Prospects for a New Politics
The Left is based on universality and solidarity. The most stupid and self-defeating thing the Left could have done is to have sliced and diced humanity and ranked people according to a hierarchy of identity and grievance - the ideologues did it.
These people identify as leftist, but that doesn't make them Left at all. Their 'radical' words and actions are performative, costing them little if anything at all. From their comfortable and secure positions within the status quo, they can advance policies and principles at no personal risk. It's a cheap radicalism which serves to boost their public image, not to mention the sense of their own self-importance.
Such people could be described as 'progressive' (except that many of their positions are regressive) or 'liberal,' (except that their attempts to silence and suppress alternate platforms is highly illiberal). Make of them what you will. I find them empty and hypocritical, entirely lacking in worth and substance. I still describe myself as a socialist, but have almost nothing in common with these people. I see them jeering, patronising, and abusing 'ordinary' folk on a daily basis. I have worked with and served 'ordinary' folk in my job, and lived in the same community as them, as one of them. The disdain that certain cultural 'elites' have for 'ordinary' people is palpable. I put the word 'elites' in inverted commas for a good reason. The word is being used a lot in contemporary political discourse. I prefer a good old-fashioned class analysis. I think we are dealing with a culturally dominant class, people who owe their income, position, and privilege to their location in contemporary social relations. They think themselves to be free-riding cultural creatives who transcend class and material interest, rising above such sordid affairs in their independence. I see no reason to take such people according to their own self-image. They are members of a dominant class and culture, but are not an elite. They are 'progressives' riding the new wave of capitalist development. Such 'progressives' perform quite the performative balancing act, being the establishment whilst pretending to fight it. That's quite the psychological and political feat, posing as radical outsiders challenging the system whilst actually being firmly on the inside and advancing its mercenary priorities.
There is a need for a new Left, because the one we have isn't fit for any leftist purpose at all, the very opposite. The contemporary Left is so antithetical to leftist principle that you could almost believe it has been invented to divide and derail the anti-capitalist forces as they started to emerge and coalesce in the 1990s ... I would go further, however, and say that there is a need for a new politics, a politics that is able to weave together the various discarded and neglected concerns of people of all persuasions to form a new commonality.
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I have seen my home town of St Helens subjected to deindustrialisation in the 1980s and then continue to slide in the decades after. I have seen it happen from the inside. I have observed it as a St Helens citizen and compatriot, but also as an academic observer. I studied Economic History at 'A' level at St Helens College of Technology. It was interesting to relate present industrial decline to the industrial revolution past. It is tragic what has happened to St Helens. In recent years I have seen the once vibrant town centre become increasingly deserted, with shops closing down and buildings being boarded up. People rush home before dark in order to avoid the "Ketamine kids." Residents complain about the state of the town, and yet keep going back to an utterly complicit and thoroughly mediocre Labour Party. They buy the excuse that decline is all down to the Conservative government at the centre. There is merit to that view, but Labour use it as an alibi for their own mediocrity. Both parties are wretched, devoid of substance and purpose, two cheeks of the same backside, taking us to the arse-end of nowhere. They are hopeless and, politically, I am homeless. The disconnect between official politics and the people is palpable. It is plain to see that 'ordinary' people are without effective representation.
The trick of the electoral game has been to convince voters that one party is establishment and the other reforming outsiders. This illusion can no longer be sustained. We had a long stretch of Labour government under Blair and Brown. At local level, too, Labour has long been the Establishment in these areas in decline. The old loyalties have been weakening for decades, and came unglued first with Brexit and then with the fall of the Red Walls at the 2019 General Election. St Helens voted to leave the EU but stayed with Labour at the 2019 election. But I knew many who normally voted Labour who voted for Johnson. The Conservatives had an opportunity to secure the working class vote and confirm the severance of the link between the working class and Labour, and blew it. That makes clear the extent to which both main parties are bereft of purpose and vision. Labour has retained its grip on the larger Metropolitan areas, and this needs to end. The whole terrain of politics is rotten. People in Metropolitan areas are having their material interests served to a certain extent, and to that extent are inclined to go along with the performative radicalism of Labour. But it is vacuous and entails no substantive change, certainly not in the sense of restructuring power and resources in favour of 'ordinary' people. Labourism is fatally divided at base, but will continue to limp on by pandering to the self-image – and interests – of the fashionably radical (that is, the culturally dominant – conservativism of the very worst, selfish, sort.
'Ordinary' working class people are been neglected, when not openly abused. It's open season on anyone with views that depart in any way from the dominant narratives. I was born four miles from Knowsley and lived four to six miles from Knowsley for most of my life. I know the area and the people very well indeed. The idea that the people of Knowsley are 'Far Right' is fanciful in the extreme, and reveals the extent to which those making the accusation are detached from 'the common people.' The simple truth is that there are a lot of comfortably-off people who are advancing policies and principles of little or no expense to themselves, for which working class people, already confronted by straitened circumstances, have to bear the costs and consequences.
