Tuesday, 21 January 2025
Monday, 20 January 2025
Bullshit and Bravado
It's long been obvious that a second Trump term would entail naked, oligarchical rule. Behind the warm noises of being a "unifier" and a "peacemaker", his attacks on immigration, "foreign criminals", trans people, and the recognition of minorities by government institutions are megaphones for crack downs on the most marginalised and oppressed in US society. "Radical leftists" did not feature in Trump's roll call, but you can be sure that shutting out the right to be different will, as night follows day, include diversity of thought. All for the greater glory of America, you understand.
Yet there were some signs of one nation conservatism, that much abused canard, in Trump's address. He positively referenced African-Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Asian Americans, he invoked the spirit of those he said had built the nation - the pioneers, the cowboys, the soldiers, the agricultural and autoworkers, a who's who of Uncle Sam's most masculine tropes. But inseparable from this was the baseless boosterism. This was day one of a new golden age, where America becomes the envy of the world and seeks to expand its frontiers. The acquiring-new-territory line might have raised some eyebrows, especially as Panama was referenced again, though Trump quickly passed on to adventures in space - including the stars and stripes on Mars.
What was different about this Trump as opposed to his 2017 vintage was the confidence, the comparative lack of tetchiness, and the annexation of hope to his project. It doesn't matter that unconstrained class rule is backward and a new round of social devastation is the likely consequence of big government cuts and deregulation, the proposed tariff programme, more fossil fuel extraction, and the coming assaults on democracy, accountability, and freedom. This speech was the recognition that scapegoating can only distract some of the people some of the time. Strapping SpaceX rocket boosters to reheated American exceptionalism is, for the audience at home, about exuding confidence and power, if not awe. "The impossible is what we do best", said Trump to a standing ovation.
Conquering the impossible, however, does not extend to the politically impossible. Cracks have already appeared in the Trump edifice over immigration, and between the oligarchical desire to gut the state and grassroots MAGA supporters dependent on social security to get by. And day one reminded us of the clash of egos too. Positive write ups of Trump's inauguration are threatened by Elon Musk's antics, who couldn't hold back his inner far right edgelord and saluted Hitler three times at a rally, earlier. Not exactly the cuddly One America vibes Trump's advisors want to convey for the moment.
To be sure, the second Trump presidency is a catastrophe in slow motion, an abject lesson in the failure of centrist managerialism. A taster of what much of Western Europe, including us, could look forward unless we're able to build rooted, mass alternatives to the politics of bullshit and bravado. The only people who can save us from this are ourselves.
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Sunday, 19 January 2025
Pausing the Massacre
The sorties might have paused, but some things never change. At the time of writing the BBC News website leads with four stories about the three Israeli captives released as Hamas's part of the ceasefire deal. The dedicated Israel-Gaza War [sic] page is little different. 'What was it like to be a Hamas hostage?' goes one of the stories. 'Who are they?' asks another. Nothing on the Palestinian hostages Israel is releasing, on the abuses and torture meted out to the incarcerated. And you can forget anything about extra-judicial killings in Israeli jails. There are no interviews with Palestinian families welcoming home their loved ones, no human interest portraits about people being united amid the rubble of Gaza. The active phase of the massacre might be at an end, but the dehumanisation of Palestinians by the BBC continues unabated.
When the deal was announced last week, social media was awash with self-congratulation. Democrat supporters were praising the leadership of Joe Biden and thanking him for bring such a terrible episode of recent history to an end. It's as if the 50,000 tonnes of weapons shipped from American shores and making available United States surveillance capacity in service of the massacre of the Palestinians didn't happen. It was gut churning. But just as objectionable was their employment of the truce to score points against Donald Trump. "This is the Dems' victory. Trump had NOTHING TO DO WITH IT" was the flavour of many a contribution. It was, of course, completely wrong. Biden needed something for his legacy other than prices galloping ahead of wages, and Trump wants to start his second presidency on a high note. And so we had close collaboration behind the scenes in making sure a deal was done.
