Kayfabe is dead. Or, I was a manic pixie teenage wrestling fan. posted by Richard Seymour

You are about to witness some quality geeking out.

You young people, with your internet, don't know what geeking out is. You think you do, but you don't. Oh yeah, I hear you, geek is the new sexy; you're so geek you're almost socially awkward. Yeah yeah yeah. You don't know shit about being a geek. It's too easy now to find your heterotopias; you don't have to wait and yearn and save and hope.

Allow me to, at some length, explain. Who can say why anyone catches a wrestling show one day, and is subsequently hooked? Maybe one of the personalities reminds you of an ego-ideal. Maybe the idea of 'wrestling' resonates with you because it dramatises your own inner conflicts. Maybe it's those tumescent bodies in tights. Or maybe you just want to watch some arrogant, nasty motherfucker get the fuck knocked out of them, even if it is all for show.

Whatever the case, it clearly isn't violence in the abstract that is appealing, but rather the violent resolution of some sort of contrived drama. British boxing briefly understood this when Chris Eubank was drawing heat* with his incomparably stylish heel* turn. The show was not, "here are two adults who are going to seriously hurt one another," but "here is a likeable person who has been badly treated by some despicable rogue, and he or she is going to kick the ever-loving shit out of them."

Now, those of us who liked this stuff and were old enough to be a little embarrassed by it, wanted it to be at least credible if not 'real'. We hated the constant recycling of cheap and obvious gimmicks - pituitary cases in gaudy costumes, pretending to be crooks, foreigners, tax men, Jews, or whatever else would get the crowd booing if they were heels*, or patriots, macho men, blue collar tough guys, or whatever would appear sympathetic if they were babyfaces*. We hated the lumbering, awful performers who moved slowly, never connected a convincing blow, and sounded like fucking idiots whenever they opened their mouths. We disdained the circus freaks such as Giant Gonzales and Doink the Clown whose gimmicks were far more important than anything they did in the ring - although, bizarrely in that light, everyone reserved a serious respect for The Undertaker, whose gimmick was that he was impervious to pain, and essentially immortal. Something about that absurd idea, and its embodiment by Mark Calloway, was mesmerising. All the rest of it was embarrassing shit, we scoffed, while still watching it all, every second of it.

So, what was the solution? Stop watching, and go back to viewing Jean-Claude Van Damme videos over and over? No. It was to go deeper into the rabbit-hole. One Saturday morning, in a Ballymena newsagents, I picked up an unofficial wrestling publication, and began flicking through its badly printed pages. Superstars of Wrestling. The centre-fold story was about 'Sabu', a wrestler I had never heard of, from a promotion I had never heard of, 'Extreme Championship Wrestling' (ECW). And there, in glorious colour, were pictures of unbelievably outlandish yet realistic violence. In every picture, Sabu was drenched in his own blood. It turned out that in all of his matches, where he displayed a gymnastic prowess rare in the WWF/WWE, he was either being cut open on a barbed wire mesh that surrounded the ring, or injuring himself by somersaulting onto a hapless victim spreadeagled on a table, or wielding or being battered with a baseball bat, or some such.

Christ, I thought: this is Channel Four on a Friday night. This is the password-protected Sky channels. This is gore porn. No more clown costumes. No more flag-waving bullshit. I've just been admitted to the adults section. I collected a copy of every wrestling publication I could find on the shelf and spent all my money on the lot. I blew my wad.

It took some time to find a way of actually getting footage of some of these promotions in the darkest corners of Northern Ireland. But I gradually acquired a working knowledge of a subculture, a cultural space with many divisions and subdivisions. Aside from the Philadelphia-based ECW, there were a couple of old-fashioned southern promotions such as USWA and Smoky Mountain Wrestling (SMW), where the emphasis was on traditional 'rassling' and less on gimmicks and plot-lines.

And beyond the US, there were astonishing promotions in Mexico and Japan. In Mexico, Asistencia Asesoría y Administración (AAA) leaned toward a highly athletic, gymnastic form of wrestling. In Japan,  Frontier Martial Arts Wrestling (FMW) delivered ECW-style gore, while New Japan Pro-Wrestling (NJPW), All Japan Pro-Wrestling (AJPW), and All Japan Women's Pro-Wrestling (AJWPW) were given to martial arts-inflected acrobatics. The cultural differences were huge.