I stopped voting Labour at any level in the general election of 1992. The party holds the working class in contempt. I knew it then, but voted with just thirty minutes left before polling closed because I felt Labour to be marginally less worse than their Conservative rivals. It was a vote placed with zero enthusiasm and expectation. The belief system which is essential to any political movement simply wasn't there for me. As for Blair, I expected nothing but the worst and was still disappointed. I heard the lies he told on tiny issues of no import before election, lies that were capable of being refuted by easily checked facts, and wondered if he could be so bold and blatant in his deception, then what big lies would he attempt. We found out. I remember the latest installment in Labour's attempt to distance itself from its working class constituency, pitching its appeal to the 'aspiring classes,' people who have raised themselves 'above' their origins, who have come to earn substantial money and who wanted to keep more of it rather than share it to give opportunity to others. The economic liberalism that had already claimed conservatism, in other words.
Truth be told, the Kautsky-Lenin thesis of 'socialism from the outside' gave the game away a century ago - the working class is not the revolutionary class marxist theory says it is, but possesses conservative aspects which are not a 'false consciousness' to be eradicated by 'correct ideology' (Lenin), but part of its very make-up. The Left seems utterly incapable of dealing with the reality of the working class and its views, seeing the class as an objective 'it' whose real interests can be read scientifically from social position. It should come as no surprise that activists and ideologues should have come to ditch the less-than-revolutionary working class for other supposed revolutionary agents. In time, they will ditch those agents, too, having come to learn that these also are not wholly revolutionary subjects that political theory says they are. The expansion of higher education has been a blight for socialism, drawing working class people from their roots and communities of work and practice into a world of certified opinions, miscalled expertise. I voted (without enthusiasm) to remain in the EU. (Having studied the EC as was at masters level, I am under no illusions as to the faultlines at the heart of the process of EU integration.) However, the abuse of working class people who voted to leave was unconscionable; it expressed a class based vitriol and contempt that made clear the extent to which comfortably off 'progressives' don't know and don't give a damn about 'ordinary' people and their struggles. The people they abused as racist and xenophobic come from areas that have suffered tremendously from the impact of globalisation; they are people I know to be fundamentally decent.
I base my politics firmly in the people who make, move, build, and grow things and proceed from there. I leave a priori principles of political rationality to the activists and ideologues. I get the impression that more and more people are disillusioned by the manifest hollowness of the mainstream parties. The Conservative party sold any conservativism it had to the market decades ago, becoming free trade – and globalising – liberals, exposing national, social, and collective ties, loyalties, and solidarities to the universal acid of money and commerce. Conservatives now stand mystified at the impotence and lack of leadership from institutions that have come under cultural assault, little understanding that once you privatise freedom and happiness and outsource the common good, the whole edifice becomes empty and purposeless. The people in charge of public institutions are no longer able to identify the public good, let alone believe in it. Conservatism and socialism both have gone, supplanted by an economic neoliberalism, falsely called Right, on the one hand and a cultural neoliberalism, falsely called Left, on the other. The mainstream parties are merely offering variants along that spectrum. So, too, for that matter, are the Liberal Democrats and Greens, absorbed entirely within liberal culture. Liberalism is the dominant political philosophy of the age and owns the culture – what liberals have yet to see or accept is the extent to which the problems they claim to address are self-authored.
A further point to make is that what people present as a process of privatisation is really a liberalisation and a globalisation which entails the corporatisation of public business and the extension and entrenchment of the corporate form. No-one in politics seems to have the first idea how to put a glove on the TNCs, for the reason they lack an agency which possesses the structural and organisational capacity to engage in transformative action. Instead, we get the cheap radicalism of performative action, part of the process of corporatisation rather than being a coherent response to it. The political terrain is empty. These are dangerous times for democracy. Too many 'progressives' are technocrats to their rotten core, openly looking to circumvent democracy in order to secure their overriding ends. Like all technocrats past and present, they will default to existing money and power for the best 'pragmatic' reasons – to get their ends enacted and served. Of course, idealists and innocents, they fail to see that their ideals will be eaten alive by power. They hanker after an enlightened despotism, on the assumption that the despots will be 'enlightened' people like themselves. The lesson of experience is that politics selects for the capacity of leaders to gain, maintain, and extend power, enlightenment be damned. It's a wretched terrain. If there is a future, then it lies with the proles ...
'Ordinary' people are breaking with the Left over a whole range of issues, some to do with class and material interests, others to do with culture, community, and morality. The issues of mass immigration and identity politics have been utterly divisive and debilitating for socialist politics, but have had the merit of highlighting the extent to which a genuine working class politics is more than can be contained by a socio-economic understanding of class and class position. Separating human beings and turning them against one another according to identity and issues is the surest way to destroy the solidaristic bonds and ties that are central to any leftist or socialist politics, but this is precisely what the new Cultural Left did. The old Social Left organised around socio-economic issues and concerns has been supplanted, marginalised, and even demonized by a new Cultural Left that, for all of its radical posturing, seems conformist to the core, complicit within the corporate capture of public life and culture. For all of the overt anti-capitalism, there is not one of the claims of identity politics that cannot be attained within corporate capitalism; we are in the presence of a performative radicalism which proceeds by way of slogans that are without substantive material substance. What does have substance is the cultural coercion and legal force that accompanies identitarianism.
