The end of party politics?
This is a follow-on to my first post to mention this before I wrote on Medium.
Real Info News (RIN) pictures the British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn above, and illustrates the significance of Labour’s recent rise in Britain with a clever metaphor: The ruling elite maintains the status-quo through a series of trenches, detailed in said article. The upshot is that the division of working class has been breached: Those wanting change (whose upswing upset the General Election last week) overtook those holding onto the status-quo (traditional union, civil service and working class), and thereby broke the first metaphorical trench defending the ruling elite. The second trench, a hard Brexit defending business & elite interests through uncertainty (detailed in same article), is about to be assailed as the incumbent Conservatives no longer call the shots. The third trench is that of party politics, waning in favour of a more diffuse and less controllable world of social media supporting thinking workers. RIN also reminds us that workers are a lot more than the ruling elite sees them as, and therein may be the rub:
Gramsci said: everyone is an intellectual. Even if a man is treated as “trained gorilla” at work, outside work “he is a philosopher, an artist, a man of taste ... has a conscious line of moral conduct”. [Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks]
I’m active with Quakers and Re-evaluation Counselling (RC) in Cambridge UK. Quakers promote empathy & inclusivity to defend the disenfranchised against elites that defend themselves via, say, oppression and war. RC says that the hurts we experienced in the past, and were unable to heal, cause our behaviour to become rigid and cloud our thinking; reactionary behaviour is then easily manipulated by commercial and political interests that put what we want (say, comfort & security) just beyond our reach: that creates an oppressive regime that invalidates our thinking and our sense of self-worth.
Working against oppression and recovering our inherent selves make Quaker and RC ideology dangerous to the powers-that-be. What if, as Gramsci said, we empowered “a conscious line of moral conduct”?! To follow RIN’s metaphor, all the trenches the elite set up (or dug in) would succumb to a citizenry united in our desire for basic human decency, and no longer divided by socio-political artefacts.
Yet as with trench warfare, this is not going to be quick and easy. Socialistic promises by Labour may not be economically sustainable. Conservatives facing new realities are not helped by minority “tails that wag the dog”. But as in the past Arab Spring, the new White House and recent Russian protests, there is most definitely a globally growing discontent with current regimes. As the UK experience in the EU Referendum and a General Election went completely cross-wise to party lines, and both French Presidency and National Assembly went to a party created just over a year ago, is this not the end of party politics as we know it?
Let’s follow this a little further, shall we? The end of party politics reflects, or was caused by, individual thinking linked together and empowered by renewed local communities — be they actual such as local associations, or virtual such as social media — but to be friends with our neighbours without the crutches of economic or political forces (say, consumerism and party politics) we’ll have to recover our own thinking and integrity, won't we?
The recent vogue in mindfulness and Hillary Clinton’s 1996 book It takes a Village, for example, show a return to self-reliance and re-assessment of values. Each of us will find our own way, but one thing is certain: it won’t happen in isolation. The politics of splitting society into disempowered individuals is as old as the hills, as is rebuilding from families through villages and countries to a globally sustainable society.
Two things
One thing has changed, however, that puts a different light on this: The dwindling of our natural resources and the growing of pollution, natural or man-made, puts in stark relief the excesses that oppressive societies lead to: In other words sustainability cannot be attained by irrational means.
It follows that the environmental challenges we face today cannot be solved the way society works now!
As a friend recently told me over brunch, “whatever we do, we must do it for our children, who will inherit what we leave behind”. So it behooves us to get cracking, and not within the parameters we live in today.
Capitalism may think it won with the fall of Communism. But with thinking workers poised to upset the status-quo, I say: “Capitalism: be afraid, be very afraid!” And like any system under threat, it’s bound to get worse before it gets better, as reflected by an uptick in race- and religion-motivated violence on both sides of the Atlantic... So let me close with Australian folk singer-songwriter Judy Small’s You don’t speak for me in the 1988 album “Home Front” I saw her perform in Calgary CDN:
You who scribble on walls with your miniscule minds
You who make midnight calls, you who rattle my blinds
The violence you preach is the core of your creed
You don’t speak for me
You call yourselves patriots, swastika-style
You feed on the fear of the ignorant child
There’s no love of nation or people or land
In the hatred behind your smile
You don’t speak for me, no you don’t speak for me
This is the first of a series, continued here.
