phlawless

(hat-tip to John A. Lee for the title)

At the time when John Rees was losing a power struggle in the Socialist Workers Party (Britain) of which he'd been a central if not the central leader for more than a decade, and consequently quitting to start his own socialist party, with blackjack, and hookers, stories started being openly spoken of about a pattern of terrible behaviour on his part, going on for ages. (But isn't that always the way? Sometimes the only time a victim can kick their abuser is when they've lost a power struggle with someone else who's not necessarily any better. And then the New Boss uses the victim stories to justify the purge of the Old Boss. Witness the kangaroo trial of Bill Logan by the Sparts, 1979.)

So anyway, the brilliant if eccentric Irish-socialist-Catholic blogger Splintered Sunrise spoke of Comrade Rees thus:

I stick to my position that he’s basically a high-functioning sociopath, and would further point out his tremendous vanity, which explains the explosive reaction when (George) Galloway suggested he could do with someone to work alongside him. His ability to switch from being utterly charming when you’re of use to him, to petulant and spiteful if you get in his way, gives you some clues as to why he’s quite good at putting an alliance together, but a fucking liability if you want to keep one together. So his eventual defenestration shouldn’t really come as a surprise.

Emphasis added. Note also that one of Rees' biggest blunders was accepting a dodgy cheque from a Dubai construction firm, then he or his allies suggesting that people who complained about this were "submitting to the bourgeois legal system" and going on about Lenin taking gold from the Kaiser. In other words: it's okay if you're a revolutionary socialist. (There are also rumours about atrocious behaviour towards the women in his life, which I won't comment on because I'm far outside the loop on that issue.)

Anyway, The issue I want to discuss is "high-functioning sociopaths", or people of similar personality traits, who feel entitled to burn humans as fuel in their personal quest, either because they really think we're in wartime and the stakes of survival are so high that issues of decency no longer apply, or because that's just the way they roll. I am in particular thinking of a prominent figure on the NZ radical left who used to be in the same organisation as me. A man of quite massive political talents - once described as "one of the top 10 agitators on the whole planet". This guy could start a picket line in an empty room.

This was also the man who would invite me out drinking with him, and then turn into what can technically be described as a raging asshole, boorishly gatecrashing parties he hadn't been invited to. I remember once when I tried to stop him doing this, he fixed an unsteady gaze on me, and said with the deepest contempt: "I don't care about you." "Never thought you did," I muttered resignedly as I turned around and went home.

There was also the time this comrade let out a screaming tirade of abuse to me, in the car in which I had just given him a lift home, for "acting the victim" when I was complaining about a sharp "turn" in our organisation's tactics which made me feel stupid for having spent the last year or three doing precisely the opposite. Funnily enough, I spent the day miserable for having "provoked" him, and felt huge relief when meeting him later that evening, he didn't seem to remember the incident at all. 

Let me explain the thought patterns which went through my head: this man is a great revolutionary. You are weak and useless. Even though you try to be friendly and helpful, you're a social outcast. In contrast, this man is a drunken boor and yet he's incredibly popular and respected because he's so good at what he does. You don't have any rights to judge this man. Be quiet and maybe you'll be allowed to be in his presence some more.

Quite soon afterwards, this man went on a drunken rampage (at a party I'd left, so this is second-hand) and was reported to have acted violently towards both male and female comrades. Our leadership voted to suspend him from his position, a decision which he accepted. To his credit, this man no longer drinks and I have never heard of him behaving in a personally abusive way ever since.

(I should also notice, though, that another member of our leadership, who had been out of the country at the time, criticised us for "witchhunting", saying "this man has done more to bring women into the organisation than anyone else!" This is the kind of "ethics" as practiced by the Church of Scientology - L. Ron Hubbard said that a staff member who was doing great business could literally get away with murder, while someone whose stats were down wouldn't be allowed to sneeze without written permission.)

And yet ... this man is now the leader of a political organisation involving a number of leading comrades who - credible testimony suggests - have acted in atrocious ways towards women. The "internal" position of his organisation is apparently that these are politically motivated slanders; and they have acted to exclude comrades who didn't buy that explanation. It does not seem far-fetched to argue that this "soft-pedaling" of macho abusive behaviour may be related to the organisation's adventurist, confrontational, every-demo-is-The-Battle-Of-Wherever politics. I remember one conversation I had with this group's leader, who was amazed to hear that I wasn't a natural rebel, that I had spent my whole life trying to conform but failing. (Indeed, perhaps I only got into revolutionary politics looking for a new peer group to submit to.)

