George Laking

Having the worst possible Labour Party at the same time as the worst possible Conservative Party at the same time as the US has the worst possible Democratic Party at the same time as the worst possible Republican Party isn’t just a coincidence we can just shrug off. This is the result of decades of intentional centralisation of power and wealth, courtesy of late-stage capitalism, and the resulting authoritarianism working to prevent any reasonable alternative to the managed duopoly. Or, in short, this terrible, undemocratic and dystopian juncture, where the nations who helped write international law ignore it to murder thousands of children, is the result of what happens when the system works precisely as intended—so we the people have no political power, the tyrants do as they please, and every avenue to change is blocked and tightly controlled. This is what happens when we meekly accept terrible ‘representatives’ on repeat: they continue to disenfranchise us while pacifying us with lies. And we know they’re lying. We know they’re playing us. We know they’re the worst kinds of people imaginable—child-killers and grave-robbers in business suits with dead eyes and greedy, plastic smiles. Yet this will only continue and worsen even as time goes by. The state of play will continue to decay because the fundamentals are still the same: the same centralisation of power, the same bad actors stifling change, the same charlatans like Biden and Starmer presenting the illusion of hope while acting completely against our interests. Until we take a stand. Until we unite across significant divides. Until we refuse to let them manipulate us with their ‘Good Cop, Bad Cop’ rhetoric where the fear of one tyrant plays us straight into the hands of another. The solution is the old solution—organisation, mobilisation, mutual aid, civil disobedience, citizen education and direct action. And while the police state has never been stronger, we have new tools at our disposal, too, in how we organise and build movements for change. If, like me, you have an issue with prejudice, with inequality, with climate change, with imperialism, or with any of the dystopian policies being carried out across the Western world, these are all upheld by the same system that exploits and disenfranchises us all, destroys communities across the world, murders innocent people, and treats our planet as nothing more than a resource to exploit. This is the only fight in town, and we’ve been subjected to it for years. We need to get better at fighting back.

If you don’t care about Palestinians being killed do you expect the world to care when it is you being killed?