Civilised rebellion

In something of a contrast to Anneliese Dodd’s lecture on which I commented in my last blog, I today logged into the launch of Jeremy Corbyn’s Project for Peace and Justice, where the take was somewhat different. Forget the triangulation (shouldn’t that be strangulation?) here we had a taste of resistance and rebellion (civilised rebellion, of course). Yanis Varuofakis summed things up rather neatly when he said democracy has never failed because we’ve never had it. For all our talk of democracy, we’ve never gotten rid of oligarchs. As long as they survive, it would be fair to say that democracy is but a dream. Of course, it’s not just the oligarchs, but their lickspittle servants in politics, the media and in every corner of our power structures that serve to strip the vote of its power to change things. Plus ça change. This kind of talk can be a bit demoralising, but Jeremy is in this respect indomitable, not one to give in. I often feel the weight of vested interests is indeed too heavy to shift (e.g. in tackling climate change) but the premise of the Project for Peace and Justice is that history is on ‘our’ side. The trouble is, not least in the case of climate change, history may well be running out of time so far as homo sapiens are concerned. Still, there has to be a counterbalance to the managerial, steady as she goes ‘forensic’ style of opposition which studies the details whilst studiously ignoring the overarching picture. I never had anything much to do with Jeremy whilst in parliament (I fully understand why he is perceived in the wider country as something of a metropolitan type) but at least with this project there is the possibility of something to counterbalance New New Labour.