Preface: This document is too long and unweildy to read. I might go back through it eventually. In the meantime, just read my beliefs.

I have very specific ideas on why the UK is so poor. In brief, neo-libertarian guttering of the UK’s public sector and several attacks on the working people and the industry of the UK since the 80s has de-industrialised Britain. While not explicitly a bad thing, I believe wealth and the movement of it depends solely on production, and the UK has been closing down its facilities of production. This is not the UK’s fault. Due to globalism, it’s cheaper to set up shop in places where labour is cheaper and ship to global customers, rather than pay a British worker with all of their worker protections, minimum wages, and the minimum of UK tax a company has to pay.

My ideological positions have no concrete sources. They are not well-researched, instead they are concatenations of the political videos I watch and their ideologies, as well as my materialist dialectical philosophy which was an idea introduced to me by communists. I trust the youtube videos that loosely form my opinions to be well researched, and if I was ever asked to produce concrete reasons for my positions, and I could be bothered to, I would likely look for the research those youtube sources conducted.

Labour Theory of Value

I can’t exactly remember all of the proper definitions in marx’s labour theory of value, but discussions of it and other opinions informed by it likely produced my modern outlook.

What I am concerned with is material: that which the world is made out of. Ultimately, everything is material, thoughts for example don’t exist without the material of electrons darting through brains. My stance on religion is that there is no god. Our world is comparable to a world with a god that has no affect on material reality. so, I see no reason to believe in such a god, as it’s an added assumption that we need not make.

On that note, wealth in a society is tied to the material, to production. Production comes in many forms, from physical goods to less tangible goods. While I see no reason for an economy not to be able to sustain itself on the production of non-physical goods, such as computer software, this is in service of those places of production that do produce physical goods.

Places of work are incentivised to get the maximum value from their workers. They want their workers to produce as much as possible and get as little in return. This is indisputably forms the definition of capitalism. People who establish companies own those companies, and hire workers to work that company. Capitalism defines success as profitable, it is its most foundational property. People who seek to make successful companies work to get the most profits out of their workers, which is done by getting them to produce as much as possible with as little pay almost by definition.

Throughout the progression of capitalism, the most profitable companies have managed to monopolise their businesses, turning from local or national shops to global conglomerates with massive portions of their market share. Throughout capitalism’s progression, more and more of the workforce, by now the vast majority of the population (compared to the peasantry, but this much has been true since the 1900s), has come under the employ of these massive corporations.

Capitalism is good

An online friend, who voted for Reform UK and notable British dipshit Nigel Farage often shares their political opinions with me. I am afraid of confrontation, I do not share my political opinions back, but I do attempt to challenge as subtly as I can for them on things such as the importance of race.

I believe they are an honest member of the British working class. Misguided by mainstream media and political disinformation, getting the majority of their views from people who are on top of society intentionally distracting the working class from their exploitation of them. I’ve no doubt they have been told that immigrants are a problem, that the law actually means anything, and that there is a certain societal order that we must uphold. But the collapse of capitalism is impossible to ignore, and it is worthy of a busied face how those who seek to benefit try to turn the pitfalls of capitalism into the pitfalls of their political opposition, usually because they give too much credence to the scapegoat of the decade (currently myself and my fellow transgender people, to the detriment of our collective safety).

They once said to me that there is a bad capitalism, and that the current capitalism is a bad capitalism. But they reassured me, there is a good capitalism, and they no doubt want that capitalism.

This is a paraphrase, but had I been willing to engage with the discussion I would have likely asked how they define bad or good in this case, the case of an economic system. Unfortunately, I was too taken aback by them saying that Italians aren’t white, an accusation created as an unholy union between American racism and anti-immigration. Minority communities are easy to scapegoat because it is harder for them to fight back, and immigrants are necessarily minorities. Black people have similarly been under the oppression of a white society for the explicit purpose of free labour, and their continued marginalisation has served as a good American distraction from the worker’s plight, pitting workers against one another in a tactic as old as society.

When people use the terminology, good and bad capitalism, they usually mean a general overview of the subject. Often, they do not consider the philosophical inclusion of time, and how things evolve over time.

Capitalism was once good in that it was a powerful force in the modernisation of society. Explicitly due to capitalism, we were able to industrialise and improve working conditions across the board. This was during the time of local or national business, where the class of working peoples had an understanding of their values and were able to fight for a share of the income of a company that gave them a comfortable life.

