Wales Enantiodromia and the rise of the Left

Wales and the future. And so four parties in Wales.. undergo a process of looking to their leadership and the future. Last year I speculated on a forthcoming battle in Plaid between Rhun ap Nuclear and Adam Price. It now seems that Plaid will have a choice between three with existing leader Leanne Woods beingg the third. A victory for Rhun Ap Ioerweth will see Plaid become a new Welsh Liberal Democratic party as it moves to the political right. A victory for Adam Price will see Plaid become a truly socialist party with its old socially conservative wing fleeing to the standard of "macho" Neil McEvoy or to the broflake standard of young Jac of the Right . However Leanne Wood is a street fighter par excellent and will most likely survive the contest. Plaid does though face a clear choice. It must decide whether it is on an eco÷socialist path or a middle of the road one. Plaids problem has been an inability to decide which one. Whatever happens in the present challenge only at best puts off this decision to the next election. Adam Price and his political future and Plaids really depends on who emerges as First Minister.
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Adam is no doubt praying for Welsh Labour to reject One Member One Vote and allow Vaughan Gethin or Huw Iranca-Davies to win allowing a Blairite tendency to maintain control. A victory for Mark Drakeford would be a serious problem for Adam. Mark is a Corbynista calls himself a socialist and has a clear Welsh identity and cultural persona. He has the support of Momentum and offers the best chance for Welsh Labour to shake off the ghosts of the George Thomas anti Welsh tendency that has long haunted South Wales Labour. A victory for Mark Drakeford would offer an opportunity for Rhun to come at Labour from the right. Thus both Labour and Plaid's leadership victors find themselves directly and indirectly linked. Each has unintended consequences for both the candidate and for their respective parties. Both parties must reinvent themselves and if both could renew themselves and create a vibrant Welsh decentralised socialist tradition then both parties and Wales would become worthy of the memory of Nye Bevan. The parties would then become natural coalition partners enriching us all and firmly reminding us that Wales is a left wing country worthy of nationhood. It does not serve Wales or Welsh Labour well when the First Minister attends a secret ceremony with the loathsome Alun Cairns and the heir to Elizabeth Saxe Coberg to rename a bridge against the will and wishes of the Welsh people..it stinks when even the press were not invited. Old centralised Blairite dictats is off putting and against the spirit of a Coebynista Welsh Labour Party. Momentum with nearly three thosand members and angry that the losing candidate for Deputy Leader gained two thirds of individual votes will not accept the election of a First Minister without OMOV and born of right wing male trade union block votes.

UKIPs election for leader tells us more about its narcissistic nature and the egos of the three candidates. As the party tears itself apart in a war of individual pride, vileness and prejudice. I suspect that whoever wins that the remnants of the midwives of Brexit will shatter three ways and distintigrate in noxious toxic fragments before final extinction or transformation into a party of the alt and far right. As for the Tories in Wales much depends on the final form of Brexit. I know nothing of Susie Davies or indeed bureacratic Paul Davies I think that says much about the nature of Welsh conservatism and i don't think that; that is an accident It s going to be an interesting few months. Let us see what happens next..and let it be worthy of Wales and our nationhood. True leadership is when the people do it themselves..

From the Lefts plague to her rebirth..

Two years on...and the tables are turned. Looking back to the days of early July of 2016 it seemed as if the right was triumphant. The Thatcher revolution was to roll on, the parliamentary Labour party was in revolt and UKIP was triumphant. As the months went by to November Trump was elected President, Leonard Cohen and Castro both died and the march of the free market seemed to be about to sweep us all away. We were lost in the end of history, the tools of prediction no longer were valid, accurate or of any use in a new paradigm of the populist right.
But then odd things began to happen. Some of us sensed a change in the wind, the political tides of the left once spent seemed to gain in strength. The irony was that the neoliberal agenda that had isolated so many, now rapidly turned in such an acute angle that was so sharp that it cut the throat of the purveyors of Brexit and all that came with it. The paradigm shift turned rapidly into a Gramscian earth quake unrecognized by many and yet the crisis of hegemony was so subtle that few perceived its strength and purpose.