I'm reading David Rozado's “The Great Awokening as a Global Phenomenon.” Rozado's analysis of 98 million news and opinion articles from 124 media outlets across 36 countries indicates that this "great awokening" appears is a global phenomenon. Here is the abstract:
“Previous research has identified a post-2010 sharp increase of words used to denounce prejudice (i.e. racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, etc) in US and UK news media content. Some have referred to these institutional trends and related shifts in US public opinion about increasing perceptions of prejudice severity in society as the Great Awokening. Here, we extend previous analysis to the global media environment. Thus, we quantify the prevalence of prejudice-denouncing terms and social justice associated terminology (diversity, inclusion, equality, etc) in over 98 million news and opinion articles across 124 popular news media outlets from 36 countries representing 6 different world regions: English-speaking West, continental Europe, Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, Persian Gulf region and Asia. We find that increasing prominence in news media of so-called wokeness terminology is a global phenomenon starting early post-2010 in pioneering countries yet mostly worldwide ubiquitous post-2015. Still, different world regions emphasize distinct types of prejudice with varying degrees of intensity. Surprisingly, the United States news media does not appear to have been the pioneer in embedding prejudice and social justice loaded terminology in their content. We also note that state-controlled news media from Russia, China and Iran might be leveraging wokeness terminology as a geopolitical propaganda weapon to mock, destabilize or criticize Western adversaries. The large degree of temporal synchronicity with which wokeness terminology emerged in news media worldwide raises important questions about the root causes driving this phenomenon.”
This 'awokening' has substantial political, material, and cultural force behind it. And it is worth speculating how and why people who claim to be liberal, progressive, and even leftist are so absorbed in it. They may well believe that there is a moral hierarchy of grievances and grudges, but they should be made aware of the extent to which this supplants the universality, justice, and solidarity of traditional Leftism. Leftist politics is now an organized resentment expressing concern to exact revenge for alleged past prejudice and injustic, with the most-discriminated categories on top. Diversity without a unifying and cohering ethic is division – this phenomenon is divisive, dehumanizing, hateful, and perverted.
And it is a distraction. There are many powerful forces and agents in this world who serve to benefit from organised mass distraction on an industrial scale. Power is best preserved by being concealed. Leftist eyes are being diverted from material realities. Their platforms seem radical and progressive, but they are reactionary and regressive.
Central bankers have stoked a populist revolt
In 1995 I studied economics at masters level, paying particular attention to privatisation strategies as a class war waged from above. It was an age in which class war was declared to be dead – it was anything but. Whilst centre-left social democratic parties abandoned the politics of redistribution, parties of the right were advancing policies which had the express purpose of redistributing wealth from labout and capital. In this, they were hugely successful. Not the least part of their success was the extent to which leftist parliamentary parties abandoned the struggle to focus on culture, lifestyle, and aspiration. That redistribution from labour to capital has continued, as has the leftist neglect of class dynamics and socio-economic concerns. There has been a substantial structural shift of power and resources from capital to labour, crystallised and accelerated by Covid, amounting to the biggest transfer of wealth to the rich in history. And leftist politics is thoroughly absorbed in narcissism, 'diversity,' and unreality. It has been a truly pathetic spectacle. At the core of this has been the inflation of language, the shift from socio-economic issues to culture and media, the expansion of education giving people a false sense of their own intelligence and expertise, and the abandonment of 'ordinary' working class people and their communities, concerns, and practices. We are now starting to see the implications of this, and they are drastic for a Cultural Left that has disappeared into a mediated unreality.
These developments are antithetical to a socialism that is premised on the restructuring of power and resources in favour of working class people and communities. We have been living through an era which has seen the greatest transfer of wealth to the rich in history, and yet all the energy and anger which is consuming contemporary politics is concentrated around issues of marginal and minority concern. One can only presume that the people who are so full of fire and fury here are living lives of material comfort, in contradistinction to the working class people they despise.
Identitarianism is a disaster for leftist politics, certainly for a leftist politics that is concerned to root itself in socio-economic realities. If the end is to ensure that working class people can come to exercise a greater degree of control within their workplaces, communities, and polities, then the most stupid and self-defeating thing to do is to divide people up into ever smaller social groupings, unravelling the solidarities, loyalties, and commitments that draw communities together and hold them together. We now have a situation in which neighbours no longer know one another, often no longer share the same language or culture, or draw on the same shared traditions and collective memories. My political initiation and radicalisation came with the Miners' Strike of 1984/85. I come from a mining town (St Helens) and spent part of that year at the home of the Miners' union (Sheffield). The mining communities could sustain strike action for a whole year against the full force of the state because they had a material, cultural, and historical substance; they were cohesive, homogeneous, communities, built around a particular industry with a long history and memory that passed on through the generations. Collective resistance and struggle of such scale and intensity could only be sustained on account of that internal cohesion. Break that cohesion up through the introduction of extraneous elements, and the collective identity and with it the collective capacity to withstand and even challenge the forces of money and power is lost. The neoliberal policies of Margaret Thatcher were designed precisely to destroy all forces and centres of collective resistence to the 'free market,' dissolving communities into self-seeking atoms powerless before the alien collective force of capital. That economic neoliberalism set out to destroy the social supports and networks of labourism and the working class and succeeded. That neoliberalism, however, proved to be a universal acid with the power to dissolve all collective forms of identity and unity, including those central to conservatism itself – faith, family, national identity, patriotism. The neoliberal onslought against socialism is very much the revolution which comes in time to eat itself. The Cultural Left supplanting the Social Left is the cultural wing of economic neoliberalism, taking aim at the remnants of collective identity and solidarity, uprooting one and all to render one and all rootless and powerless in a great sundering. The only unifying power that remains is that of corporate capitalism. The Cultural Left will in time morph seamlessly into a Corporate Left. Truth be told, no morphing is involved – for all the anti-capitalist performance and sloganeering, the demands of the Cultural Left fit corporate capitalism like a hand fits a glove.