Capitalism was good in the sense that it was able to create an industrialised society where industrialised processes were capable of producing enough value from a worker to support themselves and a small family, and then produce even more for the profit of a capitalist.

How work works

In the times of subsistence farming, a peasant would work to create their clothes, their food, and then give some to those who had the monopoly over violence out of necessity. A worker was dedicating all of their work to sustain themselves in full and producing little extra.

That extra could be seen as going to towns, where production like smithing and refining of metals could increase the productive capacity of farms, or at least reduce the amount of work a peasant needed to do to support themselves. Under feudalism, there is no incentive for a peasant to produce more than is required to sustain themselves.

To briefly explain the concept of industrialisation, instead of reducing the work day we use tools to work the same amount and to give that amount to the people who make tools to make even better tools. This is in a way the snowball of industrialism.

To put it in the terms of work, instead of one person making their clothes, their food, their recreation, they instead dedicate themselves to one of these productions, and in turn because of their tools and their mastery they are able to produce enough, let’s say clothes, so that they can hand them out to other people in return for food, recreation, and the other things a person needs.

That is how the economy works, and the benefits of industrialisation is that one person can make so much that they are able to live their lives in relative luxury, using the immense profits of their produce to purchase the immense quantities that other people are producing.

Capitalism is the well-oiled machinery of this manner: a company of people working in unison can produce so much that many people simply need not work. In the good forms of capitalism, when workers knew their power, we had families of five all sustained by a single income. Not a child nor a mother need work, one person was capable of producing enough to sustain all of these people.

But the well oiled machinery of capitalism doesn’t stop there. It’s been told that profits are the ultimate goal, so they continue to exploit the worker, which at this point is producing enough to sustain an entire family alone, and still produce some more for the company and their profiteers.

In the 80s, class consciousness died with the fall of the soviet union and the harsh war of neo-liberal politicians on the working people. Relative economic upturns happened because the markets of Russia and China opened up to global capitalism, and with that expansion came a reminder of the good days of capitalism. I cannot give a concrete reason as to why market expansion produces more profits (well, I can, but I’m saving the topic of how capitalism exploits until later), but perhaps it is because more companies creates more competition, which in turn forces companies to try harder in their production, and therefore produce more.

Then the working class were attacked, workers were paid less and less as time went on, and companies squeezed profits through raising prices and paying workers less. Through this, it became profitable to introduce women into the workforce, and now two people are required to work to produce a household income. Throughout the course of a few decades, workers were paid such a small portion of their actual production that the people these profits go to - the owners of companies and shareholders - are capable of living to such a high standard that it is essentially needless.

so many people are making more money through the profit of their companies that they literally could not fathom to spend the entirety of their money. They live like gods, buying cruise ships on a whim and casually purchasing entire governments through the sheer force of their money.

But the economy is on decline, and especially the condition of the working person is falling into poverty.

The issue with paying workers as little as you can is that they can’t actually receive the produce of their labour in return. The issue with modern capitalism is that there is so little money in the hands of the actual population that there is no-one to buy the immense produce of an individual’s labour.

I am to bring this back to the axiomatic example of a peasant now making clothes.

This worker produces hundreds of clothing items in a week, which is more than enough to clothe their entire family and hundreds of other people. A small amount of those hundreds of other people would then be able to produce all of the necessities of the clothes worker and their family in return. Productive capacity is so incredibly high that a high percentage of the population simply need not work. A small portion of the population is capable of producing enough for those who work and those who do not work, and they are capable of producing this excess without hardship and toil.

But, in the modern landscape, we are all demanded to work and produce so much that there couldn’t possibly be enough people to consume it. Worse still, instead of simply having this excess, it is made so expensive that we cannot afford to buy luxurious amounts of it. That productive capacity that is not given back to the workers is given to the kings who control the workers, those who demand we work and those who control the prices. All of the excess, which we are not able to afford, is their excess, and so they live like utter kings.

Now swap clothing for literally any produce, and you have a model of how work works now.

But how should work work?

How work should work

As I have explained, in our industrialised society a few people are capable of producing so much that many people need not work, but capitalism demands we work.

In an ideal society, not everyone would work. Due to industrialisation, a small portion of people are capable of producing all that society needs in a short work day. In this situation, these few people would be working to produce enough for society, and then they would rest, and those who do not work are able to express their desires in the arts, or perhaps they would want to work, or perhaps they would just like to live their life in luxury.

