Marx, on Ideology: “They do it, but they do not know that they do it.”

People “do” liberal capitalism, but they do not know that they do it.

Democratic options may be impossible. Who will vote to tear down the system that maintains their lifestyle? But liberal democracy is a sham, a lie. To overthrow it, can violent methods be excused?

It boils down to ‘what is the moral imperative to overthrow it?’

Lack of equal opportunity, enslavement, dictatorship of the electoriat.

SO

What in leftist thought is common with fascism?

Vanguards – Party members who serve as an example to others, and are completely dedicated the cause, willing to die for it?

Collectivism trumps individualism – the great cause is more important than any one person’s wellbeing. WHY is my right to drive a hummer (if I so desire) more important than your grandchildren’s right to breathe clean air and have enough to eat?

Authoritarianism – Is authoritarianism (in the immediate term) inevitable? To break people’s attachment to capitalist ideology, is structural violence necessary? Probably.

That said, I’ve decided to “storify” a few tweets on the subject of the row that’s erupted over her “racism”. This isn’t meant to be an in-depth analysis, just a way of saving my two penn’orth for posterity.

1. Weird that Glasman can get away with blaming immigration for every problem ever, but Diane is hauled over the coals for a throwaway comment.

2. I mean, I find “It’s all the fucking foreigners’ fault. Fuck them. Fuck them all with a big stick. Close the borders!” an extreme position.

3. …Certainly a more extreme position than, “Cor, white history is plagued with injustice and exploitation, innit?”

4. Because, you know, one is pretty much true and one is pretty much the BNP manifesto.

5. Seriously… I mean, Glasman thinks ‘Faith, Family, Flag’ is an acceptable electoral slogan in this century.

So, uhm, yeah. There you have it.

Today, twitter was once again the venue for a little discussion about love. It began as a discussion of gender and social power structures, but then I waded in and said, cynically, that I think “relationships in their entirety are all about power.” I followed this up a bit later with, “Romantic love is just a system of blackmail wherein you try to make someone love you more than you love them.”

Of course, me being me, I was being reductionist and over-simplistic. But at its heart, I do believe in that definition. I am inclined to agree with Zizek, who says (at the very start of the documentary, ‘Zizek!’) that he believes love is “fundamentally evil”, because love is a manifestation of the completely random, accidental “cosmic imbalance” that created the entire universe. Love is an “extremely violent act”, just like the Big Bang was. If you say, “I love you more than anything else,” based on some (real or perceived) arbitrary attribute, this is inherently violent and even selfish.

“Every relationship is fundamentally a power struggle, and the individual in power is whoever likes the other person less.”

That’s a quote from Chuck Klosterman, another author whose opinions I am drawn to. I like this summation. It’s true. In my experience, relationships are based on a form of blackmail, in which you try to make the other person try harder to earn your love, or even dare them to love you too much, to put themselves in the powerless position. This does not strike me as a healthy arrangement. (Is it any surprise I’m single?)

One reply I had was: “I honestly don’t feel that is how I conduct my own relationships.” I draw, in reply to this, on Marx, who said (of ideology), “They do not know it, but they are doing it.” It’s the same with any unchallenged social structure – we don’t even realise there is an opt-out, we accept that this is “the way things are done”.

I’m not saying love is a completely irrational decision – relationships are symbiotic, even alchemical – love is greater than the sum of its parts, and maybe, just maybe, everyone’s a winner.

Maybe not.

However, I’d argue that highly-paid and wealthy people hold the country to ransom not just a few days a year, but every single minute of every single day.

Take a look at this report from September, in which economists argue that rich people will move abroad rather than pay a few pence more tax in the pound. Last week the CEBR reported that the 50p tax rate is being avoided to the tune of £1bn in lost tax revenue.

This ultimate withdrawal of labour (ie leaving the country and refusing to pay tax altogether) is far more damaging, and far more immoral, than a 24-hour strike in a desperate attempt to save pensions – pensions that people have counted on, some having  planned their retirements for decades based on calculations that are about to be flushed down the toilet.

On a related note, we are told that high remuneration at taxpayer-owned banks such as HBOS and RBS is necessary to “keep talent” in those businesses. If workers at those banks refuse to accept relatively modest pay in return for the taxpayer bailing out their otherwise-doomed institutions, then in doing so they are holding the nation to ransom by being unimaginably greedy and selfish. Just taking the case of RBS in point, workers there were paid £950m of bonuses, despite the bank making losses of £1.1bn.

