Rhian

People are intelligent and we shouldn’t assume otherwise: Interview with Juliet Jacques

Much of New Socialist’s approach is underpinned by the belief that culture and politics are intertwined, and that the capacity for creative work and cultural awareness is not determined by socio-economic status. The latter idea in particular currently has to face off against traditional ruling-class contempt for the creative and intellectual abilities of ‘ordinary people’ and, more insidiously, from authentocratic claims, often from within Labour itself, that concern with abstract theory, art and cultural criticism is a middle-class preserve. In her interview with NS Culture co-ed Jack Frayne-Reid on her Resonance FM show Suite (212), Juliet Jacques identifies the shortcomings of contemporary arts and cultural coverage and the potential that the Corbyn project offers for both current cultural workers and artistic voices outside the mainstream.

Ewan Cameron—Le Guin’s Revolution

The writer Ursula Le Guin’s death in January 2018 prompted this appreciation of her disruption of capitalist realism and depiction of anarchist utopias. Given the frequency of assumptions that fantasy and science fiction are reactionary or alt-right strongholds whose worldbuilding celebrates patriarchy and feudalism, it’s vital to remember that the genre can also belong to left ideas and visions, and that women (Octavia Butler, Alice B. Sheldon and Margaret Atwood as well as Le Guin) have been some of its greatest and best-loved practitioners.

Dan Evans—Neither Red Nor Green: Labour’s Dilemmas in Wales

The state of contemporary Welsh politics and particularly Welsh Labour remains woefully under-analysed. On a British level, it’s either not reported on at all or characterised by an incurious adherence to outdated clichés. Dan Evans looks at the issues surrounding this autumn’s Welsh Labour leadership contest, and the new political currents signified by Plaid Cymru’s (equally under-reported) change of leadership in September. His account is sharply critical of Welsh Labour’s stagnant complacency and its record in the Senedd, going beyond partisan defensiveness to argue that the country would be best served by a socialist coalition which takes account of class as well as national identity.

David Wilkinson—‘I’m the Shy Boy’: Remembering Pete Shelley of Buzzcocks

The outpouring of appreciation for Pete Shelley’s music following his death in December 2018 often underplayed his political significance. Shelley’s journey from a Lancashire mill-town to punk and post-punk stardom, and his frequently disarmingly radical music and lyrics, demonstrate the ordinariness of culture and progressive politics for the 60s and 70s working class. They also do much to disprove dreary authentocratic assumptions about working-class creativity, masculinity and sexuality.

Tom Gann

Clair Quentin—Seventy Seven Nation Industrial Reserve Army

Ashara Peake—Labour’s Problem with the Police

Two pieces that work really well together in tracing certain limits of Corbynism around statist and/or national limits (both ethical and strategic) on socialist transformation. These sort of constructive, engaged critiques that hopefully can find ways of meeting with political forces internal and external to Corbynism are, I think a really valuable aspect of what we’re trying to do.

Clair Quentin’s conclusion troubles a social democracy in one (Global North) country, ethically but also strategically. From a relatively conformist social democratic perspective, the money “lost” to tax evasion is money lost by and to be recaptured by the UK- “we hear a lot from the forthcoming Labour government about how they are going to fund investment here in the UK”. Quentin is also extremely sharp on how certain, broadly post-operaist tendencies, that have become part of “Corbynism” may buttress these arguments, “a consoling value-theoretical fantasy currently popular in some left circles is that we create value for capital by dint of, for example, our unpaid immaterial labour building the vast databases of our own commodity preferences that are held by social media giants.” As Quentin works through rigorously and precisely, this money, though, is in no real sense “ours”- we hear almost “nothing about the global redistribution that will be necessary in order to stamp out the underlying inequalities between the people who do the work producing the stuff we consume and we who consume it”. This is not only an ethical problem within Corbynism, it is a strategic one- it represents a faultline in the Corbynite bloc, and a faultline between two necessary components, the possible “undoing of the present coalition between the radical left and the social democratic left in the UK: the inability of a Corbyn government to address the neocolonial position of the UK in the capitalist world order.” As George Padmore argued in 1944, imperialism and the contradiction it necessarily provokes between those positions and social bases who would like to integrated into the state and capital for the sake of a share of its spoils and radical socialists who would like to break with that order both domestically and internationally (and break with the way imperialism necessarily fixes class relations domestically), is the potential basis for a Labour Party crisis.

