The End of Capitalism?

Endism is on trend. Brexit, Trump, the collapse of the liberal establishment, the eclipse of reason. These aren't the end times, but for some it sure does feel like then. Let's throw another thing that might be coming to an end into the mix: our jolly old friend and companion, capitalism. Yup, it's on its way out (and might already be dead) according to Wolfgang Streeck in the latest issue of Juncture, the journal of the IPPR. This has to be located in the recent spate of end-of-capitalism-isms, usually associated with Paul Mason in this country, and more generally with the line of work coming out of the Hardt/Negri/Boutang stable. Whereas these folks concentrate on the objective growing power and capacity of labour power vis a vis capital and emphasise its potential to grow something new within the womb provided by capitalism's increasing dependency on immaterial labour and high technology, Streeck takes a different tack.

His argument is an iteration of the breakdown theories of capitalism, that its contradictions mount and amplify each other to such a degree that it undermines itself, resulting in a wind down of the system and, if we're unlucky, social collapse. Thankfully, that isn't what Streeck has in mind. Instead, he thinks we can look forward to a "prolonged period of social entropy, of radical uncertainty and indeterminacy" (p.69). Given what's going on here and over there, the interregnum might already be with us. And what it looks like is the breakdown of macro regulation and integration of the state, capitalism, and the institutions and industrial sectors that compose the whole political economic ensemble. The state withdraws and the collective responsibility of social risk is offloaded onto individuals. This process, long identified with neoliberal economics and governance leads to the under-institutionalisation of society, a reduced capacity for government to discharge its functions, and manifests symptoms of "ungovernability". This presents a big problem for capital because it too is disciplined and conditioned by regimes of accumulation. Because regulation was worried away by governments, the institutional architecture isn't there any more for sustainable growth. Capital is entering a cycle of unstable boom and bust.

For Streeck, the hole swallowing capitalism is an outcome of the accumulating contradictions associated with the previous implementation of solutions to what looked like conjunctrual crises. 1970s inflation was tackled by wage squeezes and throwing people out of work. The 1980s was the decade of big deficit spending, thanks primarily to huge tax cuts for capital to keep the accumulation show on the road. But with saturated markets and stuttering wage growth across the advanced economies, public indebtedness was matched by private indebtedness. Thatcher's boom and bust in the 1980s was a petri dish preview of what was to happen 20 years later: the pyramid of debt fell in and almost dragged the global economy with it. Each solution multiplied contradictions and stored up a crash in the future. The problem is the crisis hasn't flushed the system. Debt, private and public, is up. Deficit spending remains. Cuts and more deregulation have hindered, not aided growth. Unemployment has stabilised, but job growth is not a like-for-like replacement of those destroyed by the crash and austerity-happy governments. Instead underemployment has helped keep the official jobless tallies low, and all the while central banks are printing money, handing it to banks, and fuelling another round of speculation and lending. Madness.

Want more problems? Capitalism has them. For Streeck, for the last 200 years capitalism has depended on a powerful, order-making state, a great power among great powers with the financial clout and military projection to make the world safe for profit making and profit taking. That hegemon in the 19th century was Britain, and after 1945 it was the United States. Through the Marshall Plan and overweening military dominance, Washington imposed a new order on Europe's exhausted, broken states that integrated them into a new global economic order. It was premised on containing the threat imposed by the Soviet Union and its client states, up to and including "suspect" independence movements in the former colonies. It survived the oil and inflation shocks of the 1970s and the neoliberal turn, but once the USSR went under and China was increasingly integrated into global capitalism, what was left were unstable, frail/failed states, civil wars, and repressive governments. Because the US rolled back its own institutional capacities, it and its allies were largely uninterested in the goings ons at the fringes of capital's domain. That is, until, the violence of these territories were exported back as terrorism. The hegemon cannot impose its will, and that is now open to contest from rising powers and two-bit tyrannies.

Politically, the break down has had two political consequences. Displeasure with this chaotic state of affairs first manifested itself as indifference/apathy to politics, but is now working its way through political participation. Usually (but not always) it tilts to the right. It rejects established political elites and grasps hold of the ideological resources to hand. In America and Britain, with weakened and almost politically invisible labour movements, that has meant the nation is the preferred crutch of choice. As internationalism and the market is associated with remote, socially liberal but condescending politicians, the temptation is to write this movement off as irredeemably bigoted. Yet the core political content, hidden beneath layers of irrationality was succinctly expressed in the Leave's 'take back control' slogan. It's a confused and confusing expression of the desire to ground accountability, of exercising direction over the invisible processes that promote social anxiety and empower institutions that can make this happen.