The truth is, as far as the US is concerned, Israel's massacre inadvertently led to rebalancing the Middle East squarely in the State Department's interest. Hamas might claim victory, but its most experienced cadre are nearly all dead, its tunnel network partially demolished, and its ability to wage asymmetrical warfare severely blunted. Likewise Hezbollah in Lebanon. The IDF's invasion was much bloodier than military planners were expecting, but its capacity is also stymied. It also appears the "reply" to the Iranian assault on IDF targets was more effective than the damage Israel sustained. And there was the small matter of Bashir al-Assad's collapsed regime, an Iranian ally, and the subsequent withdrawal of Russian military assets from Syria. The US did not foresee any of this, but with the benefit of hindsight the deaths of tens of thousands was a price they were happy for the Palestinians to pay for their regional goals to be met.
And now? Trump wants to keep everyone guessing with regard to his foreign policy, but it's not hard to discern what his priorities are. There is bipartisan agreement that China is the big threat to American hegemony. Biden did nothing to help thaw relations with Beijing, and Trump is keen to big up their "threat". It seems likely he doesn't want any distractions from confronting Xi Jinping. So a becalmed Middle East with Israel the regional arbiter, some sort of peace in Ukraine with a view to US rapprochement with Russia, and perhaps a rejuvenation of the North/South Korea peace process. Success is not just about boosting Trump's ego as a deal maker, they are steps aimed at isolating China diplomatically and reasserting American leadership on the world stage. By the end of his presidency and regardless of the horrors Trump commits domestically, centrist and establishment Democrats will show their appreciation for his positioning by carrying on where he leaves off - just as retiring old Biden did.
What that means for Israel and the Palestinians is anything but a lasting peace. The occupation continues, and so the resistance will continue. Assuming Trump's State Department follow through with the logic of peace through strength for the Middle East, that means an endless flow of weapons to Israel continues, and the turning of a blind eye to the pre-7th October business-as-usual of internment, "targeted" assassinations, and sporadic punishment bombings. Meet the new peace, just like the old peace.
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Thursday, 16 January 2025
The Tories' Terrible Truth
This self-designated title has a long history in politics, and it's always the right who lay claim to its mantle. Nigel Farage has built a career from "telling the truth" about the European Union, immigration, and the liberal elite. To his mind and those of his followers, he's cut through the obfuscation and crap and says it how it is, regardless of who gets offended and whinges about "you can't say that!". Boris Johnson was also a skilled practitioner of this form of politics. And all extreme right parties and demagogic figures use the same ploy - Trump, the AfD, the Le Pen family, Bolsonaro, Viktor Orban. A consistent pattern of behaviour.
Badenoch's truth-telling, however, alighted upon the failings of her party. She said politicians needed to accept and acknowledge mistakes, of which the Conservatives have made a fair few. She criticised the rush to leave the EU without having a plan for afterwards in place (you might recall the Japanese state did more contingency planning for Brexit than the UK did). She said setting the net zero targets without any idea of how to achieve them was another. And her party promised to cut immigration, but the numbers kept going up was probably the most serious of all. For Badenoch, this was symptomatic of a politics of wanting to be popular, of saying things the electorate wanted to hear.
The Tory leader didn't get the memo that admitting mistakes usually requires an apology, but that was too much to ask for. Instead, Badenoch promised there won't be any empty promises from her. With her Tories, the voters are going to have to face the facts. And we know what these are going to be: she's spent 2025's first fortnight exploiting sexual abuse and making explicitly racist political points about them.
Is there a grain of truth to her explanation about why the Tories have failed? Yes. The problem her party has is its strategic addiction to the politics of negativity, of undermining the efficacy of the state if not dismantling it and offering nothing but the demonisation of minorities for its support to rail against. With Brexit exhausted as an issue, the last five years of Tory party strategy can fruitfully be interpreted as the search for new glue to stick a coalition of voters together with. Hence, for example, why Rishi Sunak was set on burning down the house to get his Rwanda deal done. The problem with this is a party cannot wind its base up indefinitely. During their 14 years in government, the Tories were able to atomise British society further, create new points of distrust and division and pull the trick of presenting themselves as the only force capable of mending the insecurities they deepened. Yet if a party promises to do something about it and then doesn't, a slab of its support will sheer away.