Ashara Peake’s critique of Labour’s positioning around policing also is in many ways a critique of how aspects, and perhaps leading aspects of Corbynism fail to make a rupture with the current state of things, again in a way that limits the project both ethically and strategically. Ethically crucial to Peake’s argument is that Labour’s failure to challenge the discourse around policing has impacts now, even with us out of office nationally. Firstly, there are impacts where Labour have some control over policing, notably London. Secondly, and the application of arguments from Stuart Hall and others’ Policing the Crisis and Adam Elliot-Cooper’s work around stop and search, is strong and useful, the impact of the criminal justice system and people within it is not just a question of the law but of behaviour which is shaped discursively, a failure to challenge the hegemonic discourse will have oppressive and racist consequences now. Thirdly, and here ethical and strategic concerns overlap, there is no law and order society of the left, its construction necessarily hems in possibilities of a socialist project not just electorally but in terms of our capacities to transform society more widely if we are in office. Following the questions posed at the beginning of Policing the Crisis, which Peake quotes, the social forces which benefit from the construction of the law and order society are not ours and can never be, the social forces that point to and ground possible socialist transformation are precisely those contained by it.

Chris Green—Learning nothing from Thatcherism

Another piece that, though it also does much more than this, articulates certain limits of Corbynism around the state and nation,

The book’s vision of a patriotic left populism will undoubtedly find sympathetic readers, especially in Britain. But as reaction to the Labour Party’s recent attempts to find appeal on more socially conservative, patriotic-nostalgic grounds have shown, there are very real contradictions within both Corbyn’s existing support, and the electoral base he needs going forward, which elude any easy formulations about building a ‘people’.

Chris develops the limits of a “left” patriotic populism rigorously and persuasively, this patriotism is, of course, never particularly radical or left, wafty appeals to “egalitarian aspects of the national tradition”, don’t really get us very far. As Chris notes, there “nothing particularly anti-capitalist, or even particularly redistributive on offer in the text.”

The limits around “left” patriotism also mark a theoretical problem around Mouffe’s use of ontology- historical contexts become secondary to formal features of the political, and this is a problem both strategically and analytically. What matters to politics is formal features, its necessarily antagonistic character and the success of the populist right is explained by grasping this not by anything historical- Chris writes with obvious horror, “the idea that in any of these countries (though we might wish to underline Belgium and France in particular) something like an uncritical imperial nostalgia or a lack of public discussion of the realities of colonialism would have nothing to do with the gains of right-wing populists seems completely absurd.” Ontology here poses a double problem, firstly, analytically, crucial aspects of an explanation are relegated to the contingent, secondary or ontic, secondly, the strategic problem reappears- the challenge posed by the legacy and indeed continuing existence of imperialism to progressive articulations of the nation is waved away (and one can see tendencies towards this in Corbynism even if usually they lack the theoretical armature).

I also find Chris’s argument around the dangers of a certain sorts of commitment to the conjunctural lapsing into a faddishness and an ignoring of structures really suggestive, especially,

A danger here lies in producing a certain kind of Gramsci-esque fidelity to The Conjuncture, in which we might say that “a crisis occurs, sometimes lasting for decades” but what is actually causing this crisis to occur is not really explored. This seems to me an especially important thing to consider when we think about contemporary populism.

This perhaps overlaps a little with the limits of ontology with regard to the nation and imperialist histories and present- the ontological appears and appears conjuncturally, ultimately without mediation of histories and structures. The line of argument then converges on the notion that, as suggested too in Chris’s invaluable Gramsci essay for us (as well as David Quentin’s and Ashara Peake’s work), that left hegemony precisely doesn’t mean imitating the tactics of the right, but somehow inserting a left content, or perhaps even worse, trying to render ourselves palatable by accepting the terms of the current order on, for example, policing, borders or “defence” in order to achieve certain things economistically. As Chris argues,

This analysis which saw Thatcherism as a complete hegemonic rearticulation that the left failed at the time to recognise contributed to the development of the kind of thinking about the need for a Thatcherism ‘of the left’ which so influenced New Labour. There is a complex intellectual and political history here, to be sure. But when we think about the ‘populist moment’ today, the one lesson we should probably take from Thatcherism is that the left would do well to avoid becoming too enamoured with the ways in which the right is currently winning.

