The Labour Party and Its Culture of Pessimism

I saw a smidgeon, but only a smidgeon, of what Iain Duncan Smith has recently been talking about (‘bullying and threats’ from the anti-Brexit campaign) at our local Labour Party this week. I do not want to get this out of proportion. Our local Party is represented by a really decent and civilised group of people who generally treat each other with respect and courtesy. The 'bullying' (such as it was) came from an outsider. It should also be said that some of the grassroots supporters of Brexit on the Right are far more vicious in their own presentation of their case than their opponents and that these Brexit Tweeters lose votes every time they lift their malign little fingers. However, I would have expected far more from the official representative of Labour's campaign to remain within Europe.

I am not interested in naming names. It may just have been an 'off night' but the pro-European Union speaker (there was no representative of the countervailing case) directed comments at the only eurosceptic in the village (me!) which overtly associated my position with that of fascists like Nick Griffin. This was unacceptable and recognised to be unacceptable (he apologised for the 'offence' but not the misrepresenting claim) but a lot of half-truths and claims remained unchallenged and on the record. That's fine up to a point - after all, the party apparat is using a conference decision to claim priority for the pro-European case. This gives it carte blanche, one supposes, to walk all over those of us with a more nuanced vision of democratic socialism and a healthy distrust of Delorsian promises that have not been delivered, are not being delivering and will not be delivered.

It was conveniently not mentioned that the speaker might as equally be associated with Goldman Sachs as I am apparently associated with extreme nationalists but let that pass. Although (to his credit) he came clean about his presumably paid position at The European Parliament, it would also have been nice to have someone represent the Stay Campaign who did not have such an obvious professional interest in the result.

Regardless of all that, my political position was redundant. Not only was there no speaker for the alternative case (which is fine), I was not given the chance to respond to the implied slurs on my character (which was not). I did not expect to be allowed to challenge the misrepresentation and half-truths of the campaign itself and indeed had made that clear but I did think it reasonable that the specific charge of association with nationalistic fascism be refuted (the Chair failed at this point). Whatever! The membership seem totally sold on the European Project regardless of anything that I might have said in any reasoned way. Further intervention on my part would have been useless. I just disliked being treated like that by a 'comrade' who had been placed in a superior position by the decision of the Executive Committee ... if I was not such a tough nut, I think I might reasonably call that 'bullying'. Nor am I alone in this from reports in other parts of the country. It may raise questions for many people whether this liberal internationalist and European Socialist Party is really their natural home but I think that assessment comes later.

I walked away that evening very much more aware of the determination and resources of the soft left machine behind Stay within the Labour Party (with its very glossy and well produced brochure), of the risks that the Party is taking in its potential alienation from its historic working class base (not only on this matter but on the refugee crisis), of the dominance of the left-liberal (rather than democratic socialist) component of the Party and of the lack of fairness and tolerance towards other voices on this issue on the grounds that it was 'party policy'. This reproduces the mentality of past Labour top-down authoritarianism if worn with a relatively velvet glove.

Further reflection has also made realise just how much the party machine is broken in terms of its responsiveness to the twin needs of mobilising and engaging new members and creating a machinery for political education that can act as a transmission belt between the wider population and the 'avant-garde' of party thinking. Again, do not get me wrong - the local Party is friendly, vigorous in its own way, and making serious attempts to professionalise its approach to the electorate. There was an excellent local election policy statement developed by a leading member, albeit one that threatened to be turned into a curate's egg by its need to satisfy the standard liberal-left posturing on some issues.

But rules (which, of course, members can do nothing about) that mean that a member only gets a CLP vote when they go through the palaver of attending a branch meeting and getting elected as a 'delegate', and the way that these delegates are forced into supporting branch resolutions created in meetings which they could not attend, means that many new members sit at the CLP as observers rather than participants, delegates lose an important degree of autonomy in discussing policy and the processes are excessively manipulable by the sort of activist who can give up time at the convenience of the party calendar.  Small branches can also be out-manouevred by the effective organisation of large branches instead of being in the position of persuading the members as a whole on the merits of a case.  Surely members themselves should feel free in their own right to bring up resolutions if they can get sufficient support from other members.

Of course, to be fair, the branch activists are also the ones who organise the machinery that gets candidates into office and so perhaps should have some additional rights but the balance strikes me as wrong. The sort of party reform that has been batted around since the mid-1990s is long over due. It is good to hear that Tom Watson, Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, is looking into this and, indeed, according to reports, is giving special attention to the digital issue which includes the particular problem of the possible disenfranchisement of those who do not have digital access. These are complex issues with no easy answers but at least there seems to be some intent to grapple with them under the new Leadership team.

In my own case, as a result of the manner in which the meeting was held this week, I came to a decision that I could not face our local electorate (as requested) in May under conditions where I might be misrepresented as supportive of the European Project simply by virtue of being a Labour candidate and so I withdrew.  Six months of engagement in the Party has started to make me feel uncomfortable on other grounds. The bottom line was that I could see that taking on UKIP in a strongly working class area would be almost impossible under such circumstances making me, suddenly, a pessimist which is not what I want to be - and life is short!

The Party's own aggressive stance on Europe had simply made me more determined than ever to stand for non-fascist and non-racist democratic socialists' argument for Leave and to give that struggle absolute priority, to the exclusion of every other political project, over the next four months. The national pessimism about May seems to have become infectious. I have caught the disease so that saving the nation from supra-nationalism in the greater interests of its working people in the long run suddenly seems so much more important than maintaining the illusory dreams of the jobsworths in the European Parliament. This does not mean that the Labour Party and Labour Movement are not to be supported as the primary voice for progressive politics in the United Kingdom (quite the contrary - they are, sadly, the only voice left!) but it does mean that the support should not be as unconditional as it once was in the days of tribal politics.

As I see it, the Labour Party at the moment has become mired in a 'culture of pessimism' as a result of the disastrous Blair-Brown legacy, the failure in the 2015 Election and the prospect of losing millions of pounds because of some particularly self-interested and vicious Tory legislation. Spend time with any activists working at a national level and they are excessively pessimistic about the prospects for their own Party. They are excessively pessimistic about their own Leadership in many cases. They are certainly ridiculously pessimistic about the opportunities to continue the democratisation and transformation of our own nation. As a result, this culture of pessimism has grabbed hold of an utterly undemocratic belief (for it is a belief) that a Social Europe can do the job that the Party cannot do domestically. This is added to a romantic idealism in which internationalism is reframed as supranationalism, democracy as platonic bureaucratism and the genuine cultural concerns of the working class as proto-fascism.  In other words, these liberal idealists would prefer a bureaucratic Europe to impose their values on the British people rather than persuade the British people to adopt those values itself.  That is not the democratic way and yet what has distinguished the Left in Britain since the days of the Chartists has been its commitment to democracy.