Streeck certainly makes a lot of sense. Politics is volatile to the point that those used to talking about it don't know what they're talking about anymore. Global capitalism's political economy is in a mess, and will get messier if President Trump (let that sink in for a second) pursues a tariff war with China. Theresa May seems to have an inkling about what what needs to be done, but the Tories cannot be trusted to pull British capitalism out of the woods - especially as they're the ones that got it lost there in the first place. That said, I don't think this is a case of too little too late. Leaving aside the export of Putinism to the United States, Eastern Europe and, possibly, France next May there are a number of long range stabilisers due to kick in. As Toby Nangle points out in his piece, Inequality's Inflection Point (in the same volume), 40 years of neoliberalism and all it entailed (chiefly, the breaking of the labour movement's political clout) was made possible by the entry of two billion workers into the global labour market. Now we're reaching the point where their integration is putting pressure on wages. The remaining untapped pools of labour, chiefly in rural India and sub-Saharan Africa can't be so easily wired into capital's circuits. Part of it is infrastructural, and part of it is, from capital's standpoint, a lack of basic formal education and skill. Second, the baby boomer generation in the West will vacate occupations as they move into retirement, allowing the smaller X, Y, and Millennial cohorts more in the way of job opportunities. Therefore, demography favours a balance back to labour in the long run, and gives capital the impetus to invest in more automation to offset wage pressures.

The second issue with Streeck is the writing out of politics. It can and likely will force change on capitalism. Those voting for Trump hoped for a more paternalist economics, but already his tax cuts plans which, shock, benefit the top the most will exacerbate the problems American (and world) capitalism has. Yet necessity has to kick in at some point, and his support are expecting something more than bluster and bullshit. The same is true with the petty Putins looking to make their move all over Europe. They are stoking a hell of their own making if the same old crap carries on under new management. In a way, May (at the level of rhetoric, at least) shows these populist movements and politicians-elect their future - a restored state that intervenes to undo the great disaggregation and promote new markets, even if only for their political survival. The second comes from the politically conscious among the constituency identified by Hardt, Negri, and friends. Appalled by the idiocies of Brexit and Trump, opposed to authoritarianism and the xenophobia, racism, and hate they've stirred up, they too will impact on politics. It's happened and is happening in Britain. Spain, Greece, and America have felt its presence. It's a new international coming into being, and one that capital accumulation is increasingly dependent on. The job of the left is to deepen its politicisation, connect with what remains of the labour movement, and push out into the base of sundry populists, Putinists, and nationalists. The act of doing so can transform capitalism, restore its vigour and, who knows, lay the grounds for its supercession by something better.

Marine Le Pen on Andrew Marr

When it comes to fascists and the far right, giving them air time is a decision that should not be made lightly. If they are to appear, they should be rigorously challenged and forced to defend themselves. Anything less just gives them an opportunity to push their propaganda. When I learned that Andrew Marr was to be interviewing the French National Front leader, Marine Le Pen this Remembrance Sunday, I thought the BBC were having a laugh. It was obvious this encounter was not going to be a grilling. If you want to drag someone over the coals, you send for Jeremy Paxman or Andrew Neil. Marr, never known for his combative interviewing style, treated the French fascist leader as one indulges a pet tamagotchi.

It was a master class in poor interviewing. Not only did her lies go unchallenged, Marr also gave Le Pen free reign to push her views in the gently, gently, tones that have won her party a large following. On multiculturalism, she said that in the English-speaking countries, fundamentalist Islam is advancing. Demonstrably untrue. On the European Union, her Europe of free nations stands opposed to the "totalitarian" EU - more rubbish. Asked about Russia, Le Pen expressed her admiration for Vladimir Putin's model of "reasoned protectionism". You know, the sort of "reason" that allows for the murder of journalists and persecution of LGBT Russians. Not once did Marr step in to challenge these bullshit views as Le Pen looked relaxed and, at times, appeared to be enjoying herself.

Asked about Muslims in France and whether they have anything to fear from a FN presidency, which looks more likely thanks to Trump's victory, she replied "we're not going to welcome any more people. We're full up." A decent journalist might have snapped back that this wasn't the question that was asked. Going on, she said the FN were not bothered about people's religions, as long as they abided by secular French codes and values. This would be the same Le Pen who compared public prayers by Muslims to the Nazi occupation of France, and said that the increasing "Islamisation" of France was putting "civilisation" at risk. Utter drivel.

And then Marr made the misstep of allowing her to emphasise the generational break between her FN, and the more openly authoritarian and classically fascist FN of her father. Along with claiming that her party isn't racist (a claim easy enough to rebut had Marr bothered doing the most cursory homework), she was allowed to burnish her own "anti-fascism" by calling the Holocaust - the historic culmination of Europe's fascist experience - the central feature of the Second World War. Famously, Jean-Marie Le Pen referred to it as a detail.

