Keep calm and carry on in 2020 "THE YEAR OF TRUTH"

The sombre news is that global coronavirus deaths have passed one million.

Interactive: how did world get to 1 million deaths?

Michael Safi, Helen Davidson, Angela Giuffrida, Aamna Mohdin, Matilda Boseley, Caio Barretto Briso and Noa Yachot have put together an interactive timeline for Guardian readers at this sombre moment. 

Michael Safi reports for the Guardian (Tue 29 Sep 2020) under the headline and subheading: 

Global coronavirus deaths pass 1m with no sign rate is slowing

Johns Hopkins University data points to rises in countries that seemed to have slowed spread

Michael Safi writes:

The number of people who have died from Covid-19 has exceeded 1 million, according to a tally of cases maintained by Johns Hopkins University, with no sign the global death rate is slowing and infections on the rise again in countries that were thought to be controlling their outbreaks months ago.

The milestone was reached early on Tuesday morning UK time, nine months since authorities in China first announced the detection of a cluster of pneumonia cases with an unknown cause in the central Chinese city of Wuhan. The first recorded death, that of a 61-year-old man in a hospital in the city, came 12 days later.

So far there have been 1,000,555 deaths from Covid-19, according to the latest update to the database, which draws on information from the World Health Organization, the US and European centres for disease prevention and control and China’s national health authority, among other sources.

But the official figure probably underestimates the true total, a senior World Health Organization official said on Monday.

“If anything, the numbers currently reported probably represent an underestimate of those individuals who have either contracted Covid-19 or died as a cause of it,” Mike Ryan, the WHO’s top emergencies expert, told a briefing in Geneva.

“When you count anything, you can’t count it perfectly but I can assure you that the current numbers are likely an underestimate of the true toll of Covid.”

More than one-fifth of the tallied deaths have occurred in the US, the most of any country in the world, followed by more than 142,000 in Brazil and more than 95,000 in India, which is currently recording the most new cases per day.

The figure is only the known toll of a virus that may have already been spreading in the world, and killing people, before it was first identified in China in December. Studies from Italy have found traces of the virus in sewage samples taken the same month, while scientists in France have identified a case there on 27 December.

There is thought to be significant underreporting of deaths in many countries including Syria and Iran, either for political reasons or due to lack of capacity. Some countries report anyone who died with Covid-19 as a death from the virus, even if it is not thought to have been the direct cause, while even in developed countries, deaths from Covid-19 in the home may be less likely to be counted than those in hospitals.

“To some extent the quest for the true number of Covid-19 deaths is impossible,” said Gianluca Baio, a professor of statistics and health economics at University College London.

It might also not be so meaningful, he added. “The million figure is indicating a tragedy, it tells us a lot of people have died. But what’s crucial is not so much the actual number.

“The point is how many people have died from Covid-19 whose lives could have been extended. That’s the real number we have to investigate and come out on the other side of this pandemic with.”

Establishing the excess mortality figure would likely come much later, after the acute stage of the pandemic has ended and data could be collected and cleaned of as much uncertainty as possible, said Marta Blangiardo, a professor of biostatistics at Imperial College London.

“It is when all this information about cause-specific deaths becomes available, which can be months and months after the main event, that you can go back and try to disentangle the numbers.”

A study published on pre-print servers in July and yet to undergo peer review estimated 202,900 extra deaths across 17 countries between mid-February and the end of May, most in England, Wales, Italy and Spain. The confirmed global toll over the same period was fewer than 100,000 deaths.

Despite its imperfections, the recorded death count still paints a picture of a pandemic that escalated with astonishing speed from February and has not relented.

There were still fewer than 100 confirmed deaths per day at the beginning of March, mostly in China, the Johns Hopkins database shows. Over the following weeks rates appeared to explode in countries such as Spain, Italy and Iran, and throughout April an average of 6,400 deaths were being recorded around the world every day.

The fewest deaths per day since then were recorded in May with an average of 4,449 deaths and August the heaviest toll with 5,652 daily fatalities.

Evidence of long-term heart, lung and other issues among Covid-19 survivors is growing, but future estimates of the virus’s deadliness have fallen since the beginning of the outbreak, and would likely continue to do so, said Mark Woolhouse, a professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh.

“Almost invariably in the early stages of a pandemic, we overestimate, often by a lot, the ration of deaths to cases. We simply weren’t detecting [the mild cases]. We were seeing the tip of the iceberg, and it was the tip of the iceberg with the deaths in it.”

It was increasingly clear that fatalities from the virus “are hugely concentrated in a subset of 10 to 20% of the population: the elderly, frail and those with co-morbidities”, he said.

“Among that population the case fatality rate is much higher than the initial WHO estimate. It’s really high, but for the rest of the population it’s much lower. It’s down to what we might expect from an influenza, or even lower than that.”

A senior WHO official said last week that without concerted action to fight the virus the prospect of the death toll eventually reaching 2m was “very likely” before a vaccine was widely distributed.

This Guardian story contains a table of countries across the world, setting out: Total cases: Cases in the last two weeks: Total deaths, and: Total deaths in the last two weeks. 

This is the tally along the LODE Zone Line

Germany
Total cases: 295,539
Cases in the last two weeks: 24,292
Total deaths: 9,509
Total deaths in the last two weeks: 123

Germany: Angela Merkel unveils new coronavirus measures

Poland
Total cases: 93,481
Cases in the last two weeks: 16,153
Total deaths: 2,543
Total deaths in the last two weeks: 273

Poland tightens restrictions in response to rising coronavirus cases

Belarus
Total cases: 79,019
Cases in the last two weeks: 3,789
Total deaths: 839
Total deaths in the last two weeks: 66

The Covid denier: Belarus President says it will be beaten with vodka, saunas and working on tractors so his people are reduced to spray painting the death toll in graffiti

Ukraine
Total cases: 218,625
Cases in the last two weeks: 44,922
Total deaths: 4,288
Total deaths in the last two weeks: 753

Russian Church in Ukraine fuels coronavirus outbreak

Russia
Total cases: 1,179,634
Cases in the last two weeks: 92,679
Total deaths: 20,796
Total deaths in the last two weeks: 1,668

Russia sees new spike in coronavirus cases

Kazakhstan
Total cases: 108,044
Cases in the last two weeks: 845
Total deaths: 1,725
Total deaths in the last two weeks: 54

Kazakhstan accused China of fabricating reports of an outbreak of pneumonia more deadly than COVID-19

Uzbekistan
Total cases: 57,190
Cases in the last two weeks: 6,937
Total deaths: 471
Total deaths in the last two weeks: 52

Uzbekistan: After a positive start, coronavirus driving health system to precipice “They don’t have enough drugs. Don’t believe the statistics.”

Afghanistan
Total cases: 39,285
Cases in the last two weeks: 402
Total deaths: 1,458
Total deaths in the last two weeks: 21

Coronavirus: Tough times ahead as Afghanistan struggles to manage pandemic

Pakistan
Total cases: 313,431
Cases in the last two weeks: 8,400
Total deaths: 6,499
Total deaths in the last two weeks: 84

Spike in Pakistan COVID-19 Infections Prompts WHO to Call for More Lockdowns

India
Total cases: 6,394,068
Cases in the last two weeks: 1,086,054
Total deaths: 99,773
Total deaths in the last two weeks: 14,154

India has become the third worst-affected country in the world behind the United States and Brazil

Indonesia
Total cases: 291,182
Cases in the last two weeks: 54,663
Total deaths: 10,856
Total deaths in the last two weeks: 1,520

Coronavirus: Indonesia grapples with fear of a hidden virus surge

Australia
Total cases: 27,109
Cases in the last two weeks: 224
Total deaths: 890
Total deaths in the last two weeks: 46

Australia coronavirus cases 'set to be lowest in months'

New Zealand
Total cases: 1,848 
Cases in the last two weeks: 37 
Total deaths: 25 
Total deaths in the last two weeks: 0 

New Zealand has ‘effectively eliminated’ coronavirus. Here’s what they did right

Colombia
Total cases: 835,339 
Cases in the last two weeks: 84,868 
Total deaths: 26,196 
Total deaths in the last two weeks: 2,531

Colombia passes grim milestone of 800,000 coronavirus cases, more than 25,000 deaths

Puerto Rico
Total cases: 49,067 
Cases in the last two weeks: 5,225  
Total deaths: 665 
Total deaths in the last two weeks: 38 

'Puerto Rico is going to be ignored' during coronavirus pandemic, experts worry

Ireland
Total cases: 36,597 
Cases in the last two weeks: 4,326 
Total deaths: 1,806 
Total deaths in the last two weeks: 14 

Coronavirus: Ireland at 'tipping point' as Covid-19 cases rise

United Kingdom
Total cases: 460,178 
Cases in the last two weeks: 74,242 
Total deaths: 42,202 
Total deaths in the last two weeks: 470

For the first time, UK coronavirus daily deaths exceed 500

A graveyard for victims of Covid-19 at the Pondok Ranggon cemetery in Jakarta, Indonesia

This graveyard in Jakarta is situated on the LODE Zone Line, close to the place where LODE Cargo was created in Glodok, an area within the sprawl of Indonesia's capital city, but with its own origins as a "ghetto" for Chinese Indonesians.

The Jakarta Post ran this story on Monday

Ardila Syakriah, reports for The Jakarta Post (Mon, September 28, 2020) on the Indonesian health experts wanting more say on how to tackle the Covid-19 pandemic, under the headline: 

Six months on, health experts covet greater voice in pandemic response

The resignation of Indonesia's top doctor from the COVID-19 task force has prompted questions as to whether the government is seriously involving health experts in its pandemic response. Urologist and professor at the University of Indonesia’s (UI) Faculty of Medicine, Akmal Taher, has tendered his resignation as the task force’s health division head, saying that he would continue contact tracing and testing -- two measures he believed as essential in curbing COVID-19 -- elsewhere. "It's true that I have resigned [...] For me, tracing and testing must be absolutely improved and I believe this must be done at community health centers," he said in a discussion organized by the Center of Indonesia Strategic Development Initiatives (CISDI) on Saturday. "These are things I'll do in any future place I work, because I think we haven't done them." Indonesia’s testing rate remains low, with 0.10 tests per 1,000 people over a rolling seven-day average, lower than India's 0.71 and the Philippines' 0.31, according to data from ourworldindata.org as of Sept. 23.

Akmal did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but the former director of Jakarta-based Cipto Mangunkusumo General Hospital indicated that he disagreed with the current pandemic response measures. During Saturday’s discussion, Akmal, despite acknowledging the government's efforts to accelerate testing for a possible vaccine, said that he personally could not make any promises about vaccines being soon developed given that clinical trials were still underway. His remarks stand in stark contrast to the more optimistic outlook of some government officials who claimed a vaccine could be ready by December. A proven COVID-19 vaccine currently does not exist. Akmal said it was "quite too early" for the government to start talking about vaccine availability, even if it only intended to remind people not to lose hope. "The danger is that there are people who are misreading it," he said, suggesting that it could result in complacency over adhering to health protocols.

Akmal's resignation came not long after President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo instructed his Cabinet members and agency heads – including Coordinating Maritime Affairs and Investment Minister Luhut Pandjaitan, Health Minister Terawan Agus Putranto and National Disaster Mitigation Agency (BNPB) head Doni Monardo – to focus on suppressing coronavirus transmission and death rates in the country's nine hardest-hit provinces. Doni has been leading the national COVID-19 task force since March. Akmal was previously a part of the task force’s expert team. In July, when the government formed the COVID-19 handling and national economic recovery committee to streamline strategic policies on countering the pandemic, Doni retained his position as task force head while Akmal was promoted to lead the task force's health division. The COVID-19 response task force has since been put under the committee, along with the economic recovery task force led by State-Owned Enterprises Deputy Minister Budi Gunadi Sadikin.

Chairing the committee is Coordinating Economic Minister Airlangga Hartarto, with State-Owned Enterprises Minister Erick Thohir as its executive chairperson. Among its six deputy chairs are Luhut and Terawan. Pointing to the military’s greater involvement in the country's pandemic response, a coalition of dozens of civil society organizations has demanded that the government hand back response efforts to public health experts. Masdalina Pane of the Indonesian Epidemiologists Association (PAEI) said the task force had yet to properly implement existing guidelines and regulations on containing the disease, saying that it also had little experience in handling outbreaks.

The COVID-19 task force, according to a list released in April, has 72 experts in fields ranging from medicine, public health and medical device technology to laboratory diagnostics and law. Three experts are epidemiologists and four are biostatisticians. The expert team is led by Wiku Adisasmito, a professor at UI's School of Public Health and infectious disease researcher who was part of the National Commission for Bird Flu Control and Pandemic Influenza Preparedness (Komnas FBPI). Wiku is also the COVID-19 task force's spokesperson, after having replaced the Health Ministry's disease control and prevention director general, Achmad Yurianto. However, three expert team members from different fields who requested anonymity said that invitations to team discussions were often last-minute, resulting in experts not being able to attend. They also said their advice on postponing the regional elections was ignored.

