Anton Jäger on 'These Strange Political Times”

The right today … is just as inconsequential as the left, and for exactly the same reason, that it’s hyper but not formally organised. “The people who go on marches subscribe to the same podcast, might follow the same pages on Instagram, might be on the same Telegram channels, but they don’t have an organisational history they shared before they entered the march. This is different even to the BNP, where marchers had a shared history in football hooliganism, and the National Front. That shared subculture is no longer there.

He says this is clear with Reform UK, “which is so heavily leader-dependent. The entire movement is at risk with this scandal of the crypto-billionaire, because there’s no party infrastructure. There is just Nigel and a smartphone and then a couple of private donors.”

To me, this fails to take into account that the right is different to the left: they have more money. “Maybe I understated the availability of private funding,” he says mildly. “The fact that we can even talk of a trillionaire, such as Elon Musk, means there’s a complete secession of that individual from what we could even call society. That is a variable in explaining why hyperpolitics on the right thrives and why hyperpolitics on the left has found it much more difficult to achieve tangible results.” They are not more organised or more ideologically coherent or more strategic; they are just better funded – which puts quite a lot on the shoulders of capital itself as the overarching organising principle of global politics. Money might not be the only thing talking, but it’s the only thing getting what it wants.

Jäger explains why we are living in the age of hyperpolitics

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The Qarmatians (Al-Qaramita)

By Nadeem Mahjoub Documentary film-makers G. Troeller and M. C. Defarge once asked a cabinet minister in South Yemen, why socialistic ideas were so readily acceptable in that part of the Arab world. He replied: “Because we have been communists for a thousand years! My mother was Qarmatian.” Official Muslim scholars and clerics, and many so-called moderates (whether individuals or groups) oppose sedition ( fitna ). Tensions and contradictions in society should be solved peacefully and even if the ruler was unjust and impious, it is generally accepted he should still be obeyed, for any kind of order is better than anarchy and sedition. “The tyranny of a sultan for a hundred years causes less damage than one year’s tyranny exercised by the subjects against one another.” Revolt was justified only against a ruler who clearly went against the command of God and His prophet.” 1 Here we look at not what happened in the minds of people who call for calm, oppose dissent and preach the re...

"A second position argues against transition, which is transitology itself. It is well known—especially among economists—as the sudden mobilization of a considerable mass of experts who are generally foreigners,generally Western, who come to preach the good word and to propose ready-made models of democracy. The science of the transition has become a financial windfall, a market. And the word transition has of course become a reflex of language, a term of reference, a call for tenders ( appel d’offres ) to which the whole society was supposed to respond. Consequently, the reticence that one can express is the following: our history is framed, transition is a heteronomy. Every democratic revolution is henceforth supposed to take a unique, imposed path, which is, at the same time, indistinctly democratic and liberal (or neoliberal). A more or less non-“negotiable” package. It is necessary to highlight the imposed character (and imposed from the outside) of this coming to t...

UK

"We are all in it together" A letter from a doctor to Boris Johnson published a few months ago: ' Johnson has contributed to thousands of deaths ' Related 'The greatest global science failure for a generation' 'Herd immunity' or lockdown

Putting a Racist in Their Place

Street art

Big Tech Takeover: Authoritarian Capture

An article subject to subscription . Read here then continue with some excerpts below. ******** Palantir is the data backbone of the authoritarian state, and Anduril is its autonomous warfare command system, turning information dominance into automated military power. Its Lattice platform connects satellite feeds, radar data and battlefield imagery into a single operational network, allowing military missions to be planned and executed at lightning speed. The company claims its systems can function at ‘level 5 autonomy’: launching, identifying targets, striking and returning without human intervention. [Starshield, SpaceX’s of Elon Musk] When NATO’s battlefield communications depend on infrastructure controlled by one man who openly endorses European far-right parties, defence autonomy becomes theatrical fiction. Other solutions such as GovCloud, from Amazon Web Services, or Azure Government, provided by Microsoft – in partnership with OpenAI, Meta and Anthropic – are now e...

Women and Sex Work in Syria, Tunisia, Morocco and the West

A long exchange How much is the condition of syrian women changing under the new regime? The condition of Syrian women under the new transitional government following the fall of the Assad regime is changing in a highly contradictory manner, marked by symbolic high-level appointments juxtaposed against a sharp decline in overall political representation, deteriorating legal protections, and a severe humanitarian crisis. While the interim administration promotes an image of inclusivity, women’s rights groups and activists express deep concern over an increasingly patriarchal and conservative political environment. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] The transition has impacted Syrian women across several distinct areas: 📉 Declining Political Representation Marginal Parliamentary Presence : In the transitional elections, women won just 6 out of 119 seats (roughly 4%) in the new parliament. This is a severe drop from the 10% to 13% representation they held under the Assad ...

Charlie Hebdo criticised for calling Brussels attacks tip of Islam 'iceberg' “Such categorization of an entire community as an insidious poison is a move we have seen before.” See also Charlie Hebdo is Sadism, not Satire Shlomo Sand: 'I am not Charlie' The Red Flag and the Tricolore Le Rouge et le Tricolore

"In the same way that Robinson [Crusoe] was able to obtain a sword, we can just as well suppose that [Man] Friday might appear one fine morning with a loaded revolver in his hand, and from then on the whole relationship of violence is reversed: Man Friday gives the orders and Crusoe is obliged to work. . . . Thus, the revolver triumphs over the sword, and even the most childish believer in axioms will doubtless form the conclusion that violence is not a simple act of will, but needs for its realization certain very concrete preliminary conditions, and in particular the implements of violence; and the more highly developed of these implements will carry the day against primitive ones. Moreover, the very fact of the ability to produce such weapons signifies that the producer of highly developed weapons, in everyday speech the arms manufacturer, triumphs over the producer of primitive weapons. To put it briefly, the triumph of violence depends upon the production of a...

"It is a peculiarity of capitalists and the bourgeoisie to think that we workers have no culture," adds the novelist, whose many tattoos include one of Karl Marx on his left arm. Argentine cleaner's double life as prize-winning novelist

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