Actually, no, that doesn't quite capture it. There is some mileage in the himself personally now argument, but not enough to go the full distance. Yes, sure, when the Brexit Party is organised entirely around Farage's person and he is leader, executive committee, and party secretary rolled into one there is no room for a potential rival. As he was occasionally wont to lament, Farage grew to despise the fact he didn't and couldn't run UKIP as a personal fiefdom. Too many fruitcakes and loons, to paraphrase a former Prime Minister, got in the way. Had Farage consented to Galloway's candidacy, there was always a chance his numero uno position would be usurped. A lesson learned from the defection and subsequent career of Douglas Carswell. While he did not seek the limelight in the same way Farage did and does, the fact he was a parliamentarian and the only one UKIP returned in 2015 as Farage crashed and burned for the seventh time sat uneasy. If Galloway, a man not averse to the media spotlight himself, got the Brexit Party ticket and was successful, it would prove too much for Farage and undermine the one-man sovereignty of his project.
Need we mention the politics? Yes, we must. Farage and Galloway might be populists, and they are both anti-EU, but the basis of their opposition is fundamentally different. Farage's politics, as per his sound-a-likes on the Tory benches, is steeped in imperial nostalgia, the faux affectation of plucky Little Englandism, and a heavy dose of libertarian capitalist politics, his project is a class project of turning the clock back and letting the market rip through what's left of the public sector, above all the NHS, and refounding the UK as a global haven for tax dodgers. Sounds idyllic, no? Galloway's opposition however is consistent with old school Bennism and sees the state as the primary vehicle for enacting socialist policies and suppressing the market, in as much as it needs suppressing. The pooled sovereignty of the EU with its neoliberal policies, unelected bankers dictating to elected politicians what they can and can't do, and its rules on state aid aren't just undemocratic, they are fundamental threats to this prospectus. Here then are two perspectives that don't exactly sit easy with one another.
But what about the presence of leftwingers on the Brexit Party's regional lists? You have Claire Fox and Alka Sehgal Cuthbert, James Heartfield and Stuart Waiton, all former members of the Revolutionary Communist Party and associates of its successor organisations, Spiked Online and the Institute of Ideas. Well, they might have caused a bit of bother for all of five minutes for past support of the IRA, though for some reason their Bosnian genocide denialism is yet to trouble the press, but Farage can handle it. Their leftism has long since drained out, filled now by the void of professional contrarianism and their alibiing of every two-bit racist and demagogic gobshite. This is performative radicalism, and I use that term advisedly, of providing 'saying-the-unsayble' filler for impeccably establishment publications like The Spectator as well as their own unreadable and best-avoided websites. Oh yes, and they are funded by well-known friends of revolutionary socialism, the Koch Brothers.
As unprincipled chancers and opportunists, they can turn out the old phraseology when it suits. Naturally, they're Farage's kind of leftist. He thinks it will hook into the lexity-leave voters and provide left cover for his project, allowing him to present his bunch as a broad coalition when, of course, any difference between the Brexit Party's European candidates are incidental and inessential. And in the mean time they will shut up. Now, say what you like about Galloway, he's no one's lapdog. Having Galloway use the Brexit Party to articulate his Lexit vision would not sit easy with Farage's business backers, or for that matter the voters Farage wants to court - former kippers, 'patriotic' Labour leavers, the disintegrating Tory vote - who might remember Galloway as the fellow who saluted Saddam Hussein, was scathing of British military adventures overseas, and minced about the Big Brother set with Pete Burns in a leotard. For his part, if the European elections and after get ugly and we see Farage strike out on wink, wink, nudge nudge racist territory, as he has before, it's not likely Galloway would keep quiet. Could you imagine him saying nothing as Farage moves on to a calculated bout of Islamophobia?
Two big personalities, two sets of ultimately incompatible politics. This is not the stuff of which a populist project can be made. Anti-EU right and left populisms oppose themselves and their particular renderings of the people to the antagonistic other of Brussels bureaucrats and their Westminster satraps determined to undo the outcome of the 2016 referendum. This, however, is not enough when this common opposition has very different bases, and appeals to different sets of punters. Farage's snub of Galloway might be an ego move, but it helps ensure his right wing project remains viable beyond the end of this month.