In any American promotion, the selling of punches, the suplexes and arm drags, and even the blood and injuries, were at most fifty percent of what was going on. Apart from the violence, staged more or less plausibly, what made a match work was how effectively the performers, the match commentators, the 'managers', and the referees, all worked the audience. In the ring, the babyface would play up some supposed admirable characteristic like patriotism, inhuman strength, or vulnerability; the heel would strut, or cheat, or display cowardice. If there had to be a storyline for a match and the wrestlers were too boring to sell it, a colourful, verbally gifted manager like Jim Cornette might cheerfully give himself an aneurysm trying to sell it for them. If a blow wasn't sold very well, a commentator would explain it away.

In a Japanese promotion, by contrast, the promos and commentary were strikingly subdued, but the costumes were extravagant, and the manoeuvres more so. The characters and thematics were drawn more from myth and anime - one major Japanese wrestler is literally named Beast-God Lion-Tiger (Jushin Liger) - than from current social stereotypes. And few heels were so bad that they couldn't behave in a sportsmanlike way. They didn't scream at each other like Jerry Springer cast-offs; they just staged imaginative, graceful, competitive violence, using their bodies to create the drama.


There was no way, at any rate, to get any of this stuff through the high street. If you wanted anything other than WWF/WWE's cartoon soap opera, or WCW's pale imitation of same, you had to scour the classified section of the magazines for contacts. And save money. It was like fucking contraband.

And once you did get hold of some samizdat footage, to really understand what you were seeing, and why it worked, you also needed commentary that broke kayfabe*. And you couldn't get that without subscribing to black and white, xeroxed newsletters like Dave Meltzer's Wrestling Observer Newsletter, which generally had good inside information and knew what the outcomes of important matches would be, or Rob Butcher's Suckerpunch, which was mostly sarcastic fan commentary from the south of England.

Being on the tape-trading and newsletter circuit meant being inducted into the smallest yet snottiest subdivision of the subculture. It meant becoming 'hardcore'. And everyone who wasn't 'hardcore' - who was a fan without knowing or caring that the business was fixed, or who only watched a big American promotion, or who didn't know the names of Rey Misterio, Manami Toyota, and Sabu alongside the more familiar Bret Harts and Hulk Hogans, or who knew nothing of the shoot tapes of Jim Cornette, or had never seen an Eighties classic from the NWA, or had no idea that Joey Styles and Bob Caudle were among the best ring commentators in the business - was a 'mark'.

Being 'hardcore' was being in the know, arguing intensely over the finer points of something everyone knew was staged, and yet being magnetically drawn to anything that seemed remotely real. Being 'hardcore' was being part of a miniscule world of people who were fans of something that they disdained; obsessed with a world they emphatically didn't believe in. Being 'hardcore' was somehow being both snobbish about the business and vehemently defensive of it. If you were 'hardcore', one almost believed, the promoters and wrestlers should roll out the red carpet and induct you into the hall of fame already. The 'marks' were so undeserving, so uncultured, yet everything was done for them. We, who mysteriously cared so much about the scene, were constantly frustrated.

Over time, however, the category of 'hardcore' has utterly lost any meaning it had. This happened in part as the WWF/WWE slowly adapted to the rise of the regional promotions like ECW by adopting their ideas and 'adult' content, and imported Japanese wrestlers. It also happened as forms of shoot material were increasingly built into the WWF/WWE spectacle. Jim Cornette's incredibly fluent, witty shoot commentary was given programme space in a promotion that had never before even tried to fake sincerity. Vince McMahon, previously a babyface commentator who tended to obscure his own role as the company boss, used real life situations to turn heel and sell himself as a bad guy who oppressed the wrestlers.

Daesh in Libya posted by Richard Seymour

It seems likely that Daesh affiliates are behind the attack in Belgium last week. Of course, this provoked the usual run of really dreadful commentary, about which I said all I need to say here. However, one thing that is surprisingly omitted in much of the reporting is the way in which Daesh are actually finding new territorial possessions in superficially surprising ways. I say, 'superficially surprising' - no one who understands the underlying dynamic here would be surprised to find that Daesh now has territory in Libya, as well as Syria and Iraq.

