#corbynistas

[doreyg]

"You shouldn't vote for Labour, they're red tories!"

I have truly terrible news about what political party are actually in power at the moment.

[beardedmrbean]

Am I dreaming? The woke Left are suddenly worried about freedom of expression. The very people who have spent years calling cancel culture a myth, and dismissing the rise of censorship as some pearl-clutching moral panic, are now railing against the clampdown on dissent and protest, specifically Suella Braverman’s attempts to ban tomorrow’s “pro-Palestine” Armistice Day march. 

Owen Jones, Guardian columnist and Corbynista TV personality, has slammed what he calls the “deliberate and hysterical campaign” to ban the march. In a video, he took aim at those Right-wingers who have forgotten their supposed liberal principles where these demos are concerned: “[S]ome of those who talk about threats to free speech, cancel culture, ‘the Left are dangerous authoritarians’, they’re the ones leading the charge, trying to ban a mass, peaceful protest because they don’t like it.” 

Novara Media’s Ash Sarkar has also been getting in on the act. “Why is it that supporters of Israel have such a low tolerance for dissenting opinion?”, she asked on Twitter / X.

The University and College Union (UCU) is similarly up in arms after the government sent a letter to UK Research and Innovation, the national funding agency for science and research, demanding to know why it had appointed two people to an advisory group on equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) who had made questionable comments in response to the Israel-Hamas conflict. (One had said the government’s planned crackdown on “Hamas support” was “disturbing”.) The EDI group has since been disbanded and UCU chief Jo Grady has written to the secretary of state for science, innovation and technology, Michelle Donelan, expressing her concerns about a “chilling effect on freedom of speech and academic freedom”. 

So, in an apparently stunning turnaround, the bourgeois, academic Left has gone from sneering at we “free-speech warriors” to trying to claim the mantle for themselves. Last night, Owen Jones tried to do just this at an online UCU event. “We hold the flame of genuine free speech”, he said, calling on the Left to mount a campaign for “actual free speech” – as opposed to the presumably phoney free speech advocated by all those awful culture warriors. UCU put out a clip of his speech online, but then deleted it, following an almighty roasting on social media.

The reason the clip was roasted was, of course, because Owen Jones and the UCU and many other Left-wingers currently speaking up for the right to dissent are completely full of it. It is clear to me that they do not believe in free speech or academic freedom at all. If they did, they wouldn’t have expended so much energy in recent years insisting that campus censorship was a non-issue, all while demonising dissenting academics. 

In 2020, Jones tried to get an Oxford employee sacked over an unpleasant tweet he posted about Sarkar. UCU, for its part, is a paid-up supporter of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign, which blacklists Israeli academics. It has also led the crusade against trans-sceptical voices within academia. Kathleen Stock, the gender-critical philosopher, finally decided to leave the University of Sussex, after months of agitation against her, when her own UCU branch denounced her and sided with the trans activists who had been making her life hell.

As for the right to protest, the woke Left had nothing to say when anti-lockdown protesters had their collars felt, time and again, during the pandemic. Apparently, those opposing the unprecedented theft of our civil liberties were undesirables, unworthy of the right to assemble. Meanwhile, those who have taken to the streets every Saturday in recent weeks to chant genocidal slogans like “From the river to the sea”, while plastered in pro-Hamas stickers, are actually noble freedom fighters whose rights must be respected.

To say that Jones et al are inconsistent on free speech isn’t strictly accurate. They’re incredibly consistent… in their double standards. They only ever defend free speech and the right to protest for those who happen to agree with them. They’re fierce supporters of the freedom to think exactly as they do. Which is why they can carry on like modern-day Mary Whitehouses one minute, then bemoan the clampdown on dissent the next.

No doubt, there have been many on the Right who have jettisoned their free-speech credentials in the wake of Hamas’s brutal pogrom in Israel and the disgusting response it has sparked on Britain’s streets. To my mind, the best way to oppose this anti-Semitic bile is not censorship, but more speech, more counter-protests and more agitation. We need to challenge the Israelophobes out in the open and deny them the status of free-speech martyrs.

But the Tories’ double standards on free expression are as nothing when compared to the rank hypocrisy of the woke Left. They don’t believe in free speech. They believe in me speech. And we shouldn’t let them get away with pretending otherwise.

