Couldn't organise a piss up in a brewery.
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356 posts and 33 image replies omitted.>>2583313>Honestly the UK left could easily take over the lower rungs of the judiciary if they actually knew anything about how British institutions actually function.Good idea
>>2583740>an issue with curtis though is that he appears to have no concept of history before the 20th centuryOther than perhaps extending this to 19th century for industrialisation, how important do you really think history before that is for influencing present day?
Isn't that one of Curtis's main messages? That our obsession with the past, or rather, a mythological past, is what's keeping us from coming up with new ideas?
Not a britbong, but I just hope you're all aware that any group, organization, or individual who participates in the Your Party fiasco is going to end up as utterly embarrassed and politically discredited as the people who participated in the DSA over here in the states. Hope you all steer clear of the mud
>>2584241>as the people who participated in the DSA over here in the states.Damn, Zohran must feel very embarrassed now getting elected mayor in one of the most important cities of the planet.
>>2584245Get back to me in a year or even just six months and tell me if you're still on board the Zohran train.
How many fucking times do the Dems have to roll out the "young, pretty, charming, social media-savvy left-wing progressive who's changing the system from the INSIDE" routine before you goldfish-brain nitwits realize it's a con and stop falling for it.
>>2584241Being as embarrassed and politically discredited as the DSA would be a major improvement from the level of embarrassing and politically discrediting that the 'left' in this country has been till now. We can only hope that we're able to achieve the level of respectability and political sophistication the american comrades are operating at in this miserable shithole.
>>2580322The SWP (U.S.) is different from the U.K. one and I don't think there's any relation. The American one kind of had a moment in the 60s but it's been a really Jehova's Witness-style sect of old Jewish ladies for awhile under a guy named Jack Barnes. The British SWP has been more of a thing on the left there for years, like they actually organize demos and shit, but
>>2580340 has more details.
>>2580401Beautiful. Like a praying mantis is beautiful, but still.
>>2580415That's interesting. Off the dome, my guess is that it's because the DSA in reality operates more like a loose confederation of local chapters rather than a single national organization. The role of the national organization is really overstated. NYC-DSA (which is the largest chapter) is practically its own organization and National DSA can't really tell them what to do.
Part of it might be that the U.S. is just so large, it makes it impossible to enforce such a thing, even if the National DSA wanted to. Also there's really nowhere else to go anyways so everybody piles into it. Because what the fuck else are you going to do? It's all very local. Like in my city, there's not that many socialists / communists anyways and everybody knows each other and more or less cooperates (except with the three old SWP members, again, the U.S. version, because they're crazy), although a Maoist group broke up recently in some infighting. They were nice though. Like maybe you get some anarchist wreckers who form a sort of local sect. But there's some DSA thing happening in Florida, that's happening in Florida and has little if any relevance on what a DSA group in Colorado is doing.
>>2584241I STG a lot of you yanks on this site dont want a better world, all you people are interested in is a counter-cultural identity that is still subversive in your country.
>>2584340Your SWP sounds like our 'spartacists'. Some crazy old ladies.
>>2584340>The British SWP has been more of a thing on the left there for years, like they actually organize demos and shitThey organise the most pathetic demos possible that consist of walking around town centres yelling slogans and holding up placards that do nothing to build class consciousness.
They also actively hijack movements with better praxis and then lie to them.
Good article on this:
https://livesrunning.wordpress.com/2025/08/21/working-with-stand-up-to-racism-the-good-the-bad-the-deeply-annoying/
>The SutR people in the room all insisted on speaking (at what was billed as a short meeting with an absolute time limit of 1 hour). Their speeches copied one another. They made boring, generalised, interventions of no relevance to our immediate situation. Yes, racism and fascism are bad: the people in the room didn’t need to be told it, that’s why they were in the room.