Of course, some of the preconditions for Daesh's spread to Libya were provided by the particular nature of the US-led intervention intended to pilot a narrow, pro-US sector of the opposition to power. But the jihadists have particularly benefited in Libya from an Egyptian foreign policy intervention aimed at crushing the Muslim Brothers. For the full background on that, I direct you to my broadcast for TeleSur recently, reviewing the media coverage of Libya and exploring the pretexts for a renewed war in the country:

They don't want Labour to win posted by Richard Seymour

It's important to keep this in mind about Corbyn's back bench baiters. They don't want Labour to win. Not like this. Not with a left-wing leadership. Blair was refreshingly candid about this in the run up to the leadership election: even if a left-wing agenda was the route to electoral victory, he would not take it.

But we must go further. The Labour Right would rather crash the party, humiliate it, drag it through the gutter every single day in the news media, than see it win from the Left. They would rather watch the Tories crush the party every day, until its activists finally say 'uncle' and let the professionals take over again. When Labour MPs anonymously brief Blairite insider Dan Hodges to the effect that they want Labour to lose the London mayoral contest in order not to strengthen Corbyn's hand, they are not expressing an extreme point of view - this is what a significant chunk of the back bench belligerati actually want.

That is not stupid or self-defeating on their part, at least in the short-term. The Labour Right has always thrived on defeat and the demoralisation it inculcates among members and activists. They may not have liked the SDP split, but they knew then that it would strengthen their hand against the Bennites and Militant. And while a split would be unavailing today, they certainly want a swift, merciless punishment of the activists and members who dared to put a radical in charge. They want the grassroots to be begging for salvation, pleading for someone, anyone of arguable charisma - and the bar is set astonishingly low at the moment, with Dan Jarvis and Jess Phillips being the cherished candidates - to take control and restore 'electability'.

That is the point of the ongoing pseudo-controversy mill. To create a constant air of crisis, so that the leadership is always wasting its effort responding to some trivial, or confected outrage, and so that the belligerents can claim to be ongoingly exasperated by the party's humiliation - which, insofar as that is taking place, they are co-authors of. As it happens, and against all odds, Labour is actually recovering slowly in the polls. Notwithstanding the histrionics of the Right, most polls now that Labour has now almost eradicated 5-10 percent lead which the Tories have held since May, so that Labour now either draws level, has a slight lead, or is at most two points behind. One hesitates to credit all of this to Corbyn, particularly since the Tories are scoring a number of own goals at the moment, and I am the last person to underestimate the obstacles facing any left-wing political leadership in the UK. But he must be doing a lot more right than his critics give him credit for. After all, we were told to expect a polling meltdown. We were told that Oldham would go Ukip. We were told that Labour under Corbyn would slump to a quarter of the vote. Not a bit of it, thus far. In fact, as Corbyn steadfastly refuses to triangulate on issues like welfare - in stark contrast to previous leaderships - he is actually landing some blows, and shifting the ideological agenda moderately to the left.

The latest such squabble is therefore coming at a time when Corbyn's position, still unassailable among Labour members, is improving among voters. It concerns a leaked list, classifying Labour MPs by reference to their supposed loyalty - or lack thereof - to Corbyn. Whatever its merits, whoever its authors happen to be, it has been siezed upon by a handful of Labour backbenchers to amplify their demand that Corbyn "stand down". As if. The most vocal of these was John Woodcock MP, a fairly standard Blairite MP who represents a constituency whose local economy depends on British Aerospace, and who has been nurtured at the teat of the Ministry of Defence. He was given space in the Mirror to claim that the party was being embarrassed by a dreadful leadership. This is rather typical of the modus operandi of the Labour Right. They don't know who authored the list, but they know enough to say it must be Corbyn's fault.

So then, let me tell you a story about Woodcock.  I had the chance to meet and debate the man at QMUL a while ago, about the bombing of Daesh in Syria. He lost the vote at the end of the debate, and would have lost it by a wider margin were it not for the Labour First people in the room. But what struck me about him, beyond his pat politician's way of trying very hard not to be detestable and his passive-aggressive whining about Corbyn, was that he didn't know what he was talking about. He had done no preparation, he made no reference to any of the facts about Daesh or Syria, and he was singularly unable to cope with the argument on its own level. Now I know that MPs don't, as a rule, know what they're talking about. But if you come to a debate to argue for bombing a country, you have to incline in favour of appearing to know something about it. Or, if not that, you have to at least be able to offer red meat to your supporters, show signs of being able to draw blood. Woodcock is not the sort of politician who can draw blood.