What then is the point in all this, apart from showing the dismal standard of Marr's journalism? I'm not quite sure the BBC know either, though it does smack of the liberal naivete you can often find in its circles. "That Marine Le Pen is interesting and controversial, let's have her on." The worrying thing, however, is the actual content of the interview. Prattling on to her heart's content, there was very little, if anything, that hasn't already spilled forth from the mouths of UKIP and right wing Tory politicians. Nothing Le Pen said hasn't already found itself expressed - often, more stridently - in editorials and hatchet jobs. Our politics have become so poisoned that her small-minded anti-Islam, anti-foreigner, anti-EU scapegoating idiocies don't seem all that horrifying any more. And thanks to Andrew Marr, he's just helped normalise the reception Le Pen and her hate-fuelled mob can expect in Britain.

Short Notes on Populism

Brexit, Trump. Trump, Brexit. Brexit Brexit. Trump. Trump. What disasters. And it's not over yet, what with actual fascists lining up to take the presidencies of Austria and France. It's as if the 2008 crash was the nuclear explosion, and the collapse of political establishments across the West fold as the slow coming blast wave bursts them apart. Politics is poisoned, and it's difficult to see how it can be bent in a positive direction.

Offering their own solutions come Owen Jones for the left, and Ryan Shorthouse for the right. As you might expect, I'm inclined to concur with the former rather than the latter. Owen recommends that the left ride the populist, anti-establishment wave rather than leave it to the Farages of this world, and re-embed ourselves in our working class communities. This sounds like a very straight forward aim, but for one thing. Hasn't leftist populism already taken over the Labour Party? Jeremy Corbyn might be an unusual populist, when you consider his style is the very antithesis of the tub-thumping charismatic leader. He doesn't talk in simple soundbites like the new US president-elect, preferring instead policy-heavy talking points. And the Labour leader is very well aware the party has to push policies that deliver for our working class support. You see, Corbyn is a populist in as far as he opposes the aspirations and the interests of those locked out (or perceive themselves as such) of the system to a battered policy consensus that puts business and the markets above all else. It hasn't and won't likely fly with the media in the future, but that would be the case if a charismatic leader replaced Jeremy anyway. Trying to make the populism we've got work rather than wishing for a new one might be a good start to the left trying to take it seriously.

As for Ryan, coming from a conservative background he's occupying very different terrain. He opposes the populist wave and calls for a struggle against "anti-establishmentarianism". Almost as catchy as the 'for constitutional fidelity' strap line used by independent US presidential contender, Evan McMullin. Ryan's piece is useful because he offers a defence of the established order. For him, the establishment is a vital component of any functioning democracy, and the people who constitute it - the politicians, the top coppers and civil servants, the business folks and the bankers, etc. - are Very Decent People who've worked jolly hard to get where they are. Besides, if they were no good they wouldn't have made it in the first place. While it would be easy to lampoon Ryan's starry-eyed defence, there are plenty of liberals who, in an honest moment, would agree with him. 

Nevertheless, he does make an important point. Despite the flux in our politics, most people are relatively happy with their circumstances. This can mean one of two things. One, that the populist shift is a passing political phase, at least as far as Britain is concerned. Theresa May need not worry as she haphazardly patches up the Thatcherite settlement. Or the other, more frightening conclusion, is that people are satisfied with their own lives in the sense that they no longer blame shit things happening on themselves. Unemployment, not my fault. House prices, not my fault. Huge debt, not my fault. Insecurity, not my fault. The populist turn differs in its Corbynist and Farageist variants, mobilising as it does different groups of people around opposed political projects, but simultaneously they might well represent a rejection of individuating social problems. Hence the apparent incongruence between rates of self-satisfaction and the anti-political establishment mood. If you're in the business of salvaging a hegemonic project, seeing one of its key pillars in such a state of disrepair is enough to make any conservative ideologue nervous.

Why Did We Call It Wrong?

Some didn't. No doubt they're feeling smug as others flail around in horror. But for the bulk of "us", the commentariat people spanning the academic pundits specialising in voting behaviour, the professional commentators paid for their opinion-forming opinions, and neither forgetting those weirdos who write about politics because they want to, Tuesday represented a unanimity of failure. That so few called it for Trump goes beyond bad analysis: it's a social phenomenon. How then did everyone get it wrong?

Well, for starters, we didn't. We were wrong, and yet we were right too. Not only did Hillary Clinton win the popular vote, she might surpass Trump's tally by some two million once all the ballots are counted. So yes, all the analyses were right that the GOP wouldn't out poll the Democrats - and the size of that margin could give Trump added extra legitimacy problems later on. Yet, despite knowing about the electoral college, too many of us treated the contest as if it was a simple popularity contest. The vagaries of this anti-democratic and archaic stitch-up system were rarely factored in.

