O'Sullivan's First Law continues - so far

"All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing."

O'Sullivan's First Law. John O'Sullivan, CBE (born 25 April 1942) is a British conservative political commentator and journalist.(Wikipedia). I suppose the RSPCA would be an example.

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The priests invariably propose an ideology, a romanticised (false) view of human nature which usefully buttresses the existing order. The Enlightenment, a secularised Christianity, is popular in the west. I make an observation, not a moral critique.

The ideology's falsity violates innate instincts and therefore requires self-control in application. The priests live rather gilded lives: stresses are few. They find mental compartmentalisation and self-control ('tolerance') not so hard.

Those outside the bubble are ceaselessly lectured, indeed have no other language of norms and morality. As O'Sullivan noted, heretics are everywhere shamed and expelled.

But in recent years there's been a widening gap. Guardian and BBC ethics have been losing purchase on life's not so little problems. The masses mill around, seeking answers. There is no truly acceptable alternative ideology. ''Populism" is an inchoate mishmash.

Most recoil at mindless prejudice and bigotry. In the old days the alt-narratives of Communism (and Fascism, with less coherence) had mass appeal. Today, not so much.

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Ideologies are not forged in a vacuum, they morally and intellectually underpin the order of society - and evolve with it.

Is there a replacement for neoliberalism, with its failing global supply chains and tottering financial  architecture? Is there an evolution which doesn't require a round of effective repression against the uppity masses? Like in Chile, the gold standard for dealing with (leftwing) populism?

I rather fear not. But the priests won't be doing the dirty work. I suspect their time is running out. Though to be clear, we are talking of a decade-long timescale here, not the events of the next year.

The disintegration of neoliberalism

When I was in my early teens, I'd listen to Labour and Tory politicians at the General Election and be baffled. Both sides had good arguments - how was one to decide?

My adolescent confusion was far from unique. It took a few more years to figure out that politics was not maths or physics; there was no one right answer. In the Marxist jargon, political parties represent different class interests (or perhaps divergent fractions within a class) and the point was to decide where you stood.

This didn't make the exercise completely arbitrary. Perhaps one party was - in the grand scheme of things - better for everybody. Perhaps one party would be better at not crashing the economy, closing down freedoms or crushing innovation.

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Marx explained that in every age, the ruling ideology was the ideology of the ruling class. This was not a crass point. Whether it's the Roman Empire, feudalism or capitalism, the theorisation of the status quo naturally aligns with the practices, values and intentions of the elite who happen to be running things.

Western liberalism, so amplified during the last two decades of Globalisation, is fraying at the edges. Way too many people don't believe that current neoliberal elites speak for them. Real interests are diverging.

So when I hear yet another world leader castigated for liberal value atrocities, I try not to join in the ritual abuse but to figure out instead whether - in the great scheme of things - the said leader is actually trying to do good for the constituency they represent .. and whether, on balance, that would be a good thing for humanity as a whole.

I don't subcontract that analysis to the BBC, The Guardian or the rest of the liberal media.

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Neoliberal sweetness and light takes you only so far. When, for example, Allende was trashing the economy in Chile in 1973, the Americans (Nixon and Kissinger) had no hesitation in supporting the Pinochet coup which brought the Chicago Boys into economic power.

Pinochet meets Kissinger

The Chilean economy was fixed pretty fast; the parallel and one-sided civil war was vile and atrocity-ridden.

More recently, those nice Eurocrats gave Greece's Alexis Tsipras a pretty hard time.

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Erdogan seems pretty popular amongst his supporters as he rolls back the Gülenists and secularists who, with implicit approval from western elites, tried to overthrow his government in a coup last July.

From the Wikipedia article:

"The 2016–17 Turkish purges are an ongoing series of purges by the government of Turkey enabled by a state of emergency in reaction to the 15 July failed coup d'état. After the immediate arrest of military personnel accused of making the coup attempt, arrests were expanded to include further elements of the Turkish military service, as well as various civil servants and private businesses.

These later actions, reflecting a power struggle between secularist and Islamist political elites in Turkey, which began to be known as a purge, affected people who were not active in nor aware of the coup as it happened, but who were alleged to be connected with the Gülen movement, a group which the government blames for the coup."

I don't know whether the Erdogan faction is a positive factor in world history or a regressive one. Perhaps we'll just have to wait and see. But his violations of liberal check-boxes are just par for the course when you're in a civil war.

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Neoliberal ideology at its heart has a helium model of humanity: for all practical purposes people are autonomous hyper-individualistic clones, as is assumed in economics.

