Performative radicalism that freaks out wider society instead of slow steady progress has led to the near complete irrelevance of the left in the west, especially the anglosphere. I mean, UK Labor is a centrist pro-capital party now. It's over.
Naive idealism mixed with immaturity leads to these things. Wishing for things to be so doesn’t make them so.
Someone somewhere has to work for things to happen.
To me it feels like when a parasite finds a weak host. Neither will survive long. The relationship can be symbiotic but that requires effort as well as conscientiousness on both sides. The place was not running at break even but they wanted more despite that. They wouldn’t even accept cuts in staffing… They bled it to death with idealism.
Business is hard. It's hard enough to "start a bookshop". And while I admire folk who have a bigger vision, the whole thing rests on the business being successful.
Given the right priorities, it can work. A business can be profitable, and also embody progressive principles. It can be both an income, and socially responsible.
But most businesses fail. 90% or so don't survive 5 years. That's before adding externalities.
So starting a business with goals orthogonal to successful business is twice as hard.
I was struck by the demand by employees to be a collective. Thats an unusual request. It suggests that, even hired, that was floated as a path. It suggests the owner wanted employees to be "part of the family". So suddenly getting decisions from on high was jarring for them.
Unionising is a strange response. (Even the union was surprised.) Frankly the writing was on the wall at that point. A more experienced business person would just have closed then and there.
Obviously the employees thought that they could have succeeded had they just got the stock for free. I suspect not. They wanted more pay, would have had no incoming monthly investment, and would be short at least 1 worker (enough was likely doing a lot of work.) Doesn't sound like a solid business plan to me.
So yes, idealism is fine, but it doesn't make the business work. And I agree, in this case it killed it. But frankly, starting a bookshop these days is a pretty doomed approach. A (good) coffee shop (with some books) may have had a chance.
No true Scotsman? Yes, there are conservative loonies today (just as there always have been). There are also hangers ons/co-opters/johnny come latelys who adopt the "conservative" label as a means to legitimize their platforms. None of these are relevant to what is being discussed in this thread.
The first sentence of the Wikipedia article on conservatism is exactly what I mean:
> Conservatism is a cultural, social, and political philosophy and ideology that seeks to promote and preserve traditional institutions, customs, and values.
By promoting the incumbent ideas, there's no chance that they "freak(s) out wider society" as the OP said. The ideology is simply to resist change, which will almost always be less controversial than advocating for change.
The so-called conservatives are radical centrists at best. While today’s „far-right“ would have been considered moderate conservatives not so long ago.
I have no idea what you're talking about. The current "far right" is rounding up the brown people (except the ones they agree with) and sending them to concentration camps. That would have been unthinkable a few decades ago, even on the right. And it's definitely not centrist.
As a european, US migration situation is insane. And it’s hard to cal US „right“ that tolerated such policies promoting illegal migration for decades a „right“ wing.
And european mainstream right is no longer right for the last few decades on those topics. Today’s „far“ right sound like what mainstream right would say 10-20-30 years ago depending on exact country.
You are saying that for you, last decade's right is centrist or left. And you are saying that last decade's right would call the current right centrist or left. So what are you?
Good question. My views didn't change. But somehow from voting moderate centre-right or even classical liberal I had to start voting for far-right instead. So... who am I?
You said it yourself - even the right used to tolerate illegal immigration. But you were okay voting the center right at that time. And now you're voting the far right who are putting them in concentration camps. So you're far right, but you didn't used to be.
My views didn't change. I voted moderate right before it was tolerating migration.
Here „far“ right offer is to deport illegals and curb new migration.
Also, we have detention centers since forever. What do you propose to do with illegal migrants waiting deportations instead? Put them in prisons? That's a wee to harsh, isn't it?
Of course, then people can start talking BS about muh concentration camps with allusions to soviet and nazi camps. But those camps had some specific features that ain't present in detention centers.
Why do you think so? Would it not be better to recognize fascism/nazism as early as possible? Hitler was in power for several years, doing various increasingly bad stuff, before he started the holocaust.
