Hard Right Johnson, Wilhelm Reich and the ‘befogging’ of the masses

So said Wilhelm Reich in 1944, “Only on paper does the process of social development appear as easy and pleasant as a taking a stroll through the woods. In hard reality it encounters new and unrecognised difficulties one after the other. Regressions and catastrophes result”.

The election of a Conservative majority government in the UK with Boris Johnson as Prime Minister is definitely a regression and may well be a catastrophe. Johnson’s Tory government becomes the latest in a line of hard right governments that have taken over major geopolitical states. Positioning themselves as daring voices speaking out against the ‘establishment’, despite in fact being the establishment, this model of leader started with Victor Orbán (elected Hungary, 2010). A number of world leaders have followed in his wake, such as Narendra Modi (elected India, 2014), Donald Trump (USA, 2017), Matteo Salvini (Italy, 2018), Jair Bolsonaro (Brazil, 2019), and now, Johnson (UK, 2019).

Why a Corbyn-led Labour Government would be better for nearly everyone, even the radical left. Part 1b: Race and Immigration, questions for the radical left

This is Part 1b of a series of articles around the UK General Election. You can find the introduction to the series here.

The Left has basically won on the question of Austerity. It has managed to convince people that the stripping back of state provision and selling off of state assets was not done to reduce the deficit but rather out of political considerations: to enrich the rich, transferring wealth upwards. Under the Conservatives, the deficit has increased and they are not in the least bit concerned because that was never their aim in the first place. Despite some fluctuations, Britain’s external borrowing (debt owed to creditors outside the UK) remains above 6,000,000 million pounds, up by another 500,000 million pounds since the Tories came to power.[13]

However, on the question of immigration, the Left has still to find an answer that can convince the population. “No borders”, is more than a political slogan, it is the only ethical position on the subject. To assert the right to residency of some people but not others has no moral basis other than a fascist-style racial supremacy that posits an arbitrary ‘ethnicity’ (either ‘Anglo-Saxon’ or ‘white’) as the basis of belonging or a feudal-style ‘right of conquest’. ‘We were here first’, runs the latter argument.

Why a Corbyn-led Labour Government would be better for nearly everyone, even the radical left. Part 1: Race and Immigration

This is Part 1 of a series of articles around the UK General Election. You can find the introduction to the series here.

If you are an actual bricks-through-windows racist, pro-marital rape misogynist or a castrate-the-gays homophobe, than Corbyn is not the one for you. But nor are any other of the parliamentary parties, so we can leave that little unpleasant band of brothers to their own nasty devices.  For the rest of the population, fed on a diet of slanted, and sometimes entirely fictitious media stories, there are a few who are concerned about immigrants destroying British values and traditions. One might wonder who really has time to mourn the decline of Morris dancing, Sunday school and suet pudding, but beneath this apparently empty debate about abstractions there are real concerns. Many link immigration with a loss of jobs and there is a reality that standards of living for much of the population has seen a real decline since the 1980s. This decline accelerated after the financial crash of 2007/08, meaning that “between 2007 and 2015 in the UK, real wages – income from work adjusted for inflation – fell by 10.4%.”[1] making Britain, Portugal and Greece the only three of twenty-nine countries in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to see a wage decrease. Coupling this with an erosion of welfare provision has produced increases in homelessness[2], temporary accommodation[3], foodbanks[4] and suicide[5].