[hero-israel]

https://www.tumblr.com/hero-israel/719929648910417920/feeling-both-smug-and-also-incredibly-frustrated

I mean, also look at how some of these people are with China-Tibet and China-Xinjiang issues. I’ve seen many of them spread myths about Tibetans being backwards serfs who wore other peoples skins who needed to be ‘saved’ by the noble Chinese empire, which reminds me a lot of the manifest destiny myths the US used to justify their colonialism, and the blood libel myths currently used to justify the murder or Jews today. They also love to generalize all religious Uyghurs as being terrorists in order to justify the extreme action of the Chinese government. These people are hypocrites who support actual colonialism and imperialism by the hands of ‘communists’, and i said it before but if Israel was allied with the Soviets and a communist nation, and wasn’t friendly/allied with the British/USA at all, they would be all for supporting Israel. There issue isn’t that israel is ‘colonialist’ but that they’re Western allied (and also bc they’re all generally antisemitic assholes as well, partly due to them being immersed in Western antisemitism from a young age (bc let’s me frank all Weaterners are a lil antisemitic, even Jews, bc of how normalized antisemitism is in the west) but also communist antisemitism and none of them ever care to admit it or unlearn it)

Sorry this is a jumbled mess but my point is these people are hypocrites because they just don’t care to be right or principled. They just care about playing out their antiWestern fantasies as much as they without concern for real world issues and how that affects people (esp the people they claim to support).

The histories of Israel and Taiwan have some pretty close parallels. Being blamed for going against the will of Communist empires is one of them.

As a rule, if you find someone who will make an "on the other hand...." excuse post for the Soviet Union, East Germany, or Cuba, you have found an antisemite who will forgive Israel nothing and sees the rightful punishment for its sins as immediate mass Jewish death. I first noticed this with the Corbynistas, then in Jacobin and other tankie-adjacent outlets.

[revolutionarysuicide]

also hearing psc bureaucrats speak is insane cause they're all sooo liberal and will defend imperialists and kkkolonisers and will spend so much time condemning the palestinian resistance and palestine action etc. which is just so baffling cause idk how you've been so involved in the palestine liberation movement to the point of ascending to a leadership position in britain's most prominent palestine solidarity org without being radicalised to at least maybe like corbynista normie socialist/trade unionist politics if not most likely further left... although I've heard the same psc bureaucrats in private/internally call for an intifada etc so idk are they just like deliberately being reactionary in public to make psc seem less radical? incredibly stupid if so but also I doubt it anyway given the fact that they expelled the manchester branch of psc for supporting the resistance

[schraubd]

Is Anyone "Criticizing George Soros"?

It has been darkly amusing to witness how the mainstreaming of anti-George Soros conspiracy mongering has prompted the American right to go full Corbynista in dismissing the antisemitism of it all. "Criticizing George Soros is not antisemitism!", they holler, heedless of the irony. The internets are replete with sneering dismissals of Jewish complaints regarding how Soros discourse can and has served as an antisemitic accelerant -- a perfect echo of how Corbynistas attacked antisemitism allegations as fictious, politically-motivated, and made in bad faith. It is antisemitic when it comes from the left, and it is antisemitic when it comes from the right. It perhaps shouldn't surprise that it would be the American right that would Corbynize first -- a cult of personality around a Dear Leader who is perpetually victimized by the biased media and whose rise to power was supercharged by an online contingent of hyper-vicious trolls targeting (among others) Jews for harassment is not exactly unfamiliar terrain here -- but I suppose there's no harm in basking in the irony a little bit.

Yet I've been thinking that this whole line of argument about how the right is being suppressed because are you saying we can't criticize George Soros is a misfire. It doesn't make sense even on its own terms. Why not? Because virtually none of the right's Soros discourse is "criticism of George Soros" is any meaningful sense.

Let's take it back to Israel for a second. Consider the following two statements:

Israel's occupation of the West Bank is intolerable, and must end.

BigCorp's investment in Israel is intolerable, and must end.

Colloquially speaking, both of these statements are likely to be considered "criticism of Israel". But really, only the first is. The second is not a criticism of Israel directly, it's a criticism of BigCorp for being associated with Israel. BigCorp is the actor who is being castigated, and they are the actor who is most directly being asked to change their behavior. It's not always wrong to criticize X for associating with Y, though I've noted that it can easily become a form of antisemitism via a contagion theory where merely being in Israel's presence is assumed to generate any and all manner of social ills that otherwise would not exist. But again: criticizing X for associating with Y is primarily a criticism of X, not Y. Y's badness is more-or-less taken for granted; X is the entity whom one is trying to discredit, undermine, or alter the behavior of.

