It's funny how "the left" crave recognition for their perverted socialist ideology. Perhaps this is just a cover for the real agenda of smash'n'grab - the principal aim of today's cohort of non-producing keyboard spongers*?
As we couldn't spend the entire Festive Season in the pub we took the opportunity to read two copies of "Tribune", a journal once thought of as the fount of all wisdom for "socialist intellectuals" (an oxymoron comparable to the similar term "socialist workers"). And the experience was even more nightmarish than we had feared! In particular, the pure, unadulterated, hatred expressed by the hard left for anyone disagreeing with them is genuinely shocking and would be a tad alarming if this lot were not just the latest manifestation of the insignificant ranting tankies and obscure comrades of the past.
Zarah Sultana
If you haven't heard of this gobsh*te Labour MP yet, you will do as she is becoming ubiquitous with her incessant hard-left ravings. The crazed Coventry Commie infamously stated that she would "celebrate" the deaths of Tony Blair and Benjamin Netanyahu and so you probably get the drift of where she is "coming from". Her performances in the House of Commons are like we imagine things were in Mao's murderous Cultural Revolution when young persons screamed denunciations in the faces of tens of millions of the regime's unfortunate victims before their executions. And so with her writing - a sort of Dave Spart-style with menace wherein she advocates the destruction of capitalism, the humiliation of the rich and paradise for us all under the yoke of totalitarian Marxism.
The fact that this young person is an adherent of the worst and most ineffectual MP ever to take several decades' worth of taxpayers' money (and still fail to produce a single change in anything at all) Jeremy "The Gammon" Corbyn, goes without saying. Jerry is notoriously thick and yet Zarah and others in the rag refer to something called "Corbynism" as if the aged Islington moron is capable of creating a corpus of serious thought for other cultists to embrace.
Non_entities.
The Labour "movement" in the UK has few iconic heroes. St Nye Bevan is revered despite being Welsh and for all his faults. Jerry Corbyn (himself no stranger to failure) and his claque unsurprisingly ululate at the mere mention of that grotestesque egotist (even by political standards) Tony Benn. And so complete non-entities are written-up in long Tribune articles as being of historical importance when they were walk-on spear carriers at best. You know that even the writers are struggling when they actually use terms like "long-forgotten revolutionary" to describe their oddball subjects, and where the writings of these misfits are inevitably now "long out of print".
We did learn something though. Robert Tressell - the author of an almost unreadble novel lauded by leftists as being of merit - was imprisoned in his early life for theft which seems a perfect grounding for anyone training for the socialist priesthood!
Nostalgia and Sentimentality.
These are two of the most embarrassing traits of "leftists". Mere mention of the word "foodbank" will elicit sobbing whilst the torture and mass-murder of millions in the name of Socialism is accepted with a gentle shrug of the shoulders as being necessary to expedite the proletarian revolution.
Corbyn himself is said to indulge in the deeply bourgeois collection of knick-knacks (he was once described in this regard as a "downmarket Duke of Edinburgh") and his peculiar obsession with manhole covers seems inexplicable - unless somehow related to his Borisian desire to enter as many women's "holes" as possible.
The Tribune writers have an absurd revererence for trade union banners. And unable to locate the membership card of the aforementioned Tressell to some obscure socialist faction they put up a huge photo of the card of some other bloke who was in the same branch. My, that was interesting.
The poverty of the past is shrilly described over and over again until it begins to sound like Monty Python's "Four Yorkshiremen" or Gloria De Piero. There was much use of a mawkish phrase (which we have never understood) "the dignity of labour", exemplified, natch, by the lovely miners. The toilers of yore are venerated by the likes of the affluent terrorist-lover Corbyn who have never done a day's work in their lives. The new left intelligensia are pretty much like the old left intelligensia in this regard - a world apart from the proletariat (whatever that is) and the Twitter nut-jobs who sit all night in their soiled pants tapping out that they are - for f*ck sake - Corbyn's "outriders"! The career of one of Tribune's top team, Grace Blakeley, is instructive. Not for her the horrors of the shop floor, the picket line and the dole office but public school, two degrees from Oxford, managment consultancy at KPMG (!) and a spell at a left wing think tank.
-isms
There is no word in the lefty lexicon and the surrounding pseudo-intellectual babble that is not improved by the addition of the suffix "ism". The more absurd the better eg. "Corbynism". The gold star goes, however, to a revolutionary raver, Rivkah Brown. This "intellectual" wrote the craziest piece in both issues headed "The Literature of Landlordism", whatever "landlordism" is, which contained this bizarre shriek against private wealth:
"Being landlords themselves, but also messy bitches who live for drama, the Tories have baited this bloodthirst".
