The 1930s historical re-enactment society gets ready to storm parliamentThese days it seems everyone on the left is getting terribly excited about the prospect of a "return to the 1930s" in the wake of the current financial crisis - with mass unemployment, labour unrest and political radicalisation.
Alas I tend to think this is a case of frustrated activists projecting their own subjective desires onto reality, rather than anything based in actual fact.
My skepticism has just been reinforced after a visit the blog of NZ's favourite right-wing conspiracy theorist Trevor Loudon where it seems that Trev too is predicting a return to the epoch of wars and revolutions - if only so his paranoid fantasies about communism taking over the world can finally find validation...
Footnote: as I have suggested in a comment posted on Loudon's blog, his fervid postings are in many ways similar to the utterances of Boston Legal's Judge Clark Brown as Trev busies himself reposting stuff from socialist and left wing websites while declaiming in a shocked voice "Outrageous!" "How dare they!"
Tim,
ReplyDeleteIn your new existence you are sounding a bit like the other sadsack Chris Trotter who blames workers for being attacked and sold out by the Labourites. Their ignorance apparently is the problem not Labour's treachery.
Anyway, I am a bit alarmed by the fatal paradox. What happened to dialectics and the negation of the negation? Arnt you reducing the class struggle to your own existence?
Unfortunately NZ is a graveyard for revolutionaries. One day when Maps gets up the courage he will tackle Owen Gager and his attack on NZ as a petty bourgeois society. He may draw the conclusion that Gallipolli is a dead end in every sense, and that the best place for Marxists is anywhere but NZ.
Buenos Aires is not a bad place.
Dave, I think Labour's pro-capitalist politics *would be* a pressing problem if there actually was a workers' movement (or significant levels of class struggle) in this country to betray...
ReplyDeleteAs things stand at the moment though while Labour Party and TU bureaucrats certainly aren't part of the solution, getting rid of them wouldn't bring us any closer to overcoming the real problem which we are faced with - namely the complete collapse of working class collective consciousness in NZ (and in much of the Western world) over the past few decades.