Virtually none of the conservative attacks on Soros are actually on George Soros. They're attacks on some other social actor or phenomenon for allegedly being associated with George Soros. Sometimes Soros really is associated with them (as in his funding of J Street), sometimes it's a complete myth (as in the "immigrant caravans"). Regardless, the target of the fusillade is not Soros, it's J Street or the immigrants. They are meant to be discredited because of their association with Soros. By their association with George Soros, we now know that they are contaminated, and should be a subject of hatred and scorn.

The right, after all, doesn't really care where George Soros spends his money. They're not trying to get George Soros to change (at least, in all but the most tertiary sense). Much as the most inveterate Israel-haters have moved beyond demanding Israel change and instead view Israel's evil as an immutable fact of its existence, Soros-haters are not hoping for a different George Soros, they view George Soros as a stand-in for inherent evil. If George Soros tomorrow announced a donation to the local homeless shelter, the right would not say "hey -- our criticism worked! Instead of donating to these terrible left-wing charities, he's donating to a nice, acceptable one. Mission accomplished!" No -- if George Soros donated to the local homeless shelter, the result would be that the shelter would suddenly become a "Soros-funded shelter" and be subject to all the suspicion and vitriol that accompanies anything associated with George Soros.

What Soros does doesn't matter. It's Soros' existence that matters -- he is a stand-in for inherent evil, whose presence corrupts anything it touches. The evocation of Soros (whether based in reality or not) is not about "criticizing Soros", it is meant to leverage this imagery of Soros the puppetmaster, the paragon of evil, the ultimate conspirator. That's why it's so frequently antisemitic. The only reason Republicans care about George Soros is because invoking his name enables access to this association of pure malice as a means of criticizing something else. But Soros fills that role less because of his own choices, and more because of surrounding currents of antisemitism, which (this is from my "contagion" post) "give[] a smoother cognitive ride down -- it makes little connections look huge, and implausible leaps seem manageable."

Of course, once we recognize that the true target is not Soros at all, but immigrants or J Street or "defund the police", then the "are you saying I can't criticize ...?" whine becomes farcical. Obviously there are all sorts of ways conservatives can and do criticize any of these things. The centrality of George Soros to their "criticisms", though, is not about seeking to alter George Soros' behavior (not least because often Soros isn't actually involved). It's about leveraging what George Soros represents in the public imagination to "make the implausible plausible".

via The Debate Link https://ift.tt/SxhMpsj

[28dayslater]

the woke left has cancel cultured the british military and Our Brave Squaddies are being sent off to war with baguettes (the guardian reading corbynista remoaners wouldn’t even let them have Proper British Bread) instead of guns. it’s enough to make a grown man cry

[qudachuk]

North of Tyne mayor and ‘last Corbynista in power’ Jamie Driscoll has been barred from running to be the first North East mayor.

[latestnewsfeedsposts]

‘That’s an annihilation’: PM under pressure as Labour poll lead leaves Tories spooked

‘That’s an annihilation’: PM under pressure as Labour poll lead leaves Tories spooked

You have to go back to Tony Blair’s honeymoon period after his 1997 landslide general election victory to find a Labour opinion poll lead as massive as 33 points. All those critics of Sir Keir Starmer – mostly on the Corbynista left-wing of the party, who’ve claimed with the Tories in turmoil, Labour should be 20 points ahead – have their answer now. Even after a successful Labour conference, the…

[eretzyisrael]

Britain’s Chief Rabbi has taken the unprecedented step of describing Corbyn as not fit for high office. Unfortunately coinciding with the launch of Labour’s ‘race and faith’ manifesto…

In a Times article, Ephraim Mirvis writes “the overwhelming majority of British Jews are gripped by anxiety” and asks “What will become of Jews and Judaism in Britain if the Labour Party forms the next government?”, finishing off by saying the very soul of the nation is at stake. Naturally, Corbynites have responded by calling Mirvis a supporter of Netanyahu, a Boris supporting Tory and a Mossad agent. Even worse, they accuse the chief Rabbi of being “a Zionist”!