This is what has happened to the Tory base. Its most racist and backward sections, those most excited by the rhetoric of division, have found a new home in Reform. Unlike the Tories, Farage has not been tested by office. He's established credibility on these issues through his long campaign against the European Union and, latterly, immigration. Married to his garrulous manner, he's become the beneficiary of the Tories' beggar-thy-neighbour policy pitches since 2019 - especially so after Johnson was forced from the scene and Farage re-entered the fray last summer.
And here's where Badenoch's problems are. Chasing after the right, on paper, makes sense for the Tories. They need to put their base back together again before they can contest Labour in a general election. But in practice, because the party's stock is so low with right wing voters, it doesn't matter how far to the right they go it looks like they're trying to catch up with Reform. They're seen to be doing it because they think they have to, not because they believe. What we saw with Robert Jenrick's conversion to the extreme right during the leadership election now applies to te Conservatives as a whole. Their posturing is tarred with the brush of inauthenticity, which makes Badenoch's gamble to try and unite the right under her leadership one unlikely to pay off. Indeed, if the polls are any indication the hole the Tories are in is getting deeper.
Yet there is nowhere else for Badenoch to go. She was elected on a right wing platform, nearly all of her party are committed to the rightist strategy of renewal, but that is inadvertently feeding the Reform beast. Every pulse of the Tory id is screaming that this is definitely going to work, that this path not only makes them feel good, it will make them come good too. But it won't. This is the hard truth about Badenoch's positioning and the party's orientation, and it's one you can guarantee she'll never mention at her next relaunch.
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Tuesday, 14 January 2025
Hal Clement's Mission of Gravity
In Mission, humans several centuries hence are investigating Mesklin. It's a poisonous, frigid world that gets up to a balmy -50C in the summer. If that wasn't bad enough, the planet's gravity is punishingly uncomfortable to outright fatal for flimsy earthlings. Because the world spins so rapidly, it's tolerable near to and on the equator where gravity is only three times that of Earth. But towards the poles it ramps up to over 600Gs, which would turn us into bloody puddles. What happens if the exploration of this world lands an advanced expensive probe near one of the poles, but its gravity-nullifying engines fail and it remains there marooned? How to get it back? This is the task our on-site boffins have to accomplish.
Luckily, Mesklin is inhabited by intelligent life forms. The imaginatively-named Mesklinites are roughly at a pre-gunpowder level of technology, and are scattered across the southern hemisphere in small states. They also think their world, which is an oblate spheroid thanks due to its rapid spin (a day is approximately 18 minutes long), is bowl-shaped. The equator represents the edge of what is known and, presumably, no one has crossed it nor has anyone sallied down from the north. It also happens that Charles Lackland, the member of the planetary investigation team that volunteered to reside on the surface, has struck up a friendship with Barlennan, a ship's captain, explorer, and trader. He handily brings a crew to the party. The Mesklinites are well adapted to their world too. They're foot long centipede analogues with their equivalent of opposable thumbs. A bargain is struck between the two: retrieve or fix the probe and riches will be his. Barlennan receives four radios and regular weather reports in this fetch quest. They have to overcome environmental hazards, hostile wildlife, spear chucking tribes, supercilious bureaucrats, as well as teaching pre-industrial sailors how to fix a rocket.
Like Clarke's A Fall of Moondust, Clement's book doesn't have a fantastic reputation these days - especially among booktubers for whom whizz bang is largely king. Clement's characterisation isn't fantastic, it's low on action, and there are info dumps - albeit of the physical sciences sort and not the vibrant lore that accompanies most genre fiction. But again, like the Clarke, Mission exceeded my expectations. There are only really three, maybe four (if you count the planet), characters and they do the job. Barlennan is shown to be a wily operator with the gift of the gab and an ability to make the most of whatever situation Clement puts him in, The rapport he has with Lakeland is believable, even if it the captain has ulterior motives. Their relationship works to move the plot along which, again, is about solving a seemingly intractable problem. There is no superfluity, and we skip around Gravity's equator in very little time.
