I couldn't agree more with your post, like you I voted Remain, I warned people repeatedly, campaigned and marched in support of Remain; was desperately sad and frustrated at the result and angry at the leave lies (NHS bus for example). Fortunately for me all my friends family and colleagues were Remain too.
Well I suppose that Marks was on the button when he wrote that capital accumulates through “surplus value.”
I thought at first that was Michael Marks of M&S.
I'll beat a retreat now.
That if course should be Marx - iPad thinks it knows best!
Well I suppose that Marks was on the button when he wrote that capital accumulates through “surplus value.”
We can see this “accumulation” concentrating into the billionaires bank accounts, and it is they who are running the system. Musk being top of a very smelly heap.
Firstly I apologise, it’s a long political read so make a cuppa and take a seat. Yesterday I came across this on Facebook, I tried to stick with it but to me it’s just a whole load of words and I don’t really understand what the message or point is. I note that 1.8k like or love the ramblings, 360 commented and 490 shared!
ON THE ANGER OF THE ELECTORATE (Photo by Diane Arbus)
Six weeks on from the US election and it’s becoming clear that Donald Trump’s victory was not the landslide that his supporters claim. You have to go all the way back to 1960 to find a successful candidate winning the popular vote by a narrower margin. Trump won 49.81% of votes, just 1.48% ahead of Kamala Harris. It’s a result that puts me in mind of the Brexit referendum, which was won by the Leave campaign on 52% of the vote.
As with Trump’s 2024 victory, that slim margin was taken as a mandate by Eurosceptic Tories for the most extreme form of split with the European Union, one which saw no scope for ties of trade or common rights. In a week when YouGov published a poll revealing that the majority of Britons who voted to leave the EU would now accept a return to the free movement of people in exchange for access to the EU single market, it’s worth reflecting on whether the reality of Brexit has anything to tell us about how Trump’s second term may play out.
How has this turn-around in public opinion about Brexit come to pass? To understand that, we have to look at the outcomes with regard to the two central arguments that were deployed by the Leave campaign: less red tape and less immigration.
No one should be surprised that the promise of less red tape from Brussels has proved to be a falsehood. If you leave an area in which you enjoyed frictionless trade, you can be certain that exporting goods to that area will become more difficult. Barriers, both physical and administrative, will go up and you will inevitably have to spend more time filling in more forms. Compliance with rules made in Brussels will be a fact of life if you wish to sell you products into the EU. Goods that moved freely within the single market area, both imports and exports, are now subject to tariffs. Producers are forced to chose between either passing their increased costs on to consumers or going bust.
Taking control of our borders was the other key message from the Leave campaign, with evidence suggesting that many people voted leave specifically because they wanted to see fewer immigrants entering the UK. However, under the points-based system for work visas put in place by the Tories after Brexit, net immigration has hit record levels, reaching 906,000 in the year to June 2023. The overwhelming majority of these people came to the UK legally on work or student visas.
Of course Brexit caused a massive drop in immigration from the EU, as European citizens lost the right to live and work in the UK. However, they have simply been replaced with people from countries like India, Pakistan, Nigeria, China and Zimbabwe, currently the top five nationalities of migrants to the UK. In total 86% of those arriving this year were from non-EU countries.
Brexit offered the British people a simple answer to some complex problems: why isn’t the economy working for everyone? Because of red tape from Brussels. Why can’t you get a house/job/doctors appointment? Because the EU allows too many people to come to the UK. The Vote Leave campaign promised that all of this could be resolved by leaving the European Union.
The YouGov poll suggests that since Britain left the EU in 2020, people have come to recognise that tariffs make everyday goods more expensive. The acceptance of free movement also implies that Leave voters have realised that, whatever the solution to rising net migration is, it’s not been solved by leaving the EU.
As a Remain voter, it gives me no great pleasure to point out that these possibilities were put to the electorate during the Brexit referendum, yet they chose to ignore them, in much the way that Trump voters chose to ignore the negative aspects of electing him for a second term. I don’t know many Trump voters, but the Brexit voters I know are not ignorant people. They simply chose not to listen to the arguments of those urging caution.
What would make otherwise reasonable people put their fingers in their ears and sing “la-la-la-la” while someone was trying to get them to face facts? Arch-Brexiteer Michael Gove neatly summed up this ostrich-like behaviour when he claimed that “people have had enough of experts”. What could possibly induce people to over-ride the evidence that voting for Brexit would likely be harmful to their livelihood?
My hunch is anger. Not the white-hot fury that would lead someone to shoot a CEO in the back on the streets of Manhattan - I’m talking more about a long term frustration with the way things are going. If you feel you no longer have any agency over your existence, that your vote doesn’t really change your situation, then the temptation to do something that throws a spanner in the works of the system is eventually going to seem like a reasonable response to the situation you feel yourself to be trapped in.
Brexit was major spanner in the works, as was the election of Donald Trump five months later. But this isn’t just a right wing phenomenon. Arguably, the first spanner was Jeremy Corbyn's election as leader of the Labour Party in September 2015. Love him or loathe him, he represented a challenge to the Westminster way of doing things, a rejection of the managerial style of politics that came to dominate the late 1990s and early 00s. And I believe that the election of Joe Biden in 2020 was a reaction to Trump’s failure to make a difference to the lives of working people.
The pattern here is one of rejection of the status quo. While Trump made some gains on his 2020 vote tally, it was the missing Democrat voters who gifted him victory, a similar situation to this summer’s UK election. Labour have a huge majority in parliament, but won just over 33% of the popular vote. If you look at the raw numbers, Starmer won despite attracting fewer votes than Corbyn managed in both the 2017 and 2019 general elections.
Labour have a mandate, but do they have the people behind them? I wouldn’t take them for granted. Likewise Trump. The American electorate are so tightly divided - 49.1% vs 48.33% - that it would only take a small percentage of Biden voters returning to the Democratic Party fold in the midterms to turn him into a lame duck.
Such volatile voting patterns suggest that the old framework for discussing politics is no longer fit for purpose. Left and right don’t have much salience in a post-ideological world. Voters now appear to be dividing into those who believe the system needs to be reformed and those who simply want to burn it all down. And when the chief fire starter is the richest man in the world, current events can be baffling for those of us who learned our politics in the 20th century.
Nonetheless the underlying problem is one that Marxists would recognise. The cost of living is constantly rising and job security is precarious. Capitalism is not delivering a decent standard of living for working people. Of all the things that people are refusing to hear - the climate is heating, Brexit was is mistake, Trump is a liar, a bully and a convicted sex offender - the failure of neoliberal capitalism is the elephant in the room.
The inflexibility of an economy that prioritises rewarding shareholders over paying workers decent wages is warping the body politic. Rather that consider policies that redistribute the balance of wealth more fairly, the likes of Elon Musk and Javier Milei are promoting slash and burn prescriptions that are as simplistic as Brexit and just as likely to exacerbate the problems faced by families trying to make ends meet.
Across the political spectrum, people are angry, that much is clear. Although they cannot yet bring themselves to say it, capitalism is the system that they are pushing back against when they vote to punish the status quo.
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