One of the experts said that "probably three out of 10" suggestions were heard. Another expert said that the discussions were reactive as they were centered on issues that generated buzz among the public. "I feel that, now, [discussions] emphasize economic interests. Discussions remain poorly planned," one expert said. Meanwhile, Luhut, upon being assigned by Jokowi to oversee COVID-19 control in the nine hardest-hit regions, told a press briefing on Sept. 18 that he was assisted by many "bright, young people" including epidemiologists.

Promises, promises . . .

When politicians make promises, offer hope when that hope is unrealistic, they may buy some time as people wait patiently, but when delivery on promises made does not materialize, then it breaks the trust that people require in authority, be it democratically mandated or not.

For politicians in government, it's the integrity of trust that's crucial in managing a crisis as serious as the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.

People's trust in politicians making promises is about to be tested further, and this time on an even greater challenge than coping with the coronavirus pandemic. The protection and sustaining of the natural environment, and maintaining levels of biodiversity, necessary to the future health of all life on the planet. This challenge is also intimately linked, by extension, to the climate crisis posed by global heating.

World leaders pledge to halt Earth's destruction ahead of UN summit

Patrick Greenfield reports for the Guardian's The Age of extinction theme (Mon 28 Sep 2020) under the subheading:

France, Germany and UK among more than 60 countries promising to put wildlife and climate at heart of post-Covid recovery plans

Patrick Greenfield writes:

World leaders have pledged to clamp down on pollution, embrace sustainable economic systems and eliminate the dumping of plastic waste in oceans by the middle of the century as part of “meaningful action” to halt the destruction of nature on Earth.

Emmanuel Macron, Angela Merkel, Justin Trudeau, Jacinda Ardern and Boris Johnson are among 64 leaders from five continents warning that humanity is in a state of planetary emergency due to the climate crisis and the rampant destruction of life-sustaining ecosystems. To restore the balance with nature, governments and the European Union have made a 10-point pledge to counteract the damage to systems that underpin human health and wellbeing.

The commitments include a renewed effort to reduce deforestation, halt unsustainable fishing practices, eliminate environmentally harmful subsidies and begin the transition to sustainable food production systems and a circular economy over the next decade. The leaders describe the pledge as a “turning point” by which future generations will judge their willingness to act on environmental destruction.

All signatories to the Leaders’ Pledge for Nature, launched virtually in New York on Monday, have committed to putting wildlife and the climate at the heart of post-pandemic economic recovery plans, promising to address the climate crisis, deforestation, ecosystem degradation and pollution.

The announcement comes ahead of a major UN biodiversity summit on Wednesday, which will be hosted virtually from New York, and part way through negotiations on a Paris-style international agreement on nature. The speaking slots at this week’s summit are oversubscribed, with more than 116 heads of states and governments asking to address the event.

“Science clearly shows that biodiversity loss, land and ocean degradation, pollution, resource depletion and climate change are accelerating at an unprecedented rate. This acceleration is causing irreversible harm to our life support systems and aggravating poverty and inequalities as well as hunger and malnutrition,” the pledge reads.

“Despite ambitious global agreements and targets for the protection, sustainable use and restoration of biodiversity, and notwithstanding many local success stories, the global trends continue rapidly in the wrong direction. A transformative change is needed: we cannot simply carry on as before.”

The leaders also commit to ending environmental crime and cracking down on organised crime groups involved in the illicit trafficking of wildlife and timber.

Boris Johnson will speak at the pledge’s launch on Monday.

The prime minister will say: “We must turn these words into action and use them to build momentum, to agree ambitious goals and binding targets.

“We must act now – right now. We cannot afford to dither and delay because biodiversity loss is happening today and it is happening at a frightening rate. Left unchecked, the consequences will be catastrophic for us all. Extinction is forever – so our action must be immediate.”

He will also announce that 30% of the UK’s land will be protected for nature by 2030, meaning an extra 400,000 hectares, the size of the Lake District and South Downs national parks combined, will be conserved.

Other signatories to the pledge include the leaders of Bangladesh, Bhutan, Colombia, Costa Rica, Fiji, Kenya, Seychelles and Mexico. The presidents of the US, Brazil and China – Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro and Xi Jinping – have not signed the pledge, despite Xi spearheading global biodiversity talks.

Earlier this month, the UN announced that the world failed to meet a single target to slow the loss of the natural world for the second consecutive decade, including goals to protect coral reefs, preserve natural habitats and reduce plastic and chemical waste to levels that do not damage ecosystems.

There have been a series of damning reports and studies about the state of nature on Earth in recent weeks, including the WWF and the Zoological Society of London’s (ZSL) Living Planet Report 2020, which found global populations of mammals, birds, fish, amphibians and reptiles plunged by 68% on average between 1970 and 2016.

The UN’s biodiversity head, Elizabeth Maruma Mrema, welcomed the new commitment by world leaders, describing it as an “inspirational contribution” to ongoing negotiations due to “the urgency, unity and ambition of the pledge”.

Sir Robert Watson, former chair of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), described the pledge as “outstanding” and praised the links leaders have made between the destruction of the natural world and the Sustainable Development Goals. But Sir Watson cautioned what was possible without the signatures of major polluters.

“Many of the most important countries in the world that are causing climate change due to their emissions of greenhouse gases, and/or are destroying their biodiversity, are not signatures to this pledge. Without countries such as the USA, Brazil, China, Russia, India, and Australia we cannot succeed in achieving the Paris Climate goal or halting and ultimately reversing the loss of biodiversity,” he told the Guardian.

Marco Lambertini, the director general of WWF International, said: “The Leaders’ Pledge for Nature marks a pivotal moment with countries demonstrating real leadership from the highest political level, and committing to reverse biodiversity loss by 2030. We call on all leaders to build on this ambition at the forthcoming UN summit on biodiversity.”

Promises, promises . . .

As they say . . . 
. . . Re:LODE Radio "will wait and see".
But, how much time have we got before it is too late? 

Reasonable scepticism, pseudoscepticism and the cynics

Re:LODE Radio considers adopting the informal stance of scepticism, that is to question or doubt, and that such questioning can be applied to any topic, such as politics, religion, pseudoscience, news, fake news, conspiracy theories, and so on, is useful. Being sceptical is the application of a method, a cognitive process and a rational state of mind, in which one withholds judgments, particularly on the drawing of moral or ethical conclusions. The opposite of suspension of judgment is premature judgment, usually shortened to prejudice. While prejudgment involves drawing a conclusion or making a judgment before having the information relevant to such a judgment, suspension of judgment involves waiting for all the facts before making a decision.

Then there are those who pretend to scepticism, and many of these pseudosceptics can be found in the rightwing billionaire funded thinktanks and the climate change denial machine, and mainly found on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.

In 1987, Marcello Truzzi revived the term pseudoscepticism , or pseudoskepticism, specifically for arguments which use scientific-sounding language to disparage or refute given beliefs, theories, or claims, but which in fact fail to follow the precepts of conventional scientific skepticism. 

He argued that scientific skepticism is agnostic to new ideas, making no claims about them but waiting for them to satisfy a burden of proof before granting them validity. Pseudoskepticism, by contrast, involves "negative hypotheses" — theoretical assertions that some belief, theory, or claim is factually wrong — without satisfying the burden of proof that such negative theoretical assertions would require.

In 1987, while working as a professor of sociology at Eastern Michigan University, Truzzi gave the following description of pseudoskeptics in the journal Zetetic Scholar:

In science, the burden of proof falls upon the claimant; and the more extraordinary a claim, the heavier is the burden of proof demanded. The true skeptic takes an agnostic position, one that says the claim is not proved rather than disproved. He asserts that the claimant has not borne the burden of proof and that science must continue to build its cognitive map of reality without incorporating the extraordinary claim as a new "fact." 

Since the true skeptic does not assert a claim, he has no burden to prove anything. He just goes on using the established theories of "conventional science" as usual. But if a critic asserts that there is evidence for disproof, that he has a negative hypothesis — saying, for instance, that a seeming psi result was actually due to an artifact — he is making a claim and therefore also has to bear a burden of proof . . .

Then there is the Cynic . . .

. . . a person who believes that people are motivated purely by self-interest rather than acting for honourable or unselfish reasons.

And/Or

. . . a member of a school of ancient Greek philosophers founded by Antisthenes, marked by an ostentatious contempt for ease and pleasure. In this context Cynicism leads us to question what is wrong with the world – and strive to make it better. 

In a Guardian article on Philosophy by Julian Baggini (Wed 10 Jul 2013) headlined:

In praise of cynicism 

Julian Baggini has a positive view of "cynicism" as a way to navigate through life, and in his article/opinion piece he "sets out his stall". He writes:

If there's one thing that makes me cynical, it's optimists. 

They are just far too cynical about cynicism. If only they could see that cynics can be happy, constructive, even fun to hang out with, they might learn a thing or two.

Perhaps this is because I'm 44, which, according to a new survey, is the age at which cynicism starts to rise. But this survey itself merely illustrates the importance of being cynical. The cynic, after all, is inclined to question people's motives and assume that they are acting self-servingly unless proven otherwise. Which is just as well, as it turns out the "study" in question is just another bit of corporate PR to promote a brand whose pseudo-scientific stunt I won't reward by naming. Once again, cynicism proves its worth as one of our best defences against spin and manipulation.

I often feel that "cynical" is a term of abuse hurled at people who are judged to be insufficiently "positive" by those who believe that negativity is the real cause of almost all the world's ills. This allows them to breezily sweep aside sceptical doubts without having to go to the bother of checking if they are well-grounded. In this way, for example, Edward Snowden's leaks about the CIA's surveillance practices have been dismissed because they contribute to "the corrosive spread of cynicism".

In December 1999, Tony Blair hailed the hugely disappointing Millennium Dome as "a triumph of confidence over cynicism". All those legitimate concerns about the expense and vacuity of the end result were brushed off as examples of sheer, wilful negativity.

A more balanced definition of a cynic, courtesy of the trusty Oxford English Dictionary, is someone who is "distrustful or incredulous of human goodness and sincerity", sceptical of human merit, often mocking or sarcastic. Now what's not to love about that?

Judgement or prejudice?

In the blizzard of facts that swirl in the electric information environment the suspended judgement of the sceptic has enormous value. Patterns of information emerge, appear through the matrix, and suspension of judgment involves waiting for all the facts before making a decision.

But what if we don't have the time to wait?

George Monbiot comes to a judgement about Boris Johnson's promises. The pattern of behaviours that George Monbiot identifies clearly points to the likelihood of empty promises having been made by Boris Johnson for brazen, not hidden, political motives. To delay, to postpone, to "kick the can down the road", and to avoid at all costs confronting the challenge to do the right thing, however difficult. 

Doing the right thing, the practical thing, the decisive thing will often prove uncomfortably unpopular. Unfortunately, for the populist politician, to create that bond of trust between a government and the governed, so crucial to managing an extreme crisis, is not the preferred approach, it's too hard. The easy tactic, the prime strategy of populist politicians, is to make promises, without the due competence, or any notion of how to deliver them, and undermining that crucial trust factor. And when accountability looms, then the diversions and distractions, framed by the usual culture war shenanigans, kick in.

Re:LODE Radio would suggest that George Monbiot is the true cynic, and that Re:LODE Radio agrees with George Monbiot that:

 Johnson's pledges on the environment are (probably) worthless

George Monbiot writes (Wed 30 Sep 2020) under the headline and subheading:

Johnson's pledges on the environment are worthless. Worse is how cynical they are

Pledges are made to distract and placate us - but at this year’s UN biodiversity summit, public anger cannot be extinguished 

It’s the hope I can’t stand.

Every few years, governments gather to make solemn promises about the action they will take to defend the living world, then break them before the ink is dry.

Today, at the virtual UN summit on biodiversity, they will move themselves to tears with the thought of the grand things they will do, then turn off their computers and sign another mining lease.

Ten years ago, at the last summit, world leaders made a similar set of “inspirational” promises. Analysis published a fortnight ago showed that, of the 20 pledges agreed at Nagoya in Japan in 2010, not one has been met. The collapse of wildlife populations and our life-support systems has continued unabated: the world has now lost 68% of its wild vertebrates since 1970.

It sounds brutal to say that these meetings are a total waste of time. But this is a generous assessment. By creating a false impression of progress, by assuaging fear and fobbing us off, these summits are a means not of accelerating action but thwarting it.

No one will be surprised to hear that the promises Boris Johnson has made at this week’s summit are worthless. But you might be surprised by how cynical they are. One of his pledges is that 30% of the UK’s land will be protected for “the recovery of nature” by 2030. This sounds astonishing, in one of the most depleted nations on Earth, until you discover he considers that 26% of our land is already used for this purpose.

It turns out that the government has simply totted up all the land that carries any kind of designation and classified it as “protected”. Most of it is composed of national parks and areas of outstanding natural beauty. While they are gazetted for their landscape value, and partly defended against certain kinds of built development, their status offers no meaningful protection for wildlife and habitats.