Only at one point did he find the slightest wind in his sails. I had commented on the futility of attempting to match Daesh's brutality with spectacular displays of violence - at one point the Pentagon claimed to be killing a thousand Daesh fighters a month, but the elevated rate of recruitment just meant that the number of Daesh fighters was growing, while its territorial footprint mutated and spread to Libya. Woodcock, presumably hoping to rouse a smattering of applause, professed himself aghast and 'offended' that I would compare the RAF to Daesh. I interrupted his pitch with a sharp, loud cackle. He looked crestfallen, and muttered, "well... if that's the tone... I think your books are probably... on the wrong shelf." Alas, the expected applause didn't materialise.

The point of this anecdote is not just that Woodcock is not a substantial person. He, of course, is not: but he isn't unique in the parliamentary Labour Party in that respect, as the ongoing search for a suitable anti-Corbyn figurehead repeatedly demonstrates. It is that, I don't think these people know how to conduct a political fight in this era. I question not just their ideas and principles, but their competence. In a more efficiently managed political and media climate, they would look and sound more convincing than they do. In the echo chamber of Westminster and the broadcast and print media, what they say would be so often repeated, and so broadly across the permissible political spectrum, that it would sound like it made sense. It wouldn't sound as vapid as it does.

But this isn't the 1990s. The traditional ideological monopoly of the major parties and their media auxiliaries is breaking down. The political master-narrative of neoliberalism and its verities - "there is no alternative", "the market works best", etc - no longer summon the same type of deference. Generational transformations, no doubt in part linked to the antiwar and pro-Palestine movements of the last decade, also mean that the comforting certainties of a certain kind of Cold War militarism are no longer as effective as they were. You can't fight and win a political battle from the centre-right merely by re-stating what would sound uncontroversial to mandarins, party managers, or hacks, because they don't rule the roost any more. Woodcock and his yappy little confederates may be annoying, but they are to be gently patronised and otherwise ignored, not worried about. They won't persuade Labour members, and they probably won't win much sympathy from the wider public.

The people to worry about are the ones who keep their powder dry, their knives whistle-clean, their voices low and courteous. The ones who at least sound like they 'get it', and are able to roll with it, patiently, for the time being. One such is implausibly listed among the 'core group plus' of loyalists on the leaked list. His name is Tom Watson MP.

Not your grandfather's working class posted by Richard Seymour

Why does Cameron want to bomb Syria? posted by Richard Seymour

Parliament has voted for war, with a sizeable majority for the government's side, with an estimated 67 Labour MPs rebelling against the leadership.  At least part of this is a result of the weakness of the parliamentary opposition to war.  While Labour's right-wingers partially wanted to use the war to shaft Corbyn (particular dishonour goes to Hillary Benn, who shamelessly invoked the International Brigades), the opposition leader and his allies were ideologically weak and made a crucial political mis-step in allowing a free vote.  It's galling to think that Miliband was actually far more effectual, causing the Tories a major crisis at the time, than Corbyn has been, and it indicates something about the strategic dilemmas posed by trying to rehabilitate the left from within a parliamentary context.  Nonetheless, we're about to go to war, on Cameron's terms.  Why?

Of course, the UK is already bombing Syria, as it is bombing Iraq.  And this fact is itself part of Cameron's case for war.  As he explained, "it is working in Iraq" and so it will probably work in Syria.  So what is his mission?  To "degrade ISIL and reduce the threat they pose".

Please note the incredibly obvious evacuation of meaning in this appeal.  'Degrade' and 'reduce' Daesh?  One is reminded of the rationale given for Clinton's bombing of Iraq in 1998, viz. that it would 'degrade and diminish' Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and his ability to threaten his neighbours.  Even if Hussein had still been in possession of such weapons, this rhetoric was meaningless.  You can arguably 'degrade' just by breaking a window.  You can arguably 'diminish' just by decapitating a passing teenager.  These are not precise objectives.