For and Against Situationist Thought

Situationist thought might seem like a mere historical foot-note from Cold War history but it is worth some reconsideration now that we have seen ‘capitalism’ go through one of its periodic bouts of creative destruction. It depended intellectually on yet another attempt by mid-twentieth century Marxists to weasel out of the tough fact that their Idealist origins meant that they could never actually relate to the human condition as most people lived it – life for Marxists is an expression of theory. On the other hand, shorn of its ridiculous and patronising Marxist rhetoric, it has been 'detourned' into every avenue of commercial art, that is where it has not become the hobby of marginalised contemporary anarchists operating on the fringe of political reality - and sometimes of reality itself.

Where Situationist Thought Sits

Yet it would be foolish to under-estimate its importance. Although derived from an untenable Hegelianism, still being played out by the buffoons in the European Commission, it had one big thing to offer. What the situationists wanted to do was to make individuals, especially individuals at the very base of society, critically observe and analyse their daily conditions of life, calculate their own intrinsic desires and act on them.

Forget the Young Hegelian padding, this was potentially pre-Socratic in form, a half-way house to a proper existentialist political ethic. Perhaps they needed to claw their way out of the very ideology in which they had set themselves and just failed and perhaps we should honour them simply for trying. Their contribution to Western culture is precisely to expose the impossibility of one’s own desire being encompassed by any theory.

Debord recognized this to a degree by opposing any attempt to turn the situationist impulse into 'situationism', an ideology. Unfortunately, he failed to escape the dominant intellectual ideology of his time. One can imagine a group of Christian radicals (anti-trinitarians perhaps) playing with similar ideas, yet getting trapped into a necessary but ultimately fruitless faith in God.

The Situationist and the Left

Debord understood Sartre’s insight into one aspect of our condition – that the will to the universal, embedded in ‘official’ left-wing thought, is deeply absurd. He saw ideology as legitimated in modern society ‘by universal abstraction and by the effective dictatorship of illusion’. What the Situationists expressed was a peculiar form of revolt that has resonance today. Within the Left, it was a revolt against the bureaucratic impulse of contemporary socialism and the repulsive dictatorship of Stalin’s nomenlatura. That particular argument was won in any case by history. From the Left, however, it was a revolt at the process of having one’s reality, desires and needs dictated by machineries that were no less bureaucratic than those of sclerotic communism but which were hidden within the operations of capitalism.

Later, the great left-wing weasel himself, Gramsci, managed to perform a trick whereby the official Left simply abandoned overt bureaucratism and adopted the manipulative techniques of capitalist enterprises for social engineering purposes. The Situationist impulse is thus important because the problems they identified have not gone away but have merely transformed themselves. Mow, the manipulation of reality comes not only from advertising agencies but from liberal-left infiltration of our culture.

Anti-Capitalism and Neo-Bureaucratic Socialism

What we have now is a culture of self-righteous and manipulative activists, all talking their book and using their minority power to force universalist regulation and legislation on a powerless population. From a Cold War situation of communist bureaucratic tyranny and ‘free world’ corporate drabness, we have transformed into a world of government by liberal-left elites amidst an economic chaos which they are incapable of managing.

The Situationist International was anti-capitalist (whatever that can mean today) but their revolutionary impulse embraced what they saw as the positive elements within capitalist development. Despite the bleatings of Marxist-Leninists, there are positive aspects. Capitalism, by lurches and starts, eventually provides for needs and desires far better than any other system, better than political traditionalism and provenly better than communism.

At a certain level of development, people began to have the opportunity for personal choice. This was certainly not the case in the industrial factory culture of mid-twentieth century France and it is not the case across most of the world for most of the time but, where the market (let us drop the loaded term capitalism) operates well, persons do have more choices although this does not mean that the choices are the ones we always want ... better is not to be taken here to mean good, just not-so-bad.

Puritan Reactions

There is a current attempt at a back-lash against choice from the sourer elements of the liberal-left but this neo-puritanism, which can descend to complaints about the complexity of mobile phone tariffs in a world of stupid and lazy people, deliberately ignores that late capitalism gives us other more critical choices of real value.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century in the developed west, we have been given remarkable choices over our sexual identity, who we associate with, where and how we live, what we take into our bodies and what we can say (despite liberal-left attempts to control this last). These freedoms derive entirely from our relative prosperity and so from late capitalism. The tragedy of the current economic crisis is that many people have not found a way to extend their freedoms independent of prosperity and regardless of the cynical interest of the ‘capitalists’.

This is where the situationist impulse comes in because the situationists were ahead of their time by half a century in asserting the primacy of the ordinary person’s ability to assert his or her right to choose his or her condition of life according to his or her desires - against centuries of social control. What we can continue to do is bring desire as a reality to the forefront of the population’s minds so that these desires can be recognized as good in themselves and, if transgressive against some dictated norm, inspirational towards changing the norm itself.

Sanguinetti

Instead of the liberal-left activist transforming a norm to meet abstract universalist principles over the heads of the population, the population might be liberated to assess its own condition and then demand that ‘norms’ be transformed away from the universal and back to the particular. What they can also do is what Sanguinetti and Debord did in their hoax pamphlet of 1975 where they ‘tricked’ major figures into showing their true thoughts and feelings on the murderous fascist interventions in Italy at that time.

This was unforgivable to elites – Sanguinetti had to flee Italy and was denied entry to France. Yet all he had done was to get the elite to show its true sentiments to the ruled. This should have been the task of journalism but journalists were and are fully embedded in the elite. As we have seen in the outpourings of garbage over the Ukrainian and Greater Syrian situations, the 'free Press' is little more than the 'father of lies' (on all sides).