On the contrary, while many of these places – the Lake District is an example – are topographically spectacular, if we saw them anywhere else on Earth, we would recognise them as ecological disaster zones. The Lake District lies within our temperate rainforest belt, but its fells have been almost entirely denuded by centuries of grazing (sheep selectively browse out tree seedlings, ensuring that when the old trees die there are no young ones to replace them). These “protected” lands are wildlife deserts, sheepwrecked, grousetrashed or reduced to blasted wastes by the deer kept on overstocked “sporting” estates. Our national parks are a national disgrace, dominated by elite hunting interests and highly destructive forms of grazing that are wholly financed by taxpayers.

Every promise the government has made to offer such “protected” areas some actual protection has been broken. Tomorrow, the burning season begins on Britain’s grouse moors. Hang on, wasn’t the government going to ban this vandalism? It was – but did it then remember that some of its lavish donors and Johnson’s friends are grouse moor owners, or that there are grouse moors in Rishi Sunak’s constituency? The pledge has been delayed, perhaps forever. Wildlife in our paper parks will continue to be torched, and the peat that underlies the heather exposed and oxidised, releasing great plumes of carbon. Perhaps for the same reasons, grouse shoots were granted a special exemption from the government’s coronavirus rules, and taxpayers continue to subsidise shotgun licences to the tune of £10m a year.

The new farm subsidies the government will phase in, as we leave the European Union’s catastrophic common agricultural policy, were supposed to pay farmers for ecological restoration. They could have had a major impact in national parks, as farming there, entirely dependent on government money, will follow the incentives. But under George Eustice, the environment department, Defra, once again stands for Doing Everything Farmers’ Representatives Ask. Beholden to the worst elements of the industry, Defra has apparently already suggested that it might strip away the positive aspects of the plan.

Even if better policies existed on paper, the complete regulatory collapse the government has engineered would render them meaningless. The budgets of the regulatory bodies have been cut so far, their powers are so curtailed, and their staff are so frustrated and demoralised, that they are effectively incapacitated. Environmental policy magazine the ENDS Report reveals that, though thousands of offences have been committed, Natural England, which is meant to defend wildlife from destruction, imposed only five fines between 2012 and 2019. It is so desperate that it has been reduced to crowdfunding its regulation of protected wildlife sites.

Similarly, the Environment Agency seems incapable of defending our rivers. Despite a promise that 75% of our rivers would reach good ecological condition by 2027, government figures released this month show that the proportion remains unchanged, at 14%. And no rivers at all have achieved good chemical condition. Instead of taking the necessary action, the head of the agency, Sir James Bevan, has proposed that the standards be weakened.

Wherever Johnson has been, a trail of broken promises litters his path like roadkill. In March, the government announced that it was phasing out the badger cull: rather than killing badgers, it would use vaccination and controls on cattle movements to prevent bovine tuberculosis. Instead, this month we learned that it is ramping up the killing, extending the cull to 11 new parts of England. Landed power wins, even when a policy makes no scientific sense. A new analysis by the RSPB shows that, of the 20 biodiversity targets the UK promised to meet 10 years ago, it has failed to reach 17. In fact, we have slipped backwards on six of these criteria.

Last year’s State of Nature report shows that our wildlife populations continue to collapse. This is likely only to get worse. The government is ripping up planning rules, to permit a builders’ free for all. Its new road-building programme will cover precious wild places in concrete. Supertrawlers tear through our marine protected areas. The whole point of Brexit, from the government’s point of view, is to sweep away public protections. A US trade deal, if it happens, will ensure that the rules defending nature are first in line.

The government’s promises are not made to be kept. They are made to assure us, to distract us, to persuade us to put away our banners and go home quietly like good citizens, because the situation is under control. Hope is the fire extinguisher governments use to douse public anger. But public anger is the only effective defence of the living world. Keep the flame burning.

All eyes on China . . .

. . . with coalmines, power stations and chemical plants around the city of Huolinguole polluting Inner Mongolia’s Keerqin grassland, authorities replaced grazing animals with sculptures.

Patrick Greenfield sets out for the Guardian reader (Tue 29 Sep 2020): 

What to look out for at the UN biodiversity summit 

Everything you need to know about who will be there, who’s staying away and what the hot topics will be at Wednesday’s virtual event in New York

Patrick Greenfield writes:

The year 2020 was meant to be a super year for nature and biodiversity, according to the UN. But with swathes of the planet in lockdown, Covid-19 has highlighted the risk of humanity’s unstable relationship with nature, with repeated warnings linking the pandemic with the destruction of ecosystems and species.

On Wednesday, the world will gather to discuss the biodiversity crisis at a virtual summit in New York. The UN secretary general, António Guterres, Prince Charles and the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, will open proceedings. Here is what to look out for.

Will China step up?

Next year China will for the first time host major international talks on the environment – postponed from this year – at Cop15 in Kunming, where the international community will agree a Paris-style agreement for nature. The stakes are high: governments failed to meet any of the UN targets to slow biodiversity loss for the previous decade and the drum beat of warnings about the state of the planet’s health is growing louder. Now the world’s biggest greenhouse gas emitter is tasked with using its growing might to corral 196 countries into agreeing a plan worthy of the crisis.

China’s modern record on the environment is poor. Rapid economic development and huge infrastructure projects such as the Belt and Road Initiative have come at a huge cost to nature, destroying precarious ecosystems and leaving many cities with severe air pollution. But Beijing is uniquely placed to influence countries eager to follow its development model but distrustful of the conservation-focus approach of some European nations whose wild areas largely disappeared with industrialisation.

“I think China is absolutely critical to the issue of both climate change and biodiversity and land degradation. We are not going to solve these problems without leadership from China,” says Sir Robert Watson, former chair of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), which informs the UN biodiversity negotiations with the latest science.

Some privately suspect that President Xi will surprise world leaders with another major environmental commitment during his speech at the summit’s opening, just days after he ramped up China’s carbon commitments by pledging to achieve carbon neutrality by 2060.

“They’ve had some really bad examples of land degradation when they deforested the Yangtze basin. Now, as I understand it, they’ve done a fairly significant replanting of trees in the Yangtze basin because it was leading to extreme floods and dust bowls. They also, of course, have terrible air pollution in their cities. I’m somewhat optimistic that China wants to show it is an economic power and play a leadership role in the world,” Watson says.

“I would argue that governments around the world need to work closely with China and see if, collectively, we can move in the right direction.”

The absentees and the reluctant

Summit organisers have been overwhelmed with requests from world leaders to speak on Wednesday. The Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, South African prime minister Cyril Ramaphosa and Britain’s prime minister, Boris Johnson, are among dozens of leaders jostling to make statements at the oversubscribed event. But the talks will be marked by those who are not scheduled to speak.

The US president, Donald Trump, will not appear and nobody from his administration is scheduled to address the event. Brazilian foreign minister Ernesto Araújo – who has previously dismissed the climate crisis as a Marxist plot – had been listed to represent his country in the place of president Jair Bolsonaro but the South American leader will now speak. Russian president Vladimir Putin will not appear, sending the head of the ministry of natural resources, Dmitry Kobylkin, in his place. All three men oversee vital life-sustaining ecosystems with global significance and Brazil has traditionally been a major player in UN environmental circles through its impressive diplomatic machine.

But under Bolsonaro, the Amazon rainforest continues to burn and many fear Brazil’s leader is steering his country towards environmental ruin. Last week the president hit back at the UN general assembly for a second year in a row about how the Amazon has been treated under his leadership, claiming Brazil was the target of a “brutal disinformation campaign”. While the US is not a party to the UN convention on biodiversity, Bolsonaro’s stance on the environment could have a major sway over the final Kunming agreement. Governments will listen to what Bolsonaro has to say with great interest.

In between the world leaders, heads of state and royalty, indigenous youth activist Archana Soreng will also speak at the summit’s opening. The member of the Khadia tribe in India is part of the UN secretary general’s youth advisory group on climate change and will be a powerful voice for her generation.

Archana Soreng

Ambition to protect the planet

Before the coronavirus pandemic disrupted talks, Wednesday’s summit was meant to be the moment international leaders gave their input before negotiators headed to Kunming to thrash out a final agreement. While there is a danger that governments might ignore the environmental targets while grappling to rescue economies and save lives, there is cautious optimism that the opposite has happened. Repeated warnings linking Covid-19 and zoonotic diseases to the destruction of nature have focused minds.

“Look at the number of governments and states which have registered to make statements. That clearly by itself says something,” the UN’s biodiversity head, Elizabeth Maruma Mrema, told the Guardian. “Noticeable trends have emerged in this period of pandemic and in lockdowns. It has really brought up the voices of many actors we probably would not have seen or noticed.”

Despite the optimism, the ambition of the “Paris agreement for nature” will be reflected in the detail of measurable, targeted actions. As things stand, the draft Kunming agreement has headline targets of protecting 30% of the world’s land and sea by 2030, introducing controls on invasive species and reducing pollution from plastic waste and excess nutrients. Ahead of Wednesday’s summit, 64 leaders and the EU published an ambitious 10-point pledge that many privately hope will bounce other countries into being more ambitious. Watch out for how that translates into statements by countries such as Australia, China and India that did not sign the pledge.

Giving nature a financial value

Expressing nature’s value in financial terms has become a big focus of conservation efforts. With the cost of deforestation, pollution and species extinction absent from most economic models, calculating the economic contribution of ecosystem services that healthy forests, rivers and oceans provide to humanity has helped reframe the conservation debate.

Ahead of the talks, the insurance company Swiss Re calculated that more than half (55%) of global GDP, equal to $41.7tn, is dependent on high-functioning biodiversity and ecosystem services. But the research also found that major economies in south-east Asia, Europe and the US are exposed to ecosystem decline. The EU, Germany, Norway, Costa Rica and the UK are leading efforts to increase funding for nature. But to take meaningful action on the environment, many developing nations with high biodiversity – including Brazil and a number of African countries – want the creation of a global financial system that recognises their ecosystem services.

The UN’s co-chair on the Kunming process, Basile van Havre, who is tasked with combining all of the negotiating positions into a final agreement, said he understood their position.

“I think they’re putting on the table some concerns that need to be heard. There are commodities leaving Brazil and going to other places in the world, and they’re feeding economies in the other places. So, if I buy food items in the supermarket, how do we flow the money back to Brazil to support conservation? I totally understand the need of those local communities.”

While these issues will be sorted in the midnight negotiating hours in Kunming next year, watch for world leaders laying out their countries’ positions on ecosystem services on Wednesday.

The private sector and vested interests

Alongside governments, banks and private companies have announced commitments to protect nature ahead of Wednesday’s summit. HSBC, Allianz and Axa are among 26 financial institutions – representing more than €3tn in assets – calling on world leaders to reach an agreement to protect ecosystem function. Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, the world’s largest investor, will also take part in the leaders’ dialogue on harnessing science, technology and innovation for biodiversity.

But like the fossil fuel industry with climate talks, there could be significant pushback from major chemical and agricultural companies that might lose out through restrictions on fertiliser, farming practices and pollution through any agreement. Half a billion dollars of environmentally harmful government subsidies was highlighted as a key failure in the UN report on biodiversity targets.

“The landscape in the private sector is a bit different on nature and that’s one advantage we have,” Van Havre notes. “All that system of agri-food is very active and very worried because their bottom line depends on effective natural systems. They’re very engaged. They’ve learned from their climate change experience. So we’re not dragging them, they’re dragging us.

“It’s a very different world from the energy sector. We’re going to need to feed more people. So if anything, they have a bigger place in the world, it’s just a very different place.”

The summit as a focal point for campaigners

Ahead of the meeting, conservation groups and organisations have fired off a slew of press releases about biodiversity and their campaigning goals. Business leaders and philanthropists have announced increased funding for the preservation of nature alongside foreign ministers. The Wildlife Trusts has launched a £30m fundraising appeal alongside the UK’s new commitment to protect 30% of land and sea by 2030. Most events have been based around the four-day Nature for Life events, with discussions on the sustainable development goals, business and nature, global ambition and local action.

The climate crisis is a Marxist plot

So says Brazilian foreign minister Ernesto Araújo. He is not alone as a politician on the right. The inclination to climate change denial is facilitated in part by a well funded network of pseudosceptic thinktanks, commentariat, and support staff who are working away with significant levels of resources that are not so readily available to the left. And it makes sense for the right to demonise those who challenge the vested interests and the capitalist system that are increasingly responsible for the ongoing destruction of the Earth. They are vilified as the left.

Left, right, centre, centre left, centre right, extreme left, radical left, extreme right, ultra . . .

The terms "left" and "right" appeared during the French Revolution of 1789 when members of the National Assembly divided into supporters of the king to the president's right and supporters of the revolution to his left. One deputy, the Baron de Gauville, explained: "We began to recognize each other: those who were loyal to religion and the king took up positions to the right of the chair so as to avoid the shouts, oaths, and indecencies that enjoyed free rein in the opposing camp".

