Unforbidden Politics posted by Richard Seymour

Adam Phillips, in his latest book, Unforbidden Pleasures, quotes Oscar Wilde to the effect that the trouble with socialism is that it takes up too many evenings. This quip reminds us, he says, "that there may always be things that we care more about than the things we care most about".

Most activists will recognise the dilemma. Anyone with an experience in revolutionary politics, in particular, can call to mind the brutal slog of windswept Saturday afternoons, freezing early morning appointments outside factory gates and tube stations, long walkabouts with a couple of dozen demonstrators, door-to-door campaigning for no-hope electoral projects, and terrified, adrenaline-fuelled vigils against parading neo-Nazis. Is it a particular disappointment if much of that energy (not all of it, but a lot of it) was wasted? Is it so terrible that most of these rituals of activism (not all, but most) for most of the time had long since ceased to be an effective use of energy and resources, to the extent that they ever were? Do we really need to mourn the hours wasted on activities that were mainly, from an organisational perspective, about sustaining party identity and discipline? Not necessarily. There is something to be gained from that kind of discipline, at least for a while. There is something to be accumulated from regularly trying to interact with members of the public, and forge a rapport on the basis of the most limited contact, be it self-confidence, patience, or a certain knowhow.

The trouble is that it does tend to make politics more forbidding than it needs to be. Socialism will always take up too many evenings, even without the bullshit. And in the context of revolutionary politics, it usually segues into a punitive moralism, the currency of which is how 'active' you are. In the first sect to which I belonged, great stress was placed on being 'active'. If someone fell out of favour and became a subject of gossip, the worst thing that could be said about them was that they had become 'very inactive' and thus, concomitantly, 'pessimistic'. People who broke with the party during one of its many crises could be cheaply explained away in these terms. People who were being difficult could be guilted about not being active enough - because, implicitly, no one is ever active enough, not even a full-timer. One can always sacrifice more of one's life. The more you give in to this logic, this revolutionary guilt, the stronger its grip becomes. You don't alleviate it by becoming 'more active,' but by reconsidering the ends of active politics.

In the second sect to which I belonged, of course, the axis of moralism often shifted to that of one's supposed or actual 'privilege'. Even today, one can find the now dispersed constituents of that sect either apologising for, or sneering at, 'privilege' construed in its broadest possible sense. If you have a one-bedroom flat, a job, access to an NHS hospital, a living wage, etc etc., you can be considered 'privileged'. And in a sense that is true: these are, relative to worse-off conditions, privileges. And I think that privilege is a category that we have to try to work with and apply rigorously, notwithstanding its difficulties. And if someone 'checks your privilege,' sometimes you have to stop and think about how privilege in some sense could be affecting your language or behaviour. The problem with the confessional mode of privilege politics, however, is that in the broad sense in which privilege is used, everyone is privileged relative to someone else. It becomes tedious and recursive to continually invoke this category either by way of explanation or critique. And if it becomes the basis of individual guilt-mongering and gossip, then in some ways it is actually worse than moralism about 'activism'. One can at least strive to be more active or make excuses for not doing so; the only way to deal with being 'privileged' is to confess it, continually, to preface everything one says with "I know I'm privileged, but...". At its worst, this becomes (quite logically) both self-pitying and masochistic: "I wish my privilege didn't impose such blinders on me, it's such a disability, it impedes my activism every day, I'm so unfortunate for being so fortunate, please, I need you all to call me out on my fuck-ups, thank you so much." You notice how the difference between self-indulgence and self-laceration collapses here, just as the gap between spiting others and spiting oneself tends to be lost.