Thus unrestricted immigration is an unvarnished public good, dispossessed workers are arbitrarily retrainable and that there are no personal, gender or ethnic differences beyond the most trivial and inconsequential.

Yes, there are people - actors, politicians and journalists - who truly believe this.

Incidentally, Marxism also cleaves to the 'human clone' model but unlike the 'transactional-individual' model of neoliberalism, it prefers the maximally-collective 'ant-nest' model - at all scales up to the planetary soviet.

Neither ideology is consistent with evolutionary theory, psychometrics or genomics (not to mention commonplace observation).

Occupying the Embassy

The Chilean Embassy in London

In the early 1970s, the International Marxist Group had a serious crush on our cousins across the channel, the Ligue communiste révolutionnaire (French Section of the Fourth International). Initially just another French groupuscule, the Ligue had surfed les événements de mai 1968 to become a formidable Trotskyist force in left-wing politics, with perhaps 10,000 members.

The IMG had around 450.

The Ligue did serious stuff. It allegedly smuggled guns to the FLN in Algeria and occupied Embassies. Wanting a piece of the action, the IMG restructured its prosaic demo stewarding organisation to form the ‘Red Defence Force’ (RDF), and I was asked to head it.

Soon afterwards I'm enjoying a pint in a pub at King’s Cross, near the IMG headquarters in Pentonville Road. What's that I hear? It's the veteran working-class activist and IMG leader Bob Pennington referring to me derisively as the IMG’s Che Guevara.

In an uncharacteristic moment of moral courage I walk across to his table and confront him:

“It was the IMG leadership’s idea to set up the RDF, not mine. If you think it’s so stupid, take it up with them, not me.”

I like to think that’s when he first took a shine to me.

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In 1973 the Chilean military overthrew the socialist government of Salvador Allende, which was then in the process of wrecking the Chilean economy. What was probably in hindsight the least bad option was nevertheless a messy and thoroughly cruel and repressive event. Naturally the IMG was signed up to all the London demonstrations against the Chilean coup.

So we have this enormous demo coming up on Chile, and an IMG leader takes me aside (was it Peter Gowan? I think it might have been) and tells me it has been decided we should occupy the Chilean Embassy on the morning of the demonstration. The demo will pass the Embassy and the IMG contingent will break through the police cordon and rescue us.

I have never heard of a more unlikely proposal in all my life: the police are quite used to our demos and we never manage to break their cordons.

Nevertheless, I have my instructions. Clearly someone has to reconnoitre the Embassy, to plan our incursion, and that person has to be me. At this time I'm a teacher-training student at Furzedown College in south-west London. I therefore concoct a story that I'm doing a project on education in Latin America, and specifically Chile. I call the Embassy and make an appointment.

I turn up - dishevelled clothes and long hair - and a security-goon escorts me up wide curving stairs into the sumptuous office of the junta's cultural attaché. We discuss Chilean secondary education, and somehow in the conversation it comes up that the whole Embassy is Chilean territory, that the guards possess guns and that they're authorised to use them.

I file this useful information away.

On the Saturday I brief my RDF team, carefully explaining about the guns, and we arrange to meet at a location about half a mile away from the Embassy at 8.30 the following morning. We all experience a rather troubled night’s sleep.

Sunday morning arrives, as it is wont to do, and I turn up a little early to check out the Embassy. I don’t get too close, just stroll in its general direction from the tube station until I have it in view. To my gathering unease there are way too many vans of the Special Patrol Group cruising the otherwise deserted streets while a large body of burly policemen block the Embassy entrance.

Returning to the rendezvous point, I gather my team together and tell them the operation is cancelled as we have no chance of getting in. We retire to the students union at UCL to debrief. I share my opinion that the police must have been forewarned about our mission; probably by an informer. Strangely, no-one seems that disappointed. I say that with one exception: when I inform Peter Gowan later that morning, he clearly expresses his view that I have messed up big-time.

We join the rest of the IMG contingent for the demo that afternoon. As we approach the Chilean Embassy we see phalanxes of police and mounted officers guarding it. Not in a million years would the IMG have got through that.

So I save the bacon of my fellow RDF comrades and myself - at the cost of showing yet again that we can't play in the league of the Ligue.

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I once said to a senior comrade, “I don’t understand why they put me in charge of the RDF. I have no combat skills and I’m not at all aggressive. In fact I’m much more of a thinker than a doer.” The comrade smiled and replied, “Did you ever consider that that might actually have been the reason?”

The RDF didn't last long and performed adequately in its comfort zone of marshalling street processions and the odd agitprop street theatre. No more direct confrontations with the forces of the state!

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IMG-related: A Mission to Prague and Red Lion Square.