To be 100% clear - it should be obvious to everyone on the Auckland left, at least, whom I'm talking about. I am not actually accusing this person of being a sociopath. I still consider him a comrade and a valued acquaintance, if not a friend. But I am worried at the pattern of behaviour of his organisation; and I am extremely critical of myself for having taken so much shit because I thought that that was my place as "not as good an activist". This is not me trying to start a witchhunt - this is me, looking in horror at how many times I sold out my personal integrity because I wanted to be liked, I wanted to be good.

Sad to see my leftist comrades screaming and ranting about the election results, as if they truly expected something better. Even worse to see the minority of them cursing the broad masses for being unenlightened, which is exactly the reason we have trouble getting through to the broad masses. Facts:

1) No Don Brash.

2) No National overall majority. Pro-government parties actually LOST seats. (National +2, ACT - 4, Maori - 1 = Government -3.) It should therefore be HARDER for the Smiling Assassin to get his policies through.

3) John Banks is at least in favour of the Auckland central city rail tunnel, the biggest "green jobs" project which is actually feasible under current circumstances.

4) No Don Brash. (I know I said this before, but it bears repeating.)

5) So called "people's parties" which sold out to neoliberalism (Labour, Maori) got a slapping.

6) A small handful of MPs now openly opposed to neoliberalism and in favour of a social democratic solution - Hone Harawira, Catherine Delahunty, perhaps a couple more Greens and even some Labour guy in the closet.

7) Labour's right to lead any alternative government shaken. Things go on like this, the leader of the opposition might be Metireia Turei next time. Or Winston Peters, but let's not go there.

8) Speaking of Winston, he's not on our side - he's an old-school anti-free-trade One Nation Tory - but he will troll the Government mercilessly, something that P. Goff couldn't do in his wildest dreams.

9) New Labour Party leader who might not be a turd.

10) NO DON BRASH.

I know that I'm now bursting with renewed energy to work with my comrades in Mana, the Greens, the broader socialist left and anyone with half a brain to start building an Ecosocialist political force in this country.

Memes - or, to use Leninist terminology, "ideas which seize the masses" - are more powerful than any organisation. Actually, let's face it, all the most influential organisations are memes first and bureaucracies second - or, in the case of al-Qaeda, not an organisation at all, just a meme. Lawrence Miles foretold this in This Town Will Never Let Us Go.

There was at least one guy on Auckland's anti-Mubarak rally on Saturday wearing a V for Vendetta / Guy Fawkes / Anonymous mask. I wonder who wets themselves with insane glee more every time that happens - Alan Moore or the Wachowski siblings? (One could actually argue that the Wachowskis, what with two reasonably influential movies, have done more to bring revolutionary consciousness to the masses of the West than anyone outside of Noam Chomsky.)

And I remember when no-one but a tiny faction of internet nerds would have gotten the reference. But that's the point at which the memetic universe of the intarwebz - and thus the main noosphere of young people - are so far ahead of the language spoken by our rulers. Similarly, when young people in Malta spraypainted Pedobear onto a poster of the Pope, the mass media didn't get the reference. Similarly, so many "radical leftists" don't understand what Anonymous / Wikileaks / open source / the Pirate Party mean in terms of good honest Marxist categories such as "the forces of production overthrowing the relations of production" or "the self-organization of the advanced workers".

So anyway, I have been offered an opportunity to participate in a project that will combine radical-left politics with cutting edge cultural/memetic science, and even be relevant to my music - the kind of thing that I've been waiting for for a long time. When that goes live, consider it my return to active service as a political activist.

... that we should stop seeking to bury our values and instead explain and champion them. So... here goes.

Listen here, you guys out there: I ride an electric bike even though it's slow and inconvenient and sometimes tiring because I don't want to be responsible for burning fossil fuels. I deliberately run a low-budget, self-reliant musical operation because the mainstream music industry disgusts me. I'm working in indexing because I didn't want to fit in with the self-congratulatory culture of academia. I lead a low-budget, frugal lifestyle by choice, and I don't envy those Captain Creeps in their McMansions and bourgemobiles, I just want to stop them enjoying those things at the expense of the vast majority of the planet, and indeed the integrity of the ecosystem itself. My politics are simple - I want to help build an ecologically sustainable high-tech culture, where all citizens can contribute and participate (not just a smug, self-congratulatory elite), and we save resources by minimising waste, greed, violence and social exclusion.

