Roger Hallam: Makerfield and the Myth of the Moderate Left
While liberals hesitate, the clock doesn’t.
I am republishing this article by Roger Hallam. I’ve not asked and hope that he doesn’t mind. I’ll pull it down – of course – if he objects. There is a brief comment of my own at the end.
The real division in western politics is between the pathological centre and challenge on the so-called “far” left and right — meaning political forces reasonably enough challenging the centre’s mass death project. Of course, the far right is based upon a con — its core spaces are dominated by the same billionaire-funded mass death agenda as the centre’s, but the sentiment on the ground is very similar to that on the left.
The point is the level of maturation — whether these forces are confident enough to separate themselves from the hegemony of the “centre” so that a credible and coherent message can be presented to the electorate that they really are “not them”. As usual, the far right has a big head start.
This requires that the leadership of Left spaces actually believe in themselves. When this happens — as in the case of Mamdani and Polanski — then the voter response is dramatic. The Green Party has risen from around 6% to nearly 20% in a year. Of course, this is helped by local factors — the collapse of Your Party and the tactical incompetence of Labour. But the structural factor is the key determinant — a political leader who directly addresses the decimation of the cultural and material means of life of the majority under monopoly finance capital. There is the conventional economic wave — the “internal contradictions of capital” — and then fusing with the new and final wave: the destruction of the biosphere.
Inadequate maturation of a Left party that promises systemic change is again catastrophically on display in the Green Party’s weak response to the Makerfield by-election. If Zack had believed in his own rhetoric — that the party is taking over from Labour — then he would have shown charismatic and strategic leadership and been out there on the streets from day one, making the self-fulfilling prophecy that Labour can never look after the interests of working people, for all the reasons everyone knows.
Instead, like docile peasants in the face of aristocratic charm (i.e. lies), the weight of tradition has again won the day. The myth held that the Left can only go through the motions of opposition to the centre, which has the divine (i.e. neo-liberal) right to rule.
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This failure is catastrophic because, as any realist worthy of the label knows, next year the world will hit 1.7°C, and this will signal the end of our civilisation, beginning with the collapse of insurance markets. Think of 2008, then multiply it by 100. Capital in the twenty-first century is the biggest Ponzi scheme in human history. It sells you prosperity while knowing it is destroying the very basis of life. This does not end well.
The far right response will be to double down on denial and ever greater psychotic short-termism, as shown by the present Trump regime. In other words, the far right has only one agenda: treason — to bring mass death down onto the British people. After all, it only took Hitler twelve years to do this to Germany. It will take about a decade to do the same this time around, but with the truly appalling outcome of the permanent desolation of our country. You cannot “rebuild” without a functioning biosphere.
What the Green Party has to do but won’t do is tell the people of Makerfield that they will die the slow way with Burnham and the fast way with Farage. Both are happy to have AMOC collapse locked in, for example. AMOC collapse means the end of the UK — no question about it. This is a physical, not a social, situation. You cannot grow potatoes in northern Norway, as one expert put it.
Of course, telling the UK public this “blood, sweat and tears” reality is most likely to fail. Never underestimate the effects of forty years of neo-liberal programming. But that is not the point. The point is that there is an absolute time limit here. There is no more time. We are at 1.5°C and 2°C is locked in (0.5°C, for instance, will be added to global temperatures once the air pollution from stopping burning fossil fuels is removed).
This means it’s now or never. You can jump over the fence and most likely get shot, or you can wait a little longer and be guaranteed to die in the gas chamber, which is the earth’s atmosphere with over 500ppm of CO₂ in it.
Sometimes choices are limited.
Let me finish on a rather British positive note. I recently spoke to a woman who was part of one of the many trials of people who have taken part in civil disobedience with Just Stop Oil. The convention now is that the judge will not allow any evidence relating to the criminality of the elites with regard to carbon emissions. Unsurprisingly, these show trials lead to guilty outcomes from juries. In one of those trials, I was given a five-year prison sentence. For some reason, in her trial, the judge allowed the presentation of evidence, including the “agreed fact” that at 3°C there will be at least 4 billion deaths — as predicted by a recent major report by the UK insurance industry. These people, we hopefully can all agree, deal in facts.
The jury went out for less than an hour and came back with a not guilty verdict. After all, who wants their kids and grandkids subjected to the equivalent of 80 World Wars Twos in the next two generations? Maybe the good citizens of Makerfield don’t want that fate either. But first, they need Mr Polanski to tell them some of these “agreed facts”.
There is a reason the “blood, sweat and tears” speech is the best-known of the twentieth century. Could it have something to do with being told the truth?
If this political moment feels like a dead end, that’s because it is — my new book Suicide names it. From the structural failure of liberal democracy to the legal and moral case for resistance, this is the argument the mainstream won’t make.
dizzy: I have estimated for myself when the World becomes uninhabitable. I don’t have any particular insight into this – I am not a climate scientist and know much less about climate than Roger Hallam – and have instead simply decided at what temperature life is unsustainable and considered likely warming to that point. In a sense that I’m not an expert is not that important because nobody really knows what’s going to happen, there are only theories, best guesses because it is yet to happen. Anyway, I agree with Roger that it is imminent, not long at all. The date I reached is 2060. It’s the rich who are driving climate destruction, the rich who are in charge of our governments and the solution is to do away with the rich. Tax them to extinction, use the money to address the climate. If we continue with Capitalism / Neo-Liberalism we have very little time.