In this society, I am not forsaking a portion of the population to hard work and toil in order to uplift a bunch of free-loaders. I am describing a portion of the population working as little as they must so that they may enjoy life with their families and friends, some of which may not be working.

Work in this idealised society would be like a household chore on the scale of society. I have evidence that a society like this would work, in part because we see microcosms of it in our degrading economy.

The most immediate example is volunteers. People who literally work for free, either because they enjoy work, for something to do, or for community. That last point - for community - exposes a very human element of volunteering that would be the foundations of this ideal society.

As a computer scientist, essentially all of our productive capacity is on the backs of people who work for free, for fun, because they find it fulfilling to code libraries and do not mind maintaining them for free. Open-source software is a spit in the face of capitalism. People want a game engine, so they make a game engine, and they charge no-one for it. If you want an alternative, you make an alternative, necessarily with a host of people working for an open-source project.

In Birmingham, we have the most explicit example of this degradation of society. We are exploited so much that we are not even capable of providing for those who collect our bins, such a task is one that upholds society and should even be rewarded in excess for it’s disagreeability. But, on those streets where people make enough money as to have some free time, volunteers collect bins as a societal chore. It is on the streets where everyone is busy working for capitalism that the bins do not get collected, and usually this is because the money of their produce in part goes to the council and then goes to the bin collectors, but in modern capitalism they are not paid enough for their local councils to collect enough income for the bin collectors to in turn be paid for their service, which they do so that the workers can dedicate themselves to their own produce.

I have made a few primary claims. The first is that industrialisation has produced a world where very few people can produce all that is required for society. The second is that instead of this, industrialisation has everyone working to extortionate proportions to the point where a few people - the benefactors of capitalism - live with the immense excesses of industrialisation. Materially, these are their mansions, their mega yachts, their computational supercomputers that provide for them arts that they would otherwise get from the working people doing what they naturally would want to do if they had spare time. The third is that in an ideal society, where instead of us all working for these god-kings, we all work for society and due to industrialism only a few of us are required to produce all of society’s necessities.

Bad capitalism

Capitalism was once good in how it was a productive force for society. It drove us from our farms spending our times producing all that we need and into factories where we were capable of producing enough for society that we were able to sustain a large portion of the population that relatively did not work, that is women and children.

Capitalism is now bad in that it forces us all to overwork ourselves and does not allow us to purchase the results of our produce for ourselves. Instead, the immense excess of the factory goes to the billionaire and multi-millionaires. It is now bad because those who we work for take so much from us that we are not even capable of using the industry’s capacity of excess to uphold important societal functions such as healthcare and bin collection.

Reform or Revolution?

There are very important political topics that need to be addressed with this analysis of the world, and I apologise for using communist terminology but I would like to call this chapter “reform or revolution” in reference to its concepts being vaguely connected to the old socialist ideas.

This political question is if there was once a good capitalism, and there is now a bad capitalism, then we should make efforts to go back to good capitalism, as it existed and had worked.

But my issue with this statement is it fails to acknowledge the progression of time, and why capitalism was good in any sense to begin with. The argument is that modern capitalism is the natural progression of the old capitalism, and that there was no other outcome for capitalism than it’s modern state.

Due to this nature of progression, it is therefore impossible to return back to good capitalism, lest we somehow create the same situation from which it arose, that is we return to a backwater feudal society. But even in this highly fantastical time-travel or apocalyptic scenario, capitalism would still progress back into something resembling its modern state.

There are several people who are giving their best efforts to reform capitalism into something positive and I admire these people and would hope they succeed, but unfortunately I cannot assess capitalism as a system and see how they alone could produce a sustaining system of good capitalism.

Capitalism progressed the way it did because of its inherent properties. It is a system where companies prioritise profits. It was a force of productive progression because initially, profits were made by improving production, by raising the productive capacity of the worker, by industrialising. Now, we have industrialised, and the only way to make profits in the way that Capitalism defines is by charging more and paying workers less.