Nowadays this label is overused so much that it pretty much lost it's meaning. It's not fascism-nazism to be against mass migration. Nor it's fascism-nazism to not fully support whatever letter comes next to join LGBTQAZ+ or whatever it is now.
Just like it's not communism to advocate for better welfare, labor rights, affordable housing and so on.
It did. The War on Terror was so bad for the political actors who took part in it in the US (and by ripple effect in Europe), that they were trounced by Obama, who is still the highest approved US President in the 21st century.
Trump won, partly by saying the War on Terror was a disaster and the Republicans were disasters. He distanced himself from a right wing which had done the same thing, made itself irrelevant to the mainstream with performative patriotism while we actually lost lives and trillions of dollars in a quagmire people didn't want about 1-2 years into it.
Whoever brings the left back will have to distance themselves from the party in a similar way
Having a set of beliefs tethered to reality probably. Also as a general principle the right/centre don't believe the job of the government is to interfere in every aspect of peoples lives. This at least limits their ability to reproduce the empty gestures and moral lecturing of the left.
That reminds me, yesterday a friend told me she believed the Trump assassination attempt was staged to make him look good: that the shooter had missed on purpose and the ear wound was fake.
I mean… it’s not impossible. I just don’t think Trump is that smart, though.
I’ve heard people making this up to. Yet their instagram and twitter is full of people praising assassinations, but then when they are attempted they claim “hoax”.
Or maybe something unrelated happened (business becoming more capital-intensive perhaps?), and everyone except the most radical moved on to other things?
The extremely effective general strike that happened in Italy of a few days ago didn't start from academia, but dock workers in Genoa. Grumpy, robust, very left-wing dock workers.
The biggest issue of most "performative", as you call it, left wing movements is the lack of direct experience with everyday politics. Real-world politics are extremely messy, often in direct conflict with our ideals. Stuff like, How far you can push your message, how far can you pull the strings of the people and the institutions around you.
Those workers have a very good understanding of working both with strong forces and delicate equilibriums (...equilibria?). Both in their everyday work and their contractual situation. Otherwise people die, for real. They knew exactly what they were doing to get their end goals.
I see the same approach in people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Interestingly enough, she has too a working class background in a field where power balance is paramount. On the other hand I can't think of a single well-known British Labour politician who shares the same.
But she worked as bartender[1] - which is one of those jobs that teaches you how "Fuck Around, Find Out" works in real life, very quickly. Again, it's not matter of social or economic status, but coming to understand extremely diverse social dynamics outside of the academic field.
Both her and the dock workers were pretty effective in their causes because they have experienced first-hand how going for an half-assed or whimsical approach even in everyday politics bites you hard.
[1]Also wikipedia says that her mother was a house cleaner and school bus driver?
Someone who spends most of their career working in bars and restaurants could be called working class. Not someone who does it as a temporary job for a few years after their university degree while waiting to find something better.
Not really. Don't know about what really happened here, but if a place is performative, and mostly unneeded and irrelevant, it tends to blow itself up, and then the problem clears itself away. Movements that stick around and achieve things have their vicissitudes as well, but they get through them.
Sure fascism is getting some power, but not because of left radicalism.
It got powerful because millionaire CEO sponsored them, due to them loving the idea of techno feudalism. And by being enabled by those who said "ignore them they are just trolls". And by support from Russia.
Labour has been "Blairite" ("centrist pro-capital," or just say neoliberal) since the SDP sabotage and the endless, worthless reign of Kinnock. This happened at the same time the New Democrats were stomping the Rainbow Coalition into the ground to finalize the transformation of the US Democrats into the exact same thing.
UK Labour has been a "centrist, pro-capital party" for probably your entire life (or at least most of it.) The only reason Corbyn even ended up in front is that a bunch of centrists nominated him as a joke candidate, and they hadn't been paying attention when Ed Miliband had changed the voting rules and accidentally made Labour a democratic party. Of course the membership voted for Corbyn, everybody else was garbage.
