Marx's 18th Brumaire revisited

G Monbiot is getting better with grasping the fundamental of marxism. He is probably due for the chop from the Graujn as a result, although they normally just bully feminists out of a job (like S Moore, forced to resign after calling for a pogrom of transpeople, or Islington equivalent -- check here). 

Some of Moore's copy is informative about Graun journalism:

if she ever included a line “about female experience belonging to people with female bodies, and the significance of this, it is always subbed out”...It is disappeared. Somehow, this very idea is being blocked, not explicitly, but it certainly isn’t being published. My editors say things like: ‘It didn’t really add to the argument’, or it is a ‘distraction’ from the argument.”...Moore claimed she was instead encouraged to write about lifestyle subjects [with] ...the cult of righteousness that the Guardian embodies,”

I note that amomng the signatories complaining about Moore was a certain 'Shraddha Pande , Agile Scrum Master, Digital IK, Software Developer', one of many web polishers and marketing folk. And one 'Senior Applicaitons [sic] Analyst'. Several didn't seem to have jobs at all.

Here is Monbiot taking risks himself with some good old stuff

Brexit stems from a civil war in capitalism – we are all just collateral damage

There must be a desperate need for an explanation because Brexit is so irrational, of course. Let's try one-- but just for this particular case.

it is worth repeating the big question: why are we doing this to ourselves? I believe the answer is that Brexit is the outcome of a civil war within capitalism.

Then it gets a bit homemade, but still OK:

There are two dominant forms of capitalist enterprise. The first could be described as housetrained capitalism. It seeks an accommodation with the administrative state, and benefits from stability, predictability and the regulations that exclude dirtier and rougher competitors. It can coexist with a tame and feeble form of democracy....The second could be described as warlord capitalism. This sees all restraints on accumulation – including taxes, regulations and the public ownership of essential services – as illegitimate. Nothing should be allowed to stand in the way of profit-making. Its justifying ideology was formulated by Friedrich Hayek in The Constitution of Liberty and by Ayn Rand in Atlas Shrugged....These books sweep away social complexity and other people’s interests. They fetishise something they call “liberty”, which turns out to mean total freedom for plutocrats, at society’s expense.

Hayek was a founding father of EU neo-liberalism, of course, even if their bureaucrats exceed their brief now and then.

Brexit represents an astonishing opportunity for warlord capitalism. It is a chance not just to rip up specific rules, which it overtly aims to do, but also to tear down the uneasy truce between capitalism and democracy under which public protections in general are created and enforced....Johnson’s government will seek to use a no-deal or thin-deal Brexit to destroy at least some of the constraints on the most brutal forms of capitalism.

Housetrained capitalists are horrified by Brexit. [and old soc dem liberals]... Without regulatory constraints, the warlords would wipe them out. Like other august institutions of capital, the Confederation of British Industry warned that leaving Europe would cause a major economic shock.

At least he identifies a house-trained capitalist element in Remain, actual interests as well as sentimental politics.

Turning to the politico/ideological:

I see Nigel Farage and similar blowhards as little more than smoke bombs, creating a camouflaging cloud of xenophobia and culture wars. The persistent trick of modern politics – that appears to fool us repeatedly – is to disguise economic and political interests as cultural movements

The old Graun myth that Farage started culture wars. And no comment on the smoke bombs and camouflage in all that Graub crap about the unnatural nature of borders, the 4 freedoms, European identity, cosmpolitan tolerance, Project Fear or the cultural onslaught on Leavers. All the hilariously hypocritical 'borrowed languages.

Only this:

This, perhaps, was the remain campaign’s greatest failure. It largely refrained from calling out the oligarchs whose money helped to persuade us to leave the EU. Any such charge would have rebounded on a campaign funded by the likes of David Sainsbury, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs....In terms of funding, this was a battle between competing elites. So the remainers, fatally compromised by the money they had taken, instead became locked in a culture war they were bound to lose, confronting xenophobia with bromides about the benefits of integration. They failed to strike at the heart of the matter.

Well it would have been horribly revelatory if they had discussed class politics, of course, having to identify themselves as agents of domestic capital and an imaginary modern Britain with a stable class settlement, accepted social inequalities, a nice old comfortable England with a Waitrose on every corner, cheap strawberries, au pairs and migrating birds.