”Ideal” capitalism

I have already explained my ideal society, where a few people utilise the immense productive capacity of industry to provide only what we need in society. I believe that almost anyone on the left would agree that this would be a brilliant ideal to live in, compared to those on the right who might stickle about how some people don’t work, perhaps stuck on the idea that everyone has to work for what they have. I would also wager that practically everyone on the left would say that my ideals are unrealistic and unachievable, and I believe this is a very rational analysis of our modern situation. It would take an immense amount of effort to transform society from modern capitalism into the ideal I described, and I believe it to be achievable. I accept that this belief is one built on hope, and one that many other people might not agree with. I would still wager that the methods in which we fight for an ideal like the one I described are ones that will improve society from modern capitalism no matter what, and that even if I could not possibly achieve my ideals, fighting for them would still produce a better society even if it is not the one of my ideal.

so let me propose another ideal: the “ideal” capitalism, as often found in what I can only think to describe as social capitalism, often a position held by self-described “social democrats” or “moderate socialists” who are not moderate in the sense that they are actually reactionary.

Ideal capitalism would be a society in which companies work for the workers. Perhaps we still have bosses and company owners, but they make little from the companies themselves because the workers are paid relatively fairly. Perhaps not the full value of their labour, but a worker cannot be paid the full value of their labour under capitalism, as it is a necessity of the system for some of their value to be given to the profiteer, to uphold capitalism, to re-invest into the company. A worker, if they work hard, would not be paid the same amount for the additional work they do, but would be rewarded for their extra work. It is as if instead of a worker’s wages being static, it is the company’s profits and ability to re-invest in itself that is static as the workers get as much as they possibly could from the machinery of capitalism. Taxes would be paid fairly from the company and the worker to the government, who could then pay well for all of its programmes.

I must say that my understanding of the social democrat ideal capitalism is likely incomplete, or not fully descriptive. There are likely minutia to get into, and everyone has their own ideas. This is the best description I could come up with utilising my particular wording on terminologies, being heavily focussed on actual material change and my understanding of work, production, and the economy. I would wager that most ideals akin to the one I’m attempting to describe would have their actual material circumstance well described by the above.

I must also say that it is a good ideal. Regardless of anything, it is a better society than the one we currently live in and a society worth fighting towards. It is much more conceivable than the relatively alien social-economic system I describe in my ideal, and therefore someone could imagine how through control of government such an ideal could be reached. I also believe that fighting for my ideals, in a way that I will describe later, has a potential outcome in a society like this ideal. That is to say, fighting for the ideal I describe in a way that I will describe will also be fighting for this “ideal capitalism” ideal.

Before I get into my grievances with this ideal I must re-iterate I am not opposed to this ideal. I have my grievances in the same way I imagine such a “social democrat” has their grievances with my methods, with the primary importance being that despite our differing ideals, we can achieve something better if we fight together regardless of end outcome. The world will progress in the way that it does, and that will be a positive way if we all fight with these progressive ideals in mind.

My grievance is that I do not believe this system of capitalism to be achievable because it describes a form of capitalism that ignores its own motives. The motive of capitalism is to profit. This is unavoidable. If you give someone control of a company, control of an organisation of workers where they are capable of producing profits by the typical methods of exploitation that capitalism allows, then those conditions will lead again to a bad capitalism, with the excessive levels of exploitation we live with in our modern age.

The wager is that if all business owners do not exploit workers, if they are all nice, then this system will provide well for all its people. However, all it takes is one profit-driven owner to undermine the system, and begin to make profits, and begin to buy out other companies, and begin to expand itself until it is capable of the levels of exploitation we are currently at.

Another grievance is that such an ideal is not rooted in modern material realities. It incorporates the political and economic systems of modernity, but in the modern day we are ruled by billionaires. To move from a society where each market is dominated by as little as six companies to one where we have thousands of kind corporations again is infeasible.

I suppose the alternative would be if those few companies with market share were in this state of ideal capitalism, in which I would point out again that the position of ideal capitalism contradicts the very incentive that capitalism offers. To transition from this society to this ideal capitalism, we would need to somehow get rid of all shareholders, all CEOs, and everyone else concerned with profits and replace them for people who are not concerned with profits. And then still we would have to hope that these people in their newfound positions of power would not feel the sickness of wealth that has been observed that seems to make people obsessed with profit.

My main point, I suppose, is that such a society would suppose that people are willing to act against their incentives, which I would deem unrealistic. I pre-empt the discussion that in the ideal society I describe, the incentive is in fact to participate in the societal chore of working, and I have attempted to describe how I believe the people in this society would be incentivised to work, under the model of societal chores.