If socialist politics is necessarily somewhat forbidding, then, the left has always found ingenious ways to make it more so, to intricate it with the logic of punishment, to convert passionate political commitment into a soul-deadening and exhausting ordeal, to turn comrades vicious, to sap humour and elan, and to turn neurotic self-immolation and guilt into a political principle. Feeding such a tyrannical political superego has little to do with being effective or successful, of course, but the lure of moralism is that it touches on something real. We all could be more active, and we all feel bad about that. We all recognise ways in which our life situation necessarily distorts and frames our perspectives. We all know that we are subjectively imbricated with structures of oppression, that class, race, gender, sexuality and other axes of injustice are also part of the substrate upon which our subjectivity is formed. And sometimes we do, in fact, fuck up. Even with the most thoroughgoing change in the economy of one's desire achieved by politicisation, purity is never on the cards. It is the left equivalent of original sin, a weakness or susceptibility that marks even the most experienced cadres. And it makes us strangely submissive, compliant, easy to order about or be silenced, ready to accept and internalise spite. And if not that, then overly dependent on dogma as a crutch, guaranteeing us a seemingly unassailable position from which to speak. And if not that, then thinly rebellious and contrarian in ways that are profoundly invested in the political superego that is being rebelled against. It doesn't bring out the best in anyone.

Notably, these tendencies are at their worst in periods of defeat and stasis, when nothing exciting seems to be happening and nothing engages the desire that brought one into political activity in the first place. The periods of excitement and tantalising possibility give us a brief sense of what an unforbidden politics might look like, and what we might do with ourselves if we weren't worshipping at the feet of a ridiculous political superego.

Aspiration is a loser's game. posted by Richard Seymour

The Times, the Blairite/Cameronite wing of the Murdoch press, brings us news that the Labour Right is descending into madness:


'Aspiration' is a richly polysemic term, and can mean many things - but pray god, let it not become a by-word for billionaires sluicing torrents of cash to central American tax havens. Let us not allow the Blairites to do that to our political language. Even Peter Mandelson didn't stretch it this far. Even he, who was "intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich", added the stipulation: "as long as they pay their taxes".

The occasion for the latest controversy is the 11.5 million leaked documents from the offshore law firm Mossack Fonseca, which disclose some of the means used by billionaires, celebrities, political leaders and crooks to circumvent taxes, laws and regulations. We have barely seen a tithe of the revelations yet, and most of the material will not be released by the media firms holding onto it. However, even the limited revelations that we have seen have produced ideological shockwaves. The agenda-setting press, usually on the side of business and billionaires as far as they possibly can be, have tended to accept that this looks bad. The Times itself considers this "capitalism's great crisis". The Prime Minister of Iceland, exposed by the leaks, has been forced to resign, and he may not be the last.

David Cameron, himself hit by the revelations, has felt compelled to promise new anti-evasion legislation and publish his tax returns. His approval ratings have sank, and Corbyn has pulled ahead of him. Conservative MPs who try to defend or mitigate tax evasion suddenly look either shifty or mad. Newspapers everywhere across the country are running polls asking if the Prime Minister should resign - universally, even in the right-wing Express, readers are saying 'yes'. In the background to this are all the complex ideological arguments about austerity and living standards after the credit crunch. If the majority of people were persuaded of the need for 'belt-tightening', and even went along with the idea that those on welfare would have it tightened the most, they were sold on the basis that at least there would be some residual degree of equity in how the pain was distributed. We were, in a minimal sense, 'all in it together'. The agitation of UK Uncut around the issue of tax avoidance in 2010-11 raised the issue of corporate tax evasion as a major factor cutting revenues for public spending, and the created a series of public-relations crises for the firms implicated. At the time, Cameron even made headlines with repeated criticism of tax avoiding companies and individuals. His speech to the 2013 Davos conference made cracking down on tax evasion a central theme. His actions never matched his words, but the point is that something like an ideological consensus exists around tax evasion.