>What we got on the Saturday though was an SutR presence which took the form of familiar, routine, chants. They took control of the PA, refused to allow one of the agreed musicians (Orchestrated Discontent) to perform. They accepted some speakers from the agreed set list, imposed others which no one had agreed and who’d played no part in the campaign but belonged to the SWP’s lost of its long-term allies (eg the People’s Assembly). A number of SWP/Sutr stewards wouldn’t take direction from the non-SWP chief steward, but stood passively at the front of the march doing nothing as the police brought out their batons
>The other Islington activists saw with frustration that the protest had become exactly what our meeting had argued against, a left mobilisation done on muscle memory, led by people from outside the borough, shouting “fascist scum” over and over again at a right-wing protest in which there were, as far as the rest of us could tell, no actual fascists, certainly none anywhere near the leadership of that protest.
>At multiple points, two Stand up to Racism and SWP leaders (Paul Holborow and Weyman Bennett) lied to other people in the coalition.
>Bennett promised he hadn’t been asked and wouldn’t speak to the cops. Bennett wrote to activists, “I’ve not had contact re police.” I’ve got the screenshot in case any friends need to see it.
>But when negotiators finally spoke to the police, two days later, they reported back on the three conversations Bennett had already had with them – the times he’d spoken to them, and what he’d said. The gist of which was that our numbers would be fewer than they were (“no more than 500”) , we wouldn’t get in the police’s way and we’d be happy to leave as early as the copes wanted. He’d signed up already to a vision of a protest in which everyone on the left would shelter in pens. NHS is falling apart. Anecdotally I've spent 2 months trying to get hold of my meds, made about 10 phone calls, and had my appointments cancelled 3 times.
How do we fix it?
>>2584429option 1: give it more money. the UK spends a relatively low amount per head on healthcare compared to other first world countries (it's italy/spain tier rather than germany tier, important to remember whenever some dickhead says "why don't we copy germany's system?")
option 2: give it more money and reform NHS England to be organized more like NHS Scotland. NHS England had a lot of basically pointless reform under Blair and Cameron while NHS Scotland didn't. By most measures NHS Scotland is as good or equal to NHS England. (That's why, when proving otherwise, people cheat and compare population health rather than the NHS itself. Scots are less healthy for a variety of reasons, but the NHS treats them just as well.)
option 3: more stupid Blair style reform that sucks up time and money and doesn't do anything but does let the government indulge its fetish for cosplaying blairism
option 4: abandon the basic principles of the NHS and introduce some kind of pay-to-play insurance system for middle and upper income groups which will no doubt have an arbitrary cutoff area where you're suddenly a lot poorer for no real reason, and probably some nonsense like the unemployed not getting any insurance unless they're on benefits, only because this is britain there remains chronic underinvestment and the government won't let you import 15 million doctors and nurses so costs skyrocket while waiting times remain basically the same
option 5: as above but somehow overcome britain's institutional dynamics so that costs go up but service quality also goes up because market dynamics operate the way they would elsewhere. it's ugly and it gets rid of the last remaining possible reason to have any pride - or indeed belief - in a nation called 'britain', but the upside is that if it works you might actually get healthcare from the healthcare system.
option 6: (sneaky, evil) move existing funding around so that emphasis is put on giving healthcare to working age people without pointless waiting and gatekeeping while creating bureaucratic nightmares that leave people above the average life expectancy unlikely to receive treatment, since costs basically increase with age.
option (191)7: as comrade sultana says, nationalize the entire economy. communism salves all ills.
>>2584429Bern thinking tbis today too. How do we begin to generate analysis and a program for wide scale NHS reform?
Are there convos about this going on in YP?
>>2584422Yea. Every city has similar horror stories with the SWP. I remember once they asked the local antifa anarchists to protect their meeting but then phoned the fucking police when the fucking fash turned up.
>>2584408>Your SWP sounds like our 'spartacists'. Some crazy old ladies.Yeah I've run into the Sparts once, and I'm sure they're linked to the U.K. ones because that's how they roll. A Trot friend of mine who was in a Cliffite org (ISO, which iirc was fraternal with the U.K. SWP, later dissolved into the DSA) said they got violent outside their annual conference. The SWP here is an odd group, they're very pro-Cuba but also pro-Israel. I swear they don't have a member under the age of 60. I've only seen them turn up with their card table selling books and their newspaper at labor events but nobody else on the left wants anything to do with them.