YES I MAKE THINGS HARD FOR MYSELF. Because those are my values. And I think that if everyone adopted those values the world would be a kinder, nicer place. So I try - and fail, because I'm a human being - to live as an example of what is possible if you live in the Real World of Horrible Jobs but don't let yourself become a part of it.

And, yes, there's a tiny part of me which would love to "give up", to learn to schmooze, to create music or write books that would sell (by telling people the lies that they want to hear), to live in air-conditioned comfort and be able to buy everything and everyone I wanted to. Because, once again, I'm a human being. But I think the essence of being a human being is to know which is the winning side, and still to choose the other - to do things not because they're convenient or fun or easy, but because you've made a choice.

One of the motivations for my decision to step out (temporarily?) of political activism is that the life of the radical political activist, in the current space-time juncture, is unremittingly negative. There are no significant "wins" for our side, where we are. At best, our activity turns terrible crushing defeats into mild, tolerable defeats - or we can vicariously "get off" in things that happen in exotic locales like Venezuela or Nepal. I can see why people sell out to liberal/reformist politics - because they win sometimes, in their own terms - whereas such as me can always see why no win which the current system allows can ever be "good enough". Even good radicals "emotionally piggyback" on liberal victories - even though I had absolutely no illusions that Barack Obama was going to be anything other than he has proved to be, I got drunk when he beat the crazy old guy and that snowbilly grifter.

But on the other hand, I'd rather be me than actual liberals who do have illusions that the extremely mild "centre-left wing of global capitalism" whom they elect will be anything different. I shake my head at the people who thought that the Obama presidency was going to turn all of America into San Francisco overnight. And I am actually scared by the people who blame it on his "lack of nerve" - i.e. the idea that he wants to be some kind of progressive superhero but is too "afraid" to just shove it down the throats of his political adversaries. Some guy even said that he wished that George W Bush was a liberal - in other words, we want our own mean, callous, emotionally blackmailing borderline sociopath who cows and intimidates his enemies! Such a narrative - that political victory is based on being "tougher" than "the other guy" - is what any Marxist would recognize as sheer voluntarism, and what any psychologist would see as a naïve fantasy wish-fulfilment attitude, as if politics were a TV cop show. (And when a strong leader on the left does arise - like the guy in my icon - the good liberals are always happy to believe the worst propaganda lies against him. Hugo Chávez does some dodgy deals with people like Putin and Ahmedinejad to get things done, and even intimidates his own side sometimes, but I thought you preferred that to the hands-clean constitutional scholar?)

Only class forces win the day, and the good liberals were more than happy to see the unions beaten and disintegrated (because working class people are sometimes prejudiced, not like us, you see?) And then the good liberals are amazed that the "good guys" don't win automatically, that you need organisation to win in politics, and Beautiful Souls who prefer their precious "individuality" and "thinking for themselves" never win unless their cause is bankrolled by some real serious class force. (You think Vaclav Havel got to be president of the Czech Republic by the force of his ideas? No, because the private capitalists who took over from the Stalinist bureaucracy wanted a figurehead who looked good on TV.) There is some possibility that professional middle-class forces could get organised and wield serious power - especially in the Internet era - but they're just not doing so. They're watching politics like any other spectator sport and bitching about why their team seems to have no "muscle". When they cheered on while that muscle was atomised in the 70's and 80's, of course.

...even ultra-conservative op-ed writers in Granny Herald have realised that "Bishop" Brian Tamaki's own personal mind-control cult is serious business.. On the other hand, cult leaders and dictators only break out the repressive apparatus and the loyalty oaths when their status is being threatened somehow, which indicates that there might be trouble in paradise.

And you rage and fume at the godless ones
Cause they don't understand how the company runs
And they think it's the money that you care about
You pretend to be offended when they figure it out
Tell me what kind of heaven do you think awaits
When your ass is too fat to fit the pearly gates?
It's like the eye of a needle and a limousine
Paradise is set aside for the less obscene
You only care for the power that the lucre brings
And you have no love for any living thing, save Mammon...