It is the rich holding Britain to ransom, not low-paid public sector workers struggling to make ends meet, who have already endured a 4-year pay freeze, and are now being told to pay larger contributions for less valuable pensions.

there is a place in the heart that

will never be filled

a space

and even during the

best moments

and

the greatest

times

we will know it

we will know it

more than

ever

there is a place in the heart that

will never be filled

and

we will wait

and

wait

in that

space.

In part 1, I talked about how all attraction is arbitrary and that love, conceptually speaking, was a load of shite. In part 2, I talked about how I’ve started becoming a cliché in order to increase the odds of igniting carnal passions in the greater public. Now, I’m going to talk about some people I’ve loved (or at least liked) in the past, because the past is key to the future and I’m in the mood for sharing tonight.

First, a disclaimer: I have never “fallen in love” (truly, madly, deeply, etc.) with anyone without making a conscious decision to do so in advance. Deciding to love someone is one of the most important life-decisions you will ever have to make. Take some fucking responsibility. With that said, time for some storytelling.

When I was 19 I half-accidentally slept with a girl 3 or 4 times. When friends learned of this, every one of them exclaimed, “Oh wow! You two are perfect for each other! You should totally get together.”

Being 19, and still believing unconventionality was an acceptable substitute for having a personality, this ultimately made it impossible for me to be with her, despite the fact she was (and pretty much still is) the closest thing I’ve met to a kindred spirit in my adult life. We went on one “proper” date, saw a terrible film and ate mediocre food, I kissed her goodbye for about 15 minutes. Then we didn’t see each other for 9 or 10 months.

Out of the blue, she popped up on facebook chat one night. I was slightly drunk (as I was 4-5 nights a week at the time), and she said she missed me and wanted to see me. Of course, I walked to her house. We ate pizza and watched Gok’s Fashion Fix. I kissed her on the couch and convinced her she wanted to fuck me, then we went upstairs and I elected not to (which is kind of my thing). We lay there talking instead. Talking’s fun.

Sometime after the sun had come up, she dropped the bombshell that she was flying home the next day. “I have to leave for work in 20 minutes,” was my reply, which isn’t a romantic thing to say at all, but which was true. I said goodbye after wondering whether I should fall in love with her for 11 of the last 13 hours and haven’t seen her again. We’ve talked once since then, and she said she missed me again. This time, she was in another country and I couldn’t walk to her place, so I couldn’t kiss her goodbye and spend months not seeing her. That was probably for the best.

I think what I’m trying to get across with this depressing story is that I’m a pathetic shit who is as terrified by the prospect of someone loving me as I am at the prospect of loving them back, and that I’m not sure how to get past this. In fact, I don’t know how anyone can get past this without the effects of powerful mind-altering drugs. It’s not a cry for help, just an extrapolation of what’s in my head at the moment. I don’t know what answers I want, or even what questions I’m asking. I’m just writing hopefully cathartic, and hopefully thoughtful, bullshit.

I did utter one amazing sentence during this exchange though, which (and I recognise I am biased) is the sort of sentence that has caused people to fall in love with me in the past. Actively constructing sentences so witty that they cause someone to have sex with me has become an obsession lately, mainly because I have very little else to offer a potential mate.

In other news, I’ve started to view “getting laid” as an appropriate way to spend my time, something that took a bit longer for me to recognise than most people I know. I like that I’ve ceased to value displays of authenticity in favour of valuing mediocre sex. It makes me feel much more normal. It’s good to belong.

The problem with Trying To Get Laid is that I often feel like I’m parodying myself. I feel like Jim Carrey must feel in the films where he’s trying to be the Jim Carrey morons want him to be. I have no idea why Mr. Carrey insists on doing this, since a) he is already massively wealthy, and b) the people who want him to act in this manner are morons. Nevertheless, my goals are no more noble. My goal is unfulfilling intimacy, sometimes with morons, which is either more depressing, less demeaning, or both.

The motivation behind caricaturing myself is that I know that no-one is going to fall in love with my strange facial bone-structure. In profile, my head looks like one off a Roman coin, and not in a good way. I look permanently “rough” and “tired”, even after a week of 10-hour sleeps. With this in mind, I construct opinions and devise witty exchanges in an attempt to garner affection, which is exactly what I am expected to do, and the only option available to me if I want to avoid being single forever. Despite the obvious advantages of such a state, this does nothing to mitigate the fact that never being in love again will result in me being judged an abject failure by everyone I’ve ever known.

