"On the Abolition of all Political Parties"

"Only what we might have discussed under the gas-lamp, we now must discuss in the dark-

The Modern Politician by Archibald Lampman, Canadian poet, 1861-1899

“The first quality of a politician is integrity. Integrity requires independence of judgment. Independence of judgment rejects partisan edicts, for partisan edicts stifle in a man’s conscience all sense of justice and the very taste of truth. When such basic truths are ignored, Parliament turns into an unseemly circus, provoking dismay and contempt in the general public across all party lines. When voters distrust and despise their representatives, democracy itself is imperiled.”— Weil, Simone. On the Abolition of All Political Parties

“Suppose that a great commotion arises in the street about something, let us say a lamp-post, which many influential persons desire to pull down. A grey-clad monk, who is the spirit of the Middle Ages, is approached upon the matter and begins to say, in the arid manner of the School men, ‘Let us first of all consider, my brethren, the value of Light. If Light be in itself good—’ At this point, he is somewhat excusably knocked down. All the people make a rush for the lamp-post, the lamp-post is down in ten minutes, and they go about congratulating each other on their unmediaeval practicality. But as things go on they do not work out so easily. Some people have pulled the lamp-post down because they wanted the electric light; some because they wanted old iron; some because they wanted darkness, because their deeds were evil. Some thought it not enough of a lamp-post, some too much; some acted because they wanted to smash municipal machinery; some because they wanted to smash anything. And there is war in the night, no man knowing whom he strikes. So, gradually and inevitably, today, tomorrow or the next day, there comes back the conviction that the monk was right after all, and that all depends on what is the philosophy of Light. Only what we might have discussed under the gas-lamp, we now must discuss in the dark.” — G. K. Chesterton, Heretics (1905),

Simone Weil 1909-1943

Simone Weil, a radical French philosopher whose writings remain profoundly relevant today, died an untimely death, driven by her unwavering convictions. Like George Orwell, she believed that truly understanding poverty required experiencing it firsthand. She lived this belief, immersing herself in hardship, which ultimately ravaged her health and led to her premature death.

Despite being raised in a well-to-do Parisian family, her radicalism emerged with meteoric intensity. Her willingness to challenge societal conventions was rooted in deep, unshakable principles.

Seventy years ago, Weil wrote a naughty little book advocating the abolition of political parties. She argued that they inevitably degenerate into self-serving cronyism, manifest corruption, and ultimately become totalitarian.

Perhaps it is time to abolish them altogether and resign ourselves to random dictatorships, staffed by narcissists, psychopaths, and whoever else happens along?

If Weil had lived longer she could have written more on her thesis in greater detail as the malignancy of what can gut whole cultures and civilizations. Fortunately there were others who picked up where she left off. Just as Orwell’s writings are foundational to our times she makes a worthy contribution. Sociologist C. Wright Mills, who also had an abbreviated existence, published The Power Elites in1956. In so many ways Mills picked up where Weil left off. In turn, there has since been a plethora books written on how we govern ourselves and the shortcomings there in. But we are contrarian societies hell bent on looting and shooting rather than focusing on the continuity of government and the critical essentiality of how we manage our affairs— especially so in these tumultuous times, when failures in governance have such momentous consequences and no regard for national borders and can be sociocidal.

In my younger years I had the unique opportunity to live and work in indigenous cultures. Their power structures were wonderfully simplistic… as the village elders rule by virtue of both their wisdom and experience. Their law was based on the hierarchy of families and the hostile unremitting environment in which they lived and survived. It could be both matrilineal and patrilineal where the wisdom of the elders was passed down orally to younger generations. The elders/leaders were most often the heads of extended families, their legislatures were the informal meetings of the elders. (While it is another subject for another time, indigenous societies are definitively custodial, ours, have a lethal tendency to devolve into tyrannies.)

In indigenous cultures they have long standing and resolute traditions for passing down the wisdom and knowledge to younger generations. In our so-called more sophisticated affluent societies there is a profound blockage, an interrupted lineage of wisdom where the very foundations of our societies are left to erode out of existence.— as Chesterton suggests above we are the mob, having destroyed the light post, now stumbling in the inchoate darkness of our creation refusing to take responsibility. We murder the monks while psychopathic war mongers and the Philistines have bought up the levers of power.

When I say “bought up” I say so very deliberately! Forty years ago they created an ideology that has since become the framework and ruination of our cultures. It is none other than neoliberalism. As scholar Wendy Brown has pointed out we are now living in the ruins of neoliberalism. As fellow scholar Sheldon Wolin pointed out we live the inverted totalitarianism that goes with it.

