A Podcast Analysis and the WPB Congress
A review of recent events outside our usual cold-hearted analyses
This post is a catch up on resources available elsewhere online that might be of interest. The main ‘news’ is that the curiously named Aufhebungabunga Podcast interviewed me last week and broadcast our conversation on Tuesday (background and links below). Aufhebungabunga (let use the short form Bungacast) is interesting because it allows highly extended interviews from a thoughtful, analytical and open-minded position that refuses to accept the absurd idea of history ending.
In addition, although I will be preparing a follow-up analysis of the state of the Workers Party of Britain after its Congress in Manchester on February 9th/10th in the coming weeks (I am merely awaiting the final decisions on Remitted Motions at its first ‘Politburo’ [Political Committee] Meeting which I have been invited to attend), I thought it might be useful to gloss the discussion in the podcast about the WPB with some material from that Congress. To date, I have been clinically objective about the WPB and its prospects and I hope to remain so as much as possible but readers should be aware that I am committed to it and should bear that in mind.
One of the key concerns of this Substack (and, I believe, my friends at Bungacast) is to end the politics of position and posturing and encourage intellectual struggle within parties and institutions as much as between them. In anticipation of that analysis, I wanted to introduce some themes emerging from the WPB’s Congress that are already available online. World events are moving incredibly fast. The WPB and all of us are having to move swiftly and flexibly in responding to what we have already termed a total ‘transvaluation of values’ in international affairs. It is hard to keep up but Unstable Times is making every effort to do so.
Aufgebungabunga #470 - Political Reaction to System Failure
In all cases, I am linking to material online rather than posting it directly here without links, despite having permission to do in the case of Bungacast. I think it important that readers do not find themselves in a closed system but can reach out to access new sources on their own terms. There are literally hundreds of episodes on Bungacast. The link to the interview with me is primarily the following:
A video version is also available on YouTube:
By way of background, the interviewers are Alex Hochuli (one of the founders of the podcast) and Dr. Lee Jones, Professor of Political Economy and International Relations at Queen Mary College. I knew Lee from our days engaged in the Brexit campaign as Left Brexiters but did not know Alex. The latter operates from Sao Paulo in Brazil which gives him a very different perspective on global politics from the usual suspects in the West. Both are serious and grounded intellectuals in a Left increasingly bereft of serious critical thinkers.
There is no point in repeating what was discussed in the podcast here but a few clarificatory points might be worth making. The lengthy interview/discussion was divided naturally into two halves - a review of the geo-political analyses familiar to regular readers of this Substack and a discussion of left-populism in Britain and the role of the WPB in that context. I should the apologise to the interviewers and perhaps listeners that I went into analytical ‘speech talk’ (as my daughter calls it) and discussion got lost in lecture at points but the interviewers seemed happy to let me continue. It is true that complex alternative narratives often need such an approach - the sub-lecture with questioning - in order to create a base line different from received narratives. I can only thank Alex and Lee for their amazing forbearance and try not to do it again!
The one area where I faltered perhaps was in the discussion of US-China relations and yet I remain, given further post-interview researches, of the view that the Trump administration is more transactional in approach and less ideologically neo-conservative about China than most commentators think. Time will prove me right or wrong but either way it does not matter insofar as the ‘dialectic’ of debate always get us closer to a proper undersanding of events regardless. Trump has been overtly referring to personal diplomacy with Putin as potentially leading to similar diplomacy with Xi and thence to potential global ‘denuclearisation’ (a ‘lovely word’ in Trump’s view). We may set this against Congressional and Deep State Sinophobia and genuine concerns to negotiate an internally-directed economic policy under the MAGA label that inevitably means severe strategic competition of some sort with China. There is much more to say on this related to the politics of Taiwan, South Korea and Japan but this is not the place. We should all have open minds on what may happen next after the ‘surprises’ of the last few weeks.
When it comes to the WPB, I have to make something very clear in case there is a misunderstanding. I think I was clear that the WPB is only at the start of its process of building a viable and credible economic policy platform (possibly matched by an equivalent social policy platform) and that my views were personal and not official policy. There are several trends to ‘square’ against the realities of the failures of late liberal capitalist democracy. Those realities, including the emergence (alluded to in the podcast) of artificial intelligence and its effects on the ‘cognitive’ middle class, are not yet clearly understood realities - reality itself is being disputed as one system collapses and another has not yet found its place.
Nevertheless, alongside legitimate traditional socialist analyses based on a range of theories from Marxist to Keynesian and the emergence of the non-socialist but socially applicable Modern Monetary Theory, there is the more pragmatic adaptation of the ‘Chinese model’ with its priority to planned infrastructure. This latter attracts many WPB members and it has to be said (which should be clear in the interview) that this is where my own prejudices lie. The bottom line is that whatever method is adopted, it is only a means and not an ends. The ends are the improvement of the condition of the widest reasonable definition of working class within a socialist (broadly understood) structure that does not require imperialism to fuel it. These ends are thus a standing challenge to current liberal capitalist democracy.
Again, more could be said on my view and its relationship to other views (which I respect). Unlike other parties, these debates within the WPB are held openly and ‘in a comradely fashion’. The ends are agreed. The means must then be considered rationally and not ideologically. That debate about means has only just started with plenty of time to take over it to get it right until the electorate finally is enabled to turn on perhaps the least qualified Government in British history (in a toss up with the clowns in the previous two Tory administrations).