When the National Assembly was replaced in 1791 by a Legislative Assembly comprising entirely new members, the divisions continued. "Innovators" sat on the left, "moderates" gathered in the centre, while the "conscientious defenders of the constitution" found themselves sitting on the right, where the defenders of the Ancien Régime had previously gathered. When the succeeding National Convention met in 1792, the seating arrangement continued, but following the coup d'état of 2 June 1793 and the arrest of the Girondins the right side of the assembly was deserted and any remaining members who had sat there moved to the centre. However, following the Thermidorian Reaction of 1794 the members of the far-left were excluded and the method of seating was abolished. The new constitution included rules for the assembly that would "break up the party groups". However, following the Restoration in 1814–1815 political clubs were again formed. The majority ultraroyalists chose to sit on the right. The "constitutionals" sat in the centre while independents sat on the left. The terms extreme right and extreme left as well as centre-right and centre-left came to be used to describe the nuances of ideology of different sections of the assembly.

The terms "left" and "right" were not used to refer to political ideology per se, but only to seating in the legislature. After 1848, the main opposing camps were the "democratic socialists" and the "reactionaries" who used red and white flags to identify their party affiliation. With the establishment of the Third Republic in 1871, the terms were adopted by political parties: the Republican Left, the Centre Right and the Centre Left (1871) and the Extreme Left (1876) and Radical Left (1881). The beliefs of the group called the Radical Left were actually closer to the Centre Left than the beliefs of those called the Extreme Left.

Beginning in the early twentieth century, the terms "left" and "right" came to be associated with specific political ideologies and were used to describe citizens' political beliefs, gradually replacing the terms "reds" and "the reaction". Those on the Left often called themselves "republicans", while those on the Right often called themselves "conservatives".

The words Left and Right were at first used by their opponents as slurs.

By 1914, the Left half of the legislature in France was composed of Unified Socialists, Republican Socialists and Socialist Radicals, while the parties that were called "Left" now sat on the right side. The use of the words Left and Right spread from France to other countries and came to be applied to a large number of political parties worldwide, which often differed in their political beliefs. There was asymmetry in the use of the terms Left and Right by the opposing sides. The Right mostly denied that the left–right spectrum was meaningful because they saw it as artificial and damaging to unity. However, the Left, seeking to change society, promoted the distinction. As Alain observed in 1931: "When people ask me if the division between parties of the Right and parties of the Left, men of the Right and men of the Left, still makes sense, the first thing that comes to mind is that the person asking the question is certainly not a man of the Left." In British politics, the terms "right" and "left" came into common use for the first time in the late 1930s in debates over the Spanish Civil War. The Scottish sociologist Robert M. MacIver noted in The Web of Government (1947):

The right is always the party sector associated with the interests of the upper or dominant classes, the left the sector expressive of the lower economic or social classes, and the centre that of the middle classes. Historically this criterion seems acceptable. The conservative right has defended entrenched prerogatives, privileges and powers; the left has attacked them. The right has been more favorable to the aristocratic position, to the hierarchy of birth or of wealth; the left has fought for the equalization of advantage or of opportunity, for the claims of the less advantaged. Defence and attack have met, under democratic conditions, not in the name of class but in the name of principle; but the opposing principles have broadly corresponded to the interests of the different classes.

War and peace in the global village . . .

In Chapter 12 of Marshall McLuhan's (1964) Understanding Media on Clothing he writes: A recent ad for C-E-I-R Computer Services pictured a plain cotton dress and the headline: "Why does Mrs. 'K' dress that way?" -- referring to the wife of Nikita Khrushchev. Some of the copy of this very ingenious ad continued: "It is an icon. To its own underprivileged population and to the uncommitted of the East and South, it says: 'We are thrifty, simple, honest; peaceful, homey, good.' To the free nations of the West it says: 'We will bury you.' "

 

This is precisely the message that the new simple clothing of our forefathers had for the feudal classes at the time of the French Revolution. Clothing was then a nonverbal manifesto of political upset.

The propaganda machines that were developed as part of the competition for global hegemony in the post World War II era, the Cold War between the US and Russia, became critical in what became an ideological battlegound, and generated an existential confrontation between communism and the "Free World", between freedom of expression and a totalitarian regime where control and censorship was the norm. For "Free World", also read "free trade", "free markets", the freedom of the movement of capital in the generation of short term profits. Capitalism became the opposite of socialism, and overlapping with the US being the opposite of the USSR.

History tells us there were "show trials", various theatrics, both cinematic and military, alongside institutional and state sponsored violence on both sides of this contested hegemony.

By the 1989 the dissolution of the Soviet Union was a process of internal disintegration already in train within the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), and which had begunn in the late 1980s with growing unrest in the various constituent republics, ending on December 26, 1991, when the Supreme Soviet voted to dissolve the union.

The process of the secession of nation states from the USSR, including Belarus and Ukraine, began in the late 1980's

On November 13, 1988, approximately 10,000 people attended an officially sanctioned meeting organized by the cultural heritage organization Spadschyna, the Kyiv University student club Hromada, and the environmental groups Zelenyi Svit ("Green World") and Noosfera, to focus on ecological issues. From November 14–18, 15 Ukrainian activists were among the 100 human-, national- and religious-rights advocates invited to discuss human rights with Soviet officials and a visiting delegation of the U.S. Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (also known as the Helsinki Commission). On December 10, hundreds gathered in Kyiv to observe International Human Rights Day at a rally organized by the Democratic Union. The unauthorized gathering resulted in the detention of local activists.

The Belarusian Popular Front was established in 1988 as a political party and cultural movement for democracy and independence, similar to the Baltic republics’ popular fronts. The discovery of mass graves in Kurapaty outside Minsk by historian Zianon Pazniak, the Belarusian Popular Front's first leader, gave additional momentum to the pro-democracy and pro-independence movement in Belarus. It claimed that the NKVD performed secret killings in Kurapaty. Initially the Front had significant visibility because its numerous public actions almost always ended in clashes with the police and the KGB.

The end of history?

In terms of the struggle for global hegemony by the two main contestants, the US and the USSR, in 1989 there was about to be a winner and a loser. Was this about to be the end of history?

The end of history is a political and philosophical concept that supposes that a particular political, economic, or social system may develop that would constitute the end-point of humanity's sociocultural evolution and the final form of human government. A variety of authors have argued that a particular system is the "end of history" including Thomas More in Utopia, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx, Vladimir Solovyov, Alexandre Kojève, and Francis Fukuyama in the 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man.

The concept of an end of history differs from ideas of an end of the world as expressed in various religions, which may forecast a complete destruction of the Earth or of life on Earth, and the end of the human race as we know it. The end of history instead proposes a state in which human life continues indefinitely into the future without any further major changes in society, system of governance, or economics.  

It was in 1989 that Francis Fukuyama brought the term back to the forefront with his essay The End of History? that was published months before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In this essay, which he later expanded upon in his book The End of History and the Last Man in 1992, Fukuyama builds on the knowledge of Hegel, Marx and Kojève.

Although not an orthodox Marxist, Kojeve was known as an influential and idiosyncratic interpreter of Hegel, reading him through the lens of both Karl Marx and Martin Heidegger. 

The well-known end of history thesis advanced the idea that ideological history in a limited sense had ended with the French Revolution and the regime of Napoleon and that there was no longer a need for violent struggle to establish the "rational supremacy of the regime of rights and equal recognition". 

Kojeve's end of history is different from Francis Fukuyama's later thesis of the same name in that it points as much to a socialist-capitalist synthesis as to a triumph of liberal capitalism. 

Mark Lilla notes that Kojève rejected the prevailing concept among European intellectuals of the 1930s that capitalism and democracy were failed artifacts of the Enlightenment that would be destroyed by either communism or fascism. In contrast, while initially somewhat more sympathetic to the Soviet Union than the United States, Kojève devoted much of his thought to protecting western European autonomy, particularly so France, from domination by either the Soviet Union or the United States. 

He believed that the capitalist United States represented right-Hegelianism while the state-socialist Soviet Union represented left-Hegelianism. Thus, victory by either side, he posited, would result in what Lilla describes as "a rationally organized bureaucracy without class distinctions".

Francis Fukuyama's argument in his essay The End of History centres around the idea that, back then in 1989, that its two most important competitors, fascism and communism, have been defeated, there should no longer be any serious competition for liberal democracy and the market economy.

If only it was that simple!

Back in 1989 the intervention of post-modern discourse was problematic, as it encouraged a tendency to gloss over the protruding inconsistencies and contradictions of mass culture.

In the twenty-first century we can ask the question: 

Are we post "post-modernism"? 

Or? Are are we just "modern"?  

Or? "Are we human, or are we dancer?" as the Killers sing in the song "Human". 

In 2014, the Killers "Human" was voted the "weirdest lyric of all time" by a Blinkbox survey.

"Human" is a song by American rock band the Killers. There was confusion and debate over the line "Are we human, or are we dancer?" in the song's chorus due to its grammar. 

Debate raged across the internet over whether the lyric said "dancer", "dancers" or "denser", a misunderstanding which elicited conflicting interpretations of the song's meaning. On the band's official website, the biography section states that Brandon Flowers is singing "Are we human, or are we dancer?" and also says that the lyric was inspired by a disparaging comment made by Hunter S. Thompson, who stated that America was;

"raising a generation of dancers, afraid to take one step out of line" 

Twenty years before the Killers performance at the Albert Hall and marking the 200 years of the French Revolution in 1989, the London based art project Not the French Revolution chose instead to celebrate the Taking of the Oath in the Tennis Court at Versailles that took place on 20 June 1789. Two hundred years on, the art project proposed that the conditions of the Ancien Régime still applied, and in many respects, they still do to this day. Capitalism in 1789 was already a part of the modernity mix. Revolution whispered, and then shouted the promise of emancipation, a promise not yet delivered!

Brian Chadwick, co-instigator of the art project Not the French Revolution - Liberté, égalité, fraternité in concert with Philip Courtenay, continued the the work of the project with this "write up" for: 

aNd magazine Issue 21. 1990

In his theory, Fukuyama distinguishes between the material or real world, and the world of ideas or consciousness. 

He believes that in the realm of ideas liberalism has proven to be triumphant, meaning that even though a successful liberal democracy and market economy have not yet been established everywhere:

there are no longer any ideological competitors for these systems. 

This would mean that any fundamental contradiction in human life can be worked out within the context of modern liberalism and would not need an alternative political-economic structure to be resolved. 

Now that the end of history is reached, Fukuyama believes that international relations would be primarily concerned with economic matters and no longer with politics or strategy, thus reducing the chances of a large scale international violent conflict.

Fukuyama concludes that the end of history will be a sad time, because the potential of ideological struggles that people were prepared to risk their lives for has now been replaced with the prospect of;

"economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands."

This does not mean that Fukuyama believes that a modern liberal democracy is the perfect political system, but rather that he does not think another political structure can provide citizens with the levels of wealth and personal liberties that a liberal democracy can. 

Rockin' in the Free World

"Rockin' in the Free World" is a song by Neil Young, released on his 1989 album Freedom.

Young wrote the song while on tour with his band The Restless in February 1989. He learned that a planned concert tour to the Soviet Union was not going to happen and his guitarist Frank "Poncho" Sampedro said "we'll have to keep on rockin' in the free world". The phrase struck Young, who thought it could be the hook in a song about "stuff going on with the Ayatollah and all this turmoil in the world.” He had the lyrics the next day.  

There's colors on the street 

Red, white and blue
People shufflin' their feet
People sleepin' in their shoes
But there's a warnin' sign on the road ahead
There's a lot of people sayin' we'd be better off dead
Don't feel like Satan, but I am to them
So I try to forget it, any way I can 

Keep on rockin' in the free world
Keep on rockin' in the free world
Keep on rockin' in the free world
Keep on rockin' in the free world 

I see a woman in the night 

With a baby in her hand
There's an old street light (near a garbage can)
Near a garbage can (near a garbage can)
Now she put the kid away, and she's gone to get a hit
She hates her life, and what she's done to it
There's one more kid that'll never go to school
Never get to fall in love, never get to be cool 

Keep on rockin' in the free world
Keep on rockin' in the free world
Keep on rockin' in the free world
Keep on rockin' in the free world 

We got a thousand points of light 

For the homeless man
We got a kinder, gentler machine gun hand
We got department stores and toilet paper
Got Styrofoam boxes for the ozone layer
Got a man of the people, says keep hope alive
Got fuel to burn, got roads to drive 

Keep on rockin' in the free world
Keep on rockin' in the free world
Keep on rockin' in the free world
Keep on rockin' in the free world

The lyrics criticize the George H. W. Bush administration, then in its first month, quoting Bush's famous "thousand points of light" remark from his 1989 inaugural address and his 1988 presidential campaign promise for America to become a "kinder, gentler nation". The song also refers to Ayatollah Khomeini's proclamation that the United States was the "Great Satan" and Jesse Jackson's 1988 campaign slogan, "Keep hope alive". The song was first performed live on February 21, 1989, in Seattle with The Restless, without the band having rehearsed it.

The song having been originally written as a critique of the George H. W. Bush administration, it has an afterlife, including a critique of the father and then the son, as evidenced in the Neil Young Archive video shown here. The montage of film and video clips sets out a critique of George W. Bush's domestic and international policies. America destroys the life of an innocent child in Iraq while confrontations continue in the US between policemen and African Americans.

Sounds familiar? 

Since its release the song has been used a number of times at different US political events.

