This is the third thread by other people I want to share here this morning. This one is by Dr Nafeez Ahmed, who is absolutely right to say Labour has an enormous amount of thinking and changing to do if it is to come close to changing the world we live in. Links are in the original tweets.
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During the IMF ‘crisis’ of the 1970’s the Neo-liberals did not waste the opportunity to assert new, radical ideas.
Oh, for someone to come along and do the same now but on a more progressive platform.
The dream I have is that Labour are just holding back and not playing their hand just yet.
They are still too close to Thatcherism and too far away from Clem-ism.
Two related problems exist.
First of all, as an example of a more widespread approach adopted system wide across both the UK and the West in all organisations and institutions, the commercial entity I was employed in for almost four decades systematically over time removed all personnel, both management and staff, with any knowledge, experience and expertise of the specific systems necessary to maintain coherence.
To be replaced by generalist yes men who were more easily malleable to the corporate mindset and who would co-operate on the atomization of the organization and its constituent parts into stand alone competing entities. in line with Corporate Neo-liberal orthodoxies. Completely disintegrating both organizational and system coherence.
As a consequence, the West has over several decades systematically managed out of every nook and cranny of all its systems the expertise and experience necessary to recover the situation so ably described by Dr Ahmed.
This is the case just as much in political party’s as it is in commercial ventures in the private sector, the public sector and the voluntary sector. It infects the Labour Party as much as the Conservative Party.
Secondly, and as a result, there is little in the way of solid evidence on offer to suggest that the Labour Party, stuffed as it is with management clones with no real world or systems experience and expertise following the purges of its most active members and personnel at every level, is ever going adopt a position which;
a) deviates from the present and problematic Neo-liberal model at the heart of the systemic collapse Dr Ahmed explains;
and, as a result
b) adequately understands/comprehends, never mind deal with, the problems Dr Ahmed has detailed.
No one I read, know or meet who is cognizant of the situation is seriously anticipating or expecting the Labour Party to change course or revise its commitment to the existing orthodoxy presently being mismanaged by the Conservative Government if it is elected to govern.
Along with the very detailed and comprehensive evidence presented on previous threads on this blog of the necessity of changing course from the existing rapidly failing Neo-liberal policy responsible for this system collapse the logic of this reality points to the Country, as well as Liz Truss, being in a state of Zugzwang.
A very fine post. Complex systems exhibit a property called “emergence” by which unforseen events occurs (BT discovered this when they implemented MPLS nationwide in the 2000s). The Uk has been the subject of simplistic tinkering by Tories of various stripes (I include Blair’s Labour in this category) for more than 40 years. This is the end-game.
In the case of energy, most politicos lack the time/training to understand the complexity – many due to funding/bribes/bungs prefer a simplistic approach. Oddly, the UK civil service, whilst paying lip service, is capable of admitting to realities (always off the record – natch). The kindest thing I can say about UK energy policy is that it is schizophrenic, on the one hand fracking, on the other 4GW of floating off-shore wind in the Irish Sea (between Wales and Devon/Cornwall) open to offers by next year. PV? Why not focus on roofs and buildings. Germany has 6,000km2 of roofs space for PV and 12,000kms2 of facade space, the Uk cannot be so far behind. Why not a policy on this? Ask me nicely & I’d engineer both the policy changes and the network changes for free. Complex, yes, emergent properties – probably, reasons for not doing it? almost none.
I am certain that others in the fields health, justice, education and transport could offer workable solutions. My problem is that Labour has an “in-crowd” which I am sorry to say, is committing the same sort of “category errors” that the tories have done.
Last para, spot on
I can see Labour winning the next GE but I can’t see what they have to offer beyond a watered-down version of ‘more of the same’. I may be missing something, but somehow I doubt it.
Having just finished all of Adam Curtis’s ‘Trauma Zone’ – about how Russia came out of communism and also out of democracy I see some really, really worrying parallels with our situation here.
What we’ve been seeing here is number iterations of the Tory party since 2010 who have been destroying the country and also the way in which it is managed – all of which will get people mad and more sceptical about democracy.
‘Trauma Zone’ charts not just the key events but many we may have forgotten or be less aware of. But what stands out is how Russia simply stopped working properly – not as properly as the West I grant you it did work as a system in a fashion. Post communism it did not even do that – it gives a real insight into the hard lives of ordinary Russians and how democracy has actually become a dirty word – a country whose male life expectancy has dropped by 6 years since 1991.
Yeltsin’s suspension of the Russian parliament for his ‘shock-therapy’ economic polices is comparable to Johnson’s proroguing of Westminster?
There is a bloody curdling quote from one of the oligarchs – Mikhail Khordorkovsky:
‘All ideologies were dangerous and that included democracy. The only thing that could be trusted was money’.
‘Our idol is his financial majesty – capital’.
It’s as if capital has witnessed the goings on in Russia and had decided that is the model it wants around the world, coming to a democracy near you! Extreme capitalism – Russian style. What’s the difference between Truss and Yeltsin in terms of their indifference to the suffering that they cause(d)?
It makes sense when you think about the lack of progress with the green agenda, and how our own parliament has become a cash machine for the well off and a killing machine of democracy.
In both cases, a route to authoritarianism has/is being created. It’s deeply disturbing stuff whichever way you look at it.
I agree with your point about systems thinking, but… it ain’t going to happen.
As an ex school governor, I wondered why systems thinking was never taught because it makes perfect common sense. Schools have a preoccupation with problem-solving. Solving problems is akin to fixing an item that’s broken. The focus is all on what’s broken and not on the underlying cause of what caused the break.
Having met a labour councillor canvassing my home. I suggested to him that a proper understanding of the money system and a longer term view were important. He didn’t disagree, but said that all parties work on a maximum of 5 years in power and most people are only interested in fixing their most important problems.
So, education teaches problem-solving and not systems thinking and politicians think very short term.
Is it any wonder we are where we are!
No, not at all