That this - nasty - sh*t was written by an alumnus of Cambridge University is particularly dispiriting.
Curiously many Tribune writers obviously believe that there is no place at all for a rented property market and wish to abolish it completely and sequester the land. Yet many of them don't have the bottle to actually say this and so simply hurl insults at anyone renting out property (whilst boasting about their bourgeois holidays via Airbnb). Thus every landlord is automatically described as "parasitic" or worse.
Neoliberalism
This word is repeated again and again and again but usually in a completely nonsensical way. In the real world the term has a range or meaning from a very rigid and extreme view that there should be no role for the state at all in the lives of individuals to the much more mainstream view that free market economics is the most efficient system of running things wo/man has yet to discover. The former concept is advocated by some Americans - even some leading [sic] Republican politicians - together with some of the Masters of the Universe in Silicon Valley who are devotees of the absurd Ayn Rand. The latter concept is basically just good old-fashioned liberalism and has been the mainstream economic and political dogma for the last 150 years. Think Blair "-ism".
Tribune repeats at nauseum that all Tories are "neoliberals". As above, the term is meaningless when thrown about in this way and is patently untrue in this context. Yes, the Tories have their lunatic fringe as do Labour (see Z. Sultana above) but, apart from a few crazies, the modern Conservative Party does not advocate the destruction of the welfare state (a Bismarkian concept and he was no pinko) even if that were actually possible. And the vast majority of professional economists believe in a well-regulated (rather than unfettered) free market.
But there we are. If you are a "liberal" believer in a free market economy you are, according to this nonsense, a "neoliberal".
Black Lives Matter
One of the great things about the BLM campaign is that is has been a "bottom-up" process not imposed on people like the Corbyns and Blakeleys of this world. This has been manifested by huge demonstations in the States and elsewhere to the powerful Premier League being forced to condone the players themselves insisting on the powerful message that is "taking the knee".
Alas, in the US the movement appears to be splintering and Tribune and the (heavily white) British left have hijacked BLM to their own ends and now insist that it is, in fact, an "anti-Capitalist" movement. Good luck with that loves!
New Green Deal
In the Tribune view of the world this means nationalisation of the power industry. It is never explained why this is supposed to be a good thing but it is now an Article of Faith.
As a subsidiary point the left - most of whom do not and have not produced anything themselves - scream that the Green deal will somehow "create jobs". Once again there is no explanation how this might possibly occur. (To be fair, Boris Johnson is pushing the same line.)
One dirty power lignite-fuelled power station in Germany still produces work for over 2,000 workers (the proletariat lol!) but a gigantic solar farm nearby, which has a similar power output, gets by with 12. Electric cars have one third of the components of existing models so that the roll-out will mean colossal job cuts in manufacturing and even in the repair business. Autonomous vehicles will put lorry, delivery and taxi drivers out of work in huge numbers. AI and blockchain technology will hit the "middle classes" and "office jobs" - even in areas like law and accountancy. No-one can really say if and where new jobs will appear.
The UK already lags behind competitiors in respect of productivity but the answer from these crazies, who have no business experience whatsover, seems to be that working less hours in wholly unionised businesses will be the panacea. Dream on.
Given that early "socialism" was meant to be an internationalist movement the Tribunites are an astonishingly insular and parochial bunch. The fact of globalisation is completely ignored as if it doesn't exist. In their glistening bubble there is no need to account for foreign competition (or the fact that vast swathes of British industry and even land are foreign-owned). In an unexplained way "globalisation" can be rolled-back and we can simply "succeed" in international markets against cheaper and more-efficient competitors. This is all pie in the sky and the world has moved on from 1848.
And so, we don't recommend Tribune and its ilk. Unfortunately, the "neoleft" "lol" owe far more to (-ism warning!) onanism than to electable socialism!
* Pre-Covid many Corbynistas, such as the awful Rachael Cousins of Swindon, were using social media up to 18 hours a day whilst claiming benefits on the basis that they were unable to go out to work. Ms Cousins even asked for people to top up her benefit income via Paypal so she could tweet all day. Yet Covid has brought home-working to hundreds of thousands of real workers and many will stay glued to their kitchen tables even if we can defeat the killer virus. Is it not time that the Government had a look at the benefit provisions again and raised the question why our money is being shovelled at the "unemployed" keyboard ranters?
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