I’m not sure exactly when I started treating “getting laid” in the same way as “getting a job” or “getting fit” (ie something I actively devote time and effort to), as opposed to “getting measles” or “getting laid off” (ie things which happen to you over which you have little or no control), but it’s kind of a big deal. I mean, it’s not actually a big deal, like a global famine or Nicki Minaj’s shoe collection, but for me it’s a big deal.

It’s kind of a big deal because I am extremely lazy. Given the choice between a mediocre outcome for little effort, or a good outcome for marginally more, I will opt for the former every time. This in no way makes me unique, but it does cause problems. It is one of the reasons I dread the thought of “growing up” in any meaningful sense, because you are expected to choose the latter for the good of people who depend on you. That is some scary shit.

I think actively pursuing something, anything has become important because, until this June, I was “in education”, officially speaking, and had a goal, namely to finish the shit out of a degree. Now, though, I don’t have any discernible goal, just a bunch of dynamite anecdotes (including one about an elephant spraying semen at an old woman) and some letters after my name that mean almost nothing. I think this is why I feel the need to pursue elbowy, sweaty encounters with mildly attractive twenty-somethings. Validation is a mighty powerful drug.

“Oh, Jon,” you’re saying. “Look what you’ve done. You’ve equated having sex with being in love.” I know I have. I’m okay with that, even if it makes me preposterously shallow and emotionally inadequate. A friend of mine recently had a crisis that revolved around the prospect of his girlfriend putting on weight. He felt bad that he would feel compelled to leave somebody he truly loved on account of an expanding pair of love handles. I understood his position entirely, because I am a borderline sociopath and because I reject society’s separation of love and lust. And not in a hedonistic, ironic, “Ooh, love is bullshit,” Morrissey-chorus way. In a sincere, “I honestly can’t work out the difference,” emotional wreck trying to function in a society he barely understands way. The differentiation makes no sense to me. Perhaps I’m insane.

At least eight people have asked me if I believe in ‘love at first sight’, presumably because I’m the sort of person who has an opinion on stuff like that. I have told every single one, emphatically, that I do. I think this is at least 21% of the problem. “I wanna know what love is,” said Foreigner, continuing, “I want you to show me.” I’ll get back to him once I work it out for myself.

The youth of areas such as Tottenham, Salford and West Bromwich do feel let down by the Coalition’s decisions to drastically reduce EMA, and also to get rid of the Future Jobs Fund, and communities with already high unemployment are struggling to cope as the economy staggers onwards, with high inflation impacting those on fixed incomes. These things have been the straw that broke the camel’s back, along with local government and charity cuts just filtering through.

But that isn’t the whole story. Labour has its part to answer, too. Misuse of stop-and-search laws has alienated black and Asian communities. Black men are “over nine times more likely” to be searched than their white counterparts, and unemployment remained stubbornly high in these places even during the boom years under Labour. These are people largely abandoned by all major parties, even if the Tories have taken it a step further.

The police have complained loudly that concerns about human rights were impeding their ability to stop the riots. Given that the initial disturbance was triggered by police shooting dead a young man, I’m surprised they didn’t just use the force of sheer irony to blast the assembled crowds away. For the Met, its credibility dragged through the mud of late over phonehacking and bribery allegations, this has been a godsend. A facebook page in support of the Met now has almost a million likes, in a spillover of the ‘Our Brave Boys’ mentality, as far as I can see.

Finally, in the interest of taking looking back further in search of the disaffected youth’s root cause, allow me to close with this quote from fifth-century BC philosopher Socrates:

The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households.

He mentions the Bailey Review, which I’ve analysed here before (including reference to its anti-feminist, socially conservative standpoint), and so I won’t go over again. Safe to say, the Bailey Review simply spouts the usual moral panic and funnels the fears of parents terrified of their children’s (and especially their daughters’) sexuality.

He asks whether exposure to porn from a young age is causing problems with body-image and self esteem, and points to trends that support the notion that all is not well with the social mass that is teenage boys. Then, from my perspective, he hits on the crux of the matter:

At the other end of the age range, sexually active older women are now widely eroticised (albeit often with a rather misogynistic undertone) as “cougars” or (forgive me) “Milfs” while their male equivalents are disparaged as dirty old men.

