This looks so much better on my site.

(after Guy Rundle, The Saturday Paper, July 15 2017)

Socialism is back.
Gone for ages, like your Aunt at a rave party ‑
a pause in the playlist and there at the end of the couch: ‘Oh hi.’ A little awk.

I

Came with Bernie Sanders (but who really considers voting rights and universal health care socialism?)
stayed with Jeremy Corbyn – triumphant despite arguing for re-nationalisation of the railways

(remember the 70s
with garbage
in the street and
unsellable government cars?)

The Tories couldn’t believe their luck

but
a public ravaged
by skyrocketing inequality
didn’t mind.
for the first time in the Anglosphere
large numbers of people were willing to think.

II

(more or less)

the crash came at the end of
3 decades of
market triumphalism,
small government,
the invisible hand
and other gnomic doctrine.

tumbling markets made it clear
what was really at the root of the boom:

debt

underwritten by China,
and by borrowing from our future
believing it would seed
fabulously.

III

After…

austerity	sucked the life	out of the economy and just kept going.
interest hit zero	0	0
trillions in quantitative easing	filled the gap	between relentlessly falling wages and the beginnings of the full-automation revolution (aka. robot apocalypse)

the rich became

the super-rich became

the mega rich

and just kept going.

Meanwhile…

working people	got used to	lifelong debt.
casualised workers	cut off from	any prospects of improvement (or a kind word).
the middle class in pointless jobs	cut off from	meaning (or a kind word).

being
annihilated,
blindsided and
disregarded is
the weather
these days.

IV

The neo-liberal system has delivered little by way of

solidity,
security,
equality of opportunity or
gains from productivity,

but it has been good at PROPAGANDA.

The right:

ditched economics

returned to the

paranoid political style,

focused on values, threats and

a barely concealed

politics of

whiteness.

(Thinking)
Thatcherite/Reaganite/Howardist politics was always magical.

The new left is chastened and circumspect.

• radicalism – no longer
• nor internationalism
• the avant garde abandoned

just a polite State busy
mandating spaces into which
community/open/free/collective
activities can

expand/shrink/stay the same.

V

But
fail to
give the people
what they want,

the right
will quickly fill
the breach
and this time

they will not falter
in their love.

---

Image: Pixabay; A piece on politics I’ve been playing with (for too long). And here’s Van Morrison with It’s All Over Now Baby Blue