1. This is what it’s really about. Farage, Truss and co have no convictions of their own. They are mere channels for the demands of capital. Here they are, supporting a climate science-denying lobby group funded by oil and oligarchs. theguardian.com 🧵
www.theguardian.com
2. Everything they do supports such interests, which pay their bills and give them platforms. All the culture wars, the grandstanding, the rhetoric about immigrants are designed both to conceal their real agenda and to shift blame onto scapegoats. 3. This is why the BBC has so assiduously promoted Farage, building him from the entirely marginal figure he was into a major political force, by giving him wall-to-wall access and coverage. Because it too, like almost all major institutions, bends like a reed to the demands of capital. 4. I don’t say that left and right have no meaning (generally, people who make this claim have recently moved to the far right). But the real political divide is between those who grovel to capital (a group extending all the way from Starmer to Farage) and those who seek to resist. 5. Those who dissent from the demands of capital have been almost entirely marginalised from politics, the media and public life. From the Labour Party to the BBC, we are treated almost as pariahs. Our crime is to seek to defend humanity and the living world from the greed of the few. 6. Just about everyone else in public life is working, at some level, as a concierge for capital. Farage and Truss occupy the extreme and obvious end, but they’re on the same spectrum as, say, Wes Streeting and Samir Shah. 7. Resistance to capital and capitalism (which is a completely different thing from commerce, by the way, but perennially and deliberately confused with it*) is our only hope of escaping the dire, multiple predicaments we face. But where is it? Where is everyone? 8. *I mean, FFS, what hope do we have if hardly anyone knows what capitalism is? I endlesly hear the bleat “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”. God, I hate that self-exonerating mantra. Of course it bloody is, if you haven’t yet managed to imagine capitalism! 9. In case it helps, here’s the definition Peter Hutchison and I give in the Invisible Doctrine:
10. It’s not just that we don’t even seem to know what we’re fighting. Most people don’t even realise they’re in the middle of a fight. A massive, existential fight between the looters and life on Earth. 11. Don’t look to the political system to right itself. It won’t. As we used to say in the 1990s, "there's no justice, just us." Imagine, organise, mobilise. Use every legitimate tool at our disposal. There is no magic formula, just hard thinking and hard work. But above all, stop rolling over. The thread on one page: skywriter.blue
skywriter.blue