Marxism & Value

Let us turn to what is wrong with Situationist Thought. Almost everything that is wrong with it can be put down to its Marxist origins and its easy acceptance of Marx’s labour theory of value. Everything in Marxism depends on this theory – and on its elaborations such as commodification, reification and alienation – so that any theory that did not accept it could not be called Marxist. The Situationists had to see themselves as Marxist if they were to be credibly ‘of the Left’.

In fact, value is not created by work but by perception, in a very different way from Marx’s simple view of all production being simply economic and ‘scientific’. How we perceive value arises from considerations that relate to our desires as much as our needs. The Marxist impulse is not merely to diminish these desires but to start creating concepts such as 'false consciousness' that will be the basis of the totalitarian manipulation of desire. Above all, the Marxist will not investigate and respect (and socialise) the animal core of desire and the 'divine' aspiration within it. While not going so far, the Situationists made the revolutionary step of interpreting Marxist theory in terms of experience and perception but laid claim to this being a stage in capitalism, ‘advanced’ capitalism.

Today, the capitalist seeks out and enables a creativity which would not be expressed at all if it was not for the capitalist who permits both efficient and wasteful organisation of resources. The Situationists, however, were hobbled by their need to fit in with ‘progressive’ historicism. Their profound insight was vitiated by the fact that they failed to understand that all value is based on experience and desire once very basic needs are met and that even those needs are contingent on experience and desire. In short, experience and desire (if only to continue living) are far more intrinsic to value than some gobbledy-gook that inserts the capitalist between the worker and his product. Even the form of basic needs can be dictated by perceptions and experience as in those situations where markets are perverted by taboo.

The Age of Spectacle

The Situationists assumed that we lived in an age of Spectacle that was different from all other ages. The latest adaptation of this is the current interest in the hyper-real, best exemplified by the work of Baudrillard. But they were entrapped within Marxist historical thought here as well. In fact, all ages are ages of spectacle and of simulacra because that is the central fact of the human condition. The only difference today is the sheer extent of the technological enhancement of the real that is available to us.

The human condition is always one of interpreting too much data from too many sources through perceptual apparatus that are not only limited by genetics but by history, habit and other people. Our species is constantly creating a version of reality that is pragmatically designed for survival.
Our reality at any one time is not the only possible reality. If it is true that it is constructed (as Marxists claim) from a particular relationship to the means of production, it is also true that it is constantly being recreated by the minds of millions of persons with instinctive wants and desires that are independent of those means.

This spectacle, this unified and always growing ‘thing’, made up of objects perceived and turned into value by the perceiving (detached from any underlying reality and certainly from the analysed reality of the intellectual) is a Heraclitean flux that can never be made solid or fully understood (despite the fantasies of the AI and Big Data enthusiasts).  The Marxist theory of alienation may be true analytically but it also contains an intrinsic problem that it derives from the Judaeo-Christian cultural tradition – that is, it does not want it to be true. Implicitly the Communist society is supposed, if not to abolish it, to reduce alienation of this type and yet this alienation is precisely what makes us evolve and be creative.

Why Alienation May Be A Good Thing

It may be far more sensible to embrace the flux, identify one’s own desires and then pragmatically seek fulfillment without collapsing into madness, in other words to be functionally happy within the flux by creating islands of vital personal rather than of sclerotic collective stability. Marxism is deeply conservative, terrified of change (unless a revolutionary blood-letting to end change), and nervous of emotion, desire and instinct.

Many Leftists would stand aghast at my comment and immediately suggest that such an acceptance of these things must be intrinsically ‘fascist’. So be it ... they misunderstand because they are wired to misunderstand these things. The Situationists embraced radical change in the short term, but their grand narrative still assumed that somewhere further down the line ‘revolution’ would bring some concordance between real reality and imagined reality. In this, they were wrong.

Though we may develop as a species in a robotic or purely intellectual direction over tens of thousands of years, we are defined now by having an individual reality (embracing our desires) that is disconnected from social reality ('norms’) which, in turn, is often out of kilter with the facts of the matter in the world. To seek to align our own situation with the ‘pseudo-reality’ of society by transforming the social into something that is in accordance with our own reality is absurd, utopianism of the worst sort, the basis of Hitlerism to name but one manifestation.

Utopian Absurdity

Why? Because there are millions of such realities, all competing and without any clear common class, race, sexual or other identity that is not created by the very society that we recognize as un-real. Faced with the flux of our desires and situation in a world where imbalances of power dictate the social norms which are imposed on us, where these same norms might be counter-productive to the effective management of scientific reality (as in some faith-based cultures), the Situationists have something to tell us but not precisely what they thought they wanted to tell us.

The Spectacle is not just a matter of contemplation but one of action where we, as individuals, have considerable opportunity to transform our and other lives if we only understood the degree of our freedom within our material and power constraints (so much, so Sartre).

What is not going to happen is any lasting transformation of society that is simply derived from a manipulative cadre – the sort of activist element we noted above – where a few individuals impose their phantasy on the majority without their own participation or informed consent. In practice only education (the art of questioning) and the market (the art of choosing) can liberate enslaved minds. Situationist events and cadres, in that context, are useful only insofar as they jolt us into questioning and into considering the value of our choices to ourselves.

Ideology as False God

From this perspective and as an example, AdBusters, which ‘detournes’ commercial advertising, is extremely valuable not because it will overthrow capitalism (it won’t) but because it raises questions outside of formal schooling institutions and it allows us to ask questions about our own values. However, if AdBusters simply replaces one world-view (slavery to the market) with another (slavery to an anti-capitalist rhetoric) nothing has been achieved.

The choice must include a value-driven choice for the product or service by the individual where that choice is informed and functionally useful to them. When an ideology like feminism raises questions for a woman (or man) about their relationship and offers a choice (to accept or not accept it) as well as a means of action (to act to make it a positive and effective choice), it is doing good.

But when it dictates an agenda that precludes questioning (‘all men are predators’) or forces a choice (‘sisterhood requires such-and-such an action'), then it is as oppressive as their invented Aunt Sally ‘patriarchy’. All ideologies need to be questioned in the same way. Debord’s ‘pseudo world’ of the spectacle is thus seen as a problem whereas in fact it is also a solution. There is no possible world that cannot be a pseudo world, in effect an imaginative construct limited by material reality, because the human species is defined positively by its own intrinsic alienation.