I'm encouraged that a few people are now beginning to point out something so screamingly obvious that you have to question the political motives of the people who can't see it – 'woke' is capitalist to the core. I am loathe to use the term 'woke' for any number of reasons:
a) it seems like lazy shorthand for something that needs to be parsed in all its complexity;
b) the phenomenon is a manifestation of a much deeper problem with regard to the metaphysical and social malaise of modernity;
c) it becomes the issue absorbing critical energies, having us swapping shadows on the wall instead of addressing substantial questions. But seeing as people identity the term instantly, I use it as shorthand, simply to make a point – 'woke' is capitalist to the core.
The liberal consensus is unravelling before our eyes. The give-away is the turn to coercion and the policing of thought and speech. People are breaking ranks from the dominant narrative, and there is a concerted attempt to keep people in line. This has people denying their own senses as to truth and reality.
It's hard to know if there is a deliberate strategy at work behind the insanity the western world has been plunged into. It seems that people are so wedded to multiculturalism, diversity, identity politics, and even environmentalism as a secular faith and religion that these things had to be pushed to extremes in order to provoke a populist backlash to finish it all off. That seems rather fanciful, though. It could just be that generations raised on post-truth beyond reality gibberish really do believe in what they are doing, proceeding by way of justification by faith and action. Marxists once called such a thing praxis (as did the Christian tradition, as in 'the praxis of the apostles' in Rome), but such a view was always premised on a realist metaphysics. We are witnessing insanity in action and we don't need to search for any malicious strategy behind it – this stuff has been taught in the universities since the 1980s, seeping into the wider culture and the education system from there. We are now seeing a pervasive, fevered, frenetic display of faith and adherence to the new secular religiosity but, increasingly removed from reality, it is ultimately unsustainable. The 'woke' that people are getting so animated about may well turn out to have been something very familiar in history, the dying gasps of a consensus that was already known to be moribond and which has been in decline for years – the senility that comes before death. The current frenzy is a last desperate attempt to realize the unrealizable, give substance to the insubstantial, and keep the whole show on life support before the final confrontation with reality.
I keep repeating that we are being triggered, trolled, gamed, and groomed by baiters and haters, behind whom are some pretty nefarious forces. It's hard not to fall for it. I switch on social media and immediately start to see post after post vying for the status of outrage and insanity of the day. You don't even need to look, just switch on and scroll. The next cab off the rank is a member of a “trans masc” football team saying that one of the benefits of the team is enjoying a comfortable locker room free of males – the very right that trans activists want to take away from women! Next up is a sex education TV show on Channel 4 UK in which grown men get to show their penises to young girls. Well if that's the kind of thing you want to see, then just go into a ladies' changing room.
I am sure I have been much less outraged by 'woke' than most others, for the reason I cut my academic teeth arguing for a critical realism against the pervasive anti-realism, anti-foundationalism, anti-essentialism, post-anything of substance of the 1990s and after. 'Woke' isn't the problem, merely a surface-level manifestation of a deeper problem. That problem isn't post-modernism, either – thinkers long before Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God had been concerned with the diremption that lay at the heart of modernity, something which the Enlightenment tradition of science, reason, and empiricism was powerless to overcome (and was actually implicated in opening up). There are much bigger issues than 'woke' to contend with. But for all that, it remains significant that so many involved in maintaining, reproducing, and enforcing a decaying liberal consensus are happy to advance 'woke' as something positive. Hearing them proclaim that 'woke' is all about justice and inclusivity and other such warm words makes it plain we are in the presence of a faith, one that people are keener to proclaim as living the more they know it to be dying.
I'll put my point this way – conservatives and Enlightenment rationalists and humanists who think that by defeating 'woke' the problems will go away have no idea of the depth of the crisis the (post)modern world is in.
“Woke,” like “postmodernism,” is a reaction to and a consequence of much deeper, longer strains of thought and action. The real intellectual architects of the modern malaise are Hobbes’ purposeless materialism, Locke’s tabula rasa, Hume’s absolute nihilistic atomism. And we should be clear that such philosophers were themselves putting into words and thoughts actions and approaches that were embedded in prevailing social relations.
There certainly does need to be a response to destructive modes of thought – an apology for their origins is not it. "Woke" in itself is a meaningless term: an empty, free-floating signifier that can be filled with anything friends and enemies desire. To criticise the lunacy of 'woke' tells us next to nothing about the nature of current problems, not least given the neglect or, typically, the misdiagnosis of its origins.
How often we hear the quote the revolution eats its own children. Well here we are. Many who proclaim themselves anti-woke give us merely the typical conservative / classical liberal’s litany of grievances, blaming one and all for self-authored crises - lamenting a revolution that was inaugurated by ‘classical liberalism,’ which they believe can be arrested only by that liberalism. The same with respect to those who invoke science. The people advocating a return to an Enlightenment rationality have little idea of the processes that have led to this – they are advocting the very things implicated in the great unravelling. To restate conservatism, modernity, science, and enlightenment is reactionary and hopeless, in other words. There are many things in all of those traditions that are well worthy of being reclaimed and reinstated. But they also missed plenty, which is why I wrote an essay claiming that 'woke,' if it has any meaning at all, is an attempt to redeem the empty promises of the past.
