For Labour to have truly addressed bigotry, be it in the form of racism, sex discrimination, homophobia and so on, would have required that Labour turn itself outwards, that instead of being an electoralist party, concerned with winning votes, and, therefore, not alienating potential working-class voters, that it became an activist party, whose focus was on winning an increasing number of workers to socialist ideas, as the only secure basis upon which any socialist government could rest, were it not to be undermined, and blown off course, when it came to pursue its programme. But, Labour could not do that, because it is not a socialist party. It is a social-democratic party.
It is quite clearly arrant nonsense to believe, for example, that any form of discrimination can simply be outlawed. The ideas that people have in their heads do not simply disappear, as a result of being made illegal! So, it is no surprise, therefore, that, despite 40 years having elapsed, since the passing of the Sex Discrimination Act, women continue to be grossly underpaid compared to men in the workforce, and to be under represented in a range of occupations. It is no wonder that racism, homophobia and other forms of bigotry continue to flourish, despite having been outlawed for the last 40-50 years. If Britain, truly were the kind of tolerant nirvana the liberals and social-democrats claim it to be, there would be no need for such laws, because such tolerant behaviour would be the norm, and those that did not act in accordance with it would find themselves being the outcasts.
In fact, all that such bureaucratic methods do is to drive that bigotry underground, and to make it all the more poisonous. It makes it appear that the reason it has to be outlawed is somehow to protect elites against a truth that everyone else knows. Its why we have repeatedly seen people interviewed in the street, who say they are voting for the BNP, or UKIP, and when asked why reply “Well I don't want to say.” It is why those same liberal and social-democratic elites do not get it, that when they simply point out the bigoted nature of UKIP, rather than discouraging the 30% of the population who share many of those ideas, rather than it causing them to lose votes, it does the opposite!
This same bureaucratic approach lies behind the failure of social-democracy, in general, across Europe, to win over the mass of the people to the idea of a European state. Instead of waging the necessary ideological war against conservatism and nationalism, including its manifestation within the working-class, social democracy has preferred to progress towards that aim by bureaucratic rather than open democratic means. It has proceeded by allowing an unelected, Brussels bureaucracy to simply grow larger, in much the same manner as it has allowed, at the level of the nation state, the development of a bloated bureaucracy, as the welfare state has expanded.
In place of a bottom up struggle by workers to develop their own forms of property, and their own self-government in opposition to those of capital, social-democracy (and much of the left that calls itself revolutionary has become itself simply a form of left-social democracy) has instead relied on an expansion of welfarism, and a growth of the power of the capitalist state, as a reformist, bureaucratic alternative. Instead of a bottom up, all out, ideological war against conservatism, social democracy has instead again relied upon, that same capitalist, welfarist state to do that job for them, in the only way it can, via bureaucratic diktat.
No comments:
Post a Comment