In 2015 and 2016, the song was played during Donald Trump's grand entry preceding his formal announcement that he would run as a Republican candidate for the 2016 presidency.

Neil Young says . . .

. . . fuck you Donald Trump

Young, a longtime supporter of Bernie Sanders, said that Trump's use of "Rockin' in the Free World" was not authorized. The contention, later determined to be a licensing issue, was resolved, and Trump's campaign used the song. Young explained to Rolling Stone that he had no issue with the campaign using the song.

Bernie Sanders also used the song at rallies for his 2016 presidential campaign.

In 2020, Trump again used the song at a pre-Fourth of July speech at Mount Rushmore on July 3, along with two other Young songs ("Like a Hurricane" and "Cowgirl in the Sand"). 

A tweet from Young from the official Neil Young Archives Twitter account responded to the usage of "Rockin' in the Free World” by retweeting a tweet from Rapid City Journal reporter Morgan Matzen that contained a video with the song playing at the Trump event with Young adding 

"This is NOT ok with me. . ." 

A minute later Young retweeted a second Matzen tweet, this time one showing a video of Young’s song "Like a Hurricane" playing before the President took the stage, with Young adding: 

"I stand in solidarity with the Lakota Sioux & this is NOT ok with me."

On August 4, 2020, Young filed a lawsuit in the Southern District of New York against the Trump campaign for copyright infringement for its use of "Rockin' in the Free World" and "Devil's Sidewalk" after both songs had been removed from ASCAP's political license.

Using the term "Left" as a slur

This video montage begins with No. 2 of NOW THIS Top Moments of the Presidential Debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. In this section of the video Trump refuses to acknowledge the danger of homegrown extreme right wing white supremacism, and ends up repeating the mantra of the Proud Boys, no doubt as a brazen implied endorsement of this sector of his base support. The word "base" in this context has a double meaning. Trump becomes almost apoplectic when denouncing "Antifa" and the left. Joe Biden points out that Antifa is an idea not an organisation. The video then shows all the NOW THIS Top Moments No. 1, followed by a Fact Check by CBS News. Then a clip of Bernie Sanders' reaction to the First Presidential Debate in The View. Then an evaluation of the debate by Fox News presenter Hannity: President Trump 'steamrolled' Biden in first debate. The US is apparently  being governed by someone who cannot hold a conversation, let alone debate, or answer simple questions. All Hannity can come up with is that he is just a "steamroller". 

Left, right, left . . ..

However, any thorough demographic analysis of political attitudes shows that socialism is, for younger generations, not such a dirty word.

Who's really afraid of socialism?

Mehdi Hasan: Welcome to Deconstructed. I’m Mehdi Hasan. President Trump gave one of the longest State of the Union speeches ever on Tuesday night, and it was filled with the usual racist lies about immigrants, the usual belligerence and warmongering in relation to Iran, and the usual BS about making America great again. But he also took time out to slam the S-word. Yes, socialism.  

Elizabeth Bruenig: It’s always a shock when you hear that kind of resurgence of Cold War rhetoric in a contemporary administration. 

MH: One of my pet theories is that Republicans have been some of the best helpers of the socialist cause in recent years. Remember how they went on and on about Obama being a socialist and a Marxist? They devalued the term as an insult. They made it less scary, less demonic because if Barack Obama is a socialist, can’t be that bad or extreme. A lot of Americans in the middle might say. And now Trump attacking socialism, I think is great for socialism. Anything Trump attacks seems to get very popular.  

EB: Yeah, and I think that Trump seeming to be sort of spooked by the sort of new socialist politicians on the scene will help them with voters. 

MH: We can only hope so. Liz Bruenig, thanks for joining me on Deconstructed. 

EB: Thank you for having me.  

MH: That was Elizabeth Bruenig of the Washington Post. She mentioned the famous quote that 

“it’s easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism”. 

And lefties like myself completely identify with that. We tend to be pessimistic about winning over millions of people to democratic socialism, especially in a country like the U.S which is obsessed with free markets, and capitalism, and consumerism, and hyper-individualism, as Liz put it. 

But what’s funny right now is that it’s the right, it’s the defenders of capitalism, who are shit-scared that their neoliberal brand of capitalism in particular, minimal taxes on the rich, zero regulation, overmighty corporations, is on the way out and that socialism — whether it’s the mild Nordic version or the more meatier Jeremy Corbyn British version with public ownership of industry — is on the way in. Hence the constant fear-mongering and demonization and references to Venezuela.   

But here’s the thing. When Trump attacks something, he tends to make it more popular. Immigration, for example, is more popular with the American public than it’s ever been. Support for free trade is up too. I suspect Trump going after socialism by name on Tuesday night in his State of the Union will only embolden U.S. socialists like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and make a new generation of ordinary Americans start looking into what socialism actually is and how it might benefit them, especially a bespoke American socialism, at the expense of the rich, at the expense of big corporations, at the expense of Donald Trump himself. So I guess for once, the left should maybe thank the president of the United States.

Listen to the podcast 

During his State of the Union address, President Trump expressed “alarm” at what he termed “new calls to adopt socialism in our country.” “Tonight,” he proclaimed, “we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country.” 

The line received a standing ovation from Republicans and Democrats alike, yet recent polls show that socialism is growing in popularity in the U.S., with a net positive rating among Democrats. 

Newly-elected Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib are both members of the Democratic Socialists of America, and policy proposals identified with the socialist movement, such as debt-free college and universal health care, are gaining traction on the left. 

To discuss America’s long-held resistance to socialism and its current rise in popularity, Mehdi Hasan is joined by Washington Post columnist Elizabeth Bruenig.

To quote the Scottish sociologist Robert M. MacIver from The Web of Government (1947):

Defence and attack have met, under democratic conditions, not in the name of class but in the name of principle; but the opposing principles have broadly corresponded to the interests of the different classes.

Proud to be a socialist, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says . . . 

. . . I'm proud to be a bartender. Ain't nothing wrong with that!

It turns out that with capitalism it is the struggle of the working class for emancipation from systemic inequality and exploitation. The planet itself is under threat from this systemic process of extraction and pollution, driven by short term private profit, and supported by a socialisation of the loss. 

Ocasio-Cortez says capitalism is an 'irredeemable' system . . .  

This Fox Business Network clip, from March 2019, illustrates how the rightwing media commentariat re-frame what Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in order to make sure the audience completely miss the point of the argument. The Wall Street Journal is no supporter of socialism, and their commentator meekly supports the Fox presenter in reinforcing the idea that socialism is bad because it involves the state owning the means of production. 

This concentration on the issue of private ownership and the capitalist system, at loggerheads with a system that collectivises and socialises the means of production, and shares the surplus produced, ends up fetishising private property as sacrosanct. 

However what Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is pointing to is that capitalism is NOT working for people, and, furthermore, unless dramatic and urgent action is taken, capitalism is on the pathway to making our planet uninhabitable for humanity. 

FAIR published this article around the same time as the Fox Business Network broadcast on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's view of capitalism:  

Fox News’ Self-Fulfilling Propaganda on Ocasio-Cortez 

How right-wing cable spent months demonizing the freshman lawmaker — then falsely inflated her unpopularity 

By Reed Richardson March 21, 2019

Over the weekend, Fox News published a story (3/17/19) on a recent Gallup poll that asked the public about their opinions on Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. 

The headline claimed that her unfavorable rating had “skyrocketed” — rising 15 points since last September — and that “most people” now viewed her negatively.

In doing so, the network committed two notable journalistic sins—one of commission and one of omission.

First, the headline itself was a sloppy falsehood, as the Gallup poll from February only found a plurality of the public (41 percent vs. 31 percent) — and not a majority, or “most people” — rating Ocasio-Cortez unfavorable rather than favorable.

But second — and more importantly — the story conveniently left out the key role that Fox News itself has played in damaging the public reputation of the congressmember, thanks to a relentless propaganda campaign over the past six months. 

It’s a chilling case study in the self-fulfilling nature of the right-wing messaging machine. 

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is not alone, and the politics she stands for is one of justice and equality, freedom from poverty, hunger and disease, as well as the freedom to speak truth to power. And, in addressing the climate emergency, the proposed Green New Deal she champions is a solution, but it's an international problem, so there needs to be an international solution, with United States taking on the promises made at the Paris Agreement. Trump has already torn up and shredded that US promise.

Bernie Sanders writes on the future of the international left

A new authoritarian axis demands an international progressive front

Says Bernie Sanders in this Opinion piece published in the Guardian (Thu 13 Sep 2018).

Illustration by Joan Wong 

There is a global struggle taking place of enormous consequence. Nothing less than the future of the planet – economically, socially and environmentally – is at stake.

At a time of massive wealth and income inequality, when the world’s top 1% now owns more wealth than the bottom 99%, we are seeing the rise of a new authoritarian axis.

While these regimes may differ in some respects, they share key attributes: hostility toward democratic norms, antagonism toward a free press, intolerance toward ethnic and religious minorities, and a belief that government should benefit their own selfish financial interests. These leaders are also deeply connected to a network of multi-billionaire oligarchs who see the world as their economic plaything.

Those of us who believe in democracy, who believe that a government must be accountable to its people, must understand the scope of this challenge if we are to effectively confront it.

It should be clear by now that Donald Trump and the rightwing movement that supports him is not a phenomenon unique to the United States. All around the world, in Europe, in Russia, in the Middle East, in Asia and elsewhere we are seeing movements led by demagogues who exploit people’s fears, prejudices and grievances to achieve and hold on to power.

This trend certainly did not begin with Trump, but there’s no question that authoritarian leaders around the world have drawn inspiration from the fact that the leader of the world’s oldest and most powerful democracy seems to delight in shattering democratic norms.

Three years ago, who would have imagined that the United States would stay neutral between Canada, our democratic neighbor and second largest trading partner, and Saudi Arabia, a monarchic, client state that treats women as third-class citizens? It’s also hard to imagine that Israel’s Netanyahu government would have moved to pass the recent “nation state law”, which essentially codifies the second-class status of Israel’s non-Jewish citizens, if Benjamin Netanyahu didn’t know Trump would have his back.

All of this is not exactly a secret. As the US continues to grow further and further apart from our longtime democratic allies, the US ambassador to Germany recently made clear the Trump administration’s support for rightwing extremist parties across Europe.

In addition to Trump’s hostility toward democratic institutions we have a billionaire president who, in an unprecedented way, has blatantly embedded his own economic interests and those of his cronies into the policies of government.

Other authoritarian states are much farther along this kleptocratic process. In Russia, it is impossible to tell where the decisions of government end and the interests of Vladimir Putin and his circle of oligarchs begin. They operate as one unit. Similarly, in Saudi Arabia, there is no debate about separation because the natural resources of the state, valued at trillions of dollars, belong to the Saudi royal family. In Hungary, far-right authoritarian leader Viktor Orbán is openly allied with Putin in Russia. In China, an inner circle led by Xi Jinping has steadily consolidated power, clamping down on domestic political freedom while it aggressively promotes a version of authoritarian capitalism abroad.

We must understand that these authoritarians are part of a common front. They are in close contact with each other, share tactics and, as in the case of European and American rightwing movements, even share some of the same funders. The Mercer family, for example, supporters of the infamous Cambridge Analytica, have been key backers of Trump and of Breitbart News, which operates in Europe, the United States and Israel to advance the same anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim agenda. Republican megadonor Sheldon Adelson gives generously to rightwing causes in both the United States and Israel, promoting a shared agenda of intolerance and illiberalism in both countries.

The truth is, however, that to effectively oppose rightwing authoritarianism, we cannot simply go back to the failed status quo of the last several decades. Today in the United States, and in many other parts of the world, people are working longer hours for stagnating wages, and worry that their children will have a lower standard of living than they do.

Our job is to fight for a future in which new technology and innovation works to benefit all people, not just a few. It is not acceptable that the top 1% of the world’s population owns half the planet’s wealth, while the bottom 70% of the working age population accounts for just 2.7% of global wealth.

Together governments of the world must come together to end the absurdity of the rich and multinational corporations stashing over $21tn in offshore bank accounts to avoid paying their fair share of taxes and then demanding that their respective governments impose an austerity agenda on their working families.

It is not acceptable that the fossil fuel industry continues to make huge profits while their carbon emissions destroy the planet for our children and grandchildren.

It is not acceptable that a handful of multinational media giants, owned by a small number of billionaires, largely control the flow of information on the planet.

It is not acceptable that trade policies that benefit large multinational corporations and encourage a race to the bottom hurt working people throughout the world as they are written out of public view.

It is not acceptable that, with the cold war long behind us, countries around the world spend over $1tn a year on weapons of destruction, while millions of children die of easily treatable diseases.

In order to effectively combat the rise of the international authoritarian axis, we need an international progressive movement that mobilizes behind a vision of shared prosperity, security and dignity for all people, and that addresses the massive global inequality that exists, not only in wealth but in political power.

Such a movement must be willing to think creatively and boldly about the world that we would like to see. While the authoritarian axis is committed to tearing down a post-second world war global order that they see as limiting their access to power and wealth, it is not enough for us to simply defend that order as it exists now.

