‘this mad riddle that no one knows what it is’

last night (on the news) horsemouth heard danny dyer proclaimed ‘the shakespeare of our times’ - and it is true - with a little work (and a few connectives, a refusal to parenthesize, the excision of a few agreement seeking right’s and yeah’s, the twat’s can probably stay) there it is.

he is channeling not just pub geezer (hearts of english oak and all that bollocks) but also a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing - this is at the heart of it, confusion. that the facts cannot be established, watching the words move around on the page and refuse to settle down. and an endless confusion, an endless quibbling.

what dyer is doing is channeling and dramatising this confusion - he wants it sorted, but it’s not his job to sort it or even to propose how it could be sorted. where is the geezer? where is the geezer who called all this on?

the world is (to quote the temptations’ hit) a ball of confusion. but this confusion is not born of the desire to poets and songwriters and playwrights to entertain, or indeed a metaphysical desire to point out how very temporary and conditional our understandings are, but is objective, it is not just in our minds but out there.

 ‘... all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind....’ so says marx, also channeling shakespeare in a way, but he wants to give us a way out.

‘.... the bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. to the great chagrin of reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. all old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. they are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations...’

in brexit and trump and bannon we are witnessing a strange revival of the reactionists, of ideas to which the bourgeoisie usually only pays lip service, or recommends for others, or does on the quiet, are now a political programme - perhaps because the progressive part of capitalism has an inconsistent character, seemingly roaring ahead into the future on one hand (AI, china, biotechnology), seemingly stagnating and decadent on the other (its backing away from production into rent seeking, and endless foam of south-sea bubbles, dirty hospitals and late trains).

there is a way in which what is progressive in capitalism has become an ideology of capitalism, one of free-trade and globalisation (neo-liberalism) despite the fact that the world is still divided up into trading blocks managed by alliances between nation states. against this the economic nationalists aka. the reactionists propose a strategy of realpolitik and trade war.

this is not the end of history (in a globalised neo-liberal utopia) that the neo-liberals were expecting but it is the consequence of their victory.

it is strange to see marxists arguing for (or against) different arrangements of trading blocks, but that’s what the debate over brexit is. for, of course, in the end, it is capitalism either way.

a post-brexit britain will not escape from the world economic system into a permanent england football victory (and its people into beer-warmed togetherness and homogeneity) but (more likely) into a dangerously isolated hinterland, the people troubled by the unfinished business of brexit. the current dust-ups in the conservative party are not set to come to a crisis and then all blow over - they will run on and on because there can never be a brexit sufficient enough to satisfy its most utopian fans. brexit cannot lead to albion (and beyond that horsemouth makes no predictions).

so where are we headed? perhaps to some economically damaging brino, or an incredibly economically damaging no-deal, or an extension... all of them capitalism will deal with in the same way as the 2008 crisis, by beating more value out of the workers, by more austerity, by more crisis.

and meanwhile the center cannot hold europe may fall torn apart by its own reactionists but not in such a timely fashion that they can abandon their (strangely neo-liberal and globalist) european principles such as freedom of movement (such as currently enjoyed by refugees crossing the mediterranean in inflatables?) - but perhaps they can, perhaps that can be portrayed as a necessary compromise with the mad unprincipled english.

for the most likely end to the business (as vaudeville actors refer to productions) is for it to remain unfinished.