Same reason why Trump won the Republican primary in the US - the Tea Party had forced the voting process to be democratic. Unlike the Democratic party, which doesn't even have a vaguely democratic process, culminating in them having absolutely no process in the last election. I still insist that if Sanders had run as a Republican in 2016, he would have been president.
That telephone monopoly was privatised - and later dragged their heels on rolling out broadband because ISDN was so profitable, causing untold damage to the UK tech economy as the country fell behind on connectivity.
It’s a great parable of badly-managed state-run monopoly vs badly-managed privatised monopoly.
If the Tory government hadn’t reserved the market for cable TV exclusively for two US companies, NTL and Telewest, BT would have rolled out fibre to the home in 1990.
I don’t think I blame BT for not wanting to invest in a market it was barred from making a profit in. This is the result of heavy handed local regulation strangling a national incumbent for the sake of foreign interests.
At any point other competitors could have made the same investment but didn’t want to either until relatively recently.
Well one of these things happened and the other one was a hypothetical? It seems very wishful thinking to assume it just would've happen if the politics of the 70s had some how limped into the 80s
>and they hadn't been paying attention when Ed
Miliband had changed the voting rules
and accidentally made Labour a
democratic party.
Great line.
I think it's fair to say that both conservatives and labour have simply been riding on Margaret Thatchers coattails for the last 3 decades. If any of them have come up with any great original ideas of their own i haven't noticed.
On the subject of democracy it has been very inconvenient recently for both parties. This is where kier starmer comes shining through. In every other area he's bumbling, indecisive and unambitious to name just a few of his traits. But when it comes to maintaining control of his party he's masterful (well, uncharacteristically competent anyway) . He took full advantage of his opposition years to purge the Corbynites from his party. He had the time, it's not like he was doing much opposition. He recently took advantage of a scandal to rid himself of his more leftist and popular deputy Angela Rayner and did a cabinet reshuffle, buying himself more time.
It's noteworthy that the only single occasion that he took any firm and decisive action was in suppressing the right wing riots and prosecuting all the instigators in a truly impressive display of efficiency from the law enforcement and judiciary.
I agree with your analysis of the Democrats. It's hard to manufacture consensus while ignoring your electorate. Especially when you have such an outspoken rival like trump. Starmers opposition is so pathetically bad that he looks ok by comparison.
Fortunately, the status quo was bravely rescued by the Guardian's non-fact-based yet effective discovery of Corbyn's antisemitism. Gotta love such center-left newspapers.
That was the point I stopped buying the Guardian, I'd like to say it was ideological but the fact is it became boring, they only had about four versions of the line against him which writers would rotate - there's only so many times you can read the same thing.
Well Corbyns been hard at work proving them right. At least people should be pondering how making palestine a cornerstone of his political ideology would meaningfully help Britain. Unrelated but it's something George Galloway should think about. I accidently listened to about 30 seconds of him talking and he seems to be a captivating speaker.
Anyway what sunk corbyn wasn't his anti semitism, that was the excuse, but his socialism, which isn't at all what New Labour is about. Starmer is a centrist, which stems from his policy of having no position on anything. He is rightfully mistrustful of the left wing of his party. They would have lost in the elections.
Of course it was his actual old-school social democrat values that did him in - can't have that in a party called Labour. But the look wouldn't have been right, so an absurd excuse was found.
"Performative radicalism" is a problem left and right
Look at UKIP, blaming the cluster fuck of the Brittish economy on immigrants, who are weak, other and easy to blame for damage caused by making taxpayers pay for banker's misfortune and Brexit
I am in New Zealand and we have the same problems, on the left and the right.
It got the Bolsheviks to take over, and one of their main goals on international stage was to estabilish Communism in Germany. They didn't get to it only because they were defeated by Poland in 1920, and you can't get to Germany without conquering Poland first. So, Germans funded a party that nearly started a war with their own country. That's a hell of a gamble.