If you think that “woke” is a calamity, then you need to diagnose its origins properly and state the nature of the problem clearly. Far too many are classical liberals or enlightenment rationalists who believe that the revolution they inaugurated can be halted at their preferred moment in history. History never ends, as the implications of various thoughts and deeds play out in time and place. You’re going to have to come up with better analyses and answers than these.
So to those liberals who share the shallow meme that 99% of those who use the term 'woke' are reactionary morons or words to that effect, and that they are on the side of the good guys, I'd make it clear that I am indeed digging deeper, and recommend that you do the same – and that means confronting the unravelling liberal consenses and a decaying liberal tradition.
The socio-economic and communitarian concerns of the old Social Left have been displaced by the identitarianism of the Cultural Left. This identitarianism is the bastard offspring of neoliberalism – a merging of the Lockean tabula rasa and a Social Darwinism levelled on the group. Identity politics is a continuation of the capitalism many of its adherent claim to oppose, not a coherent response to it. There has been no system which is more transgressive of nature, human nature, and reality than the capital system, and now its transgressive animus has captured its supposed political enemy. In his book After Theory, written twenty years ago (2003), Terry Eagleton argued that capitalism is the most transgressive system in history, bending everything and everyone to its accumulative imperatives. The words with which Terry Eagleton describes capitalism fit identitarianism perfectly:
No way of life in history has been more in love with transgression and transformation, more enamoured of the hybrid and pluralistic, than capitalism. In its ruthlessly instrumental logic, it has no time for the idea of nature - for that whose whole existence consists simply in fulfilling and unfolding itself, purely for its own sake and without any thought of a goal.
Eagleton 2003 After Theory ch 5
We have been living through a time of decline in the 'traditional' industrial base of western society (and its concomitant expansion in the rest of the world), with the switch to services coinciding with the ICT revolution and the expansion of media, culture, and education. That this has also been a period of a relentless and systematic political, cultural, and ideological assault on the working class is hardly a coincidence. It is at this point that it becomes possible to see how supposedly Leftist positions are actually libertarian, contrary to labourism, and fashioned in the image of capital’s own transgressive fluidity, plasticity, and mobility. In contrast, rooted in place, position, and practice, the working class cannot but appear ‘conservative,’ fixed rather than fluid.
Capital is the ultimate transgressive force, driven by accumulative impulses which forever looked to transcend limits. With globalisation and the ICT revolution, capital finally took flight and disembedded itself from reality. The result has been the unravelling of communities, the bankrupting of economies, and the despoliation of the planetary ecology. As these destructive processes worked themselves out, people have taken to electronic media as if it were the public square, shadow boxing with one another, idling time away. Politics has become a computer game, with all the protagonists living in a hyperreality detached from the practices that alone will turn things around. But it is easy to see why the initiative is always with the quick and the fluid, however increasingly unreal and nonsensical, even insane.
There has been no system more transgressive of nature and reality than capitalism, and now it seems that its mentality has captured its supposed political enemy. That transgressive plasticity and fluidity now pervades Leftism, making it capitalist to the core, even as it styles itself anti-capitalist.
Leftists used to be able to see this very clearly in the 1980s (Frederic Jameson, David Harvey, Istvan Meszaros, Norman Geras, Eric Hobsbawm, Jurgen Habermas to name the theorists I know best). Theorists with impeccable marxist credentials had no trouble in identifying postmodernism as the 'cultural logic of late capitalism.' Those powerful theoretical insights all got lost in the aftermath of the political defeats suffered by the working class and trade unions at the hands of the neoliberal onslought. It was a class war waged from above, the working class lost, and its ideologues and academics crawled away in search of another vehicle to hitch a ride on. It should come as no surprise that the cultural counterpart of economic neoliberalism came to be raised in the ruins of the Social Left. The 'cultural logic of late capitalism' came in time to pervade the supposed anti-capitalist Left, forging a Cultural Left that, in turn, is a Corporate Left. In becoming 'progressives,' the supposed leftists of the age are just riding a new phase of capitalist transgression. It doesn't matter whether we consider these people to be cynics, hypocrites, idealists, true believers, or dupes, the end is the same. It's hard to know whom of these is worthy of the most contempt. The comfortably off who parade their virtues and principles on a daily basis, advancing policies which impinge on others and on them not at all, are surely most deserving of criticism. The idealists have their hearts in the right place, but, again, they can afford to. The true believers are dangerous in their fanaticism. And deluded. They are turning their ire on collective forms of identity and resistance, on history, memory, and tradition, serving to demoralize and divide people within. The calculation seems to be that with the fall of a nation's identity and tradition the path will be clear for a revolutionary reconstruction starting from Year Zero. The political naivety is as hard to credit as the historical ignorance. The result of such demoralisation might well indeed be the takeover by organized forces, but these will not be those of the Left.