Perhaps the "boring" verdict lies in its being emblematic of a zeitgeist that has long passed, and profitably lampooned by the Fall Out series of video games and TV series: the 1950s flavoured hopes in science. When the Mesklinites finally reach the probe Barlennan demands, as the price for his further cooperation, the technological know how for guns, rockets, radio, and so on. Instead Lakeland and co. teach him the scientific method, which presumably would make Barlennan very rich upon his return home and (hopefully) improve the overall lot of his people. This speaks of the American character of US SF of the period. For the Clarke, proceedings were dutiful, unshowy. It was just professionals doing their job. Here the challenges are met by mustering Barlennan's faceless crew. His first mate, Dondragmer, has a knack for conjuring up schemes for getting them out of their scrapes but whatever the challenge, the spotlight is on them. They're the individuals who stand out and front the labour of others. In Moondust, the collective effort saved the Selene and that was that. In Gravity, it's these two who are the heroes, they're the ones that get centred, and are going to be the reapers of the rewards. This makes it as American as Clarke's adventures on the Moon locate it as British.
But there's perhaps a gentle warning in Clement's novel. Science can do wonderful things - it can transport humans 11 light years to another world, for one. But even here there are limits. No matter the expertise and the systems we design to support them, things can always go wrong. And with the Mesklinites, despite their pre-industrial level of development they know their world better than our star-bestriding descendents do. Rather than an uncritical celebration of postwar technocracy, there's a note here telling us not to become arrogant, not to presume to know everything, a hesitation injuncting us to take care. Only fools, or people set on losing an expensive space probe, would ignore common sense and local knowledge.
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Sunday, 12 January 2025
Hyping Farage
This latest entry in the sub-genre comes courtesy of George Eaton, who has set out to explain "why Farage is turning left". This follows comments Farage made to Politics Joe last week in which he said there was common ground between him and Jeremy Corbyn. They are both "anti-establishment" and critical of the European Union. He said Corbyn's critique of the EU was couched in oppositional terms to big business, a position he happened to share. Brussels is "good for big banks and big businesses and bad for everybody else. Well, he was pretty much right." What Eaton then supplies is evidence for Reform's "left turn" - water nationalisation (cos Labour won't do it), and protecting British steel.
Should Labour be worried? Judging by the panicky anonymous "red wall" MP quotes that accompany such pieces, some are bricking it. And of course they are. Finding a Labour parliamentarian who understands the people Reform attracts is as rare as a tin of Quality Street with a decent amount of triangles. As previously explained, there are hard limits to the extent Reform can become "pro-working class" and adopt left-sounding positions. And when such "policy" is taken on board, they're adjuncts and nice-sounding afterthoughts. Does anyone seriously believe that a Farage-led government would renationalise anything, especially when his City pals benefit handsomely from the private monopolies that own essential infrastructure?
The extreme right have form for tacking left when occasion demands. Reform is not a fascist party, but its antecedents were. The British Union of Fascists, the National Front, the BNP, all had "left wing" positions on economics. So did the interwar continental fascist parties, and when these outfits became governments they turned the state into a straightforward criminal enterprise. The "socialism" in National Socialism was for optics to compete with the socialism of labour movements and mass working class parties. The Nazis, for instance, nationalised nothing. In fact, they were pioneers of privatisation. But the fascists then and the extreme right now can appear "credible" on these issues, despite their record, for two reasons. Putting public distance between themselves and consensus economic opinion underscores their anti-establishment creds, as Farage noted. And second, it's because their core support faces left and right simultaneously. The petit bourgeois roots of the extreme right are riven with status anxiety, and fear being forced down into into the employee class, of having to work for someone else. Downward social mobility can be "caused" by workers demanding too high wages, or expecting entitlements like breaks, sensible working hours, and time off. They are never as reliable as the proprietor. Or workers as an organised collective might be expecting too much from the state, and demand higher taxes on businesses to pay for better public services. Or the petit bourgeois could be out-competed by big businesses who share their market, or screwed over on contracts or suffer late payments. Small business is, from their point of view, where the pathologies of labour and capital collide. They're pushed from pillar to post, and it's why the authoritarian programme of extreme right parties resonate with them. They offer a middle road that puts the two great forces of capitalism in their place and allows for stability. The cypher for that can be the great leader/charismatic personality, the nation, or a menu of tough-sounding promises that would restore order to the world (have you read the 2024 Reform manifesto?).