But yeah, the ISO would've been the closest equivalent of the U.K. SWP until it dissolved. It was "big" on college campuses in the 2000s. It was like the main student socialist org back then.
>>2584422>They organise the most pathetic demos possible that consist of walking around town centres yelling slogans and holding up placards that do nothing to build class consciousness.That does sound like the old ISO.
>>2580598>Oh dear Lorrrd, imagine explaining to our American comrade the hilarity of the AWL et al.Oh yeah. I'm not sure we have an equivalent of them. Probably "Solidarity" and the journal "New Politics."
>Even Communist Party writers now accept that the ice-pick wielded by Stalin’s agent Ramon Mercador stopped Trotsky’s brain from functioning, but opinions differ on the reasons for the malfunctioning of his followers’ brains.
kek
>>2583732>you should have to complete an exam to be able to vote.>voteLib
>>2583488>was fun and reassuring in a "well, at least this horrible machine is going to fall to bits" sort of way.Really? Because TraumaZone implies the USSR was dissolved by people who wanted to do away with Communism for entirely selfish reasons, 90s Russia and Thatcherite Britain are both the desired “horrible machine” and our current system isn’t going to “fall to bits” because unlike the Soviet Union of the 1980s, the people in charge of Britain today are pleased as punch with how the machine works and will maintain it, tune it and run it thusly
Tbh it’s such a cliche now to relate the dysfunction of the late Soviet Union to “late stage” capitalism as though we can sit nice and pretty while waiting for capitalism to collapse as communism in Europe did.
But the resurgent bourgeoisie of the Warsaw Pact countries intentionally mismanaged Communism into dysfunction with breadlines to justify a return to Capitalism where stuff like breadlines are no longer considered dysfunctional but just movements of the market. The only difference being the narrative that *you* as an individual may rise above the breadlines to be the one selling the bread.
The “dysfunction” of “late stage” capitalism is nothing of the sort and therefore will never result in the collapse of the state in the way the USSR did.
>>2584459The people in charge aren't really happy. They don't want to give up their privileges, which is what fixing anything would demand, but they aren't happy. They want radical change and they want someone else to suffer for it.
Starmer got in because the people who run the country had two hopeless hopes: 1. That Starmer had a secret plan to fix things (he didn't, which is perhaps his most contemptible trait.), or 2. That Starmer, an experienced civil service, could control the machine better than the buffoonish Conservatives. In these hopes, they did everything they could to weigh the dice in his favour and the best they could turn out was a lower vote than in 2019, when they'd been doing all they could to stop Labour. They know how to destroy but not how to build. They'll probably put Reform in next, but Reform seem more like the last dying gasp of the whole delusion than the people who're likely to actually tear the lot apart. (Though in their blundering I suppose they could Yeltsin it.)
The odd thing about post-Thatcher Britain is that it's more like the late-
USSR than anything else, despite the 90s-Russia seeming blundered privatizations.
I mean look at the gas, electricity or water markets. They're exactly the kind of demented scheme Gorbachev would've overseen: stupider than mediocre central planning, shittier than mediocre free markets. A sort of cosplay economy for people who can't run real private companies, invariably dependent on state subsidy to bail them out of their own messes and state price-fixing to stop them doing something asinine. An excuse for would-be lower-upper-ranking civil servants to enrich themselves pretending to be businessmen. Railways were (and in part still are) the same, but are now being belatedly re-centralized.
What comes next will probably be worse, of course. But different. They can't drag 2008 on until the 2050s…
but of course, in 2017 i'd have said they can't drag it on until 2025… >>2584547She got raided again? Madnesss
>>2584547She retweted an image comparing Dresden to Gaza lmao. Nationalism is the fascists turf. No ammount of communist tailism will change that.
Bet Churchill wished he could have bombed Baku. Oh he was so fucking close, and all.
