I have only just got round to reading this article:
I won't summarise what Aditya Chakrabortty has written; I suggest reading it. I will offer this spoiler though; the conclusion is that Aditya asks:
But doesn't he want something better than a new dark ages for his grandchildren?
To which the reply is:
If I am honest, now I am thankful for every passing year that is good and peaceful. And I hope for another one. Very short-term, I know, but those are my horizons.
The left has to up its game.
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Sounds very defeatist. A man who has given up on the possibility of reform and so forsees only descent into crisis. It would have been equally logical to tell Nelson Mandella or Dr Martin Luther King that their struggles were lost. It was clear to any experienced observer that the authoritarian elites in power (the whites) would never never change their ways or allow progress. If history teaches us anything it is that a cause is only lost when we stop believing in it.
His one useful contribution is to point out that it is not racist to state the plain fact that uncontrolled immigration really does undermine wages and working conditions for low-skilled workers. This is one lesson that the left really must learn if it is to gain the support of working people again.
I agree.
My key quote from Streeck is this one concerning a protest in Frankfurt:
“The authorities were scared shitless. I think more such scariness must happen. They must learn that in order to keep people quiet they need extraordinary effort.”
This seems to suggest that protesting must become a way of life for those of us who have had enough. Deep in our own fears, we cannot rule out that our oppressors fear us too.
Good point
“We cannot rule out that our oppressors fear us too”!
Damned right they do, which is why they so sedulously – and in the case of the Dakota Pipeline at Standing Rock, so brutally and unconstitutionally (with one peaceful demonstrator having lost an arm, I believe, from the effects of a stun grenade, and others having had skin ripped off from the effects of water cannon in sub-zero temperatures – clear infringements of 1st Amendment Rights to peaceful protest) – take up arms to deter such protests.
Earlier in the year there was on this Blog a discussion, in the light of Corbyn’s alleged desire to turn Labour into a “movement” rather than a mechanism for achieving power by parliamentary means, with the latter allegedly both superior to, and so preferable to, the former.
I found this debate somewhat sterile, but never more so than in the current developing situation. For the parliamentary road is indeed essential, but it is also totally insufficient, especially given the ability of the elite to outflank it. The US Congress, for example, must be easily one of the most corrupt legislatures in the world, with very fee of its members untainted by the lobbyists’s “big money”, and legislation regularly written by the corporate shills of ACLEC.
Only a supporting “movement” made up of 1,000’s of ordinary citizens willing to wage an ongoing campaign of disobedience – not just as a one-off, one day thing, but day after day after day, for example, blocking Whitehall and Westminster Bridge for days on end, and being willing, like the redoubtable Rev’d Paul Nicholson, to go to Court and even prison by refusing unjust Council Tax Penalty summonses, so blocking up the Courts to bring the system grinding to a halt, along with a myriad of similar such protests – only this will both embolden our MP’s while simultaneously cowing our elite slave masters I to retreat sufficiently for us to break free.
It is how the Czechoslovaks broke free in 1989, by coming out day after day to protest in Wenceslaus Square in Prague, until the Communist Government lost its nerve, and resigned. The same happened with the nightly marches and demonstrations in Leipzig, Dresden and East Berlin.
Richard has mentioned the tribalism of politicians who are unable to see the need to coalesce, but the same is true of ordinary citizens, who need to recognise the imperative to reach out across the relatively minor, even relatively major, differences of opinion to work together with those who WANT a working and meaningful democracy, against those who want NOTHING of the sort, but its exact opposite.
I have some sympathy with that Andrew
I am beginning to wonder what role peaceful civil disobedience now plays
A good point indeed. Since, and including Thatcher, governments have done more and more to make it difficult for citizens to demonstrate. I suspect that the entusiasm of those that govern show to keep us in our boxes is a measure of how much they fear us leaving our boxes and taking to the streets.
Agreed
Richard, the opposition, the civil disobedience, has GOT to be peaceful, or it’s done for.
Had either Gandhi or Martin Luther King opted for violent dissent, they have not only the moral argument, but also the war.
But based on the Dakota Pipeline experience, let’s not fool ourselves that no (real) blood will not be spent. Those doing the opposing must take care that it is only their – innocent – blood that is spilt, so that the real lawbreakers may be highlighted and exposed.
“lost” is missing from the sentence about Gandhi and MLK.
I.e “they would have lost not only the moral argument, but also the war.”