Why is this? For me, it is because as a society we still struggle to give women sexual agency. Think about the ubiquitous term, ‘MILF’. Mother I’d Like to Fuck. I’d like to fuck. I. Fuck. It’s passive, whereas the lecherous randy old goats are active. In this sense, the fairly recent adoption of the ‘cougar’ term represents a step forward in acknowledging female agency.

This is also why paternalistic misogyny (by which I mean restricting women’s avenues of choice ‘for their own good’) is so dangerous, and why the Slutwalk movement is crucial to fighting all forms of misogyny. Women have sexual agency, can choose what to wear and who to fuck, and there’s fuck all else to be said, really.

When it comes to the point of the male “creep”, this utimately comes down to threat and power-relationships, and is a subtly different (but associated) point. He talks about men being seen as “pervs, fetishists and weirdos” for liking women who don’t conform to mainstream beauty ideals, but again I think this comes down to agency. It is implicitly supposed that men will act on this preference, while women are saved the labels because they’re not supposed to pursue sexual encounters.

I sound like I’m picking holes in the argument here, but I’m not. I agree with the central thrust of the article, even if I think the focus should be on something slightly different. It’s hard to disagree with much in the final two paragraphs.

All of these prejudices are rehearsed and reiterated by men and women alike, they reside in the intangible web of social norms, conventions and culture, but they can and must be challenged and changed. If we can begin to openly and joyously celebrate the positives to male sexuality, it might become easier for men to be happy and confident sexual partners, and in turn become better lovers, and sometimes better people.

Male sexuality is no less diverse, complex and wonderful than women’s or, for that matter, no more base, coarse and animalistic. Sure, most men might be slightly more likely to let our gaze linger on eye-catching curves, and slightly less likely to giggle about our lovers’ proclivities with our friends, but in the grand picture women and men are surprisingly similar, in this respect as in so many others. Women have been entirely justified in asking that we blokes respect their rights, autonomy and wishes, that we respect them as sexual beings. It shouldn’t be too much to ask for a little of the same in return.

The sooner we get to the point where female and male sexuality are afforded the same respect, the better. That’ll be fun.

(A big thank-you to mortari for linking the article in the first place, and to georgialewis76 for her help finding a link)

Just then, the robot whirred and clicked a few times, a large blue light appearing on its head, if indeed that’s what it was. “ShinyFace Maccaroon,” it beeped, “I thought it was you.” At that moment, dozens of other machines appeared from all directions, bearing the three toffs off above their heads, like tuxedo’d crowdsurfers at some sort of bizarre festival for public schoolboys and brainless automatons (rather like Glastonbury, actually).

The three gentlemen (and I use that term loosely) found themselves in a damp, underground cavern. “Where are we?” squeaked MateyChum, to no response from the robots. As they passed holes in the walls, the three could see eyes peering at them from the gloom, and now and then the gleam of something golden. At last, the companions were seated around a table in a dimly-lit auditorium, its ceiling and walls far out of sight. The only light was the blue glow from the assembled robots.

“Wha-what, er, what do you want with us?” BlondeyHair stammered. “Don’t you know who we are?” At that moment, a large cube descended upon the table, emanating a red glow. “We know who you are,” chanted the assembled machines, and at that point the auditorium was flooded with light. Around the walls were men in suits, locked in cages of gold and silver, eating slop from diamond-encrusted troughs that ran between them. The three recognised some of them. “They’re bankers!” they gasped, as one. Across the room, some more people were being forced to shovel the bankers’ shit into a chasm. “Journos…” muttered ShinyFace, seeing where this was going.

“These were your friends,” came the chant. “Will they save you now?” And with that, the three found themselves lowered into a tank, filled to the brim with adorable kittens. “No!” they cried. “They’re too cute!” but it was too late. The mewing and softness engulfed them. “I can’t….. hate!” BlondeyHair shouted, clearly short of breath. “My beautiful selfishness!” wailed MateyChum, as the tide of kittens overwhelmed him. Before long, all three had lapsed into a cuteness-coma, unable to sustain themselves without the greedy, grasping, jealous nastiness that had become their life-blood. And to this day, there they remain, only destined to wake when they have learned to love, and to care.