We must look honestly at how that order has failed to deliver on many of its promises, and how authoritarians have adeptly exploited those failures in order to build support for their agenda. We must take the opportunity to reconceptualize a genuinely progressive global order based on human solidarity, an order that recognizes that every person on this planet shares a common humanity, that we all want our children to grow up healthy, to have a good education, have decent jobs, drink clean water, breathe clean air and live in peace.

Our job is to reach out to those in every corner of the world who share these values, and who are fighting for a better world.

In a time of exploding wealth and technology, we have the potential to create a decent life for all people. Our job is to build on our common humanity and do everything that we can to oppose all of the forces, whether unaccountable government power or unaccountable corporate power, who try to divide us up and set us against each other. We know that those forces work together across borders. We must do the same.

The Guardian invited Yanis Varoufakis to comment on Bernie Sanders piece. Here is his response:

Bernie Sanders is spot-on. Financiers have long formed an international “brotherhood” to guarantee themselves international bailouts when their paper pyramids crash.

More recently, xenophobic rightwing zealots also formed their very own Nationalist International, turning once proud people against another so that they control their wealth and politics.

It is high time that Democrats from across the world form a Progressive International in the interests of a majority of people on every continent, in every country.

Sanders is also right when he says that the solution is not to go back to a status quo whose spectacular failure has paved the ground for the rise of the Nationalist International.

Our Progressive International must lead with a vision of the green, shared prosperity that human ingenuity is capable of providing – as long as democracy is given a chance to enable it.

To that end we need to do more than campaign together. Let us form a common council that draws out a common blueprint for an International New Deal, a progressive New Bretton Woods. 

Two years on, Bernie Sanders' piece is a warning of dire consequences if Donald Trump wins the presidential election. 

The Guardian published this Opinion piece by Yanis Varoufakis on the same day in 2018 as Bernie Sanders piece, and under the common heading: Future of the international left. 

Our new international movement will fight fascism and globalists

Our era will be remembered for the triumphant march of a globally unifying rightwing – a Nationalist International – that sprang out of the cesspool of financialised capitalism. Whether it will also be remembered for a successful humanist challenge to this menace depends on the willingness of progressives in the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom as well as countries like Mexico, India and South Africa, to forge a coherent Progressive International.

Our task is not unprecedented. Fascists did not come to power in the mid-war period by promising violence, war or concentration camps. They came to power by addressing good people who, following a severe capitalist crisis, had been treated for too long like livestock that had lost its market value. Instead of treating them like “deplorables”, fascists looked at them in the eye and promised to restore their pride, offered their friendship, gave them a sense that they belonged to a larger ideal, allowed them to think of themselves as something more than sovereign consumers.

That injection of self-esteem was accompanied by warnings against the lurking “alien” who threatened their revived hope. The politics of “us versus them” took over, bleached of social class characteristics and defined solely in terms of identities. The fear of losing status turned into tolerance of human rights abuses first against the suspect “others” and then against any and all dissent. Soon, as the establishment’s control over politics waned under the weight of the economic crisis it had caused, the progressives ended up marginalised or in prison. By then it was all over.

Is this not how Donald Trump first conquered the White House and is now winning the discursive war against a Democratic party establishment? Is this not reminiscent of the Conservative Brexiteers’ sudden appreciation of a National Health Service they had starved of funds for decades, or the energetic embracing of democracy that Thatcherism had subordinated to the logic of market forces? Are these not the ways of the hard right governments in Austria, Hungary and Poland, of Greece’s Golden Dawn Nazis and, most poignantly, of Matteo Salvini, the strongman steering the new Italian government? Everywhere we look today we see manifestations of the resurgence of an ambitious Nationalist International, the likes of which we have not seen since the 1930s. As for the establishment, they are behaving as if with a penchant to repeat the Weimar Republic’s every mistake.

But enough of the diagnosis. The pertinent question now is: what must we do? A tactical alliance with the globalist establishment is out of the question. Tony Blair, Hilary Clinton, the social democratic establishment in continental Europe are too compromised by their monetary links to a degenerating financialised capitalism and its accompanying ideology. For decades they relied on free market populism: the false promise that everyone can become better off as long as we submit to commodification. They’d like us to believe in a never-ending escalator that will take us to the heights of consumer satisfaction, but it doesn’t exist.

Our generation’s 1929, which occurred in 2008, shattered this illusion. The establishment continued as if it were possible to mend things via a combination of austerity for the many, socialism for the very few and authoritarianism all around. All the while, the Nationalist International has been riding to victory, fueled by growing discontent. To counter this power, progressives must specify very precisely the causes and nature of the people’s unrest and unhappiness: namely, the global oligarchy’s intense class war against the burgeoning precariat, against what is left of the western proletariat and, generally, against weaker citizens.

Next, we need to demonstrate that the only way the many can regain control of our lives, our communities, our cities and our countries is by coordinating our struggles along the axis of an Internationalist New Deal. While globalised financial capital can no longer be allowed to tear our societies into shreds, we must explain that no country is an island. Just like climate change demands of us both local and international action, so too does the fight against poverty, private debt and rogue bankers. To illustrate that tariffs are not the best way of protecting our workers, since they mostly enrich local oligarchies, we must campaign for trade agreements that commit governments of poorer countries to legislating minimum living wages for their workers and guaranteed jobs locally. That way communities can be revived in richer and poorer countries at once.

Even more ambitiously, our Progressive International must propose an International Monetary Clearing Union, of the type John Maynard Keynes suggested during the Bretton Woods conference in 1944, including well-designed restrictions on capital movements. By rebalancing wages, trade and finance at a global scale, both involuntary migration and involuntary unemployment will recede, thus ending the moral panic over the human right to move freely about the world.

And who is going to piece together this desperately needed Progressive International? Happily, there is no shortage of potential initiators: Bernie Sanders’s “political revolution” in the US, Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party, our Democracy in Europe Movement (DiEM25), Mexico’s president-elect, the progressive elements of the African National Congress, the various movements fighting against bigotry and austerity in India.

Let us begin today. More will follow us the moment when hatred and anger yield to rational hope.

Yanis Varoufakis is the former Greek finance minister and co-founder of DiEM25 whose New Deal for Europe will be put to European voters in the May 2019 European Parliament elections

The Guardian asked Bernie Sanders to comment on Yanis Varoufakis’ piece. Here is his response:

Yanis Varoufakis is exactly right. At a time of massive global wealth and income inequality, oligarchy, rising authoritarianism and militarism, we need a Progressive International movement to counter these threats. It is not acceptable that the top 1% of the world’s population owns more wealth than the bottom 99%, that multinational corporations and the wealthy stash over $21tn in offshore bank accounts to avoid paying their fair share of taxes, and that the fossil fuel industry continues to destroy the planet because countries are unable to cooperate effectively to combat climate change.

While the very rich get much richer, people all over the globe are working longer hours for stagnating wages, and fear for their children’s future. Authoritarians exploit these economic anxieties, creating scapegoats which pit one group against another. 

The solution, as Varoufakis points out, is an international progressive agenda that brings working people together around a vision of shared prosperity, security and dignity for all people. The fate of the world is at stake. Let us go forward together now!

It's not the end of history! The fascists are back! Back with their sweet promises!

This emerging phenomenon, in Germany, Poland, Ukraine, Russia and India, confounds Francis Fukuyama's argument in his essay The End of History that, back then in 1989, liberal democracy's two most important competitors, fascism and communism, had been defeated, and there should no longer be any serious competition for liberal democracy and the market economy. 

The 2016 book by Yanis Varoufakis . . . 

And The Weak Suffer What They Must?: Europe, Austerity and the Threat to Global Stability . . .

. . . is referenced in several of the Re:LODE Cargo of Questions Information Wraps for Eire, Germany and Poland. 

Yanis Varoufakis discusses his latest book in this piece for the Guardian earlier this month (Fri 4 Sep 2020). 

Yanis Varoufakis: capitalism isn't working. Here's an alternative

In his new book, the economist imagines a future transformed by Covid-19 and sketches a daring vision of democratic socialism. 

When Margaret Thatcher coined “Tina” – her 1980s dictum that “There is no alternative” – I was incensed because, deep down, I felt she had a point: the left had neither a credible nor a desirable alternative to capitalism.

Leftists excel at pinpointing what is wrong with capitalism. We wax lyrical about the possibility of some “other” world in which one contributes according to one’s capacities and obtains according to one’s needs. But, when pushed to describe a fully fledged alternative to contemporary capitalism, for many decades we have oscillated between the ugly (a Soviet-like barracks socialism) and the tired (a social democracy that financialised globalisation has rendered infeasible).

During the 1980s, I participated in many debates in pubs, universities and town halls whose stated purpose was to organise resistance to Thatcherism. I remember my guilty thought every time I heard Maggie speak: “If only we had a leader like her!” I was, of course, under no illusion: Thatcher’s programme was despotic, antisocial and an economic cul-de-sac. But, unlike our side, she understood that we lived in a revolutionary moment. The postwar class war armistice was over. If we wanted to defend the weak, we could not afford to be defensive. We needed to advocate as she did: out with the old system, in with a brand new one. Not Maggie’s dystopian one, but a brand new one nevertheless.

Alas, our lot had no vision of a new system. Instead, we were in the business of bandaging corpses while Thatcher was digging graves to clear the way for her spanking new spiv capitalism. Even when we were putting up a splendid fight in defence of communities that deserved defending, our causes screamed “anachronism” – fighting to preserve dirty coal-fired power stations or the right of male rightwing trade unionists to reach sordid deals behind closed doors with the likes of Robert Maxwell and Rupert Murdoch.

Just as when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, we on the left – social democrats, Keynesians and Marxists alike – had the sense we would live the rest of our days as history’s losers, so in 2008, with Lehman’s collapse, those living the ideology of neoliberalism saw history erupt with similar soul-destroying force. Some years later, surveillance capitalism forced tech-evangelists, who thought they had seen in the internet an irresistible global democratic force, also to shed their illusions.

Two years ago I decided we need a blueprint, a sense of how democratic socialism could work today, with our current technologies and despite our human failings. My reluctance to attempt such an undertaking was immense. Two people helped me overcome it. One is Danae Stratou, my partner. From the week we first met, she has been telling me that my critique of capitalism meant nothing unless I could answer her pressing question: “What’s the alternative? And precisely how would things – like money, companies and housing – work?”

The second, and most unlikely, influence was Paschal Donohoe, Ireland’s finance minister and president of the Eurogroup. A political opponent who thought little of me as a finance minister (a mutual assessment), he was kind enough to write a generous review of an earlier book of mine. While Donohoe liked my account of capitalism he thought the book’s ending, in which I tried to sketch some features of a postcapitalist society, was “most disappointing”.

He was right, I thought. So I decided to write Another Now.

In a bid to incorporate into my socialist blueprint different, often clashing, perspectives I decided to conjure up three complex characters whose dialogues would narrate the story – each representing different parts of my thinking: a Marxist-feminist, a libertarian ex-banker and a maverick technologist. Their disagreements regarding “our” capitalism provide the background against which my socialist blueprint is projected – and assessed.

•••

Capitalism took off in earnest when electromagnetism met share markets at the end of the 19th century. Their coupling gave rise to networked megafirms, such as Edison, that produced everything from power stations to lightbulbs. To finance the huge undertaking, and the massive trade in their shares, the need arose for megabanks. By the early 1920s financialised capitalism roared, before the whole juggernaut crashed in 1929.

Our current decade began with another coupling that seems to be propelling history at dizzying velocity: the one between the enormous bubble with which states have been refloating the financial sector since 2008, and Covid-19. Evidence is not hard to spot. On 12 August, the day the news broke that the British economy had suffered its greatest slump ever, the London Stock Exchange jumped by more than 2%. Nothing comparable has ever occurred. Financial capitalism seems finally to have decoupled from the underlying economy.

Another Now begins in the late 1970s, straddles the crises of 2008 and 2020 but also sketches out an imaginary future, and concludes in 2036. There is a moment in the story, on a Sunday evening in November 2025 to be precise, when my characters try to make sense of their circumstances by looking back to the events of 2020. The first thing they note is how drastically the lockdown changed people’s perception of politics.

Before 2020, politics seemed almost like a game, but with Covid came the realisation that governments everywhere possessed immense powers. The virus brought the 24-hour curfew, the closure of pubs, the ban on walking through parks, the suspension of sport, the emptying of theatres, the silencing of music venues. All notions of a minimal state mindful of its limits and eager to cede power to individuals went out of the window.

Many salivated at this show of raw state power. Even free-marketeers, who had spent their lives shouting down any suggestion of even the most modest boost in public spending, demanded the sort of state control of the economy not seen since Leonid Brezhnev was running the Kremlin. Across the world, the state funded private firms’ wage bills, renationalised utilities and took shares in airlines, car makers, even banks. From the first week of lockdown, the pandemic stripped away the veneer of politics to reveal the boorish reality underneath: that some people have the power to tell the rest what to do.

The massive government interventions misled naive leftists into the daydream that revived state power would prove a force for good. They forgot what Lenin had once said: politics is about who does what to whom. They allowed themselves to hope that something good might transpire if the same elites that had hitherto condemned so many to untold indignities were handed immeasurable power.

