SUMMER ANNOUNCEMENT
Just to
say that there will be a bit of a break from blogging over this period - in any case we have to go through a hiatus as
Boris Johnson, who won the premiership of Britain with an overwhelming mandate
from the (Conservative) people takes us round the houses, promises everybody
everything and gears up to win the expected general election. With persistent
undermining, from within and without, of Jeremy Corbyn, we may find ourselves
without a Labour spearhead just when we need one, though one hopes this doesn't happen.
A letter in one of yesterday’s papers put forward Sir Keir Starmer as a likely
and worthy successor to Corbyn and more likely to beat Boris Johnson than
anyone else. Sir Keir has many admirable qualities but he is about as
charismatic as a telegraph pole. By mere coincidence he also happens to be on the
Right in the Labour Party.
Labour is
right to keep the options open as between Remain and Leave. Opinion polls are
notoriously treacherous and no more so than in febrile times like ours now. If
they look like anything, they look like a public being wilfully confused over what
to think about anything. This does not amount to a ‘mandate’. But it is likely that the world systemic
crisis involving economies, politics, societies and warfare is deepening together
with the ever-underlying (and not so underlying) imminence of global warming.
This allows nihilist ‘leaders’, either intentionally or unintentionally funny,
to caper about in Britain, the USA, Italy, Ukraine, Turkey, Israel with no need
to resort to consistency, truth, realism, strategy (except by backroom boys) so
long as they can keep the plates spinning. This is unstable; in history the
truth will always will out. That is why for Hegel the true was the real: that
is, real by dint of being the real outcome to movement of events. It is also
necessary, because it is there. The truth in the real outcome has unmasked
(nearly) every charlatan in modern history. But, alas, too late to prevent the
damage being done.
When the only possible leaders turn
out to be fools and/or charlatans, then it is time for us masses to demolish
the leadership principle altogether. And with it the structures that rely on
leadership in the form of single-person ‘charismatic’ rule. Corbyn in this
sense is way ahead of Johnson: he has no wish to be a ‘leader’ in the
charismatic, individualist/egoist sense, and this is what shows up the obsolescence
of the leadership principle, a principle that Johnson and Trump embody for our
times.
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