The delusions of the Cultural Left might be hard to credit, but are easily enough explained – they stem from the detachment from reason, reality, and 'ordinary' people. If you cleave to the idea that there is an objective reality that is at least potentially accessible, and a truth about it which is at least potentially discernible, then you are considered somehow to hold a small c conservative belief. In contrast, self-styled 'progressives' maintain that since there is no objective reality, truth can only be a personal or group construct, based on power and projections of power. We are now seeing how that plays out. If you remain on nodding terms with simple truth you are laid open to the charge of being 'Far Right.' If you point out the obvious that the athlete winning a women's sporting event is a man, you are branded 'Far Right.' If you cleave to the reality of biological sex, you are branded 'Far Right.' If you question the influx of 'refugees' into communities already facing straitened social circumstances, you are branded 'Far Right.' If you dare suggest that behind the humanitarianism of the 'refugees are welcome' activism is a very distinctive Darwinism, in which young men of fighting age, possessing very different cultural attitudes, particularly towards women and girls, you are branded 'Far Right.' People from Liverpool will know Margi Clarke, a Liverpool-Irish actress of great working class stock and socialist politics. She has now been castigated as 'Far Right' on account of coming to question the speed and scale of immigration into Ireland, breaking up cohesive Irish communities. For what? What is the end game of the libertarian, globalising Left? If working class people and the solidarities 'ordinary' people force in their cultures, practices, traditions, and communities are deemed 'Far Right,' then what, precisely and substantively, constitutes the Left? Because at present it seems that it is precisely what would have once been easily identified as the working class and socialist voice that is being denounced, demonised, marginalised, and increasingly suppressed and/or criminalised. The Cultural Left have not merely stood by whilst 'the common people' were divided, demoralized, and displaced, they have actively promoted it, turning up as alien invaders armed with their pathetic 'Refugees Welcome' placards whenever local people have the audacity to protect their communities and the people in them. If it's 'Far Right' to call a man a man and to insist that 'ordinary' people should be in control of their own communities, then we anyone still in touch with reason and reality will be 'Far Right.' That the people of Kirkby, a solid Labour seat, should come to be denounced as 'Far Right' by outsiders with an agenda shows how utterly insane leftist politics has become. Leftism has been corrupted by a cultural logic that comes straight from capitalism, neoliberalism, and the corporate form.
The insanity of the Cultural Left start to make more sense when we cease seeing the activists and ideologues in terms of a cultural and political logic that is anything but leftist. It is apparent that the phenomenon is fundamentally a part of the process of liberalisation and globalisation that has been underway since the 1980s, ushering in the new corporate form. Politically, developments make zero sense – far from being leftist, the policies and principles being advanced seem designed to finish leftism once and for all, at least a leftism defined in terms of the end of shifting power and resources to 'ordinary' working people. To put the point simply: you cannot operate an open border policy and maintain a welfare state – the numbers will simply overwhelm the social compact. No one prospers under this idiocy other than the corporations who clean up in the firesale that follows. The welfare state was designed on the basis reciprocity within closed and cohesive boundaries. Open those boundaries and the state will be overloaded with extraneous demands. In being blinded to that reality by their naivety or their fanaticism, the Left are the worst enemies of the principles they espouse. If the Left can't see that, rest assured that those working for the corporations do. You can’t have open borders and a welfare state. A welfare state that serves each and all is incompatible with liberalisation and globalisation. The question is by what strange political alchemy have people advancing liberalisation and globalisation, thereby paving the way for the corporatisation of public business, come to be identified as Left, when it is as clear as clear can be that they are neoliberals. The result is easy to see: the various welfare states of the western world will become unworkable, unaffordable, and will collapse. And the new Cultural Left will have been instrumental in bringing about the collapse. They are tools and fools. I can't think of a better way of undermining welfare systems than throwing them wide open to free riders from all over the world, thereby eroding the principles of reciprocity and bounded locality they were built upon. Liberal leftists may flatter themselves on account of their high-minded generosity, but they are being generous with others' resources and unmet needs. The comfortably off have less need of welfare systems than the less comfortably off, and so are inclined to be generous in ways that impinges on others rather than themselves. They come to appear virtuous without risking anything of their own material interests. It's a cheap, performative, radicalism which will cost people in need dearly. The naivety of cultural leftists will see these welfare systems being overwhelmed and eroded, not just fiscally but in terms of the trust of the people. The comfortable will be able to take of themselves and, as ever, working class people will go to the wall. It's class based. And it is entirely predictable once we see developments in terms of the stark opposition between the Cultural Left and the Social Left. These same people are very quick to condemn the conservativism of working class people, little realising that working class people know fine well that it is they that are on the receiving end of others' permissiveness.
It is worth noting that the members of the Cultural Left are much less than generous, much less naive and much more cynical, when it comes to the indigenous working class of their own countries who are in need of help. You have the comfortable middle class culturally and politically dominant and they have been the ruination of Leftism. I use the term 'indigenous' for the reason that it is certain to provoke charges of 'Far Right' on the part of people who never cease extolling the virtues of indigenous people everywhere except their own country. How strange to see that the people defending the rights of indigenous people against alien and extraneous forces are also so keen to throw open the borders of their own country to anyone who wishes to come. These double-standards indicate how lunatic the Cultural Left has become.
