I’m reading Owen Jones’s book The Establishment at the moment. It’s brilliant, it’s horrifying, and my radical lefty anti-authoritarian fury is doing my blood pressure no favours. The depths to which power is entrenched among such a minority, a select handful of individuals spread among various industries and professions but holding “shared economic interests and common mentalities”, is an utter nightmare, and I’ve not seen it exposed to a mainstream audience to such an extent, with so many details laid bare in one place, by anyone else.
Which is what makes articles like this so incomprehensible and frustrating.
The extent to which New Labour has fallen in line with Thatcherite neo-liberalism over the last 18 years, adopting policies that would’ve been considered dangerously right-wing by the Tories barely as far back as the 1980s, is not something that escapes Owen in the slightest, and is expounded on at length in his latest tome. So I’m baffled every time he continues to support them as any kind of left-wing socialist egalitarian alternative to the Tories of today.
Obviously we need an alternative to the numerous problems he correctly identifies with the currently reigning government, but it doesn’t have to be fucking Labour just because they’re there.
If the politics of anarchism were better understood – in a world where caricatures and straw-men hadn’t basically taken over the public perception of what anarchists believe and want – it’d be hard not to be one after reading The Establishment. To be able to write a book like that and still want to find reasons to support fucking Labour is entirely beyond me.
Leave a comment