I
looked at the face of Neil Kinnock in a major piece in the Guardian
this saturday. The face was lined, bitter, angry and empty. He
claimed and I quote “People are divided into those who are vain and
those who are not. And Jeremy is a vain man.” The picture of the
aged Kinnock filled the page only one third of it dealt with his
words. I wondered if he had ever read Freud on projection and on
displacement. That which we deny in ourselves we project onto others,
the emotions we deny we place on others.
I
remember that night in May 2015 their the aged Kinnock stared out at
the stage shortly before the declaration of the Port Talbot result.
His eyes looked into a world I could not see. There he was entranced
by his son the soon to be elected MP (with the lowest ever re4ciorded
labour vote in Port Talbot history) I looked a littler too long the
security men protecting Neil Kinnock daughter in Law, the then Prime
Minister of Denmark looked back at me so I dropped my gaze. On
Saturday I heard a recorded speech that Neil Kinnock gave insisting
that he had been elected Labour Leader with a greater proportion of
the vote than Jeremy Corbyn . The article the speech and the memories
of that night brought home to me the bitterness in politics and the
complete incomprehension of the neo-liberal elite.
The
political parties are crumbling but those of us witnessing the events
of the last two weeks feel it like the servants blow stairs. We hear
the bangs of crockery thrown, the angry footsteps, we feel almost
that we are are looking through keyholes in doors as our neo-liberal
master squabble. Talking to Neil Wagstaff this afternoon we talked
about the Gramsci an idea of the “consent to be ruled" That
hegemony is only possible if the ruled allow themselves to be ruled.
Perhaps breccias silver lining is the smashing of the neo-liberal
consensus. In a recent article in the Guardian the following was
written “Tory
and Labour MPs have held informal discussions about establishing a
new political party in the event of Andrea
Leadsom becoming
prime minister and Jeremy Corbyn staying as Labour leader, a cabinet
minister has disclosed.
Senior
players in the parties have discussed founding a new centrist
grouping in the mould of the Social Democratic party (SDP) should the
two main parties polarise, according to the minister. Talks should be
taken seriously, though they are still at an early stage, according
to the source.
“There
have been talks between Labour and
Tory MPs about a new party,” the minister said. “A number of my
colleagues would not feel comfortable in a party led by Andrea
Leads.”
It
is understood that MPs in both parties who campaigned to remain in
the European
Union believe
there is an opportunity to build on the newly founded relationships
between centrist MPs in both parties made before the EU referendum.
We
know that the Labour membership is now in excess of 500,000 members
and that without any major news paper on itside labour is at it
largest level for nearly 50 years. Perhaps Social media is making
possible new forms of political awareness and activity. Perhaps the
crisis is coming because the Parliamentary Labour party recognises
that it has lost the consent to rule. All political parties must
reflect the wishes of their members. If you want to change a party
you must join it. Parliamentarians are the representatives of their
party and of the membership. I suspect that Jeremy Corbyn would be
elected once more and the more I look at Angela Eagle and the
Parliamentary Labour party I see more and more clearly the
incomprehension that they do not understand what is happening below
Stairs.
I
think Tony Bliars Bambi like monstrous gaze reveals this as well. He
really thinks at the bottom of his being that Chilcott did not
criticise him. I suspect that the tears so close to the surface were
for him and not the victims of the war. I see a similar
incomprehension around me in the neo -liberal politicians. They dont
know what is going on and their blind spots hide the truth from them.
I dont know what is going to happen next but there is a realignment
of the left coming on strongly just as there will be a realignment of
the centre of UK politics. The British sate is in serious crisis as
the paradigm shifts and out of the mists come strange new forms of
political activity, formations and belief.
The
Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci, imprisoned for much of his life by
Mussolini, took these idea further in his Prison Notebooks with his
widely influential notions of ‘hegemony’ and the ‘manufacture
of consent’ (Gramsci 1971). Gramsci saw the capitalist state
as being made up of two overlapping spheres, a ‘political society’
(which rules through force) and a ‘civil society’ (which rules
through consent). This is a different meaning of civil society from
the ‘associational’ view common today, which defines civil
society as a ‘sector’ of voluntary organisations and NGO s.
Gramsci saw civil society as the public sphere where trade unions and
political parties gained concessions from the bourgeois state, and
the sphere in which ideas and beliefs were shaped, where bourgeois
‘hegemony’ was reproduced in cultural life through the media,
universities and religious institutions to ‘manufacture consent’
and legitimacy
The
political and practical implications of Gramsci’s ideas were
far-reaching because he warned of the limited possibilities of direct
revolutionary struggle for control of the means of production; this
‘war of attack’ could only succeed with a prior ‘war of
position’ in the form of struggle over ideas and beliefs, to create
a new hegemony (Gramsci 1971). This idea of a
‘counter-hegemonic’ struggle – advancing alternatives to
dominant ideas of what is normal and legitimate – has had broad
appeal in social and political movements. It has also contributed to
the idea that ‘knowledge’ is a social construct that serves to
legitimate social structures (Heywood 1994: 101).
In
practical terms, Gramsci’s insights about how power is constituted
in the realm of ideas and knowledge – expressed through consent
rather than force – have inspired the use of explicit strategies to
contest hegemonic norms of legitimacy. Gramsci’s ideas have
influenced popular education practices, including the adult literacy
and consciousness-raising methods of Paulo Freire in his Pedagogy
of the Oppressed (1970),
liberation theology, methods of participatory action research (PAR),
and many approaches to popular media, communication and cultural
action.
The
idea of power as ‘hegemony’ has also influenced debates about
civil society. Critics of the way civil society is narrowly conceived
in liberal democratic thought – reduced to an ‘associational’
domain in contrast to the state and market – have used Gramsci’s
definition to remind us that civil society can also be a public
sphere of political struggle and contestation over ideas and norms.
The goal of ‘civil society strengthening’ in development policy
can thus be pursued either in a neo-liberal sense of building civic
institutions to complement (or hold to account) states and markets,
or in a Gramscian sense of building civic capacities to think
differently, to challenge assumptions and norms, and to articulate
new ideas and visions.
And
on the right a more brutal UKIP looms led by Paul Nutall and funded
by Aaron Banks . Be afraid , very afraid, I am. “You
can "conquer the state,” you can change the laws, you can seek
to stop organizations existing in the form in which they have existed
up to now; you cannot prevail against the objective conditions under
which you are constrained to move! ss Gramsci says its going to be an unpleasant few years
few yearstime ahead of us all.
No comments:
Post a Comment