Political Instincts - 2 passing thoughts

So, back in the mid-eighties, support for the IRA was a stated policy of the Socialist Workers Party. Now imagine, if there were blogs back then. The Kamms and the Krapps et al would be writing post after post on how sections of the left had thrown in their lot with terrorists and fascists. (Come to think of it, this was the kind of thing they were saying about left support for the ANC). Now I, if I were a politically minded individual at that time, would have been writing about other things. Not because I wouldn’t have had an opinion about SWP policy, if asked, but because there were at the time rather more pressing things to get articulately angry about. And to concern myself with the internal politics of a relatively small and more than relatively powerless party, this would have seemed a rather wasteful and perverse way to spend my time in the age of Thatcherism and Apartheid and the terrorist war against Nicaragua (to name but a few things).

You see, it’s a question of priorities, isn’t it. And given the political struggles of the mid-eighties, it might seem not only ineffectual but also culpably negligent to have as your priority repeated and myopic criticisms of a sect or certain sects of the left. When the angel of history catches you in the rear view mirror, s/he might think ‘didn’t you have anything better to do, hadn't you heard the terrible news?’

Alphonse has a post about US correspondents’ reaction to the French EU vote, and quotes this:

I read the reports filed by U.S. correspondents and pundits from Paris, after the French Non! to the EC proposed constitution a couple of weeks ago. It was striking how many of them, presumably without any direct orders from the owners of their publications, started lecturing the French in the tones of nineteenth-century Masters of Capital.

The "Non", they howled, disclosed the cosseted and selfish laziness of French workers. On inspection this turned out to mean that French workers have laws protecting their pensions, health benefits, leisure time and other outlandish buttresses of a tolerable existence.

> Paid servants of the ruling class, registering not simply their own disdain, but the contempt of Capital itself for the worker who demands to be recognised as anything other than a resource, a pair of hands, a commodity.

There will be different instinctive responses to the above of course, which brings me to my second passing thought. As well as a question of priorities, it’s also a question of instinct, isn’t it? It’s not that the people of the right and left have, from some position of sober neutrality, carefully weighted up the respective arguments and sided with the most reasonable. It’s that based on - or stung by - what you’ve experienced and seen around you, certain basic political instincts have formed, and these have sent you to seek out the truth.

For example, some will read (say) -

‘only extremists could endorse a global capitalist system which in 1992 is said to have paid Michael Jordan more in advertising Nike shoes than it paid to the entire South-East Asian industry which produced them’.

and fail to see anything wrong at all with Jordan’s remuneration, or think ‘bloody lefties’. Others reading it, or similar reports, will feel a rising cry for justice, a sense of outrage, of moral absurdity. In other words, it’s a question of what really gets you impassioned, instinctively.

Now, if what really gets you going, what sends you to your keyboard, hot under the collar, is not the arrogance of the powerful, needless poverty, overt exploitation, the fanatical pursuit of profit at any cost, the deliberate crushing of any attempts to build collective workers organisations, but instead, simply the carryings on of parts of the left, – if that is what really gets you worked up, then what are you, after all? A snitch, a nobody, a shit.

[anyone who tries to turn the comments thread into a debate about the SWP and its policies will be deleted. It was just an example]