Anti-Semitism and our Duties as Anti-Imperialists

It’s possibly a bit strange or even wrong to include a piece in which I was involved in the writing, but although I don’t think it is entirely successful, I think it represented a fairly important intervention and I’m proud of our doing it. Firstly, I think to lay down a clear line, that antisemitism on the left exists, has some connection to kinds of left thought and particularly “common sense” and must be opposed is important clarity. Secondly, I think it was probably even more useful to make the argument against both left anti-Semites (and their apologists) and pro-imperialists, and to present this as the shared, structuring point of both apparently opposed positions, that left anti-semitism is precisely not a result of excessive, intense or indeed any solidarity with Palestine. The framing of the problem as largely one of social patriotism on the left- what is really being defended in left anti-semitism is a sentimental image of Britain as essentially a benign actor in global politics but one that has been corrupted by a “lobby”, still strikes me as a pretty significant part of the roots of left anti-semitism and why (against, for example, Bolton and Pitts) and serious programme of political education against anti-semitism needs to be explicitly anti-imperialist. I think too the general conceptions of how political education should work, the rejection of the notion and the resulting forms of pedagogy, that the role of political education is to replace wrong ideas with right ones, is sound and useful.

josie sparrow—Rhetoric, Responsibility, & the Problem of the Political: Some thoughts after reading Andrew O’Hagan on Grenfell Tower

Finally, there’s josie’s piece on Andrew O’Hagan’s “ill-considered, crypto-racist” book length essay for the LRB on Grenfell, though simultaneously, and rightly, it’s not just about O’Hagan’s “effort”. This is a really incredible piece not only because it demonstrates how and why that O’Hagan’s essay is bad, though it is, or even, I think, that it was a deeply dishonest and violent piece that needed out of duties of solidarity to be challenged, but also that O’Hagan, in many ways, is typical both of a particular literary-media-production but a whole set of ruling class responses and values- including ones that are implicated in what happened with Grenfell, particularly in the failure to listen to popular expertise as a cause of the fire and the abject failure to meet needs after the fire- Grenfell as a “failure of listening”.

It is, no shock that, O’Hagan is much more comfortable empathising with posh, “bohemian” Tory councillors than with the victims or survivors, as Josie writes,

The question becomes, then, who is permitted to feel? Whose feelings count? To borrow from Judith Butler, which bodies—indeed, which hearts—matter? Who do we choose to hear? In tacit response to these questions, O’Hagan grieves the jobs of Nicholas Paget-Brown and Rock Feilding-Mellen at least as deeply as he grieves the lives of those who perished—and those who survived, traumatised, to live and relive that night for as long as they live.

The way in which Josie establishes how O’Hagan presents the world in which these judgements are made as common-sensical is valuable and precise. The critique, which overlaps with this, of how the council were only acting like normal Tories and therefore shouldn’t really be blamed- “O’Hagan’s attempt to outsource any potential culpability onto something as vaguely-defined as “the culture”, without acknowledging the very real dynamics of power that shape and control that culture, deflates, for all its puffed-up rhetoric, at the slightest touch” also points to something more general about how a kind of unshockable “worldliness” including on the left can sometimes limit the necessary indignation that is part of a serious and effective response to events. O’Hagan then as symptom, is a symptom of a certain kind of abstraction, a necessary lack of seriousness, a constitutive incapacity to respond properly, “to respond well, I must listen. To respond well, I must be prepared to hear”, because for all the authentocrat performance, O’Hagan’s social position and the knowledge which underpins that relies on an absolute distance from those who bear the consequences of political decisions.

josie

Rhian E. Jones—The Age of Authentocracy

Possibly the most urgent and accessible piece of cultural criticism published in 2018, Joe Kennedy’s Authentocrats expanded on notions of authentocracy as bizarre, laddish political praxis that had been flying around on Twitter for a couple of years. Rhian’s review is just as vital—she draws out the key arguments of the book deftly and with generosity, but doesn’t let Kennedy escape critique for his own lapses into a different sort of blokeishness. “The book,” as she notes, “occasionally feels wearyingly framed as an argument between more or less entirely male political and intellectual opponents… an identification of political ideas and analysis with men, and a preoccupation with political and intellectual discourse as single-hand combat between them.” And indeed, it’s notable that the book’s most sustained engagement with a non-male thinker is the extended—and perhaps slightly too gleeful—razzing off of Alexandra Harris.

But what struck me most of all when reading Rhian’s review was the way in which just how many of these conversations and discourses, within and beyond the book, remain framed as overwhelmingly masculine—and represented by a particularly narrow subset of possible masculinities, at that. The book was likely so masculine because the discussions that took place, on Twitter, in the pub, wherever, likely also happened mostly between men. There’s a phenomenon within academic philosophy where men don’t read women, or engage with feminist thinking, because that’s what the women are supposed to do. Meanwhile, women are stuck doing explicit feminism because nobody else will, even when their specific interests and talents might lie elsewhere. Something similar can happen on the left, I think: too often (not always, but often) women (and particularly trans women and BAME women) get stuck firefighting, battling to be heard at all, and to institute policies and practices that make participation possible—whilst meanwhile, the men are off having Grand Thoughts and Shaping the Discourse in ways that are automatically intelligible to the status quo. How often have we heard the old canard that working class women have not historically been politicised? Really, it’s just that the ways in which we were and are politicised have not been attended to. Anybody wanting to learn more about this would find Rhian’s work a rich and rewarding place to begin.

Owen Hatherley—What Should a 21st Century Socialist Housing Policy Look Like?

Particularly on point at the moment, given the confected uproar around Kate Osamor daring to live in social housing, Owen offers some sharp and insightful suggestions around how we might begin to think through the problem of housing. Taking in questions of ownership (“the right to not have to buy” is a particularly nice turn of phrase), regeneration, construction, and planning, along with a cheeky Mao reference, the piece neatly balances rigour with humanity: Owen never forgets that houses are where people live. I really hope that people will take up some of the suggestions presented here, and use them as a starting-point for a radical, profound re-visioning of what ‘housing’ can and could mean.

anonymous—Questions for the Organisers of the People’s Vote Campaign

Hoo boy. As the Brexit clown car rumbles inexorably towards next March, the fractures between ever-more-narrowly-defined “sides” seem to get deeper by the day. Written as the so-called ‘People’s Vote’ campaign reached some sort of frenzied climax, our anonymous (Remainer) author here poses 15 key questions to the #FBPE #windmill crowd and their associated tendencies. At the time of writing, I don’t believe that anybody from the campaign has taken time out from their busy schedule of commenting “BUT WHAT ABOUT BREXIT JEREMY” under anything tweeted by Corbyn’s office to answer these questions—but they remain, to my mind, absolutely vital if any case at all is to be made for a second referendum. As a good friend of mine noted recently, “To say that Corbyn has no Brexit policy when all you can offer is hashtags is unconvincing.”

Wendy Liu—Beyond “Taming” the Tech Giants

In this text, Wendy makes the case for abolishing Silicon Valley—and if that in itself doesn’t fill you with revolutionary glee, I don’t know what will. She offers a sharp critique of the usual arguments that the tech giants make in order to justify their own existence, dismantling the mythos and returning, diligently, to the key materialist questions of who and how. From coltan miners in the Democratic Republic of Congo to a bus driver in San Jose; from a FoxConn worker in southern China to a teenager in England generating ad revenue via Facebook clicks, Wendy shows how deeply dependent these tech companies are on global networks of exploitation and extraction that are the exact opposite of the immaterial, individualistic image the Valley seeks to project. It’s a deliciously ecological critique that points the way towards radical forms of global solidarity.

Sophie Lewis—‘Labour Does You’: Might thinking through pregnancy as work help us radicalise the politics of care?

In my philosophical work, I find myself asking a lot of questions about care, and about abuse, and about the ways in which humans relate both with/to each other, and with/to everything else (that is, what Jason Moore might want to call “the web of life”). So much seems to come back to the question of care and reproduction: the figure of the carer, the mother, the social-reproducer; the ‘placental relation’ as a template for intra-human ethics, or the notion of ‘Mother Earth’. And it was always quite difficult for me, the product of an abusive, violent family that had very good politics, to find my place in that system. It often made me feel, very subtly, less than human. Less than worthwhile. In this way, when we assume that all care is good care, that all mothers are good mothers, that everything that is socially-reproduced is necessarily good, we contribute to systems of violence. Imagine my joy, then, when I read Sophie’s piece—which takes in these questions and so many more—where she writes:

“Instead of endlessly demonstrating everything that (in the complete absence of proper recognition) keeps the world ticking over, the question we must get better at asking about social reproduction is: social reproduction of what? To what end? Alienated low-status carers and multigendered mothers are, unfortunately more often than not, complicit with and even instrumental in systemic violence. Too often, ‘care studies’ and ‘social reproduction’ scholarship merely draws attention to the unpaid love that glues everything together. A critical, anti-violent politicisation of these processes would need to radically transform (and not just revalue, ‘as is’) these domains.”

There’s more I want to say (her notion, through a reading of Maggie Nelson on pregnancy, of alienated labour as labour that “does you”, is a game-changer), but I think I’m going to save it for a proper response article. But please, please read this. It’s a radically important intervention into care ethics, social reproduction, and labour politics—and all from a materialist, feminist, trans-inclusive perspective that is generous and nourishing.

Hope you all have a lovely New Year, friends!

Wendy

Two of my favourite pieces - josie’s on Grenfell, and Clair Quentin’s on tax havens - were already mentioned above, so here are my faves that haven’t been mentioned yet:

Amelia Horgan—Beyond tuition fees: Democratising higher education

A thoughtful and beautifully-written piece for our “Beyond The Manifesto” series, detailing what’s missing from Labour’s manifesto pledges on higher education. Yes, of course tuition fees should be scrapped, and student loan debt should be cancelled, but focusing solely on the fiscal elements isn’t enough:

If we merely take the existing system and remove the fees, we are not necessarily left with something radical. If we want serious change in higher education, we need a system that enables individuals to critique the world, not education to serve an individual career.

Hettie O’Brien—Monopoly’s Fallacy

Hettie has written three excellent articles for us this year. This one, on solutions to the monopolistic tendencies of tech giants, was her first article for us, and it’s one that I still find myself referring to every now and then. This article serves as a useful rejoinder to the frequent calls to “break up” the tech giants (as if suddenly re-introducing market competition will not simply start the consolidation process all over again). The internet could be so much more than simply a means to accelerate capital accumulation; instead, we should think of it as a commons, to be managed for the collective good:

Socialising technology platforms and the resources they make use of – as crazy as it might sound to those firmly embedded within the free market – is the only way to retain their efficiencies of scale and make sure they operate in the common interest.

Leo Watkins—Democratising British journalism: a response to Jeremy Corbyn’s Alternative MacTaggart Lecture

This is a very long but very worthwhile overview of the decline of journalism, with a perspective firmly grounded in political economy. Contrary to what some would have you believe, the internet did not “destroy” journalism. It merely accelerated the visibility of problems with journalism’s primary funding model, advertising—problems that would be inherent to any for-profit system of journalism. Rather than trying to somehow insulate journalism from the internet, we need to instead decommodify journalism, by taking it out of private ownership, while simultaneously democratising it. Given the crucial ideological role that the media plays in any society—whether ensuring the consent of the governed, or properly directing their dissatisfaction—the question of who controls the media becomes highly important. Corbyn’s speech on media reform in August was a step in the right direction, but only a small step; if the left is ever going to build enough popular support to accomplish its goals, we’ll need to do a lot more.

Justin Reynolds—Designing the future: a review of Economic Science Fictions

A lovely review of an essay collection, edited by Will Davies, that was released earlier this year. On the potential of science fiction to shape our imaginations in ways that can be radical (e.g., Ursula K. Le Guin) or reactionary (most popular sci-fi, sadly). Given the pervasiveness of what Mark Fisher called “capitalist realism”, radical science fiction—which presents alternate economic possibilities—has a lot of power, and maybe even emancipatory potential. The left needs dystopia—to help us understand the horrors of the mode of production we live under—but it also needs utopia, to give us something to fight for. Good science fiction has both, and the left shouldn’t underestimate its potential for awakening people’s consciousness.

