by Matthew Hammond

Last  Rant  

      Portrait by Cassius

  It is happening Now – it is everywhere the same in this capitalist system of ours. The Left and the Right have clashed over the banking collapse, and the forces of the left have lost. No matter that it was the unbridled free market that nearly brought the entire system down around our heads, or that the same credit organizations that missed the pyramid sellers in the banks are now ruining nations in the name of prudence; or that the proposed austerity programme will be deep and long lasting; in short no matter that the current recession was a product of the right (and the rightwing epoch that surely started around 1980). What does any of this matter, once the left has lost the ideological struggle. And such is the profundity of this loss, that in spite of the fact that many of us are fairly sure that the right has no new answers, it will triumph in the years ahead. It is the rightwing agenda to cut to the bone, to cut as never before, that will dictate our fate in the coming years. It is likewise very likely to eventually be a rightwing boom that will follow these cuts, and then an accompanying inevitable bust, and we all know it. And yet we can do nothing about it. This raises that deep problem of - how on earth did the left manage to lose this one? This battle of battles? This one they really ought to win – with their alternative view of the world and the power of the market. How could we have lost it? At which point, in some far chamber of Hades all the Generals of the left, (defeated, every one) no doubt start to mutter a speech, that no such general would ever choose to make: The speech after the battle is lost, the speech to explain defeat.

  “The right has two almost bottomless and disciplined battalions, battalions that fire up individual minds, and yet exist also within the world. The profoundest of these two, is the belief which the right espouses to a quiet life, Individuals are told that the life of their dreams is theirs by right. They can have children and a partner, a house and control. This control is a small scale affair. It gives citizens a goal to aim for; it creates a secular heaven. This belief is then held up as something sacred, something we are all promised. In the face of this belief almost nothing matters. It certainly is of no consequence that this belief is based upon a fundamental lie. The world is not a simple a place - it is hard and difficult. My joy, my job, my wealth, is almost certainly based upon some suffering somewhere else. My security is then based upon war, and exploitation, on forcing my rights upon the world. Only in excluding others do I have the right to all this peace and quiet; and yet of course the left knows so well that all of this is silent. For what does it matter to those citizens of the quiet life, who believe it is theirs by right? Who can win an election promising blood and sweat and tears to aid others and not oneself?

  “The second hydra head battalion of the right is that perennial ability of capitalism to inhabit any space or every space. This inhabitancy is based upon a simple fact. Capitalism as a system takes at its base value that humans are greedy and selfish. As such it is almost undefeatable on this territory. For not only will it come into play the minute bonhomie and good feeling cease to be the order of the day (something that happens all too quickly in most human relations); but also and more critically, once it has come into play, capitalism inhabits greed and selfishness, expanding them, and making them feel like the truth. Perhaps even more darkly, it is profoundly in the interests of capitalism that people are greedy and selfish. It then invariably appears to subvert societies of comrades, warping motives, and beckoning them to this other way, the way they might follow, if they follow their greed and their desire for self aggrandisement. It has then natural allies in everyone’s mind.

  “What is more, before we of the left start to get too smug, think about what happens in the left’s ranks if it suppresses capitalism’s affects: The left when it loses its camaraderie and sparkle, goes somewhere very dark, straight away. It creates then in the name of freedom endless suffering and pain, and constant acts of suppression. Can we afford to laugh or even to resent the fact that it is at this very point, the point at which the battle discipline of the left’s idealism breaks, that capitalism is at its most disciplined and resilient? No wonder then the battle is so easily lost. The left might in hope, start well but as its hope is dented in the face of the world, and the troops start to mutter and mutiny, capitalism and the right wax and become more powerful. They tear through the left’s hopes and dreams, and destroys its ability to fight at all. And (this is the clincher) the left has no answer - for it almost at this point welcomes in the enemy. This is because the left knows, that the places that its (the left’s) own greed would lead are very dark indeed. The left then needs a capitalist victory to save it from itself. No wonder then that it loses with such aplomb (and snatches endless defeats from the jaws of its own victories).

  “In addition to this, it is clear that the lands upon which the forces of left and right battle it out favour the right, in two deep ways. Firstly and most profoundly the technological age asks an awful lot of its political and economic system. For it demands that that system be able to expand and change in the face of what can now be done. The world itself, or at least what we can do in that world is in constant flux, and yet we demand a single political and economic system to absorb all those challenges. So that we, and what we can do or be might then change, or the world might transform (become smaller with cheaper flights or virtual or longer lasting or whatever), and yet we want a political and economic system that can endorse and accept these fluxes, and do it with no or minimum mess or fuss: It must then just ‘deal with it’. A polymorphism that the left cannot provide, and which capitalism can. For greed and the simple life are everywhere and anywhere. Capitalism can always then find a pitch, and create itself anew in lives and in between lives; in a way that the left cannot dream of. To makes matters worse the left has a marked tendency to inhabit certain technological epochs. It then seeks to set the world aright according to a certain set of rules about what people could or should do or be. If those rules change at some deep level, then the left looks outdated and problematic. New Labour therefore was the product of the pre-broadband age, in the same way that the unions flowered a generation ago in the face of the microchip. Or to put it slightly differently - the left always feels that it ought to be caught up with our technological future: was it not founded in that ‘white hot heat of the industrial revolution’? It therefore inhabits the technology that is there, naturally enough, and creates its hopes of fairness and dreams and promises across what is. It then commits itself to a certain technological epoch, and flounders when that epoch changes. Its promise for the future comes then with a marked sell by date.