>>2583959you cant an historian if you think we live in a post-historical world. curtis is a victim of the spectacle.
>>2584673Curtis is only half-submerged in the spectacle. He argues against the spectacle whilst believing that all aspects of the modern fearful reactionary world has to do with our "fear" of the past. Which is itself a nostalgia fuelled spectacle.
>>2584682he just appears too idealist to me. even the end of "cant get you out of my head" was an obtuse plea for radical "imagination", as if we are ensnared in a system of ideas rather than structural violence based on wage labour. he is a fan of mark fisher, so what can you do?
>>2584794That's as far as the British Media lets you go, by no means do I think Curtis or Fisher are intentionally holding back a true opinion, but they wouldn't let anyone who has a solution be published in Waterstones or given a spot on the BBC.
A housing estate and 200+ homes in Derby have been evacuated for over 24 hours with bomb disposal squad still on the scene.
Police aren't being very open about it all yet but seems 2 Polish neo-nazi white nationalists living in the area had made a bunch homemade bombs and had planted some at a Pakistani cultural centre.
Since those explosives were detonated by bomb squad yesterday, I don't know why bomb squad are still here? Unless they're searching their property or checking other areas for more explosives?
Furthermore, afaik this hasn't even made national news yet? Like how normalised is this crap that nobody even cares anymore?
I'm just so tired of living in interesting times. I don't want a society where this is normal.
>>2584429Sometimes I hear stories from the NHS, and particularly the way doctors treat people, look down on people, don't believe them, gaslight them, and its kinda got nothing to do with funding because it would be cheaper to listen to them the first time rather than do follow up appointments where you are subsequently told the last guy misdiagnosed you, and sometimes, along with many other things I get this thought that it is actually cultural.
Not in a racist way nonononono but actually british people are among the most class concious people in the world, in a bad way, we are so status driven and oritentated, take such great joy in looking down on people and shitting on people are just cunts, that doctors being cunty is a product of the fact everyone is a cunt here
>>2585128in my dark phase of thinking anyways
>>2585128>the way doctors treat people, look down on people, don't believe them, gaslight themthats just a common problem with doctors (at least on the other side of the channel its a common criticism as well). They're well educated, high status, paid well enough, which is normal because they do deal with people health and life threatening situations, but it also obviously go to their head a bit. They're also very hierarchical and used to being obeyed (often by women), and used to being the sole responsible of the medical decision, and have petty bourgeois mentality (being their own boss). All of which tend to not punish bad behavior
And their material incentives is to do quick diags without paying too much attention to details, statistically its the most efficient use of their time (people misdiagnosed will come back and pay again anyway), even if of course, from the pov of the patient, its awful and can lead to real damage
>>2580153The SWP is a detail, the bigger question is really: Why is factionalism such a danger for party democracy? And the answer is that the combo
winner-takes all elections + delegates voting for delegates makes it very easy for a tiny and well-organized minority to completely dominate everything.
>>2580070>>mix of delegates and lottery winners>is actually good. When it was all lottery winners, that was dumb, but this serves to blunt the power of delegates and mitigate chicanery and fuckery to some extent by halving their overall power- but you still get that function where people back somebody who is good at communicating and arguing for things. Its actually kind of goodYeah makes sense.
>>2585128>>2585262Playing devils advocate perhaps, but isn't it possible that people generally only go to the doctor when they're either in pain or fear for their health or both and are upset because a professional who sees people believing themselves to be on the verge of death all day every day, aren't showing the same level of concern as they themselves are?
>>2585128While you're not wrong, a small part of this
is funding. Britain loves to be penny wise and pound foolish: it may be trivial to treat you now, but that would mean spending a few pounds when it's not necessary. Once you're at death's door, however, then you can be taken seriously.
>>2585262Never forget the doctors opposed the NHS. Even today they are not properly integrated under the state as they should be.
>>2585276Even if you have to provide care to people every day there's no excuse for being callous. At least nurses can genuinely complain of a horrible workload, what is the excuse of (non junior) doctors?
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