The second point was polling. Most people writing about American politics, including Americans writing about politics, are removed from the action on the ground. You have to take what passes as evidence as your guide. And that, traditionally, has been opinion polling. While they were a bit all over the place, they favoured a Clinton outcome as per the final vote tally. Yet they also posted clear leads in the crucial battleground states, including Wisconsin where not a single poll put Trump on top. In Britain, the experience of the 2015 general election and Brexit should, by now, have taught us to treat polling with caution. On each occasion, they've been able to pick up movements in opinion but not the actual figures. Sucks to be them, sucks to be fooled by them.

And then there are the demographics. Asked about it in the lead up, like many others I couldn't see how Trump might win with such a coalition arrayed against him. Surely the bulk vote of America's ethnic and sexual minorities, allied to a sizeable chunk of white people would be enough to bury his chances? As we know, they weren't. The white middle class and well-to-do base of the GOP turned out in the states Trump needed them to turn out in, while the Democrat vote deflated. All the stars aligned for a Clinton win, and without anything else intervening we went with that.

Lastly, there's a strange sort of groupthink. In my bones, I felt we weren't going to win the general election, that Leave would put us on course for exiting the EU, and Trump was set to come out on top. But I ignored it, took Tony Blair's advice and had a heart transplant, substituting emotion for the cool analysis of hard numbers. This, however, was a conceit. The fear of the alternatives engendered a herd wisdom that appeared to have a close relationship to the simulated results of polling and extrapolations of demographics, but this was coincidental. In truth, commentators hostile to Trump right across the spectrum of opinion fooled themselves into think that he couldn't win because, well, he just couldn't. In the same way Britain just wouldn't leave the EU, how Labour wouldn't vote for Jeremy Corbyn (twice), how the Conservatives wouldn't be victorious in 2015. Being wedded to the established way of doing things, whether cheerleader or critic, meant projecting its assumptions onto a wider electorate. They couldn't possibly support ....

How to prevent this from happening again? Going in the opposite direction and forecasting doom and gloom is not an answer. Treating polling data more critically is the easy thing. Keeping a sociological imagination is necessary but not sufficient. One has to be alive to the play of tendencies and counter tendencies, their strength and weaknesses. But most importantly, and more difficult more difficult to accomplish is sustained self-criticism combined with the checking and rechecking of one's underlying assumptions, including acknowledging and allowing for your stakes in a issue and how that might colour your findings. It's not just fresh thinking that's needed now, but critical thinking and intellectual honesty. If that can be managed, then fewer in may be blindsided by so-called freak events in future.

Race, Class, and Donald Trump

How did the unthinkable happen? If only a short blog post hours after the biggest upset in world politics since the Soviet Bloc went under could provide the answers. Hot takes rarely do. Usually we have to wait months - years for perspective to form, and see an event in its singular aspect. Unfortunately, we do not have the time, the people who are going to be at the sharp end of a Trump presidency don't have the time. We need to understand what has happened not because it's a jolly fun thing to do, though there will be plenty who build careers off the back of providing comment and analysis of this kind; we need to get to grips with it to stop it from happening again. Here are some very sketchy thoughts.

The knee jerk nonsense of sundry liberals, which is already trying to carve a space for itself as the received wisdom on matters Trump, is most unhelpful. That the centre could not hold because the majority of white voters, some 62% of the population, voted because racism is the wrong conclusion. Yes, it was white people, but to mangle a phrase from a different context, not all white people. It was the well-off white folks, the middle class (not in the traditional American sense of the term) and the vast legion of small business people who are the constituencies who tipped it. In other words, the beginning of wisdom about Trump's victory begins with taking race and class together, of doing a touch of maligned intersectional analysis.

Just so we're clear, racism is as American as Mom and McDonald's. All through the American Revolution's heroic phase and down to today, the division of labour has always been heavily racialised. All whites, regardless of poverty and destitution, could draw deep from ideological resources that justified and maintained slavery to create an imagined superiority, and one that has blighted generations of white Americans. Of course, the Jim Crow laws in the South institutionalised racist supremacy and though they're long gone, the regular killing of black men by mainly white police forces show it hasn't gone away. Not completely separate from this is racial segregation. Despite being the great melting pot, it's probably fair to say that post-imperial Britain, with all its problems and issues, has proven much more successful in integrating ethnic minorities than the land born entirely from immigration. However, segregation and the racialisation of work, like all over the advanced West, had started to dissolve. More advanced in the socially progressive, metropolitan coastal states, it had a long way to go elsewhere, but nevertheless showed the interior its future. For the majority of white America, evidence of integration's insidious creep was felt through immigration. Year after year, more Hispanics appeared waiting tables in their restaurants, tending their gardens, working in their hotels, their service stations, their supermarkets and malls. They were a visual reminder that white America is a group in relative decline.