Politics

There is one point that I frequently think about, especially when it comes to discussions with those on the right of society. This is my understanding of power and control. If I were to reduce it to a single phrase, I would state that Authority is a myth. I will have to elaborate, and also somewhere in the middle I might wander to how political systems are ultimately second to material circumstance.

It is a common belief that change lies within the political system. While this is practically irrefutably true, I would like to offer the perspective of materialism. In opposition to idealism (I believe this is the correct terminology for what I will describe) which posits that ideals shape society, my philosophy of dialectical materialism would propose that it is instead material circumstance which shapes society, and therefore the political system.

Take, for example, the topic of racial liberation in the Americas and largely the rest of the world. An individual might celebrate how their country abolished slavery before the Americas, but another individual (me, at the very least), will propose that the Americas had progressed to a point in their material society where slave labour was no longer a necessity in the majority of the country.

slavery is obviously abhorrent, especially when given the context of racial slavery which the united states practiced. However, slavery was also very profitable. Given the motives of profit under capitalism, the slavers of the south were incentivised to hold slaves, and therefore incentivised to think of reasons why this slavery was just. This is how, through material circumstance and economic incentive, the ideas of white supremacy arose during the period of institutionalised black slavery in the Americas.

The north did not have this economic incentive, in large part due to cotton and other plantations just not being very economically viable in these sectors. The crops that were farmed did not benefit from slave labour. so, they were not required to believe that black people must be subjugated because they did not materially do it.

Regardless, racism persisted, either as a continued sentiment or / and because it is useful for capitalism to have these others so that it may compare their situation to how well their workers live, however exploited, so that they may exploit them to a greater extent compared to than if those workers had no comparison of poverty.

To get into government control, if material reality shapes politics rather than the other way around, then I propose that politics are subservient to the material forces of capitalism.

In communist circles, there is the idea that the state is fundamentally a tool of oppression used by the ruling class on the other classes. While I am likely missing the nuances inherent in the discussion coming straight from communists, I am able to produce my own nuance to this idea, which I believe to be at least partly true if said in an inflammatory way.

It is true that the government is controlled by the same people who control society. The nuance is that it is the higher positions of power that are held by the minority controllers of society, and this depends on the nature of societal rule in each country. An idea I have held for a long time is that the UK is the land of the landlord. We live on a small tiny island, so it feels only fitting that the most powerful in our society base their power in being able to own that land. For contrast, I have long believed that in the united states of America the seats of power are held by capitalists, and this too seems true. In the UK, the vast majority of parliament are landlords. In the unites states, most high-ranking positions of power are held by people with investment in the stock industry, board members and former CEOs, and people who own large companies.

However, just because the higher positions of power are being held by these minority rulers of society, generally all described as capitalists, the government is not made up exclusively of capitalists, that would be delusional. Instead, it is the contradiction of modern states to have the people who “control” the government consist of the capitalists, the minority rulers of society, and for the workers of the government to be exactly that - workers.

It is a common characteristic in our UK government that those controlling it are asking for wild and showy policies, and it is then the role of the government worker - the civil servants - to figure out exactly what is meant, and how to implement their policies. As the ruling class are wildly disconnected with the actual machinations of the government and, although not particularly relevant, the working world as a whole, their policies usually are nonsensical and difficult to implement due to their unrealistic demands.

And here I link the topic back to notions of authority and control: the commonly held idea is that governments are ruled by the masses for the masses. The idea I’m proposing here instead is that governments are ruled by the ruling class, the capitalists, for the masses, ultimately maintaining a veneer of being “for the people” by the means of its position in the relationship between the ruling class and the subservient classes.

It is not an easy relationship. The difficulty in it is that the majority classes, the subservient one, the working class, ultimately hold power in society because they work it. The ruling classes must then broker the relationship, make cases for their position in society. Negotiate amongst themselves the best ways to maintain the control of society. And ultimately, provide concessions to the working class in the form of public programmes like public healthcare, in hopes that the working class remains complacent.

A brief tangent on wealth and the UK

The analysis of modernity is that the ruling classes are becoming incapable of affording their concessions due to the degradation of capitalism in our countries.

And capitalism is degrading because it is moving aboard. Put briefly, money in the UK which we have from centuries of being a global imperial superpower and exploiting foreign countries, is slowly leaving the UK as people purchase produce from foreign companies. These companies produce their goods in places that have not made as many concessions to their workers as the UK; it is cheaper for those companies to set up abroad and sell their product here rather than set up here and sell their product here.