Steffan Blayney—The “Great Man” Theory of History and New Labour

I quite enjoyed this review of a terrible-sounding book by Liam Byrne, an MP whose star shone brightest during the New Labour years and has been dimming ever since. [Byrne is currently Shadow Digital Minister, a fairly minor role that he is nevertheless infusing with all his New Labour zeal, and I half-jokingly decided he was my arch-nemesis after witnessing him give a truly appalling talk a year ago, which I’ve written about for New Socialist. The book in question [which he shilled multiple times during the aforementioned appalling talk, even though it’s literally titled Dragons: Ten Entrepreneurs Who Built Britain; you can’t make this shit up] is, as Steffan says, “a bad book”, but useful as a “representative of a tendency – and a way of thinking – within the Labour Party”. Idolising the “great men” who “entrepreneurialised” their way into the history books is to implicitly support the present distribution of resources and control, so that one man who happens to be the CEO of Amazon gets to be the richest man on earth while many of his workers are barely getting by. The pendulum has clearly swung way too far in favour of the “entrepreneur”, and it’s about time people stopped writing books praising them.

Kyle

I find it hard to pick favourites, of anything, so I have picked four pieces from the economics section which I believe set up key debates on the left which have been set aside consistently over the past several decades. Pieces I was very excited about, alongside being interested in. This, in particular, involves debates which have stemmed from the changes from “globalisation” during which the left has largely been on the defensive till post financial crisis.

Clair Quentin—Seventy-seven nation industrial reserve army

This is an excellent discussion of the interaction between taxation and commodity chains; and highlights a crucial point. The majority of the wealth we want to redistribute in core economies is not ours in the first place.

This point has been made repeatedly in the history of the left, it is not new but it is contentious. Focusing on tax sidesteps a lot of the past debates on the extraction of surplus value as an empirical category though and in contrast to more diffuse debates on payments of labour to its full value or productivity represents a lump of cash which although it already looks as if it’s stolen from the core economies, really was already stolen from the global south.

Though the debate on tax is fascinating in itself, more discussion of how we imagine what is ours to distribute and how radical policy should react to this should be a crucial question for any politics that sees both capitalism and imperialism as its enemy.

John Marlow—Capitalist and Socialist Universal Basic Incomes

“Read some effing Heinrich”

It was incredibly difficult to pick between John Marlow’s two excellent pieces for us this year. But in terms of debate the weaving in this piece between a fantastic analysis of UBI and the use of Marxist value theory represented the exact sort of intervention that explicitly left publications can make.

There are layered forms of left analysis; from a class perspective, from a historical perspective, from a value perspective. Each of these elements in itself can say something meaningful and radical about the world, however, value perspectives tend to be hidden not least because they can be often come across overly abstract.

Here, Marlow not only avoids this problem, but integrates an analysis of an empirical policy with debates in value theory to produce a piece that feels like it conclusively sets up the terrain for debates on UBI for radicals. The result is a piece which really questions UBI’s relationship to capital not just its practical consequences or novel historical role.

Sahil Dutta—Servants of Industry? Getting Financialisation Wrong

The concept of neoliberalism and financialization go hand in hand. Though this is a vital empirical discussion considering the extent of its role, there has also been a tendency to idealise finance. This takes several forms, but the reification of its “unproductive” nature means the role Marx gave it, as the mechanism through which capital self-organisers its own productivity, goes missing.

The failure to deal with this has had clear consequence on the vision for immediate radical solutions to neoliberalism. This paper gives an excellent overview of this problem, and weaves it together with a failure to deal with the nation and with the conception of what counts as “the economy”.

This position is useful in itself. But importantly it also speaks to a need for the left to speak about the economy in full, and in a practical manner. In the current context the left really isn’t asking for revolution and if while it is committed to a slower more reformist outlook developing its ability to understand capital is crucial.

Paddy Bettington—Managerial Failure

This was late in for 2018 but starts to address some of the problems that radicals will face when they actually take power. It is easy to discuss the concept of democratisation and collectivisation as solving stark problems with management. But when, as this piece does, we remember they are connected to wider systemic issues of economic management we move from seeing them simply as easy solutions to seeing them as different (better) forms of management.

Dealing with this question today is crucial, in particular as we understand the failure of past socialist projects to ever seriously move beyond questions of productive organisation of resources and start to deal with the human consequences of work.

By connecting these two issues, identifying management’s role in the productivity crisis and in turn identifying how this has been shaped by a specific mode of work, this piece begs for the left to become more conscious of how management functions.

Dealing practically with theories of management will be a crucial task in the future and starting to think of this now will be important for having workable solutions when the time comes to implement them.