Taking Hold of the Spectacle

Once this is understood, we can abandon our puritanical moral panic about the lack of stability within existence and see the spectacle as something that we can create incrementally in our own image to the degree that we can ensure its and our functionality. What Debord is right to point out is the dangers of a liar lying to himself but, even here, we should not go too far.

A phantasy that is functional for the person is a tolerable madness. The issue is whether it is functional and not whether it is a phantasy. There is nothing wrong with phantasy at all. The liberatory element lies in an assertion (the only concession to the universal abstract) that the rights of persons to their phantasies are all equal and that the conditions of life should not include the acceptance of an unwilling submission of (or dominance over) one of another.

The lie that the liar may be telling himself is that he is happy or content when he has repressed and suppressed his true nature. An effective situationist response would be a socialized psychotherapeutic one, a revolutionary act of multiple enablings of self-assertions against the ‘given’. The current late capitalist spectacle works quite well at this critical level – the power of the consumer (which offsets the disempowered position of the employee or family member) permits an assertion of personal desire against the desire of capitalism to desire more resources.

The Hidden Moralism of Debord

A situationist economics might even emphasise the power of withdrawal of desire or the deferral of desire as a tactical act to get more of what is desired – not unlike the sexual politics within many relationships. The Spectacle is thus not the ‘concrete inversion of life’ (the Situationist view) but life itself, or rather what happens to life once individuals (who are truly alive) start to deal with one another in a constant process of gaming and trading.

Debord would have had much fun with our current obsession with zombies. This fascination is largely a construction of commercial interests but it is almost certainly hitting a sense in the population that the ‘system’ does treat them like zombies, units of production and consumption. But this does not mean that we are zombies, only that we are aware that we might become zombies. Zombies do not know that they are zombies.

Debord also argued that ‘things that were once directly lived are now lived by proxy’ but he exaggerates, sounding like a Christian moralist of the late pagan era. He has no proof for his statement because he was not 'there'. The literary evidence for the claim can be shown to be flawed and suppositious. He says that ‘once an experience is taken out of the real world, it becomes a commodity … the spectacular is developed to the detriment of the real. It becomes a substitute for experience’. But there is no harm in anything becoming a commodity if the trade is still good for the desiring subject. There is certainly no reason why the spectacle should not be regarded as being as real as the ‘real’ if it is felt as real by the person.

The Real

There is no real to be had in the sense that Debord is implying. Commodified experience is not only real to all intents and purposes but ‘more real’ insofar as it is the purchased expression of the fulfillment of a desire (albeit usually partially) that would otherwise not be experienced if it was not purchased. Marxism is riddled with pseudo-Judaeo-Christian moralizing about authenticity of experience and Debord cannot escape it. Here he is again: ‘our psychic functions are altered, we get a degradation of mind and also a degradation of knowledge’. He puts this down to capitalism. I put it down to socialisation under any system.

As soon as we relate to a single other person, we are beginning to see our psychic functioning altered, our mind is ‘degraded’ (meaning limited in its imaginative options) and our knowledge ‘degraded’ (made functionally useful to the system rather than ourselves). This altering and degradation increases to the degree that we are embedded in bigger and bigger institutions.

Intellectual Arrogance

We have to recognize that this ‘degradation’ applies to all human systems (not just capitalism) and that many people actively choose such ‘degradation’ as enhancing to them (our bureaucrats, corporate men and women, the military, the churches). But it is the height of intellectual arrogance to assume that such people are somehow inferior in their choice to libertarians like Debord and myself – all we can ask is that they do not force us into their mould.

Where he has an important point to make is where he says that ‘knowledge is not used [any more] to question, analyze or resolve contradictions but to assuage reality’. The ‘any more’ is highly questionable but the statement is a true representation of most people for most of the time but whether this state of affairs can ever be changed by revolutionary action is to be doubted. What the 68-ers and most Leftists of that and earlier periods did not and could not ‘get’ (because of the scientific knowledge of the period) is that this is the human species – mostly uninterested intrinsically in questioning, analysis and resolving contradictions. It is the creature that lives rather than 'thinks through' its contradictions.

Contradictions

In fact, the last thing most people want to do is resolve contradictions. Contradictions are the only way they can cope with life. No revolutionary operation is going to remove the reality of and necessity for contradiction. There is no evidence that the allegedly ‘real’ experience was, in fact, ever more interesting or pleasurable or life-changing than any acquired experience through the market. To think otherwise is a moralistic myth, an ‘ought’ from a traditionalist perspective rather than an ‘is’. It is what we think that we ought to think – no more.

Contemporary technology has made this clearer. Most desires cannot be fulfilled and will never be fulfilled wholly. The reality was always that experiences of value were few and often turned sour – think of the romp in the hay that led to a lifetime being shackled to a podgy harridan. New technologies create a culture of life-enhancing vicarious pleasure that, far from making persons less able to cope with ‘reality’, lance the boil of desire and create the language for getting some simulacra of desire into private life.

These technologies allow desires to be identified and then managed. The commodification of sexuality has included Ann Summers whose very existence has permitted sex-positive discussion between couples and has created an atmosphere of desire that counters the inability to speak of pleasure – as was the case in the past.

The Spectacle as Process

How does Debord see authority in this Society of the Spectacle? As always, he follows the Marxist pattern of making authority a thing rather than a process. There is some intention in someone somewhere apparently to maintain social control and handle threats. This is absurd.

There is no controlling mind at the centre of capitalism inventing processes for social control. It is a process in itself. Social controls are intrinsic but also subject to our own engagement in personal and so social liberation. The process includes ‘recuperation’ (the interception of radical ideas, their commodification and safe incorporation) but this is not sinister or willful. It is just natural evolution. It should be regarded as a good thing.

Even attenuated once-radical ideas (like, say, the scientific reality of human racial equality) become included within the ‘spectacle’ and the whole moves forward on the basis of its functionality and facts on the ground. Intellectuals want perfection where there is no perfection to be had. Capitalism is not degrading the life of the people. The people degrade their own lives as victims of circumstances they fail to will to change. As all intellectuals (especially Marxist intellectuals) do, Debord treats the mass of the population as fools, to be enlightened by types like himself.

What We Need

The ‘people’ (that is actual persons in the world) are embedded in a process which is ‘given’ to them but which they change each and every day of their waking lives through their actions. We do not need grumpy Marxist theory. We only need a commitment to a questioning education and the freedom to make choices for ourselves – and intervention, the legitimate role of the community as collective, to ensure that no person is hobbled from making informed choices.