It was the poorer and the browner people who suffered most from the virus. Why? Their poverty had been caused by their disempowerment. It aged them faster. And it made them more vulnerable to disease. Meanwhile, big business, always reliant on the state to impose and enforce the monopolies on which it thrives, boosted its privileged position.

The Amazons of this world flourished, naturally. The lethal emissions that had temporarily subsided returned to choke the atmosphere. Instead of international cooperation, borders went up and the shutters came down. Nationalist leaders offered demoralised citizens a simple trade: authoritarian powers in return for protection from a lethal virus – and scheming dissidents.

If cathedrals were the middle ages’ architectural legacy, the 2020s will be remembered for electrified fences and flocks of buzzing drones. Finance and nationalism, already on the rise before 2020, were the clear winners. The great strength of the new fascists was that, unlike their forerunners a century ago, they don’t need to wear brown shirts or even enter government to gain power. The panicking establishment parties – the neoliberals and social democrats – have been falling over themselves to do their job for them through the power of big tech.

To stop new outbreaks governments tracked our every move with fancy apps and fashionable bracelets. Systems designed to monitor coughs now also monitored laughs. They made earlier organisations specialising in surveillance and “behaviour modification”, like the infamous KGB and Cambridge Analytica, seem positively neolithic.

What was the moment when humanity lost the plot? Was it 1991? 2008? Or did we still have a chance in 2020? Like epiphanies, the fork-in-the-road theory of history is a convenient lie. The truth is we face a fork-in-the-road every day of our lives.

•••

Suppose we had seized the 2008 moment to stage a peaceful hi-tech revolution that led to a postcapitalist economic democracy. What would it be like? To be desirable, it would feature markets for goods and services since the alternative – a Soviet-type rationing system that vests arbitrary power in the ugliest of bureaucrats – is too dreary for words. But to be crisis-proof, there is one market that market socialism cannot afford to feature: the labour market. Why? Because, once labour time has a rental price, the market mechanism inexorably pushes it down while commodifying every aspect of work (and, in the age of Facebook, our leisure too).

Can an advanced economy function without labour markets? Of course it can. Consider the principle of one-employee-one-share-one-vote underpinning a system that, in Another Now, I call corpo-syndicalism. Amending corporate law so as to turn every employee into an equal (though not equally remunerated) partner is as unimaginably radical today as universal suffrage was in the 19th century.

In my blueprint, central banks provide every adult with a free bank account into which a fixed stipend (called universal basic dividend) is credited monthly. As everyone uses their central bank account to make domestic payments, most of the money minted by the central bank is transferred within its ledger. Additionally, the central bank grants all newborns a trust fund, to be used when they grow up.

People receive two types of income: the dividends credited into their central bank account and earnings from working in a corpo-syndicalist company. Neither are taxed, as there are no income or sales taxes. Instead, two types of taxes fund the government: a 5% tax on the raw revenues of the corpo-syndicalist firms; and proceeds from leasing land (which belongs in its entirety to the community) for private, time-limited, use.

When it comes to international trade and payments, Another Now features an innovative global financial system that continually transfers wealth to the global south, while also preventing imbalances from causing strife and crises. All trade and all money movements between different monetary jurisdictions (eg the UK and the eurozone or the US) are denominated in a new digital accounting unit, called the Kosmos. If the Kosmos value of a country’s imports exceeds its exports, it is charged a levy in proportion to the trade deficit. But, equally, if a country’s exports exceed its imports, it is also charged the levy. Another levy is charged to a country’s Kosmos account whenever too much money moves too quickly out of, or into, the country – a surge levy of sorts that taxes the speculative money movements that do such damage to developing countries. All these levies end up as direct green investments in the global south.

But it is the granting of a single non-tradeable share to each employee-partner that holds the key to this economy. By granting employee-partners the right to vote in the corporation’s general assemblies, an idea proposed by the early anarcho-syndicalists, the distinction between wages and profits is terminated and democracy, at last, enters the workplace.

From a firm’s senior engineers and key strategic thinkers to its secretaries and janitors, everyone receives a basic wage plus a bonus that is decided collectively. Since the one-employee-one-vote rule favours smaller decision-making units, corpo-syndicalism causes conglomerates voluntarily to break up into smaller companies, thus reviving market competition. Even more strikingly, share markets vanish completely since shares, like IDs and library cards, are now non-tradeable. Once share markets have disappeared, the need for gargantuan debt to fund mergers and acquisitions evaporates – along with commercial finance. And given that the Central Bank provides everyone with a free bank account, private banking shrinks into utter insignificance.

Some of the thornier issues I had to address in writing Another Now, to ensure its consistency with a fully democratised society, included: the fear that powerful people will manipulate elections even under market socialism; the stubborn refusal of patriarchy to die; gender and sexual politics; the funding of the green transition; borders and migration; a bill of digital rights and so on.

Writing this as a manual would have been unbearable. It would have forced me to pretend that I have taken sides in arguments that remain unresolved in my head – often in my heart. I, therefore, owe an immense debt of gratitude to my spirited characters Iris, Eva and Costa. Above all else, they allowed me seriously to ponder the hardest of questions: once we have conceived of a feasible socialism that blasts Thatcher’s Tina out of the water, what must we do, and how far are we willing to go, to bring it about?

Left, right, left, right, left and "austerity nostalgia" . . .

The first "Carry On" film was Carry On Sergeant, a 1958 British comedy film about National Service starring William Hartnell, Bob Monkhouse and Eric Barker.

Left, right, left, right, left . . .  

. . . what a carry on!

The promises made by certain politicians of both left and right are framed by images and associations that reassure rather than challenge constituencies within the wider society. 

Owen Hatherley, author of the 2016 book The Ministry of Nostalgia, writes in the Guardian Society book section (Fri 8 Jan 2016) about the sinister aspects of a "constructed nostalgia" as a way of avoiding challenges instead of problem solving:

Keep Calm and Carry On - the sinister message behind the slogan that seduced the nation

Re:LODE Radio chooses to present the first part of this piece by Owen Hatherley, and then quote some extracts from a review of his book by Jon Day.Owen Hatherley writes under the subheading:

It is on posters, mugs, tea towels and in headlines. Harking back to a ‘blitz spirit’ and an age of public service, ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ has become ubiquitous. How did a cosy, middle-class joke assume darker connotations?

To get some sense of just what a monster it has become, try counting the number of times in a week you see some permutation of the “Keep Calm and Carry On” poster. In the last few days I’ve seen it twice as a poster advertising a pub’s New Year’s Eve party, several times in souvenir shops, in a photograph accompanying a Guardian article on the imminent doctors’ strike (“Keep Calm and Save the NHS”) and as the subject of too many internet memes to count. Some were related to the floods – a flagrantly opportunistic Liberal Democrat poster, with “Keep Calm and Survive Floods”, and the somewhat more mordant “Keep Calm and Make a Photo of Floods”. Then there were those related to Islamic State: “Keep Calm and Fight Isis” on the standard red background with the crown above; and “Keep Calm and Support Isis” on a black background, with the crown replaced by the Isis logo. Around eight years after it started to appear, it has become quite possibly the most successful meme in history. And, unlike most memes, it has been astonishingly enduring, a canvas on to which practically anything can be projected while retaining a sense of ironic reassurance. It is the ruling emblem of an era that is increasingly defined by austerity nostalgia.

I can pinpoint the precise moment at which I realised that what had seemed a typically, somewhat insufferably, English phenomenon had gone completely and inescapably global. I was going into the flagship Warsaw branch of the Polish department store Empik and there, just past the revolving doors, was a collection of notebooks, mouse pads, diaries and the like, featuring a familiar English sans serif font, white on red, topped with the crown, in English:

KEEP CALM

AND

CARRY ON

It felt like confirmation that the image had entered the pantheon of truly global design “icons”. As an image, it was now up there alongside Rosie the Riveter, the muscular female munitions worker in the US second world war propaganda image; as easily identifiable as the headscarved Lily Brik bellowing “BOOKS!” on Rodchenko’s famous poster. As a logo, it was nearly as recognisable as Coca-Cola or Apple. How had this happened? What was it that made the image so popular? How did it manage to grow from a minor English middle-class cult object into an international brand, and what exactly was meant by “carry on”? My assumption had been that the combination of message and design were inextricably tied up with a plethora of English obsessions, from the “blitz spirit”, through to the cults of the BBC, the NHS and the 1945 postwar consensus. Also contained in this bundle of signifiers was the enduring pretension of an extremely rich (if shoddy and dilapidated) country, the sadomasochistic Toryism imposed by the coalition government of 2010–15, and its presentation of austerity in a manner so brutal and moralistic that it almost seemed to luxuriate in its own parsimony. Some or none of these thoughts may have been in the heads of the customers at Empik buying their printed tea towels, or they may have just thought it was funny. However, few images of the last decade are quite so riddled with ideology, and few “historical” documents are quite so spectacularly false.

The Keep Calm and Carry On poster was not mass-produced until 2008. It is a historical object of a very peculiar sort. By 2009, when it had first become hugely popular, it seemed to respond to a particularly English malaise connected directly with the way Britain reacted to the credit crunch and the banking crash. From this moment of crisis, it tapped into an already established narrative about Britain’s “finest hour” – the aerial Battle of Britain in 1940-41 – when it was the only country left fighting the Third Reich. This was a moment of entirely indisputable – and apparently uncomplicated – national heroism, one that Britain has clung to through thick and thin. Even during the height of the boom, as the critical theorist Paul Gilroy flags up in his 2004 book, After Empire, the blitz and the victory were frequently invoked, made necessary by “the need to get back to the place or moment before the country lost its moral and cultural bearings”. The years 1940 and 1945 were “obsessive repetitions”, “anxious and melancholic”, morbid fetishes, clung to as a means of not thinking about other aspects of recent British history – most obviously, its empire. This has only intensified since the financial crisis began.

The “blitz spirit” has been exploited by politicians largely since 1979. When Thatcherites and Blairites spoke of “hard choices” and “muddling through”, they often evoked the memories of 1941. It served to legitimate regimes that constantly argued that, despite appearances to the contrary, resources were scarce and there wasn’t enough money to go around; the most persuasive way of explaining why someone (else) was inevitably going to suffer. Ironically, however, this rhetoric of sacrifice was often combined with a demand that consumers enrich themselves – buy their house, get a new car, make something of themselves, “aspire”. Thus, by 2007‑08, when the “no return to boom and bust” promised by Gordon Brown appeared to be abortive (despite the success of his very 1940s alternative of nationalising the banks and thus “saving capitalism”), the image started to become popular. It is worth noting that shortly after this point, a brief series of protests were being policed in increasingly ferocious ways. The authorities were allowed to make use of the apparatus of security and surveillance, and the proliferation of “prevention of terrorism” laws set up under the New Labour governments of 1997–2010, to combat any sign of dissent. In this context the poster became ever more ubiquitous, and, peculiarly, after 2011, it began to be used in what few protests remained, in an only mildly subverted form.

The Keep Calm and Carry On poster seemed to embody all the contradictions produced by a consumption economy attempting to adapt itself to thrift, and to normalise surveillance and security through an ironic, depoliticised aesthetic. Out of apparently nowhere, this image – combining bare, faintly modernist typography with the consoling logo of the crown and a similarly reassuring message – spread everywhere. I first noticed its ubiquity in the winter of 2009, when the poster appeared in dozens of windows in affluent London districts such as Blackheath during the prolonged snowy period and the attendant breakdown of National Rail; the implied message about hardiness in the face of adversity and the blitz spirit looked rather absurd in the context of a dusting of snow crippling the railway system. The poster seemed to exemplify a design phenomenon that had slowly crept up on us to the point where it became unavoidable. It is best described as “austerity nostalgia”. This aesthetic took the form of a yearning for the kind of public modernism that, rightly or wrongly, was seen to have characterised the period from the 1930s to the early 1970s; it could just as easily exemplify a more straightforwardly conservative longing for security and stability in hard times.

Unlike many forms of nostalgia, the memory invoked by the Keep Calm and Carry On poster is not based on lived experience. Most of those who have bought this poster, or worn the various bags, T-shirts and other memorabilia based on it, were probably born in the 1970s or 1980s. They have no memory whatsoever of the kind of benevolent statism the slogan purports to exemplify. In that sense, the poster is an example of the phenomenon given a capsule definition by Douglas Coupland in 1991.“legislated nostalgia”, that is;

“to force a body of people to have memories they do not actually possess”.

However, there is more to it than that. No one who was around at the time, unless they had worked at the department of the Ministry of Information, for which the poster was designed, would have seen it. In fact, before 2008, few had ever seen the words “Keep Calm and Carry On” displayed in a public place.