Neoliberalism is the ideology that has created a gusher of wealth to the corporations, the oligarchs,“The Donor Class” and the war mongers. This obscene wealth has gone toward buying up all the levers of power, whole governments, and politicians are in corporate capture. Trillions are left over where oligarchs could, individually, finance their own wars and are running their own escapist space programs.

Tyrannies can only survive where the truths of our times are suppressed. They also require the absolute suppression of the prophecies of history. When history is in the hands of our “village elders” it is entirely prophetic. Shall we count the number of books written by Weil and so many others, just in the last hundred years, gathering dust in used book stores where our lineage of wisdom has been shattered by ignoramus politicians and war mongers.

Seven years after her death a book shop owner came across Weil’s manuscript and deemed it worthy of publication. The book store owner did the world a big favor. We claim to be literate societies but there are critical blockages, and failures of continuity destroying us from within.

If Weil were writing today she would have to write a much more ponderous tome on how political parties are so prone to self-inflicted abolition. Her modest little chapbook foreshadowed momentous times ahead, when political parties would play a critical role in the rise and fall of the West.

She lists integrity as the first essential quality for political parties to exist. It is also the very quality under constant assault in a capitalist system. Capitalism as we know it today is in its most predatory manifestation ever and completely out of control. Social contracts have been shattered. Democracy is in full collapse and lawlessness within the halls of power runs free and unchecked, with legal and social institutions undermined and corrupted.

Governments are bought and paid for. Legislatures have gone silent— except for delivering standing ovations for the very evils they are supposed to hold in check. They are the agents for endless war and moral and fiscal destitution. They are failed political parties at the the very core of what is supposed to be “liberal democracy”. Over many decades they have suffered incremental and detectable collapse for those paying attention— the village elders— who have studiously documented the fall and are shunned to the margins.

When Canadian philosopher John Ralston Saul wrote his naughty little book, The Unconscious Civilization(1997) it served as an update on Weil’s book as he reported how government was then and now in corporate capture.

As did H.T. Wilson with his 1989 book Retreat from Governance:

“The Canadian Federal government is in a process of retreat from the historic patterns and obligations of governance that have characterized it at least since Confederation (1867) . In previous periods, Canadians have resisted this tendency through democratic process. The defeat of Laurier’s Federal Liberal Party in the election of 1911 over the issue of free trade is a vintage example, and one which is particularly apropos to this discussion. Since 1980,{the advent of neoliberalism}, however, efforts to combat this tendency have been muted and the temptation to succumb to it even greater”.

Wilson’s book build’s on George Grant’s 1965 book Lament for a Nation:

“The power of the American government to control Canada does not lie primarily in its ability to exert direct pressure, the power lies primarily in the fact that the dominant classes in Canada see themselves at one with the continent on all essential matters……the debt that we owe the Liberals is that they have been so willing to be led. The party has been made up of those who put only one condition on their willingness: that they should have personal charge while our sovereignty disappears.”

Grants book is a work of stunning prophecy where he predicted this day of reckoning, just where we are today. Do we lapse into formal union with a declining empire or finally wake up to the reality we must assert some semblance of sovereignty? Canada has a new prime minister assuring us we are not going to become the 51st state. But another of Grant’s observations is: “Modern civilization makes all local cultures anachronistic.” Nationhood for Grant requires a very real “thrust of intention”, consistently with sovereignty in tact.

As Canada must rescue our Confederation, the USA must rescue its Republic from the parasitic empire seated in Washington, which is dragging it under. For the collective West there will be zero progress on any major issue until a new equilibrium is established. We are suffering the chaos of collapse, an immutable cycle of history. The first steps forward are too repudiate war and empire and to quit raging against and scapegoating foreign powers- the enemy is within and of our own manufacture. The semi-conscious West is both juvenile and delusional and must come to accept and take responsibility for the fact the age of empire is over.

At the end of world war ll Winston Churchill saw the shifts in world power, the decline of the British empire and the emergence of American domination. Can we so obstinately ignore the immense shifting of power and change in the world, ongoing, and our only response is vicious revanchism and more wars; all at a time in history when wars are no longer affordable.

Unfortunately, the crises of the West come at a time when the integrity and competencies of political parties are at their lowest ebb ever. They are the willing victims of too many ruinous ideologies left unchecked and unchallenged. The “temptation to succumb” is now a fait accompli.

Might we say political parties have been “partying” for too long and too often at public expense? Now, as Chesterton has suggested, too many monks have been murdered under too many lamp posts and the mob stumbles about in a pervasive darkness.

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