Therefore, talk of a "left turn" is meaningless. Extreme right parties swing this way and that with the weather. It's in the DNA of their core support, but the moves left are always rhetorical and subordinate to a specific set of political priorities.
The more interesting question is why the New Statesman and Labour Party politicians are hyping Farage when Reform will always pose more of a threat to the Tories. And, I'm sorry to say, the explanation does not lie in "genuinely mistakes" or cluelessness. It's a politics of handling expectations, of Labour not offering too much so politics (or, to be more accurate, class relations) are easier to manage. And one way of doing this is talking up the threat Reform poses the to sort of Britain Labour supporters would like to see. Invoking the threat of a demon opposition is tough when the Tories are bumping along the bottom, but with a comparably more dynamic and more extreme threat, a la Reform, some will stick to Keir Starmer and Labour for fear that something even worse than the Tories is in the offing. What the New Statesman and friends are doing is reminding us of this fact.
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Saturday, 11 January 2025
Baudrillard Vs Trump and Musk
It's a while since Acid Horizon product was last featured as a gap filler on this blog, a tradition I'm happy to resurrect on nights where the writing isn't happening. In this episode the comrades use and think against our old friend Jean Baudrillard on the nature of evil. As good Deleuzians, the hypemeister of hyperreality is found wanting. But in addition there are interesting insights into the authoritarian character of the Trumpist/tech bro crossover project - particularly their fondness for the obsolete forms of disciplinary power, which is especially noteworthy as social media platforms are the basic technologies of the control society.
Friday, 10 January 2025
Comfortable in the Gutter
Let's look back at the disaster. As forecast in November, the Tories have tried making common cause with Trump, Elon Musk, and the oligarchical interest they front. With Musk's turn against Farage and calls for his replacement as Reform's leader, the Tories have served themselves up as the most deserving supplicants. Andrew Griffith, the shadow for business and trade, marked the initiative with the most excruciating flattery, in which he credits Musk with "saving humanity" for purchasing Twitter. This came just after Badenoch wholesale adopted the call for another public inquiry into grooming gangs, an issue that she had previously shown no interest in nor would likely have done if Musk had stayed off the ketamine and taken an early night.
The repugnance and opportunism of the Tories was on full display at Wednesday's Prime Minister's Questions. Because it was obvious she was going to press for an inquiry, Keir Starmer easily turned the tables on her. He condemned the Tories for appending their inquiry call to that afternoon's child protection bill, which they voted against when it fell. So much for caring about child abuse. He attacked the Tories for not doing anything to implement the recommendations of the Alexis Jay report on grooming and rape gangs in Rochdale, leaving it to gather dust on a Whitehall shelf for two years. And most damning of all, Starmer skewered Badenoch on the fact that as Minister for Women and Equalities and as a member of the Commons, she had not once spoken on the issue since entering the House.. If that wasn't bad enough, later that afternoon Badenoch's spox told the lobby hacks that she hadn't met abuse survivors nor thought she needed to. If it waddles like opportunism and quacks like opportunism.
The Tory adoption of the second inquiry cause is about the shoring up the party, nothing else. As we saw last weekend with Jenrick's rant about "alien cultures" and language that resonates with white nationalist 'great replacement' psychosexual paranoia, Badenoch's Tories have departed the norms of conventional conservatism for the politics of Viktor Orban, the National Rally, and AfD. The Tory hope is enough people will have noticed the row in Westminster and start asking questions about why Labour are keen to avoid an inquiry into the rape and abuse of young women by criminal gangs of Pakistani heritage men, nudge nudge, wink wink. But the Tory problem is they're can easily be outflanked by Reform. For instance, Musk's anointed one, Rupert Lowe, demanded an inquiry focusing just on this aspect of rape gangs. The Tories, so far, haven't been so crude with their racism. Reform has no need for such niceties. And, of course, Starmer is not the only one who can call Badenoch out for her opportunism - Farage is well placed too.
