Referendum part 2, to Yes voters(with love and skepticism)

"When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called 'the People’s Stick'" – Mikhail Bakunin.



Beware the spectacle of Independence
it is everywhere
fear, suspicion, risk
scents the air.
the referendum asks the wrong question
limits the answers to Scotland or England
narrows the future to a fixed destination
the problems of the UK have no fixed location
the referendum fogs good sense
clogs up the class struggle
with 'national unity'
bosses feel brazen to act with impunity
the referendum forms a false bridge over the breech
sucking energy from grassroots direct action
the referendum is a gift to power,
the referendum is a leech!

Voting Yes is the opiate of the masses.
both the Yes campaign and RIC
are blowing false promises
out their asses
whether Westminster or Holyrood
the world will still be divided
between two irreconcilable classes.
Voting Yes is backed by the Scottish state
so yes campaigners get help handed to them
on a plate.
if their concern is more than bluff
than pie in the sky
then where were they
in 2011,
during Occupy?

SNP claim social justice yet want lowest corporation tax
I don't blame them, the market's dictates are law
It's not about personality, those are just the facts.
Yes won't usher in a new Scottish democracy
there can be none while we're under global capital's plutocracy
The world can't be saved by voting for the Green Party
the biggest powers are the US government, IMF ,World Bank and WTO,
I say it again and again
meaningful Reform AND revolution can ONLY come from below.

In a independent Scotland would the left's focus waiver?
 because RIC only offer the dusty droll scroll scraps
of Old Labour
but we can't go back to welfare state days
now
we live in a different age,
 so do us all a favour
think carefully
and don't be prone to haver.


The referendum has been a leech
so if no wins the Scottish left will be decimated
defeated,destroyed, deva-stated.
The referendum is a leech
so if Yes wins whatever victories we might get
whatever we gain from below
the Scottish left will be co-opted
(probably already has)
into support for
 the Status Quo.

Is there even a Scottish left
 left?
the referendum has created a left wing
with a militancy bereft.
Maybe there never was any
and there was nothing lost
in the theft?

If you must vote yes
do it without delusions
you'll still be oppressed
be under no illusions.

Quotes:


"A danger with national independence as an issue is that it threatens to engulf all else. All other issues which have emancipatory meaning – peace, equality, social justice, participatory democracy – tend to be seen through the independence issue as a lens. ...

"To the extent that campaigns come to focus on national independence, they allow themselves to become incorprated in an institutionalist world. "

"it is to invite every single-issue campaign, however everyday, to see itself in relation to institutions and to adopt a state-centred gaze. If this is so, the independence referendum has already performed chilling and debilitating work"

" Earlier, I suggested that a choice between “Yes” and “No” on September 18th is a choice between two neoliberal positions. To make the choice between “Yes” and “No” the pivotal issue in present-day Scottish politics is to step away from interaction and on to territory where neoliberal criteria apply. If such a step were merely a loss on the left’s part, it would already be disasterous. It is more: . It has domesticated a left that dreamt of less institutional and more interactive things.[11]"
-http://bellacaledonia.org.uk/2014/07/26/common-sense-scottish-thought-and-current-politics/

""We have, as Paul Mattick observed, a century of experience of national liberation struggles where apparently progressive anti-imperialist movements culminated in an oppressive new ruling class. "


"The claim made both in the Yes campaign and on the Left that Scotland too can be a ‘normal democracy’, is an astounding attempt to ignore the obvious bankruptcy of representative democracy and its living critique in recent global social movements. "

"
Both Common Weal and the vision of the Radical Independence campaign are concerned with trying to manage capitalism better.
Surely hegemonic on the Left, Common Weal is an explicitly class collaborationist think-tank – nicely summed up in its slogan ‘All of us first’.  Its proposals in creating a high-growth economy, are in reality about increasing the rate of exploitation and outcompeting workers internationally"

"Whatever the result of this referendum, the lasting gains we need depend most of all on our own capacity as a class for itself to organise and struggle.

A genuine and practical internationalism is key to this.

Hope lies not in trying to create new labour aristocracies or the international solidarity of left nationalists, but in uniting workers struggling from below against state, capital, patriarchy and white supremacy around the world."

Further Reading:-

http://bellacaledonia.org.uk/2014/07/26/common-sense-scottish-thought-and-current-politics/

http://scotlandaf.wordpress.com/2014/08/20/beyond-the-scottish-referendum/

http://scotlandaf.wordpress.com/2013/03/26/rhetoric-of-disempowerment/