The poster was designed in 1939, but its “official website”, which sells a variety of Keep Calm and Carry On merchandise, states that it never became an official propaganda poster; rather, a handful were printed on a test basis. The specific purpose of the poster was to stiffen resolve in the event of a Nazi invasion, and it was one in a set of three. The two others, which followed the same design principles, were:

YOUR COURAGE
YOUR CHEERFULNESS
YOUR RESOLUTION
WILL BRING
US VICTORY

and:

FREEDOM IS
IN PERIL
DEFEND IT
WITH ALL
YOUR MIGHT

Both of these were printed up, and “YOUR COURAGE … ” was widely displayed during the blitz, given that the feared invasion did not take place after the German defeat in the Battle of Britain. You can see one on a billboard in the background of the last scene of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1943 film, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, when the ageing, reactionary but charming soldier finds his house in Belgravia bombed. Of the three proposals, KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON was discarded after the test printing. Possibly, this was because it was considered less appropriate to the conditions of the blitz than to the mass panic expected in the event of a German ground invasion. The other posters were heavily criticised. The social research project Mass Observation recorded many furious reactions to the patronising tone of YOUR COURAGE … and its implied distinction between YOU, the common person, and US, the state to be defended. Anthony Burgess later claimed it was rage at posters like this that helped Labour win such an enormous landslide in the 1945 election. We can be fairly sure that if KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON had been mass-produced, it would have infuriated those who were being implored to be calm. Wrenched out of this context and exhumed in the 21st century, however, the poster appears to flatter, rather than hector, the public it is aimed at.

The Ministry of Nostalgia by Owen Hatherley review – a curse on the Mumfords, Jamie Oliver and beards
It’s not just the mania for Keep Calm and Carry On … Britain’s most provocative writer on architecture targets the fashionable revival of mid-20th century aesthetics
 Keep Calm and Carry On poster
The ubiquitous poster
Jon Day
Thu 21 Jan 2016 14.00 GMT
87
59
The writer and critic Owen Hatherley has become something of a sage of modernism in recent years. Casting his gaze over the built and pop-cultural landscapes, he sorts the echt from the phoney with all the moral certainty of a Ruskin or a Carlyle. His latest book – his sixth – is a short, stimulating polemic against a suite of aesthetic and political motifs united under the promising term, “austerity nostalgia”.

For Hatherley, austerity nostalgia is exemplified by the fetishisation of mid-century Danish furniture; by the coveting of the ex-council flat over the suburban maisonette; by the design aesthetic of the home goods shop Labour and Wait. Austerity nostalgia announces itself in san serif fonts. It glories in the stripped-down design of the underground network and the homely experimentalism of the GPO film unit.

Its influence is observable in fashion (“for men, moustaches and beards, sensible utility wear; for women, the semi-ironic sexualised style usually called ‘burlesque’”) and in music (the folksy, whimsical jangling of Mumford & Sons).

In cuisine, its spirit is embodied by Jamie Oliver, with his commitment to a cockney-Orwellian interpretation of hearty English grub, and his deliberate appropriation of the institutional trappings of postwar bureaucracy – both paternalistic and nurturing – in the Ministry of Food TV series and chain of shops. “One could argue”, and Hatherley does, “that he was the latest in a long line of middle-class people lecturing the lower orders on their choice of nutrition, part of an immense construction of grotesque neo-Victorian snobbery.”

The central image of austerity nostalgia is the “Keep Calm and Carry On” poster, the ubiquity of which over the past few years gives Hatherley the “horror-film-like feeling that I was being chased wherever I went by an implacable enemy”. It feels like an irreconcilably mixed bag of cultural artefacts, but Hatherley does a good job of arguing for the essential similarity of their origins. Born of an anxiety over where we are now, such objects betray a misplaced nostalgia for the aesthetics – but not the politics – of the recent past.

According to Hatherley, austerity nostalgia informs political narrative. Both “Red Tories” and “Blue Labour” activists, the latter led by Jon Cruddas and Maurice Glasman, have woven these symbols of nostalgia into a retrospective vision of English radicalism in an attempt to appeal to that chimerical entity, the English “white working class”. Cruddas’s proposal for the establishment of an English parliament to be based in York, the anthem of which would be “Jerusalem”, was, according to Hatherley, simply one of many attempts to rejuvenate the left by constructing an image of historical common-sense solidarity that never truly existed. “The wager is that we can,” he writes, “just by tapping into our own history, find a real popular radicalism that resonates with ordinary people, rather than with small groups of intellectuals discussing Fully Automated Luxury Communism.”

The book ends with the chapter, “Building the Austerity City”, in which Hatherley interprets recent developments in London architecture through the lens of austerity nostalgia. In doing so he identifies a “new typology” of building: the “austere luxury flat, the tasteful 50s-style modernist non-dom investment”. Gone are the gaudy, festooned developments of early noughties regeneration schemes. Instead, London is peppered with sober, well-made, monumental developments (the vast buildings going up around King’s Cross are primary exhibits) that echo the vernacular of mid-century modernism while – with their poor doors and astronomical “affordable” prices – retaining none of its utopian potential. “Whereas in very recent memory,” Hatherley writes, “London seemed to want to look like Dubai-on‑Thames, it now increasingly resembles a cross between Islington in the 1820s and Poplar in the 1950s.”

In tracing these cultural and political artefacts, and the built landscape in which they exist, Hatherley is seeking to describe what the cultural critic Raymond Williams called a “structure of feeling”: “where austerity’s look, its historical syncretism, its rejection of the real human advances of the postwar era had seeped into the consciousness of people who would, when pressed, probably be in opposition to it, even as they performed its aesthetics.” Once we romanticised our lost industrial past, and the loft warehouse flat was the aspirational pad du jour; now we romanticise a lost ideological past, all the while ignoring ongoing attacks on its real institutional legacies. We neglect the NHS because we cannot buy its products. “In Britain today,” Hatherley writes, “we are living through exactly the kind of housing crisis for which council housing was invented in the first place, at exactly the same time as we’re alternately fetishising and privatising its remnants.” As Hatherley is the first to acknowledge, he has done a lot to contribute to this state of affairs: as a vocal and convincing champion of a certain kind of postwar utopian architecture, he has helped to make the council estates of east London look inviting to a generation of young hipsters.

Hatherley is one of the finest – and surely the most provocative – architectural writer we have, and he is at his best here when he focuses on the built environment. Less convincing, because too homogenising, are his readings of the other arts. He offers hardly any literary examples of austerity nostalgia, and there is a curious belatedness to those he does include. He spends a great deal of energy close-reading Alexandra Harris’s 2010 book Romantic Moderns, which argued for a revisioning of English modern – if not modernist – aesthetics as a form of spilt romanticism, dedicating the bulk of a chapter to debunking what he calls Harris’s “art-historical adjunct to the Ravilious print, the Mumford & Sons record and the Keep Calm and Carry On tea towel”, which is, he says, “in many ways more dangerous” than any of these.

Indeed, The Ministry of Nostalgia’s great strength – its clear-eyed, self-confident certainty – is also its most frustrating quality. Hatherley is committed to a fairly monolithic notion of what modernism was, and what it represented. “What, Alexandra Harris asks, if modernism wasn’t really about the transformation of space, the destruction of slums and their replacement with something better for the working class, the overcoming of the 19th century and its physical legacy – but instead an upper-class movement about the rediscovery of roots?” But what if it was neither? Or both? Hatherley ignores the fact that some flavours of modernism, particularly those associated with literature and the visual arts, were backward-looking and politically conservative. Take TS Eliot’s description of James Joyce’s “mythic method”, which, Eliot said, used the classical past to give “a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility that is contemporary history”. For many writers and artists, nostalgia was modernism.

Nevertheless, the big question asked by Hatherley here is an important one – and overall he asks it well – does the left now have something to conserve?

Should radical socialism renege on its commitment to progressiveness and attempt merely to keep alive those small scraps of the postwar consensus – the NHS, comprehensive education – that do still survive? “If a social and democratic city is going to be built again, it will most probably be built by those who have no investment in the past, no fond memory of it,” Hatherley concludes. But the sad fact is that the green shoots of dissent he does identify as possible solutions to the impasse of austerity nostalgia – the people of Derby Road in Southampton refusing to take part in the television programme Immigration Street; the student protests of 2011; the “Focus E15 Mums” who occupied disused council flats, supported by Russell Brand (the prancing prince of austerity nostalgia who, curiously, goes unmentioned by Hatherley) – hardly add up to much of a countermovement. One wonders what he made of Assemble winning the Turner prize.

This is, nevertheless, a lively and gleefully argumentative book. Even when you disagree with Hatherley, he remains interesting. And there is a good chance, depressingly, that he is right about everything.

Moustaches, beards and whimsical jangling? 

Ministry of ignorance and stupidity categorises "ideas"?

Speaking of things "sinister" (From Middle English sinistre (“unlucky”), from Old French sinistra (“left”), from Latin sinestra (“left hand”), this story published in the Guardian (Sun 27 Sep 2020), on guidance to schools issued last Thursday by the Department for Education, classed anti-capitalism alongside opposition to freedom of speech and antisemitism, as an ‘extreme political stance’ equivalent to endorsing an illegal activity.

Schools in England told not to use material from anti-capitalist groups

Idea categorised as ‘extreme political stance’ equivalent to endorsing illegal activity

Mattha Busby reports for the Guardian under the headline and subheading above (Sun 27 Sep 2020) Matta Busby writes: 

The government has ordered schools in England not to use resources from organisations which have expressed a desire to end capitalism.

Department for Education (DfE) guidance issued on Thursday for school leaders and teachers involved in setting the relationship, sex and health curriculum categorised anti-capitalism as an “extreme political stance” and equated it with opposition to freedom of speech, antisemitism and endorsement of illegal activity.

Former shadow chancellor John McDonnell said the measures effectively outlawed reference in schools to key events in British history, and that it symbolised growing “authoritarianism” within the governing Conservative party.

The guidance, part of lengthy guidelines for implementing the statutory curriculum, said: “Schools should not under any circumstances use resources produced by organisations that take extreme political stances on matters. This is the case even if the material itself is not extreme, as the use of it could imply endorsement or support of the organisation.”

It listed examples of what were described as “extreme political stances”, such as “a publicly stated desire to abolish or overthrow democracy, capitalism, or to end free and fair elections”; opposition to freedom of speech; the use of racist, including antisemitic, language; the endorsement of illegal activity; and a failure to condemn illegal activities done in support of their cause.

McDonnell said: “On this basis it will be illegal to refer to large tracts of British history and politics including the history of British socialism, the Labour Party and trade unionism, all of which have at different times advocated the abolition of capitalism.

“This is another step in the culture war and this drift towards extreme Conservative authoritarianism is gaining pace and should worry anyone who believes that democracy requires freedom of speech and an educated populace.”

Economist and former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis said the guidance showed “how easy it is to lose a country, to slip surreptitiously into totalitarianism”.

He added: “Imagine an educational system that banned schools from enlisting into their curricula teaching resources dedicated to the writings of British writers like William Morris, Iris Murdoch, Thomas Paine even. Well, you don’t have to. Boris Johnson’s government has just instructed schools to do exactly that.”

Barrister Jessica Simor QC suggested that the government has on occasion not complied with the guidance itself, after it admitted the new Brexit bill would break international law (“endorsement of illegal activity”) and continued selling arms to Saudi Arabia for use in Yemen following a court ruling that it was unlawful.

Tariq Ali, the writer and activist, said although the new guidance was a sign of “moral and political bankruptcy”, the advent of the internet meant such measures were futile.

“Leaving aside the stupidity, these things don’t work,” he said. “People will read what they want to read. Trying to enhance a version of the Prevent strategy, which is already in place, is quite scandalous and shocking.

“If you put things on a banned list, lots of young people can access them via the internet and read them. Banning them from schools will not work at all, aside from the fact it’s a sign of moral and political bankruptcy.”

He added: “How could both young and old people not read anti-capitalist analysis after 2008, or now with the virus going on and recessions looming all over the western world.”

It is understood that the DfE is clear that schools should not work with agencies that take extreme positions, including promoting non-democratic political systems, and that teachers should be politically impartial.

Minister for school standards Nick Gibb said: “Our new relationships, sex and health education (RHSE) guidance and training resources equip all schools to provide comprehensive teaching in these areas in an age-appropriate way.

“These materials should give schools the confidence to construct a curriculum that reflects diversity of views and backgrounds, whilst fostering all pupils’ respect for others, understanding of healthy relationships, and ability to look after their own wellbeing.”

It comes after counter-terrorism police earlier this year placed the non-violent group Extinction Rebellion on a list of extremist ideologies that should be reported to the authorities running the Prevent programme. However, the south-east division of Counter Terrorism Policing later recalled the document.

Class warfare?

Owen Jones tweeting on this is the author of Chavs, a book that reveals how the concept and reality of social class remains an ideological battleground, a territory where a version of "education" increasingly overlaps with media influence. But thank goodness for the internet, that is when it is functioning as a "learning oriented interface", and not a tool of Surveillance Capitalism.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is working class. She is also highly articulate, and possesses a degree of emotional intelligence in her communication to people, that makes her significantly dangerous, as far as the rightwing in the US are concerned. There are many people like her, but struggle to be heard against the rightwing demonisation of the working class in the Anglophone world.   

Working class people voting against their interests?

Or, the demonisation of the working class?

Listen to her . . . 

. . . she knows what she is talking about!