On the subject of Iraq, is it in fact, "working" there?  I don't think we should be under any illusion that the superior firepower of the US and its allies, tied to ground forces, can militarily defeat Daesh. And the evidence is that  Daesh has lost territory and important supply routes, its footprint is shrinking.  Most of these losses in Iraq have not come about through bombing, but rather through the exertions of the Iraqi Army and Kurdish peshmerga.  (This is why there is so much emphasis on Cameron's claim that there are 70,000 fighters in Syria ready to support and coordinate with a bombing campaign.)  Yet, as in all such wars, the dominant axis on which these matters are settled is political rather than military.  And in that light, we have to think about why such gains as are made often seem to melt away astonishingly quickly.

One reason given by the military leadership is what Major General Tim Cross calls the low "moral cohesion" of the Iraqi army.  That is to say, even in scenarios where they have outnumbered their Daesh rivals, they have withdrawn from combat rather than being willing to bear losses.  US Defence Secretary Ashton Carter likewise blames a lack of "will to fight" on the Iraqi side.  This is why the US is escalating its involvement on the ground by deploying "special expeditionary forces".  Clearly, this says volumes about the nature of the regime deploying such troops and its ability to summon loyalty, but more fundamentally I suspect that such apparent lack of valour derives from a simple calculus: what will we do once we have taken the territory?

After all, the Sunni triangle was lost to the Iraqi army for a reason: because the government of Iraq has no legitimacy there, having expended all of it in waves of sectarian repression and persistent, structural exclusion.  Nouri al-Maliki, under US tutelage, consolidated a sectarian power base in the south of Iraq, while systematically moving to repress and marginalise non-sectarian Sunni opponents.  Mass protests in Sunni areas produced no change in policy, and in fact protest was met by torture and executions carried out by Shia death squads.  Maliki was elected on a platform nominally committed to opposing sectarianism and the fragmentation of Iraq, but evidently saw no compelling reason to reverse the patterns established since 2003.  So, even if the Iraqi army was able to recapture Ramadi, there is no good reason to think they would be able to keep it.  It would be something, at least, if there was a sincere Iraqi nationalism aimed at preserving the unity and integrity of the state, but that doesn't even appear to be the official doctrine in Baghdad.  And it doesn't strike one as obvious that their soldiers should think of dying just so that Maliki and his patrimonial allies can hang on to another piece of territory. It is for this reason that the fragility of the Iraqi Army is often contrasted with the relative discipline and cohesion of Daesh (who are, to be clear, a motley assortment of ultra-reactionary Islamists, secular Ba'athists, and jihadi tourists).

If we prioritise the political analysis over the military analysis, it becomes easier to understand how this has happened, how Daesh has been able to significantly increase its global recruitment in the context of the bombing campaign, and how it might continue to metastasise globally even if it is deprived of its present territorial resources.  This should be borne in mind each time Cameron or a pro-war MP says that the question is whether we fight them here or over there: the answer is that you'll be doing the former more on account of the latter.  It also puts the question of 'civilian deaths' in its correct context.  This is not only a humanitarian issue - and we should be wary of allowing it to be reduced to such, as the ruling class often proves fairly adept at neutralising and manipulating humanitarian sentiment which isn't appropriately politicised.  The murder of large numbers of residents of large population centres by aerial bombardment is, in this context, in this world, precisely what is most likely to galvanise support for Daesh.  And it is clear that in Iraq at least, they do enjoy some support.

But Cameron argues that the bombing of Daesh in Raqqa is part of a wider, sophisticated strategy in which, through political pressure and international dialogue, a "new government" will be brought to power in Syria.  Leaving aside, for the second, all arguments about the merits of such a policy, the idea that bombing Daesh-controlled population centres in Syria is an essential aspect of relieving Assad of power is absurd.  Even if the stated goal of 'degrading' and 'reducing' ISIS suddenly acquired some sort of urgent precision, even if Daesh started to concede territory rather than consolidating their dominion, it is not obvious what effect this would have on the balance of power between Assad and the Syrian opposition, or upon the diplomacy. It is quite possible that Assad would be the major beneficiary by using his superior military clout to take the vacated territory.  Notably, this is exactly what has happened as Assad, backed by Russian military clout, took towns near Homs from Daesh - they began to use that territorial gain to escalate the offensive against the opposition in Homs.  That leads us to another aspect of the war, which is precisely the Russian intervention on behalf of Assad.  There is thus far no sign that this will abate.  Indeed, if a new bombing campaign begins and the stakes are raised, it is likely that Russia will intensify its bombing of opposition-held territories.  Indeed, there are already claims - denied by the Kremlin - that Russia has despatched ground troops.