This doesn't leave the Tories in the most advantageous of positions. Starmer has no problem batting away Badenoch's underhanded bowls, and Farage is better placed to reap any electoral disaffection. The Tories might be glad they're making headlines again, but it's not doing anything to consolidate their shaky foundations and is doing nothing for winning back the former support they lost to Labour and the Liberal Democrats. All they've managed is confirming how comfortable they are in the gutter.
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Tuesday, 7 January 2025
Donald Trump's Expansionist Threats
To justify these imperial ambitions he has said on several occasions, most recently on Christmas day, that expansion at Denmark's and Panama's expense is essential for "national security". China, apparently, has too much of a presence at the strategically vital waterway into the Pacific and, according to Trump, US shipping has to pay an unfair premium to travel through its gates. A demonstrably false assertion. On Greenland, Trump has shown an interest since someone, in 2019, showed him a world map and he couldn't work out why it wasn't part of the United States already. And there's the small matter of extensive mineral resources US mining interests wouldn't mind getting their hands on.
For such an overweening ego, Trump's rambling "interventions" owe something to an incontinent id. To suggest Trump has ulterior motives apart from whatever spark has lit the dim corners of his limited mind affords him too much credit, but that isn't to say those around him haven't. Offering territorial expansion would play well to the base, which has recently been riled up by a dispute between Musk and MAGA over work visas and immigration. A secondary consequence might be a repeat of what we've seen domestically from other billionaires, businesses, and institutions in pre-emptively bending the knee. For example, Jeff Bezos instructing The Washington Post not to endorse anyone at the election, and Mark Zuckerberg's scrapping of "biased" fact checkers in favour of "free speech" on Instagram and Facebook. Perhaps Panama, Denmark, and Canada will pre-emptively offer concessions to sate Trump's greedy eyes.
There's further method to Trump's madness. The reason why the likes of Musk are on board the Trump train is because their politics are determined by an experiment in naked class rule. This means scrapping as many checks and balances on capital they can get away with, winding down the federal government, which includes residual social security and health entitlements, and squeezing central funding to states' budgets. Needless to say, those who mistakenly thought Trump was protecting their meagre welfare cheques are about to find out what they voted for. What's left is going to be shaken down so more federal money pours into billionaire coffers, and they'll doubly benefit from tax cuts too (though these are now another MAGA bone of contention). What Javier Milei is doing to Argentina, and what Liz Truss tried doing here is the prize, and that is a further shift in the balance between capital and labour. Though given the state of US politics, this is a move on from the dominance of capital to its unquestionable authoritarian rule. The United States economy is to become even more a billionaire's playground, with the world's largest and most advanced military there to intimidate the rest of the globe into falling in line.
This is the project, at least where Trump's elite backers are concerned. But winding the Donald up and letting him waddle into controversy is a good way of generating interference, of continually creating spectacles while the real business of looting the state and securing an even more subservient class settlement proceeds relatively unnoticed.
It's impossible to say whether this project will be successful. Everyone has a breaking point, and not even Trump can rub the faces of his mass support in it indefinitely. The MAGA row over immigration might preface far more serious disputes to come if the incoming government and, especially, Musk's Department of Government Efficiency throws millions of federal employees out of work and ratchets up the difficulties for poorer Americans and those just getting by. That's the problem with projects aiming to implement naked class rule. Existing forms of political consent break down and the truth of a society becomes apparent to everyone. And history shows those situations tend not to end well for those who've brought them into being.
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Monday, 6 January 2025
New Left Media January 2025
1. Red Barrels (Podcast) (Bluesky)
2. Think and Resist (Podcast)
3. Workers' Inquiry (Podcast)
If you know of any new(ish) blogs, podcasts, channels, Facebook pages, resources, spin offs from existing projects, campaign websites or whatever that haven't featured before then drop me a line via the comments, email, Bluesky, Facebook, or Twitter. Please note I'm looking for new media that has started within the last 12 months, give or take. The round up appears hereabouts when there are enough new entrants to justify a post!
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