This is only part of the story. The race anxiety vote theory doesn't stand up. None of this is new, it was the case in 2008 and 2012 when enough white people voted for Obama. If whites are essentially racist, why the variance over time, and why were plenty prepared to vote for the mixed race fella with the very non Anglo-Saxon name? Economics might have something to do with it too. Neoliberal economics and governance, the subordination of all to the demands of capital and the whims of the market ceaselessly undermine our senses of self-security. The lot of the majority, regardless of ethnicity and race, is to sell our bodies and our brains, and therefore our freedom for a set period every week in return for a wage or a salary. For too many of us, there's even uncertainty whether there will be work enough available to pay the bills. Doubling down on this way of being has been the great transition of the last four decades, where the memories of industrial capital echo around crumbling factories. Manufacturing jobs, Proper Jobs, have either disappeared, got themselves exported, or absorbed into manufacturing machinery. They are now replaced by office jobs, service jobs, caring jobs, of jobs that no longer make things and instead produce the intangible. Across the Western world, but particularly in America and Britain, governments have overseen and connived with the abandonment of millions by capital. These are the left behind, a strata of people with a skill set and a mind for another time, and they have been discarded. That is the unmissable, crucial context for Trump's victory in the rustbelt states.

Yet, as we have seen, while white workers of modest means did vote for Trump, fewer than half of them did. It was the better off. How then to explain this? It doesn't seem to make sense. In studies of voting behaviour concerned with economic voting, summed up by another Clinton in a happier time as "it's the economy, stupid", researchers typically distinguish between two sub-categories. There is 'pocket book voting' (behaviour conditioned by the prospective impacts on one's finances, and/or those of relatives and friends) and 'sociotropic voting', which is where a voter looks at the health of the wider economy over and above personal circumstances. All aspiring governments construct narratives that address the personal and the social, and they are emphasised and de-emphasised when expediency requires. In Trump's case, the pocket book was addressed by cutting taxes, and attacking higher health premiums for the better off to pay for Obamacare. The macro story was about restoring industry to the rustbelt by repatriating it from the Far East and Latin America, and curbing immigration to ensure the right (white) people got the jobs. As a pitch, on paper it seems something you might expect white working class voters to get on board with. And some of them did. But it was the white middle class who were proper beguiled. Why?

Generations of Marxists have talked about the petit bourgeois - small business people - as if caught between the fundamental forces of capitalism. On the one hand, big capital can out compete and always threatens to put the smallholder out of business, throwing them down into the wage-earning mass. On the other, ungrateful employees are always bellyaching about not having enough hours, wanting pay rises, having more time off, wanting more autonomy, and, through incompetence or, heaven forfend, strike action threaten the viability of the business. To occupy the position of the petit bourgeois is to surrender to the icy grip of permanent existential dread, of not having mastery over one's fate (despite the promise of being one's own boss), and feeling hemmed in and under siege in the market place and at work. Second, for privileged layers of white people, the managers and the professionals, they share a certain outlook with their small business counterparts. Their good fortune is a consequence of their talents and graft. The privileges accumulated, the good salaries, nice house, multiple cars, expensive holidays, and the million and one trappings of the good life are theirs By The Sweat Of Their Brows. And they too are anxious it could all get take away, either by economic crisis leading to redundancy and unemployment, or ever-encroaching taxes and health insurance premiums. For both these groups, their sources of status anxiety are bound up with the great intangibles of class dynamics and process, they are therefore very likely to respond sociotropically to economic policy. Trump's pledge to decent, secure, well-paid manly jobs, to get Motor City motoring again perversely had more of an impact on the non-working class segment of white America than the worker. By giving the impression of a return to stability for the worker, so too the more excitable petit bourgeois is swept up in enthusiasm.

There's no real excuse for us commentators and so-called professionals not to have seen a Trump victory coming. His platform is backward and deeply troubling, but his campaign team - and The Donald himself - understood that stability and security, served as it was in racist, anti-immigrant rhetoric might appeal to enough people. And so it proved. One of the reasons why Hillary Clinton's campaign didn't, despite just edging the popular vote, was because it stripped out emotion and values. Technocratic managerialism was the order of the day, just as it was for the failed Remain campaign, just as it was for Labour's failed 2015 election campaign. For the future, assuming a Trump presidency affords us the luxury of having one, there has to be a revolution in the Democrats. It needs a vision of the good life and not rely on how awful Trump's presidency is bound to be. It needs to challenge the nativism and racism, and win enough people back to a positive programme that understands insecurity and is sincere about tackling it. They need to construct their own American story around a credible, non-political establishment candidate. It has to fight shit values with good values, not pander to them. Unfortunately, though it's early days yet, shrieks of liberal despair across today's media aren't good. Some have not only learned nothing about Trump's shock victory, they don't want to learn anything. If the Democrats choose to listen to these people again, come 2020 there's going to be exactly the same outcome.

