Green Principles, Pragmatism and stopping the Tories in Stroud
There are those who say that when they cast their vote,
They have to vote according to their conscience,
To their ‘principles’,
Rather than pragmatically or tactically,
Rejecting any ideas of ‘a progressive alliance’
(A mirror, perhaps, to the KPD’s rejection
Of a Popular Front
In the Weimar Republic in 1932 –
And we all know where that ended up).
But what is ‘conscience’?
‘The voice in your head’ that separates right from wrong?
The internal ethical guide to universal morality …
Or is ‘conscience’ no more than a ‘pre-disposition’?
But expressed with what Mark Fisher has termed,
‘A lofty Olympian sense of detachment’
In the helter-skelter discourse on social media –
But as though ethics and morality,
Rather than the replication of one’s personality,
Or one’s presentation of self,
Or one’s doxa (one’s orthodoxy), as Pierre Bourdieu put it
Were the determinants of socially mediated opinion –
‘To thine own self be true’,
Is often cited as the justification:
People conveniently forgetting that Shakespeare
Was not enunciating a universal truth,
But rather reflecting Renaissance humanism,
In a pre-Enlightenment prefiguring of individualism,
Ina pre-capitalist rejection of collectivism,
A philosophy that reaches its apogee
In a 21 st century cult of the celebration of celebrity,
And narcissistic performance of self.
And what if, as Dan Fox puts it,
In Pretentiousness and why it Matters,
‘Thine own self’ is not true?
Is not ‘authentic’?
For
‘All the world’s a stage
And all the men and women are merely players’ …
But we’ve got to stop the Tories in Stroud.
And at Westminster.
This is not some fictive play.
This is real:
A redrawing of constituency boundaries;
A one-party state, in effect.
Forget proportional representation.
Forget the climate.
But if we stop them now in Stroud and at Westminster,
Then there is hope for the future.
Unite to Stop the Tories in Stroud and at Westminster.