For these reasons that companies do not set up in the UK, the UK then produces less. It cannot make up for the money moving out of its nation with money moving in because it simply cannot compete. The “educated” sectors are simply not enough: the UK cannot produce software instead of steel. India and China, the two places most industry moves to because of their cheap labour, are perfectly capable of producing their own non-material produce (such as software).

As money leaves the country, taxes do to. Workers are paid less and less, British capitalists ultimately do not pay their fair share, and the concessions they make with the government become unaffordable, and we loose the NHS.

The only solution for this under global capitalism is the degradation of the UK worker. The only way for the country as a whole to gain any form of wealth is for the UK worker to become as cheap as the Chinese worker - for it to be as cheap to set up here than it is in foreign countries.

The alternative is the UK shuts off its trade to the world. The workers will loose all of the benefits of foreign goods in hopes that the capitalists ruling us can rebuild the UK economy. This is completely unrealistic, the UK is not capable of producing everything required by modern society. A global economy is a necessity for any modern economy.

A way that it could be managed is if the UK were in some sort of unified trade organisation with a bunch of other nations, merging its economic power with those of other similarly sized nations perhaps of similar heritage and history as to become part of a larger whole, where as part of this larger collective the capitalists of the economic union would have a sort of collective bargain. Perhaps this economic power would become comparable in economic capacity to those most powerful in the world, such as the US, India, and China. Whatever might this economic union be?

Finally, the ultimate solution would be an upheaval of global capitalism, or at least the battle for worker’s rights and concessions to be made in those competing countries where the industry is moving to. But this is largely the task of the people of that nation, and all the UK people could hope to achieve is to support any mass workers movement that arises in these nations in any way they can.

Democracy

When I state that the governments of our world are controlled by the capitalists and other majority classes, the most immediate dismissal of this point is that we live in a democracy. Because they are the only systems I engage with, I can only use the democratic systems of the US and the UK as an example, but I’ve no doubt the same is applicable to other nations in similar material positions to these.

The US does not have a democracy. I will make the position that neither does the UK later in this part, and you may disagree with elements of that, but it is blatantly obvious that the united states of America does not have a system in which the people vote for a leader.

What the US has is a system where people have two choices, and these are the only two choices in the political system. Independents exist, and so do smaller parties, but the vast majority of the voting peoples do not have the time nor effort to engage with the political system. This is by design and is a natural by-product of overworking the people. It is also by blatant effort to stop political discussion and organisation within the workplace by companies. After soul-draining labour, all workers can do is rest, and that any of them engage in politics to become well-educated leftists is a testament to human will. That any of them can engage in the politics of anti-empathy and hatred of the right is a testament to the press’s ability to stir fear, and provoke human will against itself with false targets.

In a system where not many people can engage with politics, people have little information to go with. They are given two candidates: the Democrats and the Republicans. Both are shit. One is lead by some disillusioned bigots saying whatever they think will get them in office, saying that they’ll make things better but they never have. The other are the same, but with more hatred and bigotry. At least their leader is enthusiastic and cares about things, and all of the news says that immigration, trans people, and DEI are a problem and this person says they’ll fix it all, whereas the other party recently put a woman up for candidacy.

There are three rational camps: do not vote because either option will lead to difficulty, vote for the one that will cause the least difficulty but will nevertheless continue the downfall of society, or vote for the person who says with conviction that they will make things better, who you may also choose to vote for on a single issue because they’ve covered every worker-dividing press hit saying they’ll fix it.

The fact of the matter is that voter turnout in the united states is abysmal because there are no good options, and in reality the people of the united states are better to engage with the systems that more directly affect their day to day life, I will get into that later.

In the UK, things are at least more fair, but we are still given two options due to the phenomenon of strategic voting and the problems of first-past-the-post. Next election, people will have the choice between a trump-like figure, who says they will change things and make things better, hitting on the issues of the press, or they will vote for the status quo of a broken Britain.

It is the same situation, other parties only stand to split the vote and give more power for Farage as the Tory party withers away as a bickering lot of landlords. The people of the world will suffer, people who are fleeing hardship in their country will be drowned in the channel, and the transgender population of the UK will have to fight for their very right to exist.

I suppose my position is not that we are not in a democracy. After all, what is a democracy if not the choice to choose between the extinction of trans people or the extinction of trans people and the withdrawal of human rights. My position is that this is not a democracy for the workers, it is factions of the British capitalists fighting amongst themselves to buy out as much press as they can to put their good word in to the British people, or to say whatever you can that is agreeable in light of Capitalism’s latest and dated scapegoats, so that they can convince the working people of Britain that their faction is better than the other.