So given that there is no apparent commitment to entering into military combat either with Assad or with his Russian backers - and I think that is a good thing - it is not obvious what kind of military yield is expected.  There is unlikely to be any kind of convincing breakthrough that will validate the campaign any time soon, and it seems that before long the question of ground troops will be posed.

We are still, then, left with the question we began with.  The explicit rationales offered for the bombing campaign plainly make no sense, and the government's propaganda looks incredibly shaky around it. It seems to me that there is a logic to the bombing, but it has far less to do with Syria than it does with: i. the calculus of consolidating the Conservative leadership in parliament, reversing the setback in 2013, and weakening the opposition (which, mission accomplished); ii. the domestic politics of putting any potential anti-austerity alliance centre on the Corbyn-led Labour Party on the back-foot; and iii. the geopolitics of augmenting the global prestige of an imperialist military.  This can be done in a low-cost way (the estimated tens of millions of pounds cost being insignificant in government spending terms), and in an era when the government has been significantly cutting the military budget.  It is also easy to effect, as the bombers will simply be diverted from their existing missions in Iraq as of tomorrow.

It is not that imperialist states would not have good reason to want to destroy Daesh.  Of course they do.  They don't appreciate massacres in their major cities, and the US doesn't feel like ceding a big chunk of Iraq, which they expended a lot of blood and treasure to get control over, to the jihadis.  It is just that the bombing campaign is peripheral to that objective.  The problem is political.  The reason Daesh could take control in parts of Iraq is because of the pathologies of a sectarian state.  The reason it has ground in parts of Syria is because of a civil war in which Assad, backed by Russian imperialism, is massacring the opposition.  Neither problem is amenable to this bombing campaign.

EasyJet and Gap Yahs. posted by Richard Seymour

This is the Britain Stronger in Europe first campaign video:

 

The Meaning of the Precariat posted by Richard Seymour

My early-morning talk at the Subversive Festival, in Zagreb.

The culture of genocide posted by Richard Seymour

Jeremy Corbyn is opposed, under any circumstances, to the use of weapons of mass destruction.  He is opposed to weapons whose use is inherently genocidal.  There is no circumstance under which it is conceivable that the military use of nuclear weapons would be anything short of insane, and Corbyn is opposed to that.  He would not push the button.  And our political and media class finds this to be outrageous.

The pundits are noisy and truculent.  But behind their noisy rationalisations, there is this symptomatic aporia.  They will not say it.  Not a single one of them can or will say under what circumstances they would consider the use of nuclear weapons.  Instead, we get mysteriously complacent bluster along the lines that "it would be lovely to live in Corbyn's world of magical elves and fairies, faw faw faw, where no one is ever unkind, faw faw faw, but this is the real world, faw faw faw, what would he do if the Islamic State threatened Britain with a dirty bomb, faw faw faw...".

The Westminster consensus is monstrous.  It couldn't be clearer that for its adherents, Britain's role in the world, and all of the immense material gains that businesses and investors derive from this dominance, depends upon the continued implied threat of nuclear genocide - and they're ultimately very comfortable with that.

It is better that we know this than that we don't.  We have endured years of histrionics over weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East.  The 'Iran deal', about which there is some misplaced triumphalism, followed years of belligerent falsehoods and tub-thumping for war, because someone might break Israel's nuclear monopoly in the region.  And the very same state elites and a media claques that would not hesitate to 'push the button', and for whom the idea of not ever doing that is something absurd and drippy, to be scoffed at, are the ones who raised the alarm.  It is, as I say, good to know.

The two faces of Labourism posted by Richard Seymour

Our feral, lying, good for nothing media posted by Richard Seymour

You don't see the consensus in all of its suffocating conformity until someone challenges it.

If you want to know what the consensus is made of, just look at what the media considers a gaffe.  Corbyn, a republican, doesn't sing the royalist national anthem.  Gaffe.  Corbyn, a socialist, appointed a hard-left socialist as shadow chancellor.  Gaffe.  Corbyn refused to answer journalists' questions.  Ultra-gaffe.  That's just rude.  From the Guardian to the Express, from the New Statesman's craven toeing of the Blairite line to the lies in supposedly neutral dailies like the Metro, from The Sun's made-up 'exclusives' to the queue of Labour MPs and liberal pundits lining up to spew bile for the Daily Mail, from Tory attack ads to the Telegraph screaming for Corbyn's head, the media and the political class have near total unanimity in their ferocious anti-socialism.  I know we call them 'the bourgeois media', but not even the most crass, petty-minded Stalinist apparatchik could have produced a caricature as venomous and despicable as our lot.