  “The second feature of modern life that favours the right is the manner in which we define the ownership of goods and services. At the heart of capitalism is a threefold split of property, goods and services, that the left finds very hard to cope with. The left in its ideal world would insist that there is only one population, one people, one world, and can cannot easily address the fact that in capitalism there are three very different types of citizen (or the same citizen has three avatars). Capitalism then splits up the population into labour force, owners, and consumers. Every problem from oil spills in Mexico, through global warming, to the propping up of a currency, will then be understood from these three different perspectives. The complexities of which become then localised in three areas, and the relations between this threefold population. This methodology creates a profound advantage for the right. The threefold framework transliterates all problems into a problem of capitalism and creates three perspectives for that problem, each perspective then having its own right wing element to it. Problems become then not only consumed within capitalism, but also become problems of the right (problems then of money or the right to consume, or the right to work). The left is then caught in a complex dilemma. On the one hand it knows the world is both more and less complex than capitalism appears to allow for. It wants then to keep the world as a single complex system and have a single perspective upon that world (and not capitalism’s threefold division). And yet this move is far from satisfactory, as it risks either dissolving its own analysis into endless complexity, or profound and problematic simplicity: For the left everything is always either too easy or too difficult, with very little in between. On the other hand if the left accepts the right’s threefold division it is already at a profound disadvantage, as it is already talking the language of the right, a language that precludes the left actually saying anything really left wing! In short the left has a tendency to be destroyed by the fact that it is forced to fight upon territory which it has no real control over, and yet cannot seem to come up with its own battle ground.

  “All of which is bad enough, but the left is hampered further by the fact that its tactics are often lousy, and its troops mutinous, and problematic. This leads to a strange situation where the leftwing can win certain initial battles, say the battle for free expression, and the right to use the word ‘Fuck’ in a serious essay, and yet lose the war. For who can argue that being able to live in a tolerant society is not good? Who can argue then against the ethic of the permissive society, the society that allows one to say and do what one pleases as adults. The left’s agenda here is clear and valid. And yet of course it is not the left that were the eventual big winners of this conflict of yesteryear. On the contrary the people who really made money from permissiveness were dodgy corners of capitalism and porn wallahs. They moved in after the left had had one its victory, and stole its thunder. The left won only the first round, and lacked staying power for the second.

  “This theme, where the left wins the initial encounter and still loses the war is repeated again and again. Take health or housing – these were the great mantras of the left in the 1945 – they won an election landslide upon these promises, and yet (in a way that the left itself would find hard to mirror) by 1951 the right had occupied the same territory, and were proposing their own solutions to health and housing problems. The right then absorbed the left’s charge, and came back all the stronger for it. The left is then caught in the battle strategy of Harold and Hastings: its desire for a quick initial victory destroys it time and time again. But this of course is the problem with marching on hope. Hope needs an initial victory and relatively easy laurels, else it all too easily becomes despair. 

  “In its ability to endlessly regroup, the right is helped by two additional factors. Firstly the right tends to win the narrative war. Banks might collapse and countries be ruined in the process; or big companies might destroy entire coastlines and ecosystems, but the right’s agenda, the right’s commentary will still win out in the explanation war. That is, some way will be found that it is not capitalism’s fault as a whole, and some scapegoat be it hidden leftist agendas or hapless capitalists or pension funds will be blamed. It is simply too difficult to question the entire system. More that that the bodies in charge of questions, that is the media organizations, have a clear vested interest in supporting the status quo that has made them their money, and hence do so constantly. The net effect is then that the rightwing view of a decade or a government tends to stick. People are therefore very likely to remember New Labour for the debts they left and not the good they did. In the same way that people remember Thatcher for her strength of leadership (one way or other), not for the fact that she abolished credit controls, and so set the ball rolling for the current crisis. Secondly the right has a marked advantage in any act of regrouping, in that its colours (its battle banners) are well defined and pronounced. It is easy to rally around a patriotic theme or the rights to own property, in a way that rallying around the ‘Rights of Man’ are not. The right then can easily pull its troops together, where the left tends to dissolve in the face of attack. No wonder then it loses the struggle.

  “The effect of these last two points is to make the right a formidable force in defeat, and the left a poor winner. To this must be added another point: Battles are not won by having a grand plan, for battle plans are seldom enacted in full. On the contrary a good general has an overall goal, and numerous strategies to get there; beyond these they must rely on chance and the luck of the day. Battles are then won from being flexible. The trouble of course is that the left has a tendency to ignore this - it wants to chart out in a grand plan what will happen next. It wants then to control the battlefield in a way that is impossible, and in a way that the right would not dream of. Events happen and the left is caught on the hop, and without any flexibility of plan to respond; no wonder then it loses so badly, and so constantly. It will continue to do so, as long as it has no answers to these deep problems in its tactics and its strategy.”

  So says perhaps the general in Hades, and it is our living problem that they are so right. And yet the world needs as almost never before the left to behave differently, and say something different. So can we of the left change, or are we once again and forever fated to fight our losing battle - and to fail in spite of all the advantages which we have on our side? And do we have a right to such a failure, such an inability to respond, when the world needs the left to win as never before? A tragedy that poor Cassius knew so very well – one kills a tyrant and makes a new and worse tyrant, and does so when the world needs freedom: and is there any way beyond this paradox now or then?