This blog is dead.

This should be obvious to anybody who has been following this blog for any period of time.  I can't be fucked with it anymore.  Existing content will stay up for the time being, but I'll probably delete it eventually.

I'll be trying something slightly different over on tumblr. Follow me at a wandering ghost for more weird fiction and heavy metal.

Today's society

From the comments here:

Today's society is about making perfect decisions, and not regretting anything...Bottom line: stop saving people from themselves. They don't benefit from it, and it's none of your business.

Though, on second thought, the labour movement may not be the way forward after all

Sort of a counterargument to my last post, courtesy of Mark Fisher writing in the New Left Project:

The Labour Party’s acquiescence in capitalist realism cannot of course be construed as a simple error: it was a consequence of the disintegration of the left’s old power base in the face of the post-Fordist restructuring of capitalism. The features of this - globalisation; the displacement of manufacturing by computerisation; the casualisation of labour; the intensification of consumer culture - are now so familiar that they, too, have receded into a taken-for-granted background. This is what constitutes the background for the ostensibly post-political and uncontestable `reality’ that capitalist realism relies upon. The warnings made by Stuart Hall and the others writing in Marxism Today at the end of the 1980s turned out to be absolutely correct: the left would face obsolescence if it remained complacently attached to the assumptions of the disappearing Fordist world and failed to hegemonise the new world of post-Fordism. But the New Labour project, far from being an attempt to achieve this new hegemony, was based precisely on conceding the impossibility of a leftist hegemonisation of post-Fordism: all that could be hoped for was a mitigated version of the neoliberal settlement. 

h/t m. jelly

The End of History

With Jack Layton dead and a leadership race getting under way, The Globe and Mail reports here about the NDP tying itself in knots over the importance of trade unions in the party, with some potential leadership candidates wanting to keep the party's historic ties to organised labour, and others wanting to curtail labour's privilege in the party to give more space to other "progressive elements" such as environmentalists.  Though the article doesn't mention them, I would expect anti-war organisations to be included here as well. That this is an issue shouldn't be at all surprising to anybody following the trajectory of the NDP: it's impossible to give a single reason for the party's meteoric rise in the last federal election, but there's no doubt that the way the party openly courted middle-class voters had an important effect.

Strategically, this makes a lot of sense.  Membership in unions is decreasing while self-identification as being part of the nebulously-defined "middle classes" remains high.  Never mind for a moment that there are plenty of studies showing how the middle-class, as defined by income, is actually contracting and polarising with more people ending up on the shit end of the pile.

The NDP distancing itself from the unions isn't going to help this.  The way that the Tories crushed the Air Canada strike and the Canada Post lockout under the pretext that collective action harms the economic recovery is a prediction of things to come and is again going to result in more people traditionally in the middle-income bracket ending up worse off.  And since one of the first things the Tories did once forming the government was to introduce a budget measure to abolish the per vote subsidy for political parties, the NDP would be unwise to alienate the unions.  The party's ability to fund itself may depend on this.

There are more important issues at hand here, though.  The first and most important one is about what it means to be a "progressive" (left-wing/social democratic/whatever) party right now.  The NDP is potentially taking a massive misstep if it choses to move away from organised labour: issues like environmentalism are extremely important, but at the same time, they don't necessarily challenge the status quo.  It's challenging--in Canada, especially with Alberta's tar sands--to reconcile more stringent environmental standards and continued economic growth, but it certainly isn't impossible.  And with that economic growth--or even without it, as we've seen in recent years--we're going to see a consolidation of wealth and power in the hands of a few.  Indeed, this was the lesson of the economic crisis: the economy is irreparably fucked and isn't in the long term going to get better and while we're told by our bosses that there won't be pay raises this year because the economy is bad, they're taking home larger bonuses and pay packets than ever before.  And this in a country that fared better than most through the crisis.  This is precisely what needs to be opposed, and should be the primary task of any left-wing or progressive party worthy of the name.  This strategy of meek damage control that the NDP is currently pursuing doesn't hack it.

Serenade in Lead

Reportage from Libya:

Zeid's passion, he explained, is metallica music. "I mix war with music. Death metal gives the real part of humanity; most music talks about love, beaches, cars, but this talks about real things, brutality, poverty, the soul." His Iron Maiden T-shirt denoting the slogan 'matters of life and death' made for the perfect war gear.

"I have to stay on the front line, I can't go back to my home and wait for Gaddafi to come and kill my family. We win or we die," added Zaid his face turning somber.

From Al-Jazeera.

Also this:

Essraity, whose house had been hit by a tank shell, joined him on the front line, as did Hazim “Haz” Bozaid, a powerfully built 29-year-old with a goatee, a stocking on his head, and a black Sepultura T-shirt. An import manager, he was also the lead vocalist and guitarist in a local thrash and death-metal band called Acacus. “I was inspired by Megadeth, Cannibal Corpse, Morbid Angel, Chuck Schuldiner’s Death, that sort of stuff. It was not easy to find in Libya, so if you got something on tape, you guarded it like gold,” he told me...For Bozaid, a machine gunner who put his body count at more than 25, preparation for battle meant listening to Slayer on his smart phone. “Some of my friends said that I should be reading the Koran. But I needed my drug.”

h/t Invisible Oranges.

Glorification of violence and hatred for authority:

"I blame the pernicious culture of hatred around rap music, which glorifies violence and loathing of authority"

Quote from here, via here.

It couldn't happen here, II

The Globe and Mail--which, for some completely inexplicable reason (oh, all right, it's because people are fucking morons), people across the country tend to think of as a left-leaning paper--has in the past couple of days published what is in effect a media statement from a fascist and passed it off and news and has blamed the riots in the UK on immigration.

I feel extremely anxious that this sort of thing is becoming ever more increasingly a part of mainstream political discourse. Nothing good will come from it.

(Part one here)

Decency and Morality

I'm seeing a lot of praise among left-leaning friends today for Peter Oborne's article in the Telegraph about the moral rot in British society. There is something nearly commendable about it in the way that Oborne looks at the ruling classes and finds them as venal and as self-interested as the looters, and how he remarks that because of their class status these people can screw everybody for their own personal gain yet remain of the right side of the law. I say "nearly commendable" because at root, Oborne doesn't fundamentally see the structure of capitalist society and the way in which ensures that there will always be an underclass to be at fault. For Oborne, the problem is rather with individual moral comportment: that poor people should respect the authority that keeps them poor and that the rich should pay their taxes to fund whatever crumbs the state decides to throw at the poor. "Decency" and "morality" are meaningless concepts here.

BONUS:

A couple of noteworthy things I've seen lately:

• An Open Letter To Those Who Condemn Looting from Socialism and/or Barbarism, parts one and two.

• #riotcleanup or #riotwhitewash from University for Strategic Optimism

It couldn't happen here

The Globe and Mail, which wrung its collective editorial hands about the Norway mass murders, and declared that we need to "expose dangerous fictions" to prevent things like this happening again, today hosted an online "live chat" about "What kind of immigrants should Canada be selecting", complete with an interactive feature on "Which immigrant would you choose for Canada?"

Just saying.