Today’s intervention would bad enough for Labour, however it will also undoubtedly overshadow their race and faith policy announcements, which include:

Creating a new body to oversee the legacy of colonialism

A race equality unit at the Treasury

Reduced charges for Home Office documents and tests

Changes to the curriculum to teach children about the injustices of the British Empire

Make the Equality and Human Rights Commission – the very body investigating the party for institutional Antisemitism – “truly independent” (a proposal heavily criticised by the Jewish Labour Movement)

Meaning today’s uncosted announcements come to (drum roll): a meagre £1.5 billion…

[sinessinessines]

The Economic Lysenkoism of Late Capitalist Realism

This is rather a fascinating documentary from local history - from the year I was born in fact. The eventual result was a loss by Benn by a single percentage point. Dennis Healey, a hard-bitten, cynical realist of the Labour right, received 50.5%, while Tony Benn, an idealist whose radical ideas for reforming the Labour Party to include commitments to extra-parliamentary and even revolutionary action in support of the Labour movement, received 49.5%. This was in spite of a ridiculous bloc voting system designed to prevent radicals like Benn from ever winning internal elections that were put to the vote.

This proved to be a turning point. Labour had come dangerously close to allowing a man with revolutionary proclivities into a front bench position, and it would be 30 years before such an opportunity arose again with the last minute inclusion of Jeremy Corbyn onto the leadership ballot to “widen the debate”. 

In this respect, the 1981 Deputy Leadership election in the Labour party was more significant than any General Election would be, since it scared the crap out of those who believed that capitulating to Bennite principles of direct democracy and the promotion of state-owned cooperatives would eventually lead to the collapse of the Labour party as a parliamentary force altogether. Benn himself was transformed from “the most dangerous man in Britain” into a “national treasure”. In other words, he was, to coin a phrase “Mandela-ised”.

Militants were purged from party ranks, becoming scapegoats for what many saw as a problem with widespread entryism into Labour by Trotskyist groups. Neil Kinnock, who became leader after Michael Foot’s disastrous stint “impersonating the leader of the Labour party”, to use his words, obsessed over the issue of how to deal with Militant Tendency, a very small but highly organised and disciplined group who had gained effective control over Liverpool City Council. The Tories, as well as Labour, began to collude in their ideas about transforming the traditions of collectivism within the working classes into a dangerous “enemy within” - a Red menace that had to be marginalised from society and from the Labour party in order to make that party “democratic” and “electable”.

Of course, what this led to was the complete ideological disintegration of the Labour party, and the bitter reality that the world's first real Thatcherite to come to power would be one in charge of the party opposing hers. Thatcher famously said that her greatest political achievement was Tony Blair. She had, in a war of brutal attrition, managed to transform Britain into an effective one party state with no working class representation in the political system or across the media, which had fallen into the hands of a small number of extremely rich right-wingers.

My theory, probably repeated elsewhere, is that the political doctrines espoused by dominant groups and repeated over a generation tend to ossify into political facts, especially among those who are selected to become members of elite establishments. This is particularly true with doctrines like neoliberalism, since one of the goals of neoliberalism was to eradicate the conceptual framework of class as a way of understanding conflicts across a society. Every politician in power from Thatcher onward has espoused more or less the same idea - that the class war is over, that poverty is a decision rather than the result of a lack of opportunity, and that the working class no longer exist as a group.

This doctrine continues to be undermined by the ongoing collapse of the principles held dear by this ruling theocracy - a theocracy that would prefer right-wing populism and xenophobia to any progressive alternative. Corbyn's landslide victory, along with his electoral gains against the Tories, came as a complete shock to everybody in politics and in journalism, who had internalised the logic that nobody was a socialist any more, barring a tiny minority of “unreconstructed” socialists who refused to keep up with modern times.

Since this definitive 1981 election, the mantra within the Labour party gradually came to be this: "we don’t want to, but we have to capitulate to the interests of right-wingers to be electable." This eventually turned into a competition to become as right-wing as it was possible to be without joining the opposition party. Becoming right-wing became synonymous with wanting power.  And power was predicated on accepting the “reality” of life - that people were selfish and stupid. In other words, cynicism became the realism of fools.

This is an example of what Mark Fisher calls "capitalist realism" in his book of the same title. The doctrine is that neoliberalism is factual and real, and that any alternative is for dreamers and ideologues doomed to live on the margins. The fact that this theory, which became reality through Thatcher and Reagan, has now been proven to be completely wrong. The problem is that this will not prevent our political elites from repeating it. They will continue to make ever more absurd claims based on the associated doctrines about human stupidity and selfishness that used to be the best way of achieving positions of power in political systems and in journalism - when you couldn’t be bothered or lacked the time to research anything, assume the worst and people will think that you’re intelligent anyway: now, we see this in the increasingly pathetic-sounding attempts to reassert the old regime: "peak Corbyn" has been reached; if a "moderate" were leading the Labour party, they would have won a historic landslide against the Tories rather than simply erased their majority; Corbyn, a lifelong anti-racism campaigner, is a vicious "unconscious antisemite" and an "existential threat to Judaism", according to the right-wing Jewish press. Such claims were not even levelled at Adolf Hitler. 