Under this more moderated form of the Situation, questioning and assertive persons can create ‘situations’, reconstruct their localities, choose their relationships, engage with their environments and merge playfulness, free choice and critical thought. There will be no help from a revolutionary proletariat while any ‘art’ that thinks it will transform the conditions of humanity is living in a phantasy all of its own. It is the other way around. The transformation of society will enable an art that can exist for its own sake and is not burdened by theory or politics. Rather Wilde than Marx …

The aim of the Situationist International was much the same as mine – a world of luxury, happiness and freedom but allowing education and the market (a proper market and not socialism for corporations) to thrive is almost certainly more likely to produce these goods over the long term than reliance on a revolutionary proletariat and a bunch of artists.

Riots and the Crisis of Late Capitalism

The English Riots in 2011 caught a lot of people by surprise. It might be worth revisiting them as dire warnings emerge of similar violence because of 'austerity' on the one hand and negative assets affecting middle class savers on the other. We have our doubts on both scores. There is evidence that the rioting owed a great deal to social deprivation and social exclusion but also to a longstanding dynamic of opposition between street-based cultures and law enforcement that predated the 2008 crash and the world of 'cuts'. Similarly, historical evidence suggests that the middle classes do not riot or even demonstrate but turn to populist parties who promise them relief from harsh reality and the burden of history.

At the time, the marketing industry which had played up aspirational rebellion until that date was thoroughly caught out by events. It has since taken an even stronger turn towards the classically conservative strategy of corporate social responsibility, directed more at placating authority and legislators than speaking for their poorer customers. Young males can respond to messages of defiance and individualism but it was clear that they were not supposed to act out the fantasy that had been presented to them on a plate by clothes and shoe manufacturers. 

Fantasy became reality when Levi's notion of a young male squaring up to riot police actually did square up to riot police. This led to one of many 'moral panics' where analysis of the long term structural causes of a social phenomenon could be ignored in favour of a wave of emotion, resulting in the type of gut reactions that would only store up problems for the future. No one was thinking. No one is thinking.  The response of the marketing community came down to an attempt to answer the question at the heart of the political crisis of our time: to sell a good or service, does one appeal to the emotional instinct of the customer base or respond to the emotional reaction of a herd-like media and political culture in a state of confusion, ignorance and fear? Normally, the marketing man goes for the customer and ignores society but, in a crisis, he will swing violently back towards what he believes to be society but is, in fact, merely his terror that the media will persuade the national executive to order the legislature to 'do something' on the basis that 'something must be done' and that that something will restrict the business' ability to make a profit.

We had an answer to the question very quickly in 2011: business joined in the panic and suddenly became 'socially responsible', meaning, in fact, conservative in the worst sense, part of the problem of suppressing discontent rather than stating firmly that it is merely responding to the mood of the time as sound business and expecting Government to do what Government is supposed to do, govern. If people are discontented, it is not because of moral laxity (an abstract without meaning except from the stand point of the comfortable moraliser) but because they have reasons for discontent - local policing, lack of opportunity, overcrowding, underemployment, generational lack of respect (from the old to the young), the hypocrisy of the rich and the lack of representation by a serious Left (the real crisis for the under class and the young).

A video now removed from YouTube at the time showed an articulate employed black telling it like it was to the Mayor of London. This man was bright, talented and on the right side of the law but he was not happy. He did not have to look far to see a world where others no better than he was were still raking in bonuses despite (in the eyes of the many) bringing the country to its economic knees. In fact, it was incompetent Government that failed to create a framework for hyper-capitalism that had brought things to the edge, a fact probably to be carefully forgotten by many centre-left voters in May. On the other side, and equally legitimately, a video spread at the time showed a tough black lady taking on the rioters. This encapsulated the tragedy of those riots. Small traders and property owners with little capital were being ruined and threatened by people with no capital who had nothing left but unthinking ill-educated carnival politics with which to express themselves

Both sides in the same community were shoved into the position of the soldiery of the competing powers in 1914. Neither side asked then why they should even be in this position and neither side is asking that question today. One reason is that there is no reliable political force ready to intermediate within communities against elites unless we think the intellectually ramshackle UKIP plays that role faute de mieux. Just as in the 2014 'celebrations' (because that is what they often seemed to be) of the 1914 fiasco, no one is interested in the absurdity of the fact that two sets of masses should have more in common with each other than either should with the preening political class that purports to rule them. And yet they set about destroying each other on equal terms (the magistracy speaking here for the small trader) - and with enthusiasm. The draconian and eighteenth century conveyor belt that doled out 'justice' after 2011 was the true signal of what we were dealing with - the liberal facade of society was dropped by the magistracy in order to remind us where ultimate power lay, a power that can clearly cover up systematic child abuse with impunity and no doubt herd us into camps or conscription if it ever blunders into another war.

Here is where one has to put in the mantra that all this does not justify the riots. The riots, of course, were not political as we generally understand them but closer to 'carnival' - anarchic, criminal if strangely authentic. People suffered but not the people who should have done. And, ironically, the most admirable reaction to the whole business was that of The (Tory) Lord Harris. He did not pontificate or moralise. He did not even try to analyse (the job of others). He dealt like a practical man with a fact and offered material assistance to the victims and called on the Government to provide jobs. Yup! A Tory. How inconvenient for the Official Left. The mantra of moralistic blame from 'commentators' of the communitarian school missed the point. The riots were a fact on the ground. They happened because they were ready to happen. It is like expecting to humiliate Germany in 1919 and not expect another war. You can moralise all you like about why Germans should have accepted liberal democracy and bleat and whine after the event - but the dead of the 1930s and 1940s are on the tab of the vengeful non-German liberal democrats who did not think.

Business is now stuck in the middle of all this because something bad is going to happen if we do not get economic growth going elsewhere in the world and if our own falters (as it probably will when we choose the weak centre-left over a cynically half-competent centre-right). For two decades or so, business, for example, has tried to ride the tiger of incipient populism and weakening states by trying to collaborate with elites in developing a manipulative liberalism that changes nothing but gives us a fine rhetoric based on charitable works and not getting caught, all managed through the art of the lobbyist. Stage by stage, the Left has degenerated into a transcendental bourgeois idealism and business and the State into cringing manipulators who think they have the whip hand when they do not. The final stage of this game is being reached today in Europe where human rights idealists undercut the very economic base of modern welfare societies by insulting the people who buy their exports (as we have seen in Sweden and Germany) while continuing to do nothing to invest in the national infrastructures that will permit new wealth to meet future needs. Weak states prepared to be thugs in a crisis, a cowering evasive business community and bullying activists and single issue NGOs conspire to create the conditions for right-wing populism and short bursts of alienating street violence.

