Histomat: Adventures in Historical Materialism

'Historical materialism is the theory of the proletarian revolution.' Georg Lukács

Tuesday, May 08, 2012

May 10 Strikes - Now lets bring the British Tories down

The British Tory government really just don't get it do they? The defeat of Sarkozy sounds the death knell for Cameron - (the death knell for Clegg has been ringing for so long now it has gradually faded away without anybody noticing), and yet now Cameron and Clegg are still blustering on in all their public school arrogance as if the local elections never happened and nothing has changed and there is to be no alternative to their austerity 'strategy' of cuts cuts and more cuts, which they believe will in the long term work wonderfully to somehow revive the British economy. Yet as Charlie Brooker notes after the recent elections,

 The further Cameron's stock slides, the less unelectable Ed Miliband appears. Miliband, unfortunately, looks and sounds like a dork. And not just any dork either, but the dorkiest dork in Dorking; someone you wouldn't cast as a dork in a drama-documentary for fear of looking implausible. But in a fight between the school dork and a dim, angry prefect with a warped sense of entitlement, only an absolute sodpot wouldn't root for the dork.

 It is I think here valid to make comparisons between Ed Miliband and Francois Hollande here - though if Hollande played up being 'Mr Normal' to beat Sarkozy, Ed Miliband has been trying to do 'Mr. Normal' for a while and well, he is having a slight problem pulling it off convincingly. Brooker offers some advice to Miliband:

 Jarvis Cocker recognised that the best way to turn your weaknesses into strengths is to magnify them: rather than trying to disguise his inherent gawky perviness, he accentuated it at every opportunity until he became a star. Maybe if Miliband overly emphasised his slightly peculiar and nerdish persona it would pay dividends. If he started collecting Magic: The Gathering trading cards and riding to the Commons on a little blue tricycle, with his knees all sticking out like a doofus.

However, even if Miliband makes such a turn to 'uber-geek' and electoral glory, the rest of us are left with no strategy for confronting the Tories' class war from above on workers and the poor from Miliband except er, 'wait three years and vote Labour'. Which is no strategy at all when the cuts are hitting now and hurting now. The time has come - to keep with a new 'uber-geek strategy' and quote er, Robert de Niro from Meet the Parents - to bring Cameron down - and to bring him down to Chinatown.

There is only one language that Cameron and the British Tories understand - class war - and it is time our side began fighting this war seriously. Everyone should get therefore behind the mass public sector strike over pensions this Thursday - an escalation of such struggles can begin - as has happened in Greece where they have had over 17 general strikes over the past two years - to slowly move British society and politics towards the left in a way in which we can start to really talk about making those most to blame for the capitalist crisis begin to pay for their recent blunders and crimes.

Edited to add: Utterly irrelevant really - but I made the mistake of googling the disgraced journalist Johann Hari today to see what he was up to - which took me to this page, dated 11 April 2012 where Hari tells me that 'Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com is part of a tradition of American writers – from Thomas Paine to Mark Twain to Noam Chomsky – who embody the best values of America'.  One slight problem perhaps here, Johann - is it correct to claim Thomas Paine as an 'American writer' when he was at best only partly American, having been born in Thetford in England and famously once declaring himself a 'citizen of the world'? 

5 Comments:

At 6:56 pm, Blogger Rosa Lichtenstein said...

Hi, Snowball. I can't contact you in any other way, but I wonder if you could up-date the link you have to my site, which is now incorrect. The correct address is:

http://anti-dialectics.co.uk/index.htm

 
At 12:56 pm, Anonymous David Duff said...

Calm down, dear! You don't really suppose that life under 'adenoidal Eddie' would be more than a jot or a tittle different from life under 'Dim Dave', do you? They are both wedded to the centre where the vast mass of what you would call The People are gathered.

 
At 5:31 pm, Blogger Snowball said...

Rosa - you could email histomat@hotmail.co.uk and in about 6 months I'd have got back to you.

David - oh dear. No, generally speaking, life under Ed Miliband wouldn't be better than life now - you are right - but there would be one respect in which it would be better and that is that right wing commentators up and down the country like yourself would feel less confident about pontificating about claiming that they knew exactly what 'The People' (a term I'd appreciate you finding an example of me using by the way) felt about things.

 
At 8:20 pm, Blogger Rosa Lichtenstein said...

Thanks for that Snowball.

[I didn't know your e-mail address!]

 
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