Bridging the gap of disconnection and disillusionment to one of solidarity:
Lets start with the rich guys and how they operate The American banker, JP Morgan, said: The working class? They’re no problem. I can buy one half to kill the other half. Party politics, operate much the same way. The bigger part of the voting population winning over the smaller part and eventually the majority of both parts realising, neither are any better off.
Nothing has changed since Morgan’s time. Alienation of working people, in a much more global scale than before. It has been uncovered, not by the big US media of course, that the American administration are planning to use foreign nationals, from places like South America, as soldiers in the US armed forces. (and have already started in Iraq.) A privatise army, that will facilitate the poor of one country, killing the poor of another. This is all achievable, through corrupt voting systems, propaganda, racism, fear mongering, violence and coercion, in a country that has some of the worst poverty in the western world. Our own administration, (British) seem to be welcoming and in some cases surpassing American in the achievements, of making a mockery of civil society.
This mockery is being implemented completely oblivious to the dissent, debate and views of the general public. We are becoming America without even realising it. One of the lessons we should be learning from this is, voting for change only rearranges the problems. We need to move the focus of attention back on to the people and sanity and away from the mandarins of power, who are dehumanising the very institutions that were created to protect our liberty from the vagaries of power. We will not change things to any great extent by voting or throwing stones at tanks. We can achieve things by knowing and relating our ideas to each other and we could start in our locality. This is where the main threat to elite power will begin.
Ok, if you have to vote
Before we start placing our bets on the next festival of derision, lies and contempt toward ordinary peoples opinions and values, (the next election) maybe we should consider some things.
First.It is not in the nature of politicians to inform the population of what is going on. Why. To protect their interests of course, Most politicians are business men, career orientated, power seekers. They may shout at each other and treat each other as the enemy. Underneath they are all part of the same club, right and left. There may be a few discrepancies here and there, but I think it is prudent to see them all in this category.
Second. Most politicians are lawyers or ex lawyers and spend most of their time making money, investing in property and such like They will spending as little time as possible on the business of their constituents unless there is something in it for them. What they are really good at, is giving the impression that they know every thing and you (the voter) know nothing. Politicians ( the coordinator classes) do not know where you live, how you live, or care. The coordinator classes are there to control the masses for the upper classes. ( an interesting rhyme to learn and remember)
It is not in the interest of the afore mentioned that you should start thinking for yourself. Can you imagine the trouble it would cause if people paid close attention to how these administrators, control what is happening. It is in the interest of the coordinators that you should feel powerless and that, you could not operate without them. It is of prime importance that the citizen – does things through the proper channels – ie the ones that the coordinator controls.
Separate charismatic, personality, from political ideas and get rich schemes of the fear industry.
It is useful to think of the above government workers, as coordinators and not as personalities. We are not dealing with pop stars here. We are dealing with people who make decisions that can drastically effect our well being, through creating illegal wars, that we do not wish to be involved in and curtailing our liberty by proposing ID systems, that will do more to control the individuals actions, than the actions of those who are deemed to be a danger to us.
It is important to separate and concentrate less on the charisma of the candidate, and focus more on the ideas that they represent. And if the ideas that they do presented, can not be understood, or are unexplainable to the layperson, they will probably do him or her more harm, than good. Ideas should stand on their own merit, not on the patronizing charm of the proposer no mater how high up the chain of command they sit. In fact the further up the chain of command they are the more abstract, unbelievable, and useless to ordinary people their ideas become.
War creates capital for the upper classes and poverty for the lower classes. (check your history books and try and find a member of the ruling classes who went bust paying for a war. They are non existent. Getting rich by war, however, there are countless examples) And the spin off’s – ID cards are good for business and would chiefly transfers a population of personalities into a list of useful categories of consumer types for business. Not only that. Guess who will pay for them.
Damage limitation voting
The above are only a few but important examples we should be aware of. If you want to vote for someone who knows very little about your situation, (apart from your profile data on your ID card). How many people know or have even seen their MP? When choosing from the bunch we need make sure it is someone who can do the least damage, not promise what the can not hope to do, when they get in. After you have voted him or her in, you had better be prepared to cajole, check out, question and keep on their case, to make sure the person you have voted, to represent you, does what they said they would do .
Voting for someone is only the first step .Coordinators with new found power should be treated like pre – school children in a toy shop. If you leave them unchecked they will wander off towards the goodies, oblivious to what is happening around them, who is going to pay for the expensive toy that they have found, and what they were brought into the shop for in the first place.
When you switch on the news of an evening, do you ever wonder what all this stuff has to do with you. (not the celebrates or stories to make you scared, but the politics) Can you relate to any of it. Is this part of your world. These are supposed to be intelligent people representing our interests, not morons arguing over who has the best toys, who has spent the most money.
