Chris Rea surveys the landscape of the Freedom movement at the close of 2023 and issues a stirring call to action for the year ahead.
In 2024, the Freedom Movement must unite itself behind a democratically agreed programme of action and build a mass movement capable of overthrowing the ruling class and governing in the interests of the people.
That is a grand ambition and certainly not one that will be easy to accomplish. But if that isn’t the ambition, what is the point of having a Freedom Movement, or a Real Left?
The ruling class has a plan. It has always had a plan. We need one of our own. Socialist elements of the Freedom Movement represented, though not exclusively, by Real Left can play an important part in this process.
Traditionally, the Left has been good at analysing social and economic conditions and devising policies and programmes. During much of the twentieth century, it was also good at organising effectively to win power. We need to re-engage with this expertise and use it to help the Freedom Movement think and organise on a much bigger scale so that it moves from being a cradle of revolutionary potential to a fully-grown state in waiting. The movement needs to not merely set itself against the ruling class but overthrow it and rule in its place. The movement will not be able to do this until it unites behind a central policy and plan. I don’t believe that the catholic broadness of the Freedom Movement is an impediment to achieving this state of unity. All serious members of the movement ought to agree on the really important issues, namely opposition to central bank digital currencies, foreign wars, the biosecurity surveillance state and the anti-carbon dioxide agenda.
The involvement of bad actors, however, is a different matter. The movement is riddled with informers, gatekeepers, controlled oppositionists and saboteurs. The movement must be on permanent high alert and call out these disruptive influences loudly and publicly.
Priceless propaganda assets
The movement needs to make better use of its propaganda assets, which are plentiful. Two campaign pillars stand out: exposing the reality of the injection programme and opposing central bank digital currencies. There are others but these two have the most potential for effective mass agitation and lend themselves to straightforward messaging. Public meetings, leafleting and demonstrations around these issues, which have been taking place since March 2020, must be stepped up and organised with greater coordination. We should be confident that there is a large audience for these campaign messages. Added to the millions who demonstrated against lockdowns and injection mandates in 2020 and 2021 and who still represent a solid bedrock of support for the movement, are millions more who have sympathies, even if latent, with the core positions of the movement. Below the surface of media-managed discourse, a large section of the general public is aware of the horrifying reality of the experimental injection programme and realises that they are being driven into a cashless economy, along with awareness of other characteristics of the new world order that the ruling class is attempting to construct.
Even if the majority of the population of the UK continues to dream in the face of reality, a well organised dissenting minority would form a credible challenge to ruling class power. A small part of this bloc succeeded in halting the injection mandate and passport programme in 2021. Just think what a larger, better organised movement could do.
A massive racket and a filthy lie
I believe that there has never been a time in our history when so many ordinary people have shared a common understanding that the powers and institutions that rule over them are rotten to the core, that the economic system they toil within is a massive racket, and that everything the mainstream media tells them is a filthy lie. Such views used to be regarded as being the preserve of paranoid cranks and inky-fingered back-bedroom revolutionaries, but it is harder for ‘respectable’ opinion’ to dismiss such a line of thinking now that it has become – rightly – normalised.
Developing this line of thinking leads to fundamental questions about the reality of ruling class power. The movement must be explicit in its propaganda about who and what constitutes the ruling class, including the money-power elite at its apex and the supporting infrastructure of businesses, government agencies, NGOs and media platforms. It should maintain a relentless focus on the characteristics of the economic system and in particular the role of the central banks and the private financial dynasties. The focus should always be on the economic drivers of the system. All of this ought to be the concern of the legacy ‘left-progressive’ movement and would be if it were an authentic left-progressive movement.
The first step must be to convene a national convention of the multiple parties, organisations and groups associated with the Freedom Movement with the purpose of agreeing on a unified national structure and programme of work. Real Left must represent the socialist interest in this development.
Politics is personal
Moving from the programmatically political to the personal, it is appropriate given the time of the year to give some consideration to the attitudes, behaviours, characteristics and dispositions that Freedom Movement activists should always be seeking to cultivate. This isn’t an exhaustive list and it is subjective but perhaps comrades will recognise some of their own predilections and preferences.
First, try not to be distracted. It’s easy to get drawn into subsidiary and sideline debates and controversies, many of which are deliberately dangled to cause confusion. Stay focused on the objectives and actions of the ruling class. Always follow the money.
Be healthy. Spend as much time out of doors as possible and walk as much as you can. Avoid mainstream media and ‘culture’ like the plague. Most of it is produced by the deep state. Get rid of your ‘smart’ phone if you haven’t done so already. Use cash whenever possible. All of this is obvious and widely practised by now.
Cultivate a righteous demeanour. Not in an insufferable way. But we have justice on our side. We should be proud of our moral authority. It wasn’t easy holding the line through the covid programme and many of us paid a price for doing so. But we knew we were right then, and we have been proven to be right since.
Don’t expect anything from the legacy Left. It’s a busted flush. They flunked their big moment, collaborated with the ruling class over covid and rendered themselves irrelevant for eternity.
Get stuck into Real Left instead. It needs volunteers, writers, organisers and advocates. At the very least, share every article you read here through your networks.
Think eclectically! My experience of politics has become much richer in the past few years. If I say that it has a more spiritual aspect to it, I’m not expressing myself adequately, but I don’t know how to put it better.
Involvement in the Freedom Movement caused me to stand my political philosophy on its head in order to establish whether its fundamentals were still fit for purpose. It’s still the same head but I don’t intend putting it back into its old position. I suspect lots of you have had this experience. I’m sure that my ideas about the real nature of the ruling class have changed – I mean the people at the very apex of the pyramid of power. The ruling class is not what the legacy Left think it is and it is much worse than any of us can imagine. The ruling class’s wickedness is beyond the comprehension of the civilised majority. It’s possible that some of worst depravities attributed to them are true.
The Freedom Movement should rejoice in the moral revulsion that it feels towards the ruling class. All right-thinking people should share that revulsion. The struggle should be waged with a religious intensity. Ideas that I would at one time have dismissed as batty make some sort of sense in the light of the past four years. Perhaps it is true that everything we think we know about history, society, art and the world at large is a vast deception. Perhaps we are ruled by a cabal of fabulously wealthy magicians.
But however metaphysical the enemy and abstruse the dialectic might be, we live in a precious material reality of fellow men and women, cats and dogs, cafes, non-league football, water treatment plants, oil refineries, trail shoes, curry and the motorway network – again, not an exhaustive list, just some of my highlights. That’s the material reality we are concerned with. It’s our reality, not theirs, and we want it back.
The post New Year’s Revolutions: What is to be done in 2024? first appeared on Real Left.