My Comment this week in the daily Plymouth Herald (4.6.24). The rigged “balance” required of the media during an election period means I can’t get published what I’d really like to say: Farage’s Reform Party offers an embryonic fascist rally which threatens the entire working class, the Greens are a pro-Capitalist Party with a terrible anti-working class record in Europe and indeed, against trade unions when running local councils; Galloway is socially conservative with adherence to religious family values that opposes a women’s right to choose, gay marriage and trans-rights, his Workers’ Party inviting cross-class alliances with Farage and ex-UKIP  candidates. Starmer is more than ready to lead us into World War Three within the duration of the next Government term (for which the imperialist ruling classes already undertaking the preparations). And anyway, putting one’s faith in bourgoisie democracy and the election of a socialist pro-working class government has been thoroughly destroyed by the ruling class offensive against Corbyn (not to mention the various corporate-funded right-wing coups against socialist reformers across the globe). The Left, historically infiltrated by chancers, turn-coat careerists, renegades, police spies and agent-provocateurs, continues to fragment just when political unease and renewed strike action in our class offers a chance to build a coherent mass organisation. The rise and falls of mass movements: Black Lives Matter; Me Too!; Climate Strikes and now Freedom for Gaza each represent missed opportunities for decisive leadership for whole-system change, linking all the issues together into an anti-Capitalist offensive. It’s no longer any good to say you’re a “socialist” without saying you’re anti-Capitalist. It is Capitalism and its current development of Imperialism that links all these movements and issues. The Capitalists will not allow you to reform their System out of existence! The only way out of this is revolution, which may well be brewing elsewhere in the world for us to jump-on and build here. One mass strike is worth ten general elections!

But none of this can be printed.

So instead, here’s the long version of the printable edition:

The candidates are about to be declared, the stage about to be set. General elections are theatres for Party activists.

People join together into political parties with reason. There are ideas that conjoin and ideas that splinter into opposition. It’s very difficult, for example, to believe in universal human rights whilst promoting racial superiority – is it okay that some people are born with more privileges and entitlements than others?

Some beliefs come together towards a whole and encompassing world view.  To act upon the our formed “way of seeing” we need to join together in sufficient numbers to have impact and change the direction of social organisation towards our preferred conditions. Hence parties.

On a very superficial level, that’s what putting a cross on a piece of paper at election day represents – a personal alliance with a world view.

The current drive towards politicians “independent” of any world view is probably a short-term proposition. A non-Party “independent” may be elected because they catch the majority view on a single issue but soon get into trouble when people disagree with other views they now espouse but were not in their manifesto. 

They may be elected as forthright and unbending on their stated goal, but find that, to achieve anything they will have to compromise into a coalition with others, watering down their mandate and starting to link together into a new political Party. 

The rise of the “Independents” is a necessary reaction to the general sense of “they’re all the same” which has swept into the consciousness of the electorate. The lack of faith in democracy as currently organised is prevalent across the Western world whilst still being fought for in the Global South. 

The point is, there are real differences in preferences for social organisation. There are Right and a Left wings of the political spectrum. Social organisation to share resources to ensure everyone’s needs and human rights are met is a world view and ambition that is the complete opposite of a belief in individual competition and personal enrichment at the expense of others. 

The best example is our National Health Service, loathed by Right-wingers as a construct of “socialism” because people pay into the common purse in order to get free health care at the point of need. The privatisation of the NHS is a right-wing strategy to turn our health service into a fee-paying, for-profit capitalist enterprise run by transnational pharmaceutical companies, not the State.

Any NHS charging essentially separates those who can afford to pay from those who can’t, into a society where your right to health care is based upon your personal income and inherited wealth. To accept charging in order to lower taxes is to accept individual competition as the social norm – a world view with wider implications.

It is difficult to ride on the back of two horses running in opposite directions. There are new parties seeking to go beyond, or bring together, Right and Left, despite the inherent conflict at the core of those ideologies. This may be an honest attempt to rebuild democracy away from the current two-party system which offers no real difference in policies or outcomes. But it’s a project doomed to failure.

A white-supremacist cannot be, at the same time, anti-racist and for a multi-cultural State. Someone who believes men should have power over women is unlikely to defend the rights of LGBTQ+. Warmongers don’t vote for Peace. Anyone who believes that the majority of Muslims are extremist “Islamists” is unlikely to believe in the rights of refugees and asylum seekers. Beliefs coalesce into world views.

The inescapable fact is that we live in a polarised society based upon class, the conditions we are born into determining much of how we see the world and what we believe. We are born into a System, not of our choosing or making, where social policy either benefits the wealthy elite or it benefits the working class and the poor. Either we raise taxes to pay for social need, which requires the rich to pay-up in full, or we collapse the State and engage with a dog-eat-dog system where those without are left to perish. 

History provides many examples of where this class conflict which produces trade union strikes, mass movements, protests and community campaigns, produce real social changes far more profound and more often than general elections. 

So the core question to candidates should be, are you for the People (the majority of whom are working class reliant upon day-to-day income) or the Rich ruling class few who extract and exploit in order to maintain their privileges? Everything else stems from this divide. Whatever the result, we’ll still have to fight for our rights.