Vote Hillary, Vote Democrat

It's high time I invested in a nose peg factory. Here we are again, a presidential election showdown between the Democrat and Republican candidates, just as it has been for 150 years. And on this occasion, just like nearly every other, the logic of lesser evilism must come into play. However, in case you've been living under a rock the contest is between the Democrats and something qualitatively worse. Difference is not a matter of degree any more.

Yes, American politics is stuck. Thanks to the early award of the franchise, the American labour movement never took off unlike pretty much everywhere else. While the Liberals here in Britain tried and failed to co-opt working class votes and aspirations, democratisation preceded industrialisation in the US, meaning our movement fed into one of the two main bourgeois parties, and that's where it has more or less remained. Historically, it has conditioned the Democrats and pushed it in a direction similar to but not entirely comparable with Europe's social democratic and labour parties, and has also ensured its openness to successive progressive movements like civil rights and anti-racism, women's and LGBT liberation. Yet a bourgeois party it remains, another historical twist where early advance gave way to lasting backwardness. Yet here the processes transforming politics here are at work in America too. No exceptionalism this time.

Here is the problem with the Democrats. They are a party entirely in hock to big capital, and also have a progressive voter base. This can be galvanised into doing good works, but even then its active electioneering tends to dissipation as soon as the polls close, as per the genuine enthusiasm for Obama in 2008 and 2012 have shown. A small number might get involved in community organising and find other political outlets, but most remain passive until next time round. The Sanders insurgency however has cast a light on the ferment at the Democrats' base. Hillary Clinton's victory in the primaries was square, but certainly not fair. This has stirred minor controversy as Bernie-to-the-end types have not accepted it is the end, and are prepared to vote Republican in some feeble, farcical echo of the Stalinist third period. Nevertheless, from the long term standpoint of giving labour an independent political voice in the US, it is preferable that the Democrats are in office and that the election campaigns waged by its base, often around unsuitable and anti-working class candidates, win as opposed to defeated by the hard right GOP.

Yes, Hillary certainly does fit that unsuitable mold. A free market, Wall Street-loving, hawkish candidate is never going to do. Her win tomorrow would fracture the glass ceiling some more, but treating that as the singularly significant event to the point of excluding all else is the worst kind of myopia. Obama's extra-judicial kills-by-drone and all the misery that causes is set to continue. Threatening to impose a no fly zone over Syria is madness. And her tin ear to those communities left behind by decades of dog-eat-dog market fundamentalism shows not just shockingly poor political judgement, but scant awareness how such policies can easily turn Democrat voters away from the party. Why is Hillary the worst the Democrats could come up with? Because she's going down the very same political path that got us here.

Yet were I an American citizen, I would vote for her. And on most downticket races I'd vote Democrat too. Because, in case you hadn't noticed, this isn't an ordinary presidential election. As the year has worn on and we've got used to the buffoonish countenance of Donald Trump capering about the stage, the more obvious it is that his presidential campaign endangers democratic politics in the US and elsewhere. Like the Conservatives here, the Republicans are in long-term decline. Their explicit positioning as the white people's party put demographics against them, and they are divorced from the greater and greater dissemination of progressive social attitudes and values. Christian fundamentalism, the Tea Party, and now Trump's candidacy are the last gasps of an America struggling to disappear. And as we've seen with the Brexit vote here, when reaction wins a battle the aftermath is economically and socially damaging. Should Trump win, every racist, every fascist will be emboldened to carry through their imagined grievances against hispanics, blacks, Muslims, Jews, LGBT people, women. The so-called liberal elite, variously identified with journalists, academics, and lawyers are also threatened. And because the US remains the world's preeminent superpower, it will boost the politics of reaction everywhere. Should the worst come to the worst and a President Trump accompanies a GOP majority in both Houses of Congress, then the Republic itself is in peril.

This is not scaremongering. The danger a Trump presidency represents to the people of the United States and of the world is real. And what is awful is that even if Clinton wins, he's run her far too close. It's a pivotal moment from which very different histories flow. On the one side is a fatuous demagogue whose angry, but deeply insecure movement will take America into a very dark place. And on the other is a competent if uninspiring establishment politician whose victory would, nevertheless, drive a stake into a tottering party of racists, religious extremists, and the putrid politics they hold and, despite herself, allow the progressive reconstitution of politics to carry on unimpeded.

Those are the stakes. Vote Hillary, Vote Democrat.

White Nationalism, Conspiracy, and Anti-Semitism

Our last Sociology Research Seminar Series session at the University of Derby saw Andrew Wilson present his recent conference paper, 'The Thematic Preoccupation Governing Meaning Construction on a White Nationalist Forum'. The focus of his research was the infamous hang out of assorted fascists, Nazis, and racial fantasists, Stormfront. Founded in its present incarnation in 1996, Stormfront is the hub for white supremacism/nationalism on the internet. For instance, between 1st April and 29th June this year, it received two million unique visitors and 3,246,612 page views. 51% of its audience are from the US, and ten per cent hail from the UK.

