Jeremy Corbyn has won the first battle in a long war against the ruling elite. By Paul Mason
the British ruling elite and the business class are not the same entity. They have different interests. The British elite are in fact quite detached from the interests of people who do business here. They have become middle men for a global elite of hedge fund managers, property speculators, klepto-crats, oil sheikhs and crooks. It was in the interests of the latter that May turned the Conservatives from liberal globalists to die-hard Brexiteers... hard Brexit creates a permanent crisis, permanent austerity and a permanent set of enemies – namely Brussels and social democracy. It is the perfect petri dish for the fungus of financial speculation to grow. But the British people saw through it.
To stop Jeremy Corbyn,
the British elite is prepared to abandon Brexit – first in its hard form and,
if necessary, in its entirety. That is the logic behind all the manoeuvres, all
the cant and all the mea culpas you will see mainstream politicians and
journalists perform this week. And the logic is
sound. The Brexit referendum result was supposed to unleash Thatcherism 2.0: corporate tax rates on a par with Ireland, human rights law weakened, and
perpetual verbal equivalent of the Falklands war, only this time with Brussels
as the enemy; all opponents of hard Brexit would be labelled the enemy within. But you can’t have any
kind of Thatcherism if Corbyn is prime minister.
Hence the frantic search for a
fallback line. Those revolted by the stench of May’s rancid nationalism will
now find it liberally splashed with the cologne of compromise. Labour has, quite
rightly, tried to keep Karl Marx out of the election. But there is one Marxist
whose work provides the key to understanding what just happened. Antonio
Gramsci, the Italian communist leader who died in a fascist jail in 1937, would
have had no trouble understanding Corbyn’s rise, Labour’s poll surge, or
predicting what happens next. For Gramsci understood what kind of war the left
is fighting in a mature democracy, and how it can be won.
Consider the events of
the past six weeks a series of unexpected plot twists. Labour starts out
polling 25% but then scores 40%. Its manifesto is leaked, raising major
questions of competence, but it immediately boosts Corbyn’s popularity. Britain
is attacked by terrorists but it is the Tories whose popularity dips. Diane
Abbott goes sick – yet her majority rises to 30,000. Sitting Labour candidates
campaign on the premise “Corbyn cannot win” yet his presence delivers a 10%
boost to their own majorities. None of it was
supposed to happen. It defies political “common sense”. Gramsci was the first
to understand that, for the working class and the left, almost the entire
battle is to disrupt and defy this common sense. He understood that it is this
accepted common sense – not MI5, special branch and the army generals – that
really keeps the elite in power. Once you accept that,
you begin to understand the scale of Corbyn’s achievement. Even if he hasn’t
won, he has publicly destroyed the logic of neoliberalism – and forced the
ideology of xenophobic nationalist economics into retreat.
Brexit was an unwanted
gift to British business. Even in its softest form it means 10 years of
disruption, inflation, higher interest rates and an incalculable drain on the
public purse. It disrupts the supply of cheap labour; it threatens to leave the
UK as an economy without a market. But the British ruling
elite and the business class are not the same entity. They have different
interests. The British elite are in fact quite detached from the interests of
people who do business here. They have become middle men for a global elite of hedge
fund managers, property speculators, kleptocrats, oil sheikhs and crooks. It
was in the interests of the latter that Theresa May turned the Conservatives
from liberal globalists to die-hard Brexiteers.... read more:
