1) That Britain still produces steel comes as a surprise to anyone not immediately employed or financially engaged in steel manufacturing. Public attention locking onto the plight of what appears to be our last lowly blast furnace is much the same as the whiplash focus brought to the Falkland Islands, or Kursk, or Myanmar. “Can you point out the blast furnace on a map?” / “Well that's hardly the point! It's in the North somewhere. Anyway, it doesn't matter where it is, it's the Heart of our Country! Our culture, our history, our very soul is imperilled!”
2) The Reform Party’s announcement that Britain must wrench “our steel” from Chinese hands and put it back to The People insults the Socialists, who until now have enjoyed a four decade monopoly on the idea of re-nationalisation. “Doesn’t Reform know they've gone against their own economic policy?” That nationalisation and industrialisation might be taken as a Right Wing project confirms the actuality of a successful and thorough liquidation, expropriation, and looting of the intellectual and physical properties of British Socialism, as much as Russia's oligarchs amorphously govern and extract rent from Soviet factories and supply chains. Socialism was never to be the property of Socialists, but always the objective movement working through any and all persons or parties; that they ignore this has no bearing on anything besides their own unhappy consciousness.
3) Calling MPs back from recess to begrudgingly argue over the fate of one blast furnace: Interrupting the recess is far more important than the blast furnace, more important than a British steel industry, than the idea of nationalisation, or the Chinese, the Americans, the Europeans, the Indians, etc. Every problem of this kind begins and ends in Parliament. History can't be made in Parliament. The motor of the world can't be moved by conversation.
4) A weapon in the arsenal of electoral politics, then. British Steel, one blast furnace; That we “used to make things here”, that there was dignity in work, that production meant community, jobs, meaning in life, is not an affirmation of life. The bare life of work, that work is the necessary grounding of all meaning: such a concept, consistently and sincerely articulated by both the Reform Party and the Socialists, clarifies the reactionary, narrow, substanceless non-quality of our politics. When “we” did “make steel”, or “mine coal”, or “weave cotton”, or “build ships” it was for the determinate ends of world warfare, for the conquest of everything, conditioned exclusively on the actuality of Empire. Narrowing steel production, or any production, to the peripheral and circumstantial notion of dignity is directly proportional to the narrowing of our productive capacity and national historical horizon, the rendering of production to the mere play at production. The left and right wings of post-liberalism, Socialists and the Reform Party, erect a demarcated ground within which they pull to and fro at a little figure called “the White Working Class”, jostled and jived between them so that this figure might recognise itself in one of the two, to seek in one or the other the means of life. Never mind that this figure is entirely bereft of life, actuality, spirit; this figure is not the agent of historical change, not least in its formulation as such a figure. It is an inert substance continually impressed upon, a putty set to revert as soon as the performance is ceased. Putting it “back to work” will inevitably become putting it “back to war”, the grounds of production in Britain's “golden age” of manufacturing. That the Socialists are against war is why the Reform Party will win over them. The Right Wing concept is more profound and thorough, albeit within the bounds of an entirely shallow and voided world picture
5) British Socialists lust for a Reform government, for the final liquidation of all the hard-fought Socialist institutions, so they might retrieve and repeat the struggles of the 19th and early 20th Centuries. Democracy has arrived at its termination, so the Reform Party must be the midwife of a renewed Democratic Struggle. Repeating the last two-hundred-odd years, whose players are to be a dwindling native population padded-out with substitutions, in a country without aristocracy, without memory of pre-industrial conditions, the traditions of all dead generations weighing on the brains of the living like a nightmare but without any of the premises upon which the original struggles were fought… “Somewhere along the road, things went wrong” for the Democratic Movement. It lost its mandate somehow, and the motor of the world halted; “Let's restart! You go over there, we'll go over here. We'll do it over.” Full immiseration must come again to give meaning to Socialism. The Socialist shall never realise that Socialism won, that their forebears have struggled tirelessly to bring about our present condition. Culpability lies with the Democratic Movement, with the Socialists. Capital, the oppressor, is a mere consequence of work, the same work “dignified” by the Democratic Movement:
‘... the capitalist class, from its birth, is in fact subordinate to the working class … Working-class struggles against the iron laws of capitalist exploitation cannot be reduced to the eternal revolt of the oppressed against their oppressor ... it is the working class' directly political thrust that imposes economic development on capital… the political history of capital [is] a succession of attempts by capital to free itself from the class relation.’
Mario Tronti
6) The Socialist and Communist Parties aren't Parties, then, because Parties (to them) must be agents bound to necessity, to the cause of moving the motor of the world. The Parties today are varying congregations of Old Believers who honour the Saints, perform the rites, and debate the veracity of their systems and metaphysics. The Socialists and Communists in the English speaking world are forgetting their atheism, no longer holding religion in contempt. These Parties are for their congregants the heart of a heartless world, unable to recognise that the Spirit of Communism has fled from them; the Real Movement has absolutely no need for various firms vying for IP, and it was always to be the case that Communism would escape them. It was never to happen as they pleased. It has arrived by circumstances existing both within them and beyond them, given and transmitted from outside.
7) Two possibilities: one is to tune in to the signal, adopt the manner of automatic being, and let go; the other is to maintain oneself in the awareness of a still world, to be a knife ever sharpening against a stone, to act without recourse to struggle and production as anything but play. When the Socialist has given up his sincere mental and spiritual investment in British Steel and all associated concepts, he has freed himself up to play. Any struggle can be his, any position, but for the joy which animates it, devoid of the anxiety which arises from vulgar, outdated ideas like historical necessity.