Election as myth

The recent UK election resembled one of Roland Barthes’s ‘mythologies’, a ritualised spectacle like his ‘World of Wrestling’, but second-rate and pretentious. (Roland Barthes, Mythologies ( London: Vintage, 2000) pp.15-25) The election adversaries went ‘exactly through the motions which are expected’, their ‘excessive gestures, exploited to the limits of their meaning’, the loser’s immediate resignation typical of the ‘grandiloquence … of the vanquished wrestler’. According to Barthes, myth is ‘depoliticized speech’ in contrast to the ‘language of man as producer’ and ‘revolutionary language proper [which] cannot be mythical.’ (ibid pp.145-6) So can we find hope instead of despair in the almost complete absence of the Left in this election? Did we shun it because it was a sham? Are we all still around but biding our time until the real show starts?

A few – a very few – presumed Lefties did take part, as an analysis of the content of The Independent 7 May 2005 shows. The paper’s 16 page pull out of the results shows the following:

There were 165 Lefties standing, including 2 Communist Party (Comm), 4 Communist Party of Britain (CommBrit), 2 Democratic Socialist Alliance– People Before Profit (DemSocAll), 5 Alliance for Green Socialism (GreenSoc), 25 Respect the Unity Coalition (Respect), 15 Socialist Alternative Party (SocAlt), 1 Socialist, 43 Socialist Labour Party (SocLab), 56 Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) and 10 Workers’ Revolutionary Party (WRP). Between them they got 129,581 votes. See table.

Another snippet from The Independent: a letter entitled ‘Bolshevik Blair’ says: ‘Sir: I could hardly believe it when I heard Mr Blair utter the “C” word on TV. This leads me to expect that the “S” word will soon pass his lips. He must indeed be rattled by the election result! If he is already referring to defeated MPs as “comrades”, what odds on the word “socialism” being slipped into a future public utterance?’ Yes, well, sad that the comforting Leftie vocabulary has to be spelled out so laboriously, and doesn’t Blair usually use these words about once a year, just in case…?

‘Trotskyites’ also got a mention in the paper: ‘The new leader of the [FBU] union is Matt Wrack, who attracted the backing of a wide range of militants, including Trotskyites, because of his opposition to the deal which ended the long and bitter dispute.’ ‘Senior management expressed their concern over the election of Mr Wrack whom they believe will lead the union into a fresh bout of industrial action.’ Well, good luck to him then!

The rest of the paper is solid Barthes-ian metalanguage and profoundly depressing.

BUT almost 130 thousand real flesh-and-blood people of this country made a bid for real politics. Even if you adjust this down according to your preferred socialist orthodoxy, surely that provides a glimmer of hope, a spark to fan into flames?

Chris Marsh, 8 May 2005