In short, the Panama Papers have produced a crisis of legitimacy for the government and for its austerity project. The story they tell is not about hard-working, aspiring individuals being clever and creative with their finances. It is about class, and about how the super-rich have for several decades been waging a successful war of tax resistance, depriving the treasury of tens of billions of pounds each year, and thus reducing the sum of funds available for schools and hospitals. In a way, it confirms and validates what everyone already knew; in another way, it forces the issue, making everyone think about and confront the cold, brutal facts. You can evade taxes for years and get a knighthood; or you can over claim a few pounds on welfare, and get locked up. Given the scale of the government's crisis, Corbyn would be derelict were he to do anything other than strike repeatedly and boldly. If he relented in the way that critics are now demanding, they would have every right to complain. He would not be doing his job.

Now, in this context, what is the logic of members of the shadow cabinet intervening anonymously to spare Tory blushes? Why should they try to push the ideological agenda to the right of where Cameron has stood for years, and to the right of where Mandelson once stood? There are a number of possibilities. One is that they have investments of their own to worry about. A second is that they are protecting Labour business donors, who might have to answer questions fairly soon. A third is that they are worried that Corbyn is going to do quite well out of this, and that Labour's concomitant gains in the polls will prolong the marginalisation of the party's right-wing. That would make sense: they have proven time and again that they don't want Labour to win. The fourth and final possibility is far more worrying: they truly believe, as a matter of strategy and principle, that beyond all the fuss this is not a big deal and that there is a fairly stoical bulwark of 'aspirational' voters out there who not only don't object to billionaire tax resistance, but aspire to be in the same position themselves one day.

Their intervention here is akin, in its rationale, to that of Labour MPs who lobbied Miliband not to go too hard on austerity since Labour would have to implement cuts of its own if it regained office, and not to be too critical of 'irresponsible capitalism', since Labour would need irresponsible capitalism once in government. The blistering zenith of this cunning strategy was: i.) Ed Balls saying, before the general election, that he agreed with every cut in George Osborne's budget; ii.) Ed Miliband saying, before the general election, that he wouldn't let the SNP wreck Tory cuts or stop Trident; and iii.) Harriet Harman insisting, after the general election, that Labour MPs should abstain on welfare cuts rather than be seen to against aspiration. It is not so much a strategy as a nosedive into oblivion. It is the formula for Pasokification distilled to its precise chemical components. And it is, of course, why they lost control of the leadership in the first place. It isn't just that they don't want Labour to win on any sort of left-wing agenda. It is that what they think constitutes success is exactly what will obviate the purpose of Labourism, and finish it off for good.

Aspiration, for Labour, is and always has been a loser's game.

Green Party grows down posted by Richard Seymour

Hey gang! Aren't all these politicians silly? A buncha kids, that's what they are! Not like us, we're grown ups - aren't we, kids? This is the Green Party's pitch, in toto:



Anyone with a long enough memory can place the inspiration for this vomit-worthy atrocity more or less precisely. It's Liberal-SDP, circa 1987. The idea is to set up two untenable extremes, then define an imaginary, common-sense, middle-ground voter to cater to. But this is not just condescending, trivialising tripe, it is politically unintelligent.

The problem for the Greens, as they know very well but can't admit here, is that they agree with most of what Corbyn is doing. And for as long as Corbynism is on the ascent, and actually achieving something, they are going to have trouble defending their hard-won electoral niche. The smart play, and the genuinely adult thing to do, would be to declare this openly: "We agree with Jeremy when he opposes cuts, works against Trident, and denounces racism and war. The problem is that he's the captive of a party whose elite despises him, won't let him be effective and will one day try to get rid of him.  We will work to support Jeremy in parliament when he does the right thing, but if you want to see a progressive politics free of these sorts of games, then vote for the Green Party." That wouldn't stop them losing votes, but it would give them somewhere plausible to start from in the event that Corbynism does begin to degenerate.

The fact that the Greens can't openly admit that on most policy specifics, they agree with Corbyn, is itself the most infantile, tribal, yah-boo tedium, packaged as an appeal to #grownuppolitics. If the Greens want to openly become the new Liberal Democrats, that is their prerogative - but I don't see the electoral yield in that.

Bernie Sanders in the media posted by Richard Seymour

My latest media review covers the misleading coverage of Bernie Sanders's campaign:

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.