The politicians game is not to agree with each other, even over the most obvious solutions to problems that would benefit the general population, (which would make people interested in the news) but to infer that there is some really important debate going on that is beyond the viewers or listeners understanding. (Which stops people having any interest in the news)
Coordinators are consumed in their own importance and operate in the pretensions of their own bubble, that floats above the political landscape, not in it, where you are.
It is not to difficult for people to believe the above. The problem is we are all caught up in the zero-sum-game and feel debilitated and useless, when we look at the grand scale of events and the machine that drives them. But we [public] inadvertently represent most of the components of the same machine that moulds and controls us.
The question that remains is how do we get back to some kind of human notion of living in the world. We are living in a global, social disaster, that is driven by western nut cases, we call leaders. While these big issues are a global problem, in order to drag ourselves back from the edge that we are being pushed toward, we need to start at the local level. (where we are) The fortunate thing is, we have the power to change big things, through our collective (smaller) actions. All we need is the confidence in our ability to make change happen.
How to build the bridge that can span the gap between a positive hope of the future and the hopelessness, which has become the staple of much of working people. This at present I believe is the main challenge of any socialist movement. A challenge that should be built on principals that seek to gain power and control for working people, rather than the uselessness of the replacement of the right wing coordinators, with left wing coordinators, who will spend much of their time making deals with [big business] the workers oppressors.
Looking back to go forward
In realizing this forward lasting vision we need to go back. Not back in a regressive manner, but back to an idea and experience before capitalism where the will of the people could be felt through kinship and mutual aid rather than destruction, bullshit and fear.
We are forever being urged by our present leaders to go forward; forget the past -there are new horizons to be aimed for -we need to forget these old ideas and learn new ones – There is good reason for this kind of rhetoric, because the ruling classes know as well as anyone, that, the study of what happened in the past is the key to understanding the present and to building a better future for workers.
Pig in the middle
No matter what the particular parties politics, are, left or right, their policies will always depend on living off the backs of the working people. The coordinator class, of which the earlier mentioned SWP are part of, is yet another layer of bureaucratic subterfuge, and mostly men in suits, who will trade off working class principals and standards for political expediency, in order to gain power – As usual the workers find themselves as pig in the middle. On the one hand the state structure that has kept them oppressed by the exploits of the rentier society – and on the other a left wing who are watering down the very structures that could go towards creating a lasting change that would meet better the needs of working people
Awakening the real left wing.
The working classes need to reconnect with the old values that have been knocked out of them with so many battering’s from market economical subservience, and from left wing sects playing to the people whilst seeking power at all costs, just like their seemingly opposites. There are many working people in the world, on the front line of the conflict, not in the meeting halls discussing different brands of politics. It is these people who we should be looking to for direction. The people who risk and put their bodies where they will do most good, and do not rely on the rhetoric of ideologies. And if we look we will find the same kind of people in our communities. It is these people we can learn from and in turn should be encouraging, for it was from the work and effort of these same communities that radical movements were built.
We, if striving to improve the world for workers, need to start living by our principals, and raising our spirits to believing that there is an alternative to the crap that is consuming our world. We need to reclaim our culture and detach and discard what is harmful to it. We need to hope for a better future and instill that hope in the people around us who lack it. But we need to remember who we are doing it for and not be distracted from our goal – by those who think they know our lives better than we do ourselves.
How do we start
By rejecting the status quo and replacing it by a set of principals that will focus on who you/we are, and what you wish your life to be. And by using these principals to determine your actions. This is not as difficult as it may seem because each and every day we have to make decisions, usually to someone else’s rules. Well first we could start by questioning these rules according to the principals that we have set for yourself.
Where will we find the time
Some people have more time than others. But what is more important is not how much time you have, but how it is used. like the fraudster who deducted a penny from each account amassed millions over the course of time. Each and every, no mater how small effort made, time spent, adds up to something bigger. Each time the debilitating technology is switched to off and people start communicate with each other in our communities, we advance humanity. Each time we open our mouths in protest or stop to write a letter, we build confidence in ourselves and encourage others.
We must tend to our garden
How many new (government sponsored) retail parks do we need saturating our communities, as well as our minds and destroying communal integration and pastoral reality. Before we can change the world we must tend our own communities in order to plan our future.
It was not by accident that the great city planner Patrick Geddes encouraged his children to be gardiner’s as an important part of their education, if not the most important part. The philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau understood well the analogy of the garden, concerning politics when he advises “We must tend to our garden” – with good reason. A garden, like politics, can’t be ignored until you find time for it.
A garden needs constant attention if you wish it to bear the fruits of your toil. A garden is an ever changing place which needs coordinated ideas, an economic balance of labour, long term plans to suit growth, the unpredictably of changing elements. The success or failure, taking into the consideration the changing nature of a garden, are mainly down to the experience of the gardener.
