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It is difficult to avoid getting sucked into the swamp of electoral politics and all the idiocy that is associated with it. However such is the degeneration of political discourse, that increasingly elections look more and more like an expansion of the silly season. It is mildly interesting that the deposed leader of the Labor Party, Kevin Rudd, is carefully leaking stuff damaging to the woman who replaced him. that is is damaging to the Labor Party which he used to lead does not seem to matter to Rudd. He is bent on revenge and he wants the dish to be served as warm and bloody as possible. So I am beginning to think that Labor will lose and for the first time since 1932 we will have a one term government. That event should correspond to some sort of gigantic political and economic crisis, but no such crisis exists. Rather the working class here reminds me very much of my second dog - the terrier who whines and then rolls on her back to be tickled if I look at all cross with her. Because the Labor Party no longer even stands for the selling out of the working class, but rather undertakes full scale attacks on the living standards of the workers, it is unable and also unwilling to mount a defensive response to an attack from the capitalist class. We have had two of these the advertising campaign from the Mining barons against the proposed tax on their super profits, and now a relentless campaign in the Murdoch media to bring down the government and install once more the Tories. Murdoch is seemingly motivated by a desire to further monopolize the media in his favour, and it may be that the Labor Party has said no deal and is now paying the price. The overall picture is that the political has been reduced to the aesthetic. But this is very much the aesthetic not of the grand spectacle such as those that Leni Riefenstahl recorded. No these are post modern times and the aesthetic code is definitely that of Big Brother, Survivor and Master chef. Two candidates compete and we get to vote which of them will be thrown out of the house or out of the tribe or whatever. And somehow we are supposed to feel warmer and more powerful or something. My heart bleeds to be living though these filthy post modern times, when people scramble over each other to demonstrate how stupid they are. Maybe I have been reading too many of Carroll's posts, but yesterday on my way to work, I got into a snarling march with a Tory who wanted to hand me some propaganda material. I denounced him as the enemy and the ass-hole announced in a lordly fashion that we do not have enemies in Australia and we are blessed to be living here. I have been living here longer than the nationalistic prig, and I also thought that he should go and tell the Aboriginal people that we do not have enemies in Australia. The whole thing put me in a rage which is still simmering away, but it is Friday after all here and soon cheerfulness will break out. comradely ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: [email protected] Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