The selling process, whether political or commercial, is, of course. an emotional process, a manipulative process, of entering into the consciousness of its targets and tweaking it into an action in the interest of the sellers. It is not much different from the classical view of magicians of their craft. Politicians are also not much different from salesman except that they are 'channellers', responding to the emotions of voters and seeking to manipulate them for their own ends, raising intermediary demons (the media) who, like all raised demons, are untrustworthy tricksters. In the end, the only authentic behaviour seems to be that of the people themselves at the hard edge of the crisis, something clearly tapped into by Syriza in Greece - the rioters rioting in a context of their own, the police trying to do their job under difficult conditions, the victims of rioting and those attempting to clean up afterwards. Four sets of flotsam and jetsam pushed hither and thither by their masters.

In the 2011 case, the magistrates panicked, the politicians panicked, the media panicked and the marketeers panicked - the only people not panicking were the population at large. Listen to conversations around you at the time and the question was always: why did this happen now? Yet this was a question studiously avoided by the panic-stricken Establishment because it was an inconvenient question, partly because nobody knew the answer although everyone had an opinion, an opinion usually cast in terms of morality and 'oughts' rather than what was actually happening on the ground. The Establishment does not really want to answer that question or any other significant question (such as why the British care system turned into a recruiting machine for organised crime and pederasts) because each question raises still more serious questions about what the politicians and the media have been doing for the last three or four decades, perhaps since the Edwardian era. We, on the other hand, can certainly raises our own questions about whether the political and economic system is more broken that we had all thought.

The 2011 Riots and the Saville case are not the first times that the Establishment had failed to predict an event of great importance - we might start with the fall of the Soviet Union or the rise of Islamic terror - but failure to predict economic collapse and urban mayhem are the less forgivable because there is no excuse about lack of data. The 2011 Riots are history but the fact that no serious questions were raised then is matched by the continued inability to ask the fundamental questions arising out of the multitude of child abuse events happening now. But before jumping into bed with authoritarian moralists who wished to re-introduce the strap, conscription, hanging and all forms of social terror to a free young population, most of whom did not riot, or apply them to paedophiles today, we should ask this: how is it that the persons we hired to govern us failed to structure a society where everyone feels they have opportunity, where perhaps one in five of the population is now on the economic edge and in which policy can be made rationally before a crisis instead of irrationally after one? We could learn a great deal from Lord Harris' humane, practical approach to the business of recovery. It strikes me as no surprise that an experienced Tory businessman of the old school should have put the rest of the panicking and hysterical political elite to shame then. We need similar practical men from all schools of practical experience to do so now.

The Only Right Left Standing - The Autonomous Individual Potentiating

Last week, we wrote on 'rights' which we think of as little more than demands and claims which cannot speak their name but must be cloaked in evasive language because the prevailing hegemonic system - whatever it may be - has pre-appropriated moral language for its own historically defined ends. Our view remains that demands and claims should be made in the name of autonomous individuals and of groups that would do no harm to others and that these demands and claims can be made without requiring any of the customary fluff and bluff of unjustifiable moral assertions from half-crazed activists.

Perhaps one 'right' (that is, demand) seems to be completely forgotten amongst the comical plethora of rights to cover every attribute that a person may have or not have. This is the 'right' simply to be a person - or rather to exist as who you are and not as you should be in the eyes of others. A person, above all, should have the right to live in accordance with their own biochemistry and to make private choices about attempts to change that biochemistry by any means at their disposal - carefully cultivated 'poisons', sexually, risk-taking, playfulness, transformation or whatever. The 'right' is associated with a very simple responsibility - the only responsibility - which is to take personal responsibility for harms to oneself and others. Even their death is the business of persons alone although my own prejudice is entirely towards the impulse to a life well lived.

The only reasonable exceptions are when the rights of others are diminished on the same terms as they are claimed - violence against the person springs to mind. The only sanctionable obligation should be to nurture one's offspring and, secondarily, all the young of the species, because these are persons in the making who need help to become persons. A nation of greedy self-regarding narcissistic pensioners piling debt on the young is an obscenity and the political liars who created this state of affairs beneath contempt. This commitment to the future and disregard for the dead weight of the past and 'tradition' makes me unusual amongst those who have come from a Left tradition in feeling deeply uncomfortable about abortion (as denied potentiality) while accepting, pragmatically, that the balance of interest directs us to a woman's claim to choose.

But, once born, there is nothing lower 'morally' than the person who abandons or mistreats a child. So perhaps one right - the right to autonomous development - can be salvaged from the absurd moralistic mess of contemporary liberal nonsense. I have to face the fact that this ends up with a core moral position not entirely alien to the Catholic Church albeit without the necessity of God or the flummery of the Church. This is the full acceptance of the 'right' or claim (or demand from the life force) of each person to be an autonomous individual to meet their full potential and not to be killed, injured or have the resources required to make choices removed from them - if the Left had consistently held to this principle some of the nastier brutalities of history might have been avoided.

Each person also as a subsidiary 'right', or claim or evident demand, arising out of this autonomy to be met, that is, to engage in precisely the levels of intimacy and commitment that suit them and no one else.  Of course, this is where our world view really does part company with the Iron Age restrictions of Catholicism. But, however we try to salvage them, all rights are a fiction other than this right of autonomy because only the autonomous right arises from the simple fact of a consciousness aware of itself in the world, an emergent right to be treated as the essence of a whole person's relation to Being, one who is always more than their attributes (thereby damning all forms of identity and essentialist politics) and who has an integrity of body and mind for which they can take responsibility themselves if permitted by social conditions. The Leftist aspect, of course, is thus not the evasions of rights ideology - that repulsive faux-left thinking of the petit-bourgeois graduate - but the commitment to create social conditions that give equal chances to all persons to be highly self-potentiating autonomous individuals in their own 'right'.

