K-punk by Mark Fisher Darren Ambrose

Author:Mark Fisher,Darren Ambrose
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House LLC (Publisher Services)

PART FOUR

FOR NOW, OUR DESIRE IS NAMELESS: POLITICAL WRITINGS

don’t vote, don’t encourage them1

There was a time when elections at least seemed to mean something. I still recall, viscerally, the hollow, bitter sense of total existential defeat the day after Foot’s tragically bound-for-disaster hard left succumbed to the storm troopers of SF Kapital under Thatcher, and I, only fifteen years old, contemplated “Five More Years” of Tory rule. I didn’t hear it at the time, but the song that always brings that feeling, that moment, is Mark Stewart’s “Liberty City”: “I’ll give a wave to the management mercenaries… Don’t their clean clothes look so pretty/Try to awaken then from the comforts of slavery…”

There are still those who would like to pretend that a Tory administration would be so much worse than New Labour, so that deigning to vote for anyone else would be an “indulgence”. Choosing “the least worst” is not making this particular choice, it is also choosing a system which forces you to accept the least worst as the best you can hope for. Naturally, the defenders of the dictatorship of the elite pretend — perhaps they even deceive themselves — that the particular slew of lies, compromise and smarm they are hawking is “only temporary”; that, at some unspecified time in the future, things will improve if only we support the “progressive” wing of the status quo. But Hobson’s choice is no choice, and the delusion of progressivism is not a psychological quirk, it is the structural delusion upon which liberal democracy is based.

Johan Hari tries to make the case for reluctantly voting New Labour today, on the grounds that the Tories are the only realistic alternative and they are manifestly worse than New Labour. But just what is the threat that Howard’s Tories pose? Will they suspend habeas corpus? Can’t, Toneeeeee’s already done it. Will they shamelessly and shamefully play to the rightwing gallery on immigration? Well, yes, but that’s only what the Joker Hysterical Face is already doing. (It’s not the war that made me lose any vestigial sentimental attachment to New Labour, it was their disgusting and despicable pandering to the right on immigration.)

Let’s dispense with this idea, once and for all, that New Labour has “improved” anything. New Labour is the worst of all worlds: Thatcherist managerialism without the Thatcherite attack on vested interests. In the pre-Thatcher 1970s, it took six carworkers to do the job of one; in the post-Thatcher Noughties, it takes six consultants to do the job of none (since the mission statement wasn’t worth writing in the first place). Same decadence, different beneficiaries. New Labour and its supporters scoff at the Tories’ idea that you could cut £35 billion in public spending and yet improve public services. As someone who works in public services, it strikes me as eminently plausible (not that I believe that the Tories would do it, or do it right, if they came to power, naturally). Cutting back on red tape, bureaucrats, paperwork would have two

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