The USA has the highest per capita ownership of guns in the world at 88 per 100 people.  They are, quite simply, nuts about guns.  To the annoyance of the US gun lobby, parents have to wait until their kids reach the age of 7 before they can start teaching them how to shoot a gun – and they often learn by firing at a human shaped target. 

A  few days ago a 9-year-old American girl accidentally shot a gun instructor in the head when she lost control of the Uzi machine gun he was teaching her how to use.  
The Israeli made Uzi is a nasty little thing. Like most guns, it was developed with the sole purpose of killing or disabling human beings – most particularly in the context of close quarter 'combat' – aka crowd control.

The USA spends more money on "defence" than the next 13 countries combined, and it is the top supplier of weapons to other countries.

It imprisons more of its citizens than any other country; it has 5% of world's population but 25% of its prisoners – a grossly disproportionate number of whom are black and hispanic.

It leads the world in the consumption of opiate painkillers, consuming 80% of the world's production.

35% of its population is obese and health issues arising from that are of epidemic proportions.

It wastes 57% of its energy annually.

50% of its population breathe air that is polluted enough to cause health problems and polluted air causes an estimated 200,000 early deaths annually.

It used to have one of the safest water supplies in the world but its infrastructure is crumbling rapidly under the weight of a lack of investment and the strain of dealing with the 50,000 chemicals in use and increasing leaching and spills from the country’s massive toxic waste dumps. Attempts to privatise supplies have failed and led to the obscenity of poor people having their water supply cut off when they are unable to pay the bills.

In terms of GDP, the USA is the world's richest country, but it ranks:

3rd in the world in terms of inequality of wealth distribution;

16th in literacy;

27th in the world in median household income; 

27th in life expectancy;

61st in environmental protection.


It's 46th in infant mortality – behind Cuba and Korea, most of Europe, Australia, NZ and Canada. 

Annually, twice the number of US babies die on the first day after birth than in all 27 European Nations combined, although 1 million more babies are born in Europe. (Save the Children's State of the World's Mothers’ Report).  

A major contributor to the USA's infant mortality rate is the high number of premature births among poor women who experience low levels of primary health care and high levels of physiological and psychological stress during pregnancy.  This is a judgment on the American health-care system and on American society as a whole. 

So what is the relevance of all this to us here today just 18 days out from an election?

Make no mistake – this is the sort of society we are on track to become if the right continues to set the political, economic and social agenda.  We are already well on the way and  the rolling back of all the social advances that people of my generation took for granted, simply has to be halted and reversed.

The only way to do that is to vote in a progressive government – and then camp on its doorstep and force it to do those things it promised to do – and more. 




A Parable For Our Times: with apologies to real sharks

Just so we are all on the same page - this is a parable based on the Kim Dot-Com situation


Once upon a time there was a little shark who wanted to be a Great White when he grew up. Because he was a clever and devious hunter he grew to be a very big little shark.  He was not content to dominate the sharks in his part of the ocean and set off towards the zone of the Great Whites – the shark elite whose ranks he thought he was big enough and vicious enough to join. 

This elite of Great Whites allows certain other smaller sharks to scavenge the edges of their kill zone and if they are well fed, they may even let an enterprising little shark dart in to seize some prey for itself, but if a little shark starts to act like one of the Great Whites, or threatens their interests, they'll turn on him.  

The big little shark desperately wanted to be a part of the Great White elite but to them he was just a scavenging pest. When he started to muscle in on their kill zones, they decided to destroy him. He managed to escape and fled south but they were in a blood frenzy and pursued him across the oceans as far as the great southern ocean where he found some quiet waters in which to rest and gather his strength. 

The local sharks seemed a pretty dopey bunch and were easily bribed with a few fish to let him take up residence in their waters. Once rested, he took to his usual tactic of scattering around large amounts of fish offal to boost his reputation as the biggest predator in the neighbourhood and managed to gather a number of scavengers around him.  

But, unbeknownst to him, there was a Great White in residence – cleverly disguised as a dolphin. This shark in a dolphin suit alerted the Great White elite to the big little shark's presence in his waters, and a kill squad was sent to finish him off.

Using all his skills, the big little shark managed to escape the kill squads and found himself a spot where he could defend himself.  He thought that if the Great White elite was never going to let him become one of them he would be as much of a nuisance to them as he could – especially to the resident Great White.  

He looked around for allies. There weren't many as the waters had been so depleted of fish they could not support much in the way of predators, but he managed to find some prey species which were swimming around in an agitated and fearful state. 

He devised a cunning plan. He also disguised himself as a dolphin (a very large one it must be said) and persuaded the prey fish that he and his dolphin school would protect them from the Great White and its gang of scavengers if the prey fish would act as a diversion. They were to present themselves as a target while he and his school would sneak up behind the Great White and ram him – that being the way dolphins attack sharks.  Once deprived of their devious leader, the scavenger gang could be chased away by the dolphins and all would be well. 

The fish were so anxious for some leadership they totally forgot to question how come this particular dolphin had such huge teeth, not to mention the fact that dolphins also eat fish. 

After a lot of discussion, the prey fish agreed to band together to create a big enough shoal to attract the resident Great White's attention. The Great White duly sniffed out the prey and headed in for the kill. To the horror of the fish there was no sign of their dolphin protector.  Once the Great White had killed and eaten as many of the fish as he could catch and his scavengers had finished off the rest, he turned and found himself confronting the big-little shark.

"That was my gift to you," the big little shark said. "Proof of my good intentions. I want to stay here in these waters and if you let me I can promise you more prey, especially lots of tasty young juveniles. They can see right through your disguise because frankly it's wearing a bit thin, but they think I'm a real dolphin."

The Great White thought a while and being a very pragmatic sort of shark who didn't get to where he was by useless displays of overt aggression, agreed to let the big little shark stay, as long as he delivered a regular tribute of the tasty young prey he'd promised. 

And if he became too much of a nuisance, the resident Great White thought, there is more than one way to kill a shark.

The End.