‘ Once corruption reaches the scale and interconnected spread that is now inescapable fact then the move from understanding it as corruption to understanding it as the exercise of class power is a very small step.’ Great quote and thanks for the link Keir.

Ta

James walsh

It’s as if the world is going through a self-generated ideology critique of itself. Unfortunately ideology critique is not enough. What we lack is a belief that ‘ordinary people’ can have any sort of traction on the world.

In that vein I think that the idea of corruption might, despite its drawbacks, be useful. I’m not sure because it’s hard to separate it from the right wing populist narrative of a foreign element corrupting the body populous and leading it away from a mythical time when the system worked to everyone’s advantage. But if we look at Charles Moore’s article even that narrative doesn’t make sense at the moment. Once corruption reaches the scale and interconnected spread that is now inescapable fact then the move from understanding it as corruption to understanding it as the exercise of class power is a very small step.

Of course, the ultra-leftist voice in my head knows where will it end: a media baron will walk away, his empire will be broken up and his family disinherited, and we’ll all go back to work with faith restored in (a) the British press, (b) the integrity of the non-Met police and (c) our fearless parliamentary representatives.

As you say, that sort of ultra-leftism is one of the most crippling forms of quietism. It sounds radical but really it’s just a more knowing version of the passive impotence which marks our lives most of the time. Does it increase my capacity to act? Does it bollocks.

All the same, Hackgate is pretty disempowering, at the moment. The drama is being played out on their stage, not ours (if Keith Vaz is our best hope, then we truly are fucked). And you need a brain the size of Joe 90 to keep up with all the players, dates and revelations. But we should remember that a lot of this is happening precisely to head off any possibility of popular action. When a Telegraph leader writer starts doubting the wisdom of voting Tory, it’s a sign that there is something going on. The last thing that global capitalism needs now, as the shit-storm of austerity starts, is a clearer emergence of social division in the UK. Greece is a big enough headache.

I’m not too sure about using the word ‘corruption’, though. Corruption implies its opposite, purity, so it’s usually accompanied by that old line about a “few bad apples”. You say the whole Hackgate thing is “one instantiation of a system that can only operate through such corrupt mechanisms”. But if a social organisation can *only* operate through corruption, then how useful is it really to talk about corruption? It’s a little like conspiracy theory. There is no *conspiracy*, just as there is no *corruption*: this is the way class power works in a capitalist world.