havemehavana

Interesting Guardian bit titled “Miliband warned Labour faces a fight for survival as party of power”. Let’s forget how problematic these polls and their messy statistics can be for a second and look at what the people who fancy themselves the great hope for centre-left government have to say.

Patrick Diamond (who worked with Ed Miliband on last Labour manifesto), and Olaf Cramme (director of Mandelson-founded ‘Policy Network’ thinktank) says European “pendulum has swung aggressively against the left”. But look at turnout, at concerns re. “vested interests” (which doesn’t just mean unions, folks), at scepticism about whether government-led action can make things better for people.

I read that and don’t see a problem solely for social democrats but for representative democracy in general. This obsession with getting back into a position of power is dangerously short-term and fails to engage with the big issue which is that the politics of government right across Europe, across most of the world, is separated from people. What’s more it fails to see that people aren’t swinging away from “the left”, they’re fed up with the establishment, and they experience, every day of their lives, how powerless we all are in the face of the capitalist machine. They know they haven’t been ‘saved’ by capital. Trouble is, lots of people think they have been, because they’ve got a roof over their head and a toilet that works and enough shiny magic circus bread to satisfy the neurons until it’s time to go back to work.

I don’t much care where all this leaves the Labour party but I do think it’s a disaster for everyone if we don’t tackle the scary thing: we have the ability to ensure every person on this planet is able to live their lives with access to good health care, education and a decent standard of living. Why aren’t we doing it? If we think the fact that matter can be self-aware and grow what we call a conscious intelligence is important, why aren’t we looking after it?

Capitalism is a symptom but the disease isn’t ‘the human condition’ or genetic selfishness or some such bollocks, it’s the greatest ever act of self-sabotage and procrastination. Anyway. Labour are dead in the water if they concentrate on developing “coherent ideology” at the expense of principles, vaguely centre-left parties are dead if they can’t see why people are fed up with governments, parliamentary politics is dead no matter, it’s simply a question of whether we keep grilling bits of the corpse for lunch or chuck it out before we all die of plague.

And yes, we’re all dead in the long run, so do cheer up. I’m off to sit under a tree and read some Patti Smith.

Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man—state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion. Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.