What we are really witnessing is a group tantrum by esteemed "realists" whose shtick no longer works. Their “realism” is no longer real, and they have decided that the only course of action in the face of this dissonance is to deny the existence of reality itself. This is Trumpism at its finest. Everything disagreeable is “fake”. Everything can be spun into an delusional affirmation of how great an individual you are.

It feels, to me, like the concluding chapter of a seemingly unending nightmare that began in the year that I was born into. Like all final chapters, it is also the most dangerous one, because loose ends need to be clumsily tied up, and many are looking for simple answers to a very complex and interconnected problem. Slavoj Zizek notes somewhere that fascism is “a desire for capitalism without capitalism” - in other words, fascism is an irrational desire for all of the positive features of capitalism, without any of the antagonisms contained within it, which are all conveniently outsourced onto a token scapegoat. As said repeatedly on Scooby Doo, “We would have gotten away with it if it wasn’t for you pesky kids.” 

The most dangerous thing to happen among the elites has been to conclude that their failure - catastrophic and repeated failure - to predict future events with any degree of accuracy, using economic theories that they themselves had elevated to the status of an objective science, doesn’t prove their theories are wrong. Indeed, for them, it proves that something is wrong with reality. In short, mainstream economists have ceased to become objective reporters of truth, and are now, even more so than usual, hired propagandists and theologians who are chiefly there to spout doctrinal gibberish, the main point of which is to intimidate the layman from engaging with the issue by offering them a courtier’s reply.

Yanis Zaroufakis, the Greek economics minister during the election of SYRIZA and the negotiations with the European Union, suggests that the complete detachment of EU technocrats from the real world was first expressed in their response to the Greek debt crisis, in which Zaroufakis was centrally situated. For them, reality itself does not matter - only their “realism” does. Their “capitalist realism”. It is a form of economic Lysenkoism, and the next global financial crash, whenever it happens, will further cement this bankruptcy. Since the radical left, in a surprising turn of events, are the only group of people with any realistic idea about how human societies can adequately respond to the demands placed upon us, it is vital that we respond to the next inevitable crisis with a serious, concrete set of proposals, and a narrative that people can relate to.

[revolutionarysuicide]

also kinda wild how in the Great Satans of the world (ie britain and amerika) there's simultaneously mass support for palestine from the internally oppressed peoples of those countries but no electoral parties have really taken advantage of this huge gap in the electoral options people are being presented. obvs a lot of the principled anti-zionists are also Never Vote communists but at least here there's also a lot of otherwise not super political muslims and also corbynista types, and a party running on an explicit principled anti-zionist platform—ie supporting cutting all aid to israel, expelling the israeli ambassador, supporting bds in general, and putting political pressure on israel—could draw v significant amounts of votes and def win seats in constituencies with high muslim populations. you can see in eg ireland People Before Profit seizing upon the spinelessness of Sinn Fein to get the popular anti-zionist sentiment rallying behind them into pressuring SF to support expelling the israeli ambassador for instance. unfortunately all british communist/marxist parties suck complete shit doodoo poopoo so that can't happen here. but i dunno even like corbyn forming his own party could fill that vacuum to an extent even tho corbyns a liberal zionist two-stater.

[sarcasticbitchs-things]

Day two:

#favoritecorbynmoments

I love corbean ❤ He is such an angel..... He deserves the world! Actually much more than the world. One of my favorite corbyn moments is this:

And this:

And this

I love you corbean ❤❤❤❤❤❤

[themancorialist]

Piccadilly Gardens, Manchester.

[andysouldancer]

YES.....

Just in case the Labour Party are going through my social media.....

[viablesystem]

left-right electoralism is an 18th century european construction. communism is older than history itself. it will reemerge as something we will not readily understand. mass movements no longer have coherent politics, but they are coherently political in that they cannot be made into "friends" of the ruling order. i think back fondly on occupy because even tho it failed it was only after it was violently suppressed that its image could be mobilized by the spectacle. believe in the power of things that cannot be captured. as long as "sun and man still generate man" i.e., as long as someone can remember that they are human, communism has a chance of making another appearance on the stage of history.