Hello Introductions thread

I'm Tim, and I was drawn to this forum by a tall stranger who promised money, action, excitement, and fifty-seven individually wrapped bags of Spring Dragon tea. While disappointed by the absence of said tea, I feel if we work together we may eventually have a lot of tea.

First, I consider myself on the right politically, and tend to disdain leftism. However, unlike most others I do not seek hegemony of one psychological type and annihilation of the others, nor do I believe the others are 'wrong' or 'stupid', but that each group has concrete incentives based in group evolutionary strategy and reproductive strategy which cause them to pursue particular ends. A plurality of values exists, rooted in biological survival, and groups in conflict have a real conflict of interest: the good vs evil narratives are typically attempts at securing discounts and recruits using moral sentiments. I know why people behave as they do, and why they must. That goes for the left and right especially.

My own trajectory first passed through Anarcho-capitalism, and then further right as I learned of the importance of biological and cultural realism. This is apt since at the moment, given the direction the world is taking, people are being pushed to the political margins, and the action is on the social democratic and far left on one side, and the alt- or new-right on the other. Given how anti-right wing Britain is, I should explain further. I am in the tradition of its intellectual elite, ie, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Evola. Concerned with seeding strength and an upward arc of history, not suicidal softness. The current Conservative party is not right wing at all, but merely smiling centrists out front and rampant looters out back. Meanwhile, your thuggish groups like the BNP and EDL represent the lower classes as they used to be before the left wing co-opted them, think Archie Bunker or Alf Garnett. They use slogans, rallying and violence because they don't know what else to do to protect their cultural and genetic capital, which is all they really have. The job of the right wing is to establish and curate commons, and defend cultural and genetic capital. This is unpalatable to the conflict-averse, bourgeois children of the Enlightenment, but needs must. One cannot have a society without defenders of these foundational elements.

There is a covert agenda at work, operating through many guises. Its goal is enslavement of humanity and nothing less. Most lack the imagination to grasp that beyond their circles of comfort lie the lightning-cracked cliffs of primal nature, and its law is power. There is a ruthless elite and they will eliminate you by any means unless you eliminate them. The current phase is to suck the wealth out of society and use poverty as a weapon. That's not all there is to it, but I'm already running long.

Generally I try to concern myself with realism, historicism and science, and my disgust threshold is very high. This means no empty signalling, attempted value appeals, or silly tricks will work on me. And... that will do for now.

I am pleased to see any attempt to organise political debate on the Labour left and I share the declared purpose of Momentumunnofficial to support Corbyn and those around him.

I believe passionately that the Labour left, and the left in general, is weakened by its lack of interest in the social theories that underpin political positions (more often than not only implicitly).

I also believe that debate should be held on the basis of the work of the great theoreticians of the past. It bothers me to see debate in which participants seem to be trying to work out their positions on the basis of intuitions or from some kind of first principles. Karl Popper (of whom I am no admirer) use to be found of the saying "If you begin where Adam began then you must expect to get no further than Adam". About that I think he was dead right.

Finally, I think that all theoretical work should start from a critique of current political and theoretical concepts. Nothing should be taken as given. Those concepts should, in my view, be understood as expreessions of social life and reflections of various interests (which doesn't exclude the possibility of objectivity). Therefore the critique of concepts needs to be materialist (there aren't any sources of ideas outside social life). For me the greatest contribution to such a critique is found in the Marxist tradition. Whether that is right or not has to be debated. The problem is that the great majority of left activists can't debate it because they know nothing or next to nothing about it.

I contribute fairly often to debates on Left Futures and also have published some 60 or so posts there. Many of them have been about education on which Labour's record has been lamentable.

That's my stall briefly set out.