I really hope that the large minorities of non-white British folk do not vote for Farage, on accounts of him being a racist bigot. The only hope I have for the next election is that the multiculturalism in Britain is enough to avoid ReformUK.

Crime

In radical spheres, it is generally understood that the law explicitly exists to control people. A large part of radicalism is a rejection of the law’s authority, and the open challenge of it.

From a more left-wing perspective, there is the idea that law and the police exist more to manage the working class and protect capitalism than to actually stop and fight crime. From my perspective, the police exists in contradiction to its idealised form. The police exist to protect businesses and maintain the status quo, while also juggling the veneer of how the police are portrayed as the protectors of society against criminals.

This is not to say that the police do not fulfil a useful role for the working class. To give an example, they are often a poorly funded social security net with an implied responsibility to look after those society forgot about. Their presence will stop any immediate crimes between workers. But, as is provable through how the law is actually enforced, they will not protect workers. They will protect businesses.

An easy and blatant case is crimes with fines. These are only crimes for those who cannot pay them. Boris Johnson could have went speeding down the M1 at autobahn-speeds, and it would have been forgiven after a week of press coverage and public scandal. Your mate Mike might not be able to pay rent if they get a speeding ticket. I hope my anecdote doesn’t distract from the actual message that there are many “crimes” that are explicitly only meaningful for the poorer in society to commit.

It is common sentiment that it is your responsibility to look after and lock up your bike. It is your responsibility to keep your pockets and your phone safe. But when it comes to businesses, it is the police’s explicit responsibility for their protection. If these are not the responsibilities of the police, then the police do not work to protect the common folk, as these are the types of crimes that people are most often exposed to.

It is not like the police cannot genuinely help with these crimes. For an example of what the police could do to help against bike theft, I’ve heard from someone in the university that they had left a bike in the university unlocked, and when they came back to it some personnel affiliated with the university had locked up the bike for them and provided a phone number to call to unlock the bike, which was a prompt response. The police could do a similar thing with poorly locked bikes, but they don’t for several reasons, one of which I’d suggest are how they don’t actually exist to stop bike thievery.

There are a myriad of ways that our government could genuinely reduce crimes on the street, most if not all of which could involved defunding the police in favour of policies that support those who are in positions where they need the police, which are provably more effective than the police at stopping these sorts of crimes. But they do not happen, because there is no genuine interest for those in control of the government to help those in situations like that.

People living in poverty, people who are homeless, those left on the street by the system, they serve society as an exhibition. They are what happens if you don’t get a job, if you don’t work. If you don’t pay rent. They are not only a means of inflicting fear, but they also serve as a “reserve” workforce. If you demand more working rights, if you try to unionise or fight against your bosses, these downtrodden people are said to be so ready to take up your position.

This is coming directly from that conversation with the online friend. They brought up an incident where Polish police, border guard, or army (I cannot remember which one, and frankly it’s not too pertinent to the discussion) were given the authority to shoot at “illegal immigrants” trying to cross the border. In this discussion with them, I attempted to bring up the empathetic position that people who have immigrated are fleeing from deadly conditions in their home country. They have likely wandered for thousands of kilometres in harsh conditions only to be turned away at a border. I attempted to insert that these are people who deserve to be treated with respect.

The conversation continued with the paraphrased claim that “if they’re literally climbing up walls and over barbed wire, what else are you going to do to keep them out”. This person’s general position is that because crossing a border without engaging with the appropriate bureaucracy is illegal, it should therefore not be done under any circumstances, and because it is a crime it is morally justifiable to stop this crime with threats of immediate execution by firing squad.

They might assert that “not be done under any circumstances” is a poor judgement of their phrasing, but I cannot think of any non-hypothetical situation where illegal border crossing is morally justifiable, and in fact should be done.

Their position seems to be informed by how illegal immigration is bad. They once admitted that immigrants are good for the economy, and the brief discussions often lead to the admission that immigrants should seek legal methods of entering a country. But usually, I do not persist in explaining how such methods are not sufficient and can even lead to rejection, which for these people is not an option.

This understanding of the law - that it is something that should not be broken under any circumstances - gives the law a certain final authority that it frankly does not deserve.