Catching Up with the WPB
My word alone should not be taken on progress at the WPB. As I noted above, I will be reporting on this in more detail in due course but there are a number of resources online that will help give you some sense of where British Left-populism is heading. I (you know me by now) am the cold-hearted intellectual, the voice of clinical reason, but that is not always good enough. Politics needs to be driven from the heart and not just from the head. A Congress (or Conference in the language of the current dominant group of parties) is a time when legitimate and mobilisatory emotion can be let loose. The best source for ‘considered emotion’ and argument is the WPB YouTube Channel. I am going to draw your attention to a few videos that might help understand what is taking place in this space, see:
I will start with George Galloway’s five minute contribution to an initiating debate on two important Motions that used the opportunity of Congress to establish the absolute ideological ground rules for the WPB. The first Motion is in full here (the second motion is just a gloss on socialism that does not change the core of the first):
Motion 3 - Four Principles for the Workers Party
The prospect of four years of an unpopular Government operating with a majority that it does not democratically deserve, alongside a challenging new right wing Government in Washington to which our Government is subservient, means that we, the Workers Party of Britain, have to be secure and united in our principles and work tirelessly to make a decisive attempt at the next General Election to attain effective power as well as sustain our current momentum for progress in local Government and acquiring seats at forthcoming by-elections. In addition, we may have to face attempts to blacken our name or destabilise us by ruthless interests determined on war and international confrontation. In that context, we affirm four fundamental principles to take us through to political power and the peaceful and democratic removal of thecurrent Government.
1. Working Class: That we will not deviate from our primary purpose which is to represent and fight for the interests of the working class of Britain which we interpret as all those whose livelihoods (regardless of all other factors) depend on the decisions of the owners or managers of capital or the Crown and have no significant capital of their own beyond what is required reasonably to secure their pensions, care and personal security and those of their families.
2. Anti-Imperialist: That we will oppose all forms of imperialism and imperial alliances and that this is in the interests of the working class as well as of the dispossessed and oppressed peoples of the world and we oppose any use of military action, support or imperial subversion or intervention outside these islands except in direct and immediate defence of the people.
3. Socialist: That we will make every attempt to recover public support for socialism as the common-sense solution to systemic failure in the neo-liberal economic system and that we will interpret socialism to be the best available, effective, accountable, fair and sustainable means of redistributing power and resources as widely as possible within the nation where all citizens have equal worth in and of themselves.
4. Unity: That the WPB will be open for debate on how these principles will be implemented but that there will be no toleration of attempts to breach these principles, which underpin the ten point programme on which the party was founded. While pragmatic political alliances may be regarded as necessary in attaining the implementation of our principles, these alliances will not be permitted to change the character of the Party or its programme.
Congress accordingly approves these three fundamental principles and one organisational principle as the standard instruction to Officers for the next five years with a review only in the light of the results of the next General Election and a reasonable period of reflection thereafter
The second video is the contribution to the debate of an activist, Khalid Chohan from Watford, who does not sit on the Political Committee but whose views reflect two of the trajectories underpinning British left-populism or common sense socialism as many members like to call it. First, the recovery of socialism as an ideology on terms that are much broader and more inclusive than the sectarianism or utopianism of much of the Left that has intentionally or unintentionally sustained the existing order. Second an interest in learning from China on economic policy without accepting those aspects of East Asian thinking that work against core Western values including freedom of expression. Later in Congress, there was the strongest possible assertion of freedom of expression along lines that J D Vance would have appreciated. Note also the tone of the debate - open and frank.
George may overplay (below) the game on DeepSeek (below) for polemical reasons but he does it to good effect in order to make three major points that help guide WPB policy: the commitment to multipolarity as an anti-imperialist policy, the positive interest in artificial intelligence as the democratisation of cognition and the strategy of making Britain great again by committing to the new world of global trade rather than being constrained by Festung West and its paranoid and increasingly militaristic (especially in an increasingly weak, fragmented and partially demented Europe) approach to rising powers. The reference to the young and the joke about being old actually hides a more serious commitment which is to use the Party to nurture a new generation of confident and politically educated working class politicians. This was the original intention of the founders of the Labour Party.
This sequence of videos is dominated by George only because of his oratorical and leadership skills but do not make the mistake of thinking that the WPB is his Party in some ownership sense. It is a Party of 2-3,000 members who have chosen to elect him and a number of Deputy Leaders because they are in tune with the memberships’ thinking. In this final video (below), you see the Party’s ability to react rapidly to current events as the WPB pitches to lead on any resistance to attempts to embroil the UK in the Ukrainian situation. Positions are, incidentally, not unilaterally developed at the top but are tested and refined within the Political Committee and then presented rapidly through a dedicated social and alternative media network.
The fighting talk that the WPB will be first in the ranks to defend the UK represents a cultural reality in a Party which has a significant number of military veterans in its ranks but this is set off with a determination that British lives and taxes should not be wasted on grandstanding adventurism to profit the military-industrial complex. This is a live issue as pressure builds to cut yet more public services in order to fund increased defence requirements. These are not requirements at all but arise from a combination of ignorant self-serving paranoia and the manipulation of the political agenda by special interests.
And so we end this more polemical article which we hope is educative. We will return to our cold and clinical detached analyses soon.
Wholly reasonable and most refreshing. Thanks for sharing.