Andrew’s Reviews > New Model Island: How to Build a Radical Culture Beyond the Idea of England > Status Update

Today currents were savvy attempts by a clique of cultural parasites to make themselves relevent under the new neoliberal behemoth. Rejecting "fustian Old Labour values" and to "move beyond a classically Marxist politics based on the experience of a mostly European industrial working class" was pretty much just a binning of socialism overall, one which managed to erase the fact that the working classes largely if not totally encompassed these minority groups, even in their Fordist heyday (Grunswick anyone?) but that these new identitarian politics were almost always fantasies created by minority group elites to gain the benefits of cultural capital by presenting their own minority status as a group essence, thus preserving their own class position and neatly binding minority groups into neat consumer groups ready for their integration into the neoliberal blob. Blairism then, far from representing some kind of intital sublimated center lift aspiration for a new leftism against neoliberalism, was in fact its example par excellance, better in fact even than Thatcher. Devolution, which he appears to be predicating his whole argument on, was always a neoliberal ploy, one barely passed in Wales and failed at a regional level, than aimed to transcend notions of a national class politics into dividing the role of good government into provincial bourgeois elites. Devolution now is almost a dead dog, its track record at best a mixed bag in terms of its leftism (more so in Wales, where it has always been a tiny force, less so in Scotland, unless one counts a party that openly campaigned for Trump to build his golfcourse while predicating their entire argument for independence on fossil fuel based extractivism as left, which i dont). After the 26 Summer of Hell in UK devolution seems even less desirable, considering the patent need the South's going to need for Scotland's massive rain forest in some kind of pipeline for basic irrigation, and itd be interesting to see how a tiny welsh nation would cope without the national british army to put out wildfires there. National criseses require national solutions, not a fetish for petty regionalism devolving into resource wars over water and land. Seems to thats hes culumating his argument for some twerpy new cultural progressiveness on the (then) new Corbyn phenomenon, which...my god...is just fucking tragic and pathetic now.

But i suppose this is leftist intellectual writing 101 now. He even cites chunks of his mates book, published by the same publisher, at length, which just makes me think well why dont i read that fucking book then? The mandatory rerences to matyred Saint Mark Fisher are of course here, as the left becomes like a cat eating and vomitimg out the sick from its last dinner in perpetuaity.