On Objectification

Once upon a time, it was self-evident that God existed and that He was good. Today, it seems equally self-evident to many that there is a thing called sexual objectification and that it is wrong. Just as some people will never not be able to believe in God, so others will never be able to do anything but impute negative moral value to the market in sexual display and observation.

The New Clericalism 
   
People who have such opinions, whether about the existence of God or the moral horror that is lapdancing, have a right to those opinions. They can go to church or avoid lapdancing clubs as suits them. But what neither should do is dictate the terms of freedom for others.

The Church has largely been chased away from public policy (not quite far enough in our view) but feminist extremism is reaching its apogee of power and may yet institute its horrors on us through the Nordic model. In Hackney and in the progressive communities of the 'new feminism', Church and post-Marxist graduate ideologue have been converging to build critical mass for new social myths and new oppressions, the pseudo-theocracy of the authoritarian activist.

The 'progressive' feminist position was even converging at one point (perhaps still is) with that of the communitarian right - the theory of objectification is flowing into a bed already scoured out in the desert by the Judaeo-Christian concept of 'sin' and by Islamic concepts of womanhood. The thesis is that objectification is a thing that is real and that it is bad and that is what we will deal with here. Both statements are dubious. But we will accept, for the sake of taking on these people on their own ground, that there is something called objectification: that is, that persons treat other persons as things-in-themselves and then we will ask whether this is quite so bad as post-Kantian rectitude asserts.

Sinister Philosophy 

The idea that objectification is a bad thing in itself arises (in modern thought) ultimately from a reading of Immanuel Kant - moral value must lie in never treating another person as the object of one's desires without their interests being at heart. This is fair enough but the way it has been extended by Theory is another matter. This Kantian model, already distanced to a degree from what it is to be human in practice (his position was a moral exhortation rather than a description of the actual situation of humanity where we have to wait until Nietzsche for a fair assessment), got extended by the progressive Left into something very much more demanding, especially under Marxist influence.

Two further ideological formulae were added. The first was that using the labour of another to improve or enrich or take pleasure was always  'exploitation' so that the only unexploited person was one who lived beyond the market in some putative future socialist paradise, a fit religio-metaphysical parallel to the traditionalist's Golden Age or Lost Eden. But the second was more sinister. If Marxism made all current human relations potentially exploitative, another school of thought within Marxism but allied to progressive liberalism and derived from Plato, suggested that consent to exploitation was not permissible because any consensual element was a form of 'false consciousness'.

The Rule of the Few

In other words, Kantianism as interpreted by Marx and Platonic Liberals (regardless of similar but theological criticisms of displaying oneself and observing others) came to mean that: a) we lived in a system of mutual exploitation but b) some people who understood this system had the right to limit exploitative behaviour as preparation for its eventual ending. The denial of personal autonomy explicit in submission to God had come full circle to a denial of personal autonomy in the face of not Providence but History or Right. You can't keep a good sado-masochistic authoritarian nut down for long, it would seem.

The Marxist and Liberal debt to Christianity is as strong here as Christianity's to Platonism. Poor old Kant has long since been left behind and Nietzsche ignored. One central belief here is that mutual exploitation is never beneficial nor ever a reasonable and even pleasurable aspect of being human.
There is the belief, already noted that some people have a right (one not coming from God but from 'reason' or 'analysis') to decide who is being exploited and then judge that this is wrong. But a third belief is that the persons who are then defined as exploited can have no voice in the matters because they are ignorant.

All three of these beliefs are somewhat vile because they systematically deny agency to an individual in whatever situation they happen to be in and deliver them up to the situation as interpreted by others. The first belief denies humanity its right to be human and twists it into a rationalist simulacrum of itself. The second is inegalitarian not by way of attribute within a free society but by the fiat of the few who seek to command the many. The third shows contempt for the ability of persons, no matter how 'lowly', to make decisions in their own interest.

Objectification as Temporary States of Being

But let us get back to objectification itself which contains two states of being (we will not call them rights because this concedes too much ground to the 'progressives') - that of displaying and that of observing. The dialectic of displaying and observing is separate again from a personal decision to do one or the other.

A central if implicit psychological theme of much 'objectification discourse' is that display or observation are assaults not only on the person who objects to these states in others but on 'society' - that is, even if no one objects to a display or observation, in some mysterious way there is an observer of the display or of the observation who does. This observer would seem to be the re-invention of God but on terms that pander to the superior knowledge of the intellectual who can interpret Him.

In fact, most, though not all, display and observation falls into the category of the victimless crime at worst and, at best, as a matter of civil dispute between the displayer and the observer or the observer and the observed. The discomfort of one person is otherwise privileged wholly without any equity being invested in the inconvenience of another.

Worse, the politics of objectification means that the State and the community (in a grim repetition of the dark days of Judaeo-Christian control of public policy) are brought into play in order to demand that the observer not observe and the displayer not display. This is only the mirror image of a theoretical State demand that the observer must observe and the displayer must display that we see in the contemporary surveillance State. Obliging people by diktat to observe or not observe or display or not display is of the very essence of totalitarianism.

Politics of Disgust

No policy equitably forces the unobserved to be forcibly observed or the undisplayed to be forcibly displayed. Quite rightly. men and women are not forced to parade naked down the street but the man or woman who wishes to parade naked down the street is always regarded as having broken some law (even when, in fact, they have not).

We are, of course, embedded here in the politics of disgust and in the conservative politics of custom, forgetting that custom was once invented and often invented by earlier versions of the 'disgusted' personality types who most object to the sexual or display rights of others.

But let us get down to basics here because most reasonable restrictions on display and observation have nothing to do with the community or the State, and certainly nothing to do with the minority of 'activists' who exist within some text-based ideological framework. They are a matter of good manners and manners are never a matter for States.

Let us now reverse the radical feminist position: free persons generally know their own interest and politics should only be about increasing the flow of information to persons (education) and of free resources (economic redistribution which is where I part company with classic American libertarianism) as well as creating opportunity to escape untenable situations. It should not be about moral condemation of private acts.

The Moralists as Waste of Political Space
  
If the State and the ideologues cannot deliver full information, resources and escape valves (the three key tasks of the State other than security), then it is for ordinary folk to make the best decisions that they can about getting through the day. If that includes a drink, a flutter on the horses, a bit of drug-taking, lapdancing and even prostitution, these must be assumed to be rational decisions.