In that vein, let me draw your attention to a story that has appeared in The Independent, with these words in the headline: "Jeremy Corbyn 'loses a fifth of Labour voters'".  Understand, this headline is a complete lie.  The first warning is those scare quotes.  Before the authors even get to the story, they're distancing themselves from its major argument.  The next is the fact that the article opens, not - as would be logical - with a quick summary of the point of the story, but with some entirely other statistics.  The third is that, when they actually do refer to the main point of the story in the second paragraph, it is already watering the story down, saying that one in five people who previously voted Labour are "more likely to vote Conservative next time".  That is already not the same as Corbyn 'losing' a fifth of Labour voters.  Unsurprisingly, even this claim is given no elaboration.  Instead, the juice of the story is presented in a series of charts, which represent the results of the study.  What the figures actually show is as follows:

63% of Labour voters say they are more likely to vote Labour in the next election with Corbyn as leader, as opposed to 20% of those voters who say they are more likely to vote Conservative.  There are similarly polarised responses among other voters.  So, for example, over a third of SNP voters, approximately a third of Lib Dems, about one fifth of UKIP voters and 8% of Tories are more likely to vote Labour with Corbyn as Labour leader.  By the same token, four fifths of Tory voters are more determined to vote for their own party, just under a fifth of SNP voters would be more likely to vote Tory, while a third of Liberals and a whopping 40% of Ukipers would be more likely to vote Conservative.  Corbyn has not lost a fifth of Labour voters.  What he has done is polarised the voters.  And polarisation, in this context, is a good thing.  It shows that there's something in the fight, for once, and that people are being motivated.

What is more, these results give us a clue as to how evaluate the responses to other questions.  In ORB and Yougov's polling, there have been questions asked which follow the agenda of the Conservatives and the anti-Corbyn media, inquiring as to exactly how much like a Prime Minister Corbyn looks, how much you'd trust him with this or that.  The results, of course, don't look good.  Corbyn is a new figure for most of the public, his policy ideas are new, and they are being brought up in a context of near total ideological monopoly of neoliberalism for over thirty years.  His first days as leader have been characterised by an intense campaign of character assassination.  I think it would be odd, in the best of circumstances, for a majority of people to suddenly find him utterly trustworthy on the economy and schools, and these are not the best of circumstances.  And yet, here you have evidence that far from being put off, a very considerable number of people are attracted to Corbyn's Labour.  The only electoral poll we've had since Corbyn's election as Labour leader thus far, has given Labour a small bounce, rather than registering some sort of collapse in the Labour vote.  To me, this is a good reminder of how carefully to handle such polls - the answers to polling question are as polysemic as the questions themselves.  If asked whether Corbyn looks Prime Ministerial, you could quite honestly answer 'no', given the way the image of Corbyn is mediated, and still think he's a huge improvement on everyone else thus far.

Understand this.  The ferocity of the British media in this instance has nothing whatever to do with Corbyn's media strategy, spin or lack thereof.  Certainly, they're offended at Corbyn's refusal to play their game.  Certainly, they would be kinder to a slick, amoral businessman bashing immigrants.  But the media will never coddle Corbyn in the way that it does Farage.  Not for him the complicit, stagey antagonism with which right-wing populists are greeted.  The difference is that the mass media in this country agrees with and defends and articulates the principles upon which Farage stakes his claims, but can barely understand let alone sympathise with the principles underlying the current Labour leadership's position.

You can't understand the reasons for this in simple commercial terms.  It isn't about securing advertising accounts, or selling copy.  Nor is it simply about the short-term interests of their proprietors.  It is primarily about their integration into the party-political machinery.  It is about their dependence on, and participation in, the exercise of state power. They are active participants in policy debates, the selection of political leaders, and the outcome of elections.  Apart from the schools, they are the major institutions through which the dominant ideology of the national state is reproduced.  They are, in short, "ideological state apparatuses".  And the reason they are going feral is because the traditional mode of their domination is under attack.  That, too, is a good thing.