In leftist circles, it is fairly uncontroversial to say that stealing from large corporations is morally justifiable. The most agreeable of these circumstances is when it is the only option for someone to get food. We should not let our mythical ideas of the law’s authority stop us from saying that someone should not have to die because they cannot afford food. We should not let the law stop us from actively supporting these people in defiance of the law.

It is not our responsibility to feed these people either. Charity is a small circular plaster stickered over a gaping laceration of a broken system. A right-wing position might be that it is that person’s personal responsibility to find legal routes to food, such as finding work by any means necessary. What this position doesn’t understand is that the situation of these people does not involve any way to get food legally. Defiance of the law is a last resort, and corporations that get stolen from can afford to have the entire stock of their supermarket stolen, so any argument that is not on principles is meaningless.

These “principles” too are given the same sort of mythical authority that the law is given, but I digress.

More radical left wing positions justify theft from large companies regardless of desperation. These justifications are less moral and more so backed with the understanding that these supermarkets are exploiting workers both here and abroad, so it may even be morally justifiable to steal than to pay. The workers will receive the same wage regardless, and the profit margins of the capitalists will not seriously be affected.

Social Contract

Authority is then just a social contract we all enter. It only has power because we choose to believe in it. It is only right and just insofar as we believe it is, because when you look past the veneer of myth, the story that the police tell, if you consider material reality, the law is just a piece of paper with some writing on it. Courts are not organisations of god-ordained deciders, who determine the ultimate authority of the law. They are sets of people, looking at pieces of paper, deciding what certain words mean.

The police are not the guardians of society, upholding public order in face of rioting. They are a bunch of people who are told by a bunch of other people to stand around and stop people from doing the things that a piece of paper says you can’t do. And their chiefs? I don’t know, but ultimately it all goes back up to the capitalists, who hold the positions in government that vote on what laws should be passed.

They are not the righteous leaders of our nation. They are a bunch of people that were ticked off on a ballot because the alternative was wasting youre vote on a political conviction you actually believe in and / or letting a tory or reform nutter win. The leader of their party is a landlord, and about a quarter of them are landlords, which is not representative of the UK population.

The working people of a society should not have to conform to the rules cultivated and informed by a small portion of society.

Also borders are fake, immigrants aren’t taking you’re jobs any more than capitalism is ripping you off, and under no circumstances should anyone be punished for acting rationally under material conditions out of their control.

Legal? Protest?

Recently, there is something that has highly bothered me. The idea of a “legal protest” makes no legitimate sense - especially informed with my ideas of authority and the law.

Protests are often in active defiance of the law. They represent the people getting together to let their voices roar across some city’s streets. This should have no legal restriction. If anything, they should serve as a warning to the government. It is a representation that this is how many people care about a thing, and if that thing doesn’t change, then this is how many people the government will have to answer to.

Similarly, laws on unions also seem blatantly counter-worker. All this time, I’ve been believing that the government has to maintain an image of being for the people. In its defence, there are laws protecting workers as often as there are laws protecting businesses. I might say these are concessions to the working class and you might disagree and counter to say that the laws were written by the people and for the people. I might say that laws protecting businesses are often protecting them from other businesses or bad market practices, which are explicitly the capitalists trying to manage themselves and set their own laws.

But labour unions, specifically, seem nonsensical to mention in law.

The principle of a labour union is the people standing up for themselves against a company working to exploit them. Their power comes from their collective ability to organise against a company, utilising the way that they ultimately control the means of production to scare a company into treating them better.

It is a form of collective resistance like a protest, except it is an action that targets material reality. It doesn’t make sense for this act of resistance, done by a mass of organised workers against a misbehaving company, has restrictions by law. It is almost explicitly companies giving themselves legal right to utilise the police force to protect their profits, in direct opposition to the will of the masses.

The most egregious form of this is general strikes being illegal. The working people explicitly have power in society because they are the ones who produce, and to take this power away from them is a ridiculously pro-capitalist law that should not be followed. Our ability to organise and perform this display of control is in such an opposition to the status quo that it must be made illegal. It’s egregious because general strikes specifically are a way of attempting to shut down a nation’s economy to usually get the government to do something rather than a private company. It’s as if the government saw a potential threat to their power and slapped a “please don’t do this” sign on it.

Workers should general strike for power at every chance they get, and if the government upholds the unjust laws around general strikes then let it be a display of their true allegiance.