Andrew's previous experience researching apocalyptic cults, conspiracy theory, and fringe beliefs took him to Stormfront in the wake of last year's Paris attacks. He found that by post six (on a thread of thousands) about the incident a poster was already touting conspiracy theories by way of an explanation, which became the dominant discussion theme. What also attracted Andrew's attention was the convergence of this conspiracy mindset, which is a staple of the far right with a certain species of spirituality, or, as Charlotte Ward and David Voas put it, conspirituality. This is important because for the site's participants as their investment goes beyond the political (and certainly the party political). Their loyalties lie in a transnational ethnicism, a quasi-mystical attachment to a contested and variously understood ayranism which, for its part, is held down by sinister conspiracies.

The performance of conspiritual identity requires the adoption of certain regalia. Anyone who's been on Twitter for five minutes will know that overtly political people tend to fix their avatars or festoon them with ribbons. Stormfront is no different. Typical displays include knights, flags, wolves, Norse Gods, weapons, targets, and a pantheon of Nazis. Some were assembled in a manner akin to Dick Hebdige's celebrated notion of bricolage. What Andrew was interested in was whether there was a correspondence between contributors with certain avatars posting on particular topics via the process of discourse mapping. Picking the five most popular discussions - The Holocaust, National Socialism, September 11th, Illuminati, and Reading, which amounted to 28,808 posts at the time of the study, among the 50 most used words and terms were Jews, People, Germany, Nazism, and Holocaust. As there was a chance the result could have got skewed by extended but relatively neutral discussion of aspects of holocaust history, stripping the thread out of the combined results saw Hitler receive greater prominence. Performing a similar operation by discounting the National Socialism thread, Andrew found the terms 'People' and 'Jews' came top. No matter what was left in or taken out, Jews and Jewishness cropped up again and again. He then performed a Latent Dirichlet Allocation, which identifies word patterns, and found Jews were mostly associated with Holocaust, Nazism, and Conspiracy. In the rarefied world of far right conspirituality, anti-semitism remains the core attribute. At the same time, Andrew began to see patterns emerging, of avatars tending to be active across topics that shared common ground with their motif. Further investigation of these patterns would allow a researcher to identify the in and out groups, what terms and values are likely to repeat, what and who gets labelled friends and enemies, and how this work tries to glue together a collective identity.

Questions were then taken about the place of hatred in these conspiritualities - is being against something enough for these identities? The repeated use of avatars with repeated far right themes, which in turn are anchored by the discourses posters contribute to suggests it is necessary but insufficient. Andrew also noted that despite Europe's far right switching to Islamophobia as their public target of choice, there was little evidence Stormfront's contributors were concerned with Islamism, the Islamification of Europe, or other such nonsense: obsession with Jews and Jewish-controlled conspiracies remained the shared focus of paranoia and hate.

This was an interesting opener into work yet to be done, and Andrew raised a number of interesting questions. Particularly with regard to the status of the white nationalism on display on Stormfront. Because of the transnational understanding of race they operate with, the fusion of conspiratorial politics and pseudo-religion, and, of course, the far right's propensity to terrorism, perhaps it would be profitable it they were viewed as a species of extremism not dissimilar to Islamism.

New Left Blogs September/November 2016

High time we indulged one of these.

1. Army of All (Unaligned) (Twitter)

2. Forward March (Labour) (Twitter)

3. Frank Parker (Labour) (Twitter)

4. Jill Mountford's Momentum Blog (AWL) (Twitter)

5. John Burgess (Labour/Unison)

6. Justin Schlosberg (Labour) (Twitter)

7. McDuff (Labour)

8. Renewing Labour (Labour) (Twitter)

9. Roger C (Labour) (Twitter)

10. The Clarion Magazine (Labour) (Twitter)

11. The Jeremy Corbyn Effect (Labour) (Twitter)

If you know of any new(ish) blogs that haven't featured before then drop me a line via the comments, email, Facebook, or Twitter. Please note I'm looking for blogs that have started within the last 12 months. The new blog round up appears on the first Sunday of the month, usually.

How Likely is a General Election?

If you were feeling nostalgic for this summer's Brexit chaos, the last couple of days should have provided you a fix. The High Court judgement that - rightly - stipulated the requirement for Article 50 to come to the Commons before its trigger threw the government into a panic. It also reminded us of the utter stupidity of senior Conservative politicians . Not having read the judgement, let alone understood it, morons like David Davies and IDS have paraded into the studios to decry this "assault" on the referendum result. This greenlit the unhinged editorial suites of the rightwing press to parade contrived outrage befitting the froth of a Nazi rag. The Mail providing a new low in their grim history as Britain's most vile newspaper. This was almost matched by The Sun who purposely chose to darken the skin of Gina Miller - the petitioner who brought the case - to emphasise their "foreign elite" headline.