Politically and intellectually, the Left as a meaningful force is based on universality and solidarity. The most stupid and self-defeating thing the Left could have done is to have sliced and diced humanity in order to rank people in a hierarchy of identity and grievance - the ideologues did it. I see them daily jeering the 'ordinary' folk I have known over the years, and draw the conclusion that we are really dealing with 'progressives' riding the new wave of capitalist development. Such 'progressives' perform quite the performative balancing act, being the establishment whilst pretending to fight it.
The big problem that activists and ideologues have with the working class is the discovery of the politically unpallatable truth that 'ordinary' people do not conform to the ideal type of revolutionary marxism, but contain as many conservative qualities as socialistic. That conservatism values proximity, close relations of kinship, friendship, and neighbourliness, communities of practice where people put a shift in, a commitment to faith, family, and patriotism which proceeds from the local and which is antithetical to abstraction. There is a gut antipathy in the working class to the 'liberal' technocratic class which has a stranglehold on politics and culture (and which, in truth, is a permissive individualism that is backed by money, power, and material comfort, all of which affords an illiberal and arbitrary collective imposition on all). If we are being forced to take sides in this world, I look first and foremost to the people who make, move, build, and grow things and take it from there. I have no time for the people who claim the right to order and organize others from above. And I don't trust those who seek to incite people to action and unreasoning response by way of fear and emergency.
"Gullible twits" is a good description which sums a lot of the middle class idealists up. They are, of course, in on any politics which allows them to pose as the good guys, especially when that politics entails greater risk for others than oneself. It's the age of victimhood. The odd thing is that I come from a part of the country which suffers real deprivation. I was born four miles from Kirkby. The people there are abused as "Far Right" when they protest. As for the crowd of preferred victims at the heart of the Cultural Left, they are all so oppressed and marginalised as to have the mainstream media, corporations, politicians, the lot on board. Leftist politics is now senile. It picked up this senility from the neoliberal Right and extended it throughout the entire political and cultural terrain. I hope this is the senility that comes before death, and that is does indeed express the cultural logic of a 'late' and soon to be dead and buried capitalism. People looking for change need to look elsewhere, and reconnect with the people who build, move, make and grow things. The crowd of activists and ideologues reared on social media and indoctrinated by way of miseducation are detached from reason and reality and detached from the common people.
There are a whole range of issues which could coalesce into a new political movement that unites those seeking a resolidification and resolidarisation around realities and commonalities. A resolidification and resolidarisation that is achieved by way of forging new solidities and new solidarities. Much depends on the extent to which contrary conservative voices are willing to bite the bullet and back workers in struggle. I don't entertain any illusions here. But the cost of living crisis is creating mass discontent, and food and energy stress grace of a deliberately engineered eco-austerity will further incite popular anger. Add immigration, 'diversity,' and identity constantly being forced upon people who have had no say in the matter, and politics is a powder-keg. A good start is to reject all the mainstream parties, the lot, breaking the tribal loyalties which complacent politicians have banked upon for too long. We need an economically socialist, socially conservative, patriotic and populist party, one that is unafraid to address the material dynamics and class relations of the contemporary crisis. There are a lot of issues of direct, tangible concern to people which are either not being addressed, or are simply being engineered 'from without' by some pretty nefarious forces.
Years ago I described my view as “Reclaiming Socialism, Reframing Conservatism,” in recognition of a) the reality of class relations and dynamics and b) the existence of solidarities and loyalties that transcend class and transitory economic interests. I'd still describe myself as socialist when it comes to socio-economic organisation, but also as socially and maybe even morally conservative. I half joke that if you want to achieve socialism you had better become conservative, and if you want to protect and realize the values of conservativism around place, community, and proximity, then you had better become socialist. At the moment, liberals/progressives are performing quite the psychological feat in being the establishment whilst pretending to fight it as plucky, marginalised outsiders. This is their mess and the task is to make them own it.
It's a terrain that is ripe for a political realignment. One fear I have is that very many of this “classless class” of educated managerialists that is all over politics, media, and culture at the moment are looking for every opportunity to erode democracy. The perceived – and actual – uselessness of the mainstream parties is allowing the technocrats in our midst, the people who wish to assert their ends regardless of consent and support, to keep claiming that 'democracy has failed.' The social and institutional conditions for democracy are not being attended to. It's a dangerous situation, with real possibilities for fragmentation and withdrawal and apathy. That plays right into the hands of those happy to bring the curtain down on democracy (the people who already have the main parties boxed off – vote red, vote blue, get an eco-austerity that will last you the rest of your days).
Given that I've been involved in women's football and know a couple of the female trainers at the gym – and know that women are being intimidated into silence to keep their jobs - I've been tempted to give the Party of Women a punt. That would be something of a surprise to people who have known me in the past, not least on account of the fairly abrasive encounters I have had with feminists over the years (the middle class academic ones most of all, working class women looking at socio-economic issues confronting women get my vote every time – which is to say that my criticisms of feminism are related to class). A few years ago I wrote “The Left will one day make women reap what [man-hating/anti-essentialist] feminists have sown.” And so it came to pass. But here I am thinking of POW. I don't normally bother with single issue parties, but seeing as I am politically homeless at present, there is no reason why I shouldn't lend my support.