As in the Garden, in our communities we will need to grope our way back to a saner world by making smaller changes and by trial and error, rather than being led by the machinations of the “political business” which demands fast answers to difficult decisions and slow action, to obvious basic needs of people, culminating inexpensive costs to the tax payer who inevitably ends up having little to show in return.
The only thing today’s market economy has to offer most people is poverty. The other vote catching alternative to capitalism, may be a more lenient form of authority, exercised by those on the left, who claim to have the workers best interests at heart. However in the end, whichever form of political action that is taken – the only people who can shape, project and protect working peoples concerns and interests, are the people themselves – and the only way we advance in the struggle to regain and maintain our liberty in the long run, is by mutual aid and by understanding the seductive techniques of ideologies and how to guarding against them.
Live the life
How will we get there By participating in the decisions that affect and at present, control our freedom to act in our best interests. To question at each stage and to ensure the validity of political proposals and decisions that are carried out for working peoples benefit and the judgment of such proposals and decisions on there merit.
Our economy should benefit more the people who do most of the work Our present economic system is the worst possible structure in achieving these ends.
Economics can be complicated but not impossible for working people to understand – and will become easier to understand when people realised the benefits gained for their interest.
History a powerful tool of empowerment
The study of history is the essential ingredient in political life. and it is through the examination of the past that will shed light on the complexities of the present – That the economic system that represses us from a carefree life was designed by people with the same flesh and blood and thinking processes as us. And the economic system that is in use today (practically unchanged in its goals) was tailored from its conception to favour the rich. It was not god given, or a factor of human nature – it was one way of doing things – not the only way and can be changed.
The historical question that could be looked at regarding contemporary economic structures, is. What did we do before Ricardo, the rentier society, kings and queens, churches, who have always exploited us. An examination of peoples history (usually the unofficial account) will inform us that any progress made concerning the advancement of conditions, at the grass roots, was through the efforts of grass roots activity, not by the kindness of our rulers.
We have become so brainwashed, into believing that the political and economic, structure that we live under can not be changed,
It may be that we are soon to find out ultimately where our present forms of governments, economic systems will deliver us.
Perhaps we can survive in the west, for some time, with the rest of the world barren, dead or completely subservient to our demands. But market capitalism has nowhere else to go, apart from destroying the competition, then destroying itself (empires always destroy themselves). And to help them along in this process – It is becoming obvious to small defenseless countries, especially the ones that are rich in minerals, that the only way that they can protect themselves against imperialist bullies, primarily the USA, is being armed with weapons of mass destruction. It is an imperative to our survival that we find the will and to use our imagination to change the present situation. (I would refer you to the “New American Century document” if you are in doubt about what the present situation is. )
These are desperate times
The desperation of poorer nations, who are more and more being made, to being accepted as non-people by western power and the struggle of the domestic working classes, caught between unemployment and cheap wages must surely be ringing bells for change. If we are to address these problems We need to address the earlier question. How Hitler, Bush, (Rumsfeld) Blair, became possible. The answer is, we let them happen, we put our world in the hands of the psychopath. The question now is – how do we take it back.
We have to learn how we arrived here in the first place, then proceed with caution to rectify the disparities that have made us enemies to our fellow workers of other nations. Our problems are global we can no longer exist in the bubble of nation states. And we can no longer trust our liberty and values to the professionals, who constantly rob us of our voice
A political garden needs constant attention and therefore a shared workload to proceed. Care and attention is needed to coordinate the life of the garden. Species of plant and vegetable need to co exist. Every area needs special attention through balance and proportion, the expected and the unexpected will need to be prepared for – If we learn how to value and judge our political life by these methods, we will have no need for leaders and coordinators to judge what kind of life we deserve. We will soon regain our skills of cooperation and creativity. But first we need to start to think of a vision for a new future and in the process we are sure to find together the strength that will make it possible.
We have just witnessed in America, and will no doubt in the near future in this country witness the same scenario of voting against or for a mirror or its reflection.
We may even get out on the street and protest. We may write articles like this one, to try and convince each other on how to make our lives better. No matter what we do, no mater how much noise we make, no mater how right we are, no mater how obvious things seem. Nothing much will change unless we are willing to do the boring, thankless, seemingly unimportant, seemingly small, rote tasks, that are an imperative to organising for change.
So long as the folk reading this who are “not into politics” actually believe that. We are lost. We are all involved in politics, whether we like it or not. The challenge of governments and corporations is to instill the former. The challenge of socialist movements is to convince people, through their actions, of the latter and to encourage in our communities, useful, enlightened and creative involvement. Starting, at the threshold of peoples experience, and what they understand, what they can do. not what I or others might tell them.