The press are accustomed to exercising their power without responsibility, and it's an unalloyed good that the circulations of our most irascible organs are plunging downwards. However, the government, content to let the press mobilise rape and death threats (which, true to hypocritical form, The Sun subsequently branded sick), certainly isn't immune to consequences. On the one hand, it gives more power to the elbows of Cameroons like Nicky Morgan and Anna Soubry - any old rope will do to remind folks they exist and are halfway relevant. On the other it stirs up uneasiness among the wider Tory fraternity as they interpret press outrage as the stirrings of a populist mob of demented bigots venting anger toward institutions the Conservative Party cherishes while simultaneously making their new, strong leader appear powerless. And it can lead to some quitting in disgust, like Stephen Phillips's resignation from Parliament. Despite being a Tory and a Leave supporter, his objection to the sidelining of Parliament in the Brexit negotiations is right and principled. Furthermore, he's not returning to the Commons either. See, Zac, that's how you resign in protest.

Theresa May's project has two strands to it. First off, there is the patching up of the Thatcherite settlement and, of course, securing Brexit. Her base in big business will ensure as softer a Brexit as possible is secured for them, despite current disagreements and round robin letters from our captains of industry. And, indeed, the High Court judgement, which seems unlikely to get overturned on appeal, is going to help that. The problem for May is the former, for the foreseeable, is destined to be conditioned by the latter. If she makes efforts to follow through on the one nationism, which is ultimately about giving British capitalism some degree of stability, they are under threat of getting blown off course and/or undermined by the volatile mess of the latter. Given circumstances are less than ideal, what with a small majority and all that, and commanding huge leads in the opinion polls (which, lest we forget, have historically overstated Labour support), there are voices in the cabinet and media urging her to go for a general election. A whopping majority would, after all, shrink to insignificance the rebellious potential of Cameroons and diehard Brexiteers and ensure, should the Supreme Court find against the government, a large majority to get Article 50 through the Commons with the minimum of fuss.

I still think a general election is unlikely. Firstly, and it often appears that professional commentators need reminding of this, it is no longer in the gift of the Prime Minister to call an election. If there is to be an early election, it requires either a vote of no confidence in the government or a two-thirds majority in the House assenting to Parliament's dissolution. Now, some figure that a way around this is for the introduction of a bill for its abolition, which would only need a simple majority, or the Act's amendment granting the Prime Minister discretion. The problem is both would take up Parliamentary time. It would be very surprising if opposition parties opposed such a move, but it means every party can see it coming a mile off. Effectively, the day it appears on the parliamentary timetable is the day electioneering begins. And it could go on a while if the Commons gets into a game of legislative ping pong with the Lords. The process of calling an election is far from easy.

Second, an election means May would be forced to do the very thing she doesn't want to do, and that is set out the government's Brexit negotiating positions. It is simply not sustainable for the next Conservative government to issue a manifesto and merely say it is dedicated to the best possible result for Britain on page after page. Ordinarily, most voters don't pay attention to detailed minutiae, but with millions politicised by the referendum, this time's would be a little bit different. Oh yes, and there's EU politicians too. While it is impolitic for governments to give running commentary on the internal politics of other governments, there's nothing stopping politicians that are more junior, or are in opposition parties from making statements about the latest Brexit news to come from the UK. And in the febrile atmos of a general election, they could make quite a splash. In short, it's an absolute nightmare that defies the imposition of control.

And there's the issue of whether May could win an outright majority. On the basis of the polls, it might appear absurd to suggest she wouldn't. The PM, however, is nothing but ultra cautious. With politics behaving strangely, she knows it's possible Jeremy Corbyn's Labour could do better. In 2010, despite getting its second worst result since the war and led by a perceived lame duck, it ran the Tories much closer than mid-term polling would have suggested. The second is what would happen to the Liberal Democrat vote. May's majority rests on the ruthless wipe out operation Dave pursued against his erstwhile partners, particularly in the South West. Yet, as we know, the LibDems have been kicking up a storm in local council by-elections. Ordinarily, they mean very little but the trend is sustained and consistent across a spread of constituencies. Not only have they outpaced UKIP, reclaiming the position of third party in England and Wales, but their performance is well in advance of polling figures. If there's a trend in actual elections as opposed to the polls, then chances are it's real. Seeing as May has foolishly flirted with Wrexitism, she is doubly exposed as liberalish Tory types recoil and strong Remain identifiers give the LibDems a punt where they are best placed to win. And if I know this, you can bet she does as well.

How likely is a general election? Not very is the answer. I could be mistaken, but a review of the political terrain and the additional problems a poll in the Spring entails should rule it out. And yet, if she does go to the country despite all this it wouldn't be a first in recent times if politics indulged the irrational.

T99 - Anasthasia 2016

Can't be arsed tonight, so here's a rework of a classic rave tune from 1991.