I fail to see in what way Farage and Galloway's opposition to the EU is incompatible: both fetishise national sovereignty, both oppose free movement, both oppose capitalist development and advocate a regression to earlier forms, both have a contempt for what they call "liberalism", both are misogynists and social conservatives in general: it's a true Red-Brown alliance, even if the Brown leader has shafted the Red in a farcical re-run of the Night of the Long Knives.
ReplyDeleteJim Denham is quite right, and all the Bennite claptrap about state "socialism" also indicates why. That was precisely the programme adopted by the Nazis. It was the programme adopted by Oswald Mosely whilst still a Labour MP, as set out in his Mosely Manifesto, also supported by Nye Bevan, of a cobbling together of state capitalism, with Keynesianism, and nationalism.
ReplyDeleteThere is nothing actually socialist in any of that agenda. Moreover, it stands in the way of the real task of the working-class not of contracting out its historical tasks to the national capitalist state, but of itself creating international working-class unity, based on its own self-organisation and self government.
As Lenin put it, our aim as socialists is not self-determination for the nation, but self-determination of the working-class!
Jim Denham and Boffy, I don't understand how you can fail to see why they're incompatible having read the article.
ReplyDeleteIt is the third paragraph down. You did read it before commenting didn't you?
If you can't see it, then I can only surmise you are being wilfully blind, or perhaps it's nuance that your ideological standpoint obscures.
Pleb Jones: "Farage's politics, as per his sound-a-likes on the Tory benches, is steeped in imperial nostalgia, the faux affectation of plucky Little Englandism, and a heavy dose of libertarian capitalist politics, his project is a class project of turning the clock back and letting the market rip through what's left of the public sector, above all the NHS, and refounding the UK as a global haven for tax dodgers. Sounds idyllic, no? Galloway's opposition however is consistent with old school Bennism and sees the state as the primary vehicle for enacting socialist policies and suppressing the market, in as much as it needs suppressing. The pooled sovereignty of the EU with its neoliberal policies, unelected bankers dictating to elected politicians what they can and can't do, and its rules on state aid aren't just undemocratic, they are fundamental threats to this prospectus. Here then are two perspectives that don't exactly sit easy with one another": and how, exactly are these two reactionary nationalist vision of an unachievable future, "incompatible"? For all practicable purposes, they're one and the same thing.
ReplyDeleteI suspect Pleb James is just another manifestation of our old troll, but for now, here goes.
ReplyDeleteI'd suggest reading Lenin's Imperialism, not because its a theoretically sound analysis of imperialism (It most certainly isn't, and wasn't even when he wrote it), but because it contains some useful insights, and concepts.
In particular, I am thinking here of Lenin's writing about the utopian and reactionary nature of those reformists, who following Kautsky argued for breaking up monopolies. Lenin correctly points out, quoting Hilferding, that these monopolies were the rational outcome of capitalism, of the process of competition and of the consequent concentration and centralisation of capital it brings. Kautsky himself had previously set out (The Road To Power), why in fact this development is an essential development of the productive and social relations tending towards socialism.
Lenin points out that it is no part of our project to try to turn that clock backwards, and that doing so is in any case impossible, because competition and the process of capital accumulation will continually reverse it. But, a part of the Stalinist agenda, rather like that of the libertarians has always been to try to turn the clock backwards, for example with their "anti-monopoly alliance" with Liberals, and petit-bourgeois elements.
It can be seen in Corbyn and Labour's antagonism to such monopolies and corporations today. Similarly both Trotsky and Lenin pointed out the progressive nature of European nations states coming together in a United States of Europe. Trotsky in the programme for Peace wrote that if the Kaiser should bring about such a unification, it would be no part of a social programme to try to reverse it.
The libertarian programme of Farage/Mogg et al is unachievable, but in trying to achieve it, they would be forced to go down the road of Bonapartism in which they would be swept aside and fascist elements take over. There is little to choose in the nature of the economic nationalism of fascism and of Stalinism as far as workers are concerned.