Another media had emerged and few noticed that now two discourses were active : one was conventional and connected to the daily right wing press of the Mail, the Express and the Sun and the other that had first been glimpsed during the Scottish referendum had been seen in Trumps victory and the Brexit referendum as a right wing tide was false.. Yet it was more than what it seemed.....it was as though the specters of the right once embraced by large sections of people had been seen to be false like wisps of fog and the reality dawned on the many that had been left behind by globalization and the parties of liberal democracy crackled out and fadedm

Carl Jung the Depth Psychologist coined the term enantiodromia which literally means changing from one thing to its opposite. As I write this piece in early July 2018. The Tory party no longer knows what to do or what to say. It wants power that much is clear and it wants to stay there at any cost. It will support any policy that will keep it there, it will sell its soul to the DUP to do so. Yet within its heart it knows that it is dying. The conspirators are surrounding May. As the impossibility of Mays promised Brexit dawn's and we approach Friday's end of days cabinet meeting. Civil war stalks the Tory Party and the wounded beast that it is strikes out unleashing it's rampant id. Vote Leave is shown to have broken electoral laws on four charged and the demand for a popular vote on the Brexit deal surfaces throughout Unite Union and within the Labour Party. Corbyn nears the position that support for a Tory Brexit cannot be. The Brexit result nears annulment as we realise the situation fast emerging. Another shift is coming and very soon.

The alt right with its Anders Brevik pony tails and its fake Oxford scarves and their cigarettes , look confused and lash out at any one challenging them. They even forget that the term"libertarian" is an adjective and not a noun.

The tone has changed on social media, This time two years ago the trolls swirled around people like myself and now we see the trolls weeping under their bridges. They cry out that the left are so dominant. And yet every troll shaking under his bridge cries out the same words. They call the left, “tools” and “nut jobs”, they claim ownership of a patriotic working class group yet each one looks the same, sounds the same and uses the same terms. And everyone of them fails to realise what is happening. I have lost count of how many comments from this group are interchangeable from one troll to another. Nothing significant has been said except to hand out abuse at the “snowflakes”. They fail to understand that every snowflake has a different pattern and every troll has the same basic 20 words that they spew out. The alt right fades as quickly as the comet that was Milo Yiannopoulos had
burnt out and fades away. UKIP seems to be experiencing entryism from the far right and is embracing the street fifghters of the

These events are symptoms of a savage thirst for change and as the current runs strongly on the populist left presaged by Bernie Sanders in the States and by the Green party and others prior to 2015 in the UK.

Thinkers and thereoticians ranging from Varofakis, Picketty and Paul Masson provide an intellectual critique that has been needed for so long. Technological change has made all of this possible, wjile change of the communication form feeds it and the old established positions weaken. We stand here in July 2018 and look at another world where the likes of Neil Kinnock, Gordon Brown, Tony Blair and Nigel Farage, beg the question ...just what is the point of them in this paradigm and place? They have nothing to say about Hillsborough, Grenfell Tower, or the market mechanism, privatization or peace they have nothing to offer or say on any of these events or issues. They are being outsourced and replaced..and yet they still do not know it.
.The issues of a citizens income, new technology and big data clearly shows that the paradigm has been changed and a left agenda with it new ideas, new terms and new approaches are winning in these days of summer that are so reminiscent of the period of the early 70s. The rules have been rewritten, the unintended consequences of Brexit have enabled reform, revolution and revolt to take place. Let us see what happens next.........Within Wales both Labour and Plaid wrestle with the process of renewal.. The future calls and there is a world still to win...

enantiodromia
ɪˌnantɪə(ʊ)ˈdrəʊmɪə,ɛˌnantɪə(ʊ)ˈdrəʊmɪə/
noun
ra
noun: enantiodromia the tendency of things to change into their opposites, especially as a supposed governing principle of natural cycles and of psychological development
"the remorseless enantiodromia between good luck and ba