We need a party that gets back in touch with the human roots that feed politics. I was glad to have worked so long among the 'ordinary' folk of my local community. I see the 'clever' folk on here frequently pouring scorn and ridicule on 'ordinary' folk, picking them up on their spelling and grammar should they ever dare raise their voice against their would-be masters. If the clever are nowhere near as clever as they think they are, 'ordinary’ people are not nearly as stupid as 'clever' folk say they are, and nowhere near as stupid as those who say they are. And they know when they are being treated with contempt. Surely to goodness a party or movement can emerge to give so many disillusioned people a home. I like a lot of the things I hear from the SDP. But I see too few who are prepared to address the material relations and class dynamics driving these failures, fewer still relating them to the corporate form. I like the way Emma Webb speaks, but that Common Sense Society seems to be still hankering after a liberty and prosperity cast in the image of classical liberalism. That's how we got in this mess.
Nick Cave says something significant here. Nick Cave's early punk music energy was all about “f***ing with people,” he told Freddie Sayers. “How to you f*** with people in 2023?” Sayers asks. “You'd go to church and be a conservative” replied Cave.
We are living in an age of myriad inversions, many of them strange indeed. The strangest of all is to have seen self-styled punks, rebels, and radicals become utterly predictable, conformist, and conformed, as hide-bound in their conservatism as any conservative they choose to ridicule. Such people imagine themselves to be marginalised and embattled outsiders taking aim against an oppressive culture, little realising that it is they who form the dominant culture, they who are oppressive of difference and otherness, they who are dull and herd-like in their views. Atheism is as easy as falling off a log in this culture, and so that's precisely what many people do. They call it 'humanism,' little realising that without God, human beings are no more than biological imperatives. There is no meaning to the game of life other than staying in the game long enough to reproduce genes and memes. Then death, then an extinction that embraces each, all, and everything. Reductionism is built into such a humanism, fitting the dehumanising and demoralising intent of the technocratic agenda seamlessly. Humanism inexorably reduces to an inhumanism.
We have seen the unprecedented over-reach of state bio-power into our daily lives since the onset of Covid in 2020. Some are beginning to notice that the extent to which the vast majority of libertarian intellectuals and academics well versed in Foucault fell silent as states set about enacting Foucault's nightmare of the biopolitical panopticon. In 2016 I submitted my work to an academic institute in France, only to have it criticised as 'moralistic,' being told to read Foucault. I had read Foucault and in depth and had long since concluded that he was a dead-end. But I did at least appreciate Foucault as a theorist with genuine critical insights, not least when it came to bio-power and the possibilities of states coming to incarcerate one and all in the biopolitical panopticon. I was never impressed with Foucaultian academics, who seemed more than anything to be complicit in the psychic and intellectual preparation for entry into the panopticon. Some are beginning to ask why the Foucaultians failed to critique the contemporary authoritarian turn. There is no mystery. Like the marxists before them, they are academics first and foremost and Foucaultians not at all. They are unmitigated mediocrities and careerists, individuals whose material interests are bound up with 'the system' they feign to criticise. Such people have no interest in unmasking power as such, only the power that lies in the hands of the people they dislike, power which they want for themselves and their ilk. They luxuriate in the fantasy that from the comfort of tenured positions of power they are brave unmaskers of power. It is no wonder that the Cultural Left is so deluded, so soft, so authoritarian.
What we are witnessing now is the reboot of the failing capitalist system in the form of an even more predatory and exploitative regime, a Fourth Industrial Revolution powered by clean, green energy and technology controlled by the corporations. This is the 'system change' advocated by 'progressives.' The controversies concerning the Cultural Left is merely the floor show. Whilst our attention is drawn by the freak show, we fail to pay attention to the whole circus. Whilst we keep responding to the hand that is constantly being waved in front of our eyes, we risk missing what the other hand is up to. I don't for one minute doubt that Dylan Mulvaney is a pointless little twerp, and I don't doubt that his insulting parody of women and sportswomen is deeply damaging. But the architecture and engineering that threatens to enclose us all is the deeper question. This is nothing less than the final expropriation of the commons in all its forms. Yes, the rights and spaces of girls and women are being eroded and undermined, and need to be defended vigorously. But this is just one aspect of a much bigger war that is being waged. There is an agenda being advanced throughout politics and culture which has the end of creating the surveillance planet in which every aspect of human and natural life, including biological life, are commodified. All natural and human processes and relationships are to be enclosed, colonised, quantified, and commodified. It is a dehumanisation, called transhumanism, and is central to the technocratic vision backed by the corporations and hedge fund managers. The attack on biology is a frontier war, softening us up for a future forced migration into virtual realities beyond human dignity and decency. We are being ushered into a ‘post human’ future of enslaved and incarcertated subjects without privacy, autonomy, agency and free will.
Will it happen? Maybe. Maybe not. The vision is utterly transgressive in its inhumanism. It seems powerful, but is actually very week on account of its unreality. It reads like another empty empire and universalism. In the short run, however, this insane dream of endless digital accumulation will exact a terrible price on individuals in every aspect of their lives. We already see the austerity, the food and energy stress, grace of the legal and social forcing mechanisms at the heart of the emerging global feudalism. Empires based on an empty universalism collapse in time, but can be around a long time all the same, and do immense damage along the way. It's worth pointing out how many supposed leftists and progressives are on board. We shouldn't be too surprised. Decades ago, Lewis Mumford criticised the academy for preparing the intellectual and psychological ground for entry into the Megamachine.