A woman or man who makes such choices is not 'weak' or 'inferior' but is dealing the best way they can with their circumstances and they are more likely to escape those circumstances if they are harmful to them if they are respected for their efforts and given what help is available without moral grandstanding from 'committees'.

But most people involved in display and observation are not at the margins of society. Display and observation are central to what it is to be a human being. The right to be naked, the right to get maximum economic value out of your looks, the right to aspire to look good, these are all sneered at by extremist feminists and yet this is what people want. None of those who want this are in any way to be regarded as inferior to those who choose to clothe themselves from top to toe, avoid make-up, look frumpy - and vice versa. These are just life choices.

Observation is a pleasure. There is a reasonable anti-exploitative argument that anyone in the adult industries should be decently paid, have appropriate healthcare facilities and not be forced into anything that was not consensual - but this applies to all workers in all industries. Conditions in some adult entertainment industries are clearly better today than in some sweatshop suppliers of manufactured items that radicals use every day without thinking how they came to be.

Choice is a Value
  
There is, however, no argument (if people make free choices that are economically rational and are not enslaved) against the right of people to earn revenue from physical attributes or skills for the pleasure of those who observe. To say otherwise is to deny humanity to the observer and economic value to the observed.

The alternative of feminist moralism is that the observed ends up in a dead end job with less money and probably a worse sexual mate while the observer becomes depressed and possibly vicious. But there is bigger charge to answer for those opposed to the theory of objectification. Feminist theory would claim that it is wrong in itself to observe or engage with another person sexually as a commodity or as an object for use.

However, the privileging of sexuality is curious here because there are other aspects of human activity that are equally fundamental and where one is normally treated as a commodity or as an object of use. We are treated like this every day as consumers, as voters, as contracted workers and spiritually by religious and community leaders.

The Peculiar Hold of the Sexual
  
What is the peculiar hold of sexuality in this general attitude to the use of humans as commodities and objects of use. Why is sexuality given a sacral nature that is not by any means essential. This fascistic over-emphasis on sexual purity is really just the special interest of one part (some women and some men) of one part of the community (all other people).

Logically, if we were truly serious about objectification, we would have a general critique of commodification and, of course, some very radical feminists manage this purist position - being anarcho-socialist feminist atheists without employment who effectively live outside society.

But, for most people most of the time, this is an utterly absurd stance. To survive in the world not only economically but in terms of simple pleasures and psychologically with some constructed meaning and participation, we require a society in which exploitation not only takes place but must take place.

The question of exploitation is not that it takes place but how to make it 'fair' - that is, how is the exploitation to be limited to the essential for mutual survival and then balanced out so that the few never exploit the many. How, in other words, is a pleasurable mutual exploitation going to result in a society where exploitation is a pleasure for all and everything balances out.

The Market & Desire
  
The market to some extent, over time, manages to do some of the balancing but not very effectively. The State does have some role in correcting imbalances and civil society (notably trades unions) has another but both the State and civil society have a tendency to be captured by ideologues and people of simple mind.

The theory of objectification has created an 'absolute' where our situation is one of 'relatives'. Thus the man who looks at a naked beautiful woman is designated a 'pervert' and the woman who strips for him as a 'slut' when, in fact, truth to be told, the man is just being a man (of equal worth to a woman) and the woman is stripping him of his resources.

The roles can be reversed. A woman may spend her money to see some inconsequential film that would bore any man silly because the 'star' offers her a fantasy that is really not so different from the man's but just involves less interest in exchange of body fluids.

Human desire is important. It fuels us as persons. It makes us who we are. Those who satisfy our desires should be well recompensed. And the person who thwarts desire by stopping the trade in desire through some asinine theory from academic philosophers is worse than dessicated, they are anti-human.

Disrespect and Objectification
  
Objectification is simply part of the social trade in desires. Perhaps we can move steadily towards an equality of desires. The real revolution for women must be to ensure that their desires are given equal weight to that of men rather than allow the suppression of the desires of both men and women for some dream of a socialised a-sexuality.

There is no intrinsic reason why objectification as such shows any disrespect to a woman (or to a man's) personal or intellectual capabilities. This is a feminist myth that deliberately misunderstands the nature of time, of context and of choice.

The central point here is that any act of objectification is not permanent. Objectification is a period of time during which a desire or the fantasy is lived. It is not a state of permanent being but a state of temporary being. When the moment is over, the participants return to what they were or at least are changed inwardly by the experience (in very personal ways that can never be assumed to be 'good' or 'bad') but the objectifier has no hold over the objectified unless the objectified is a neurotic - which is, bluntly, their problem. Most of what happens in most situations is imagined and distant.

This fundamental error of objectification theory - that it is exploitative - is important to understand. It confuses structural exploitation (where coercion lies within poverty or the limits of some communitarian authority) with a momentary exchange. Poverty may dictate the terms of the exchange but it is the poverty or other external matter, bullying probably, that is the problem. These post-Marxist pseudo-radicals need to get back to problems of coercion and poverty and away from imagined problems of culture and language.

Vicious Totalitarians
  
In nearly every area where extremist feminists rant against other women's choices, they are thus acting as somewhat vicious totalitarians because they are taking the symptoms for the disease.

The only objection to a woman being portrayed as weak or submissive in pornography, for example, is the same as one portraying a man as weak or submissive - that is, if the man or woman was coerced or not decently treated during the process. Otherwise, it is his or her decision to sell and his or her decision to buy.

Moreover, and this is central to my argument, equality between men and women permits perfect equality of desire. To condemn males for their desire as 'aggressive' or 'perverted' and privilege women in theirs is grossly unfair and leads to the logic of a negation of desire for both men and women, equally, as the only way to restore 'fairness'.

Feminist Ariel Levy thinks that modern society (as if there was such a reified thing) 'encourages' women to objectify themselves. The tone could only come from a text-worshipping academic. Such language denies the right of women to decide for themselves their own status as both subjects and objects in contexts they choose. Some are being led into submission to academic theorists in a manner little different to those who were led into futile and cruel political ideologies in the first half of the last century,

Feminist Perspectives

Levy is said to have been surprised at how many of her interviewees saw the new raunchy culture emerging in the twenty-first century as representing the triumph of feminism because it showed that American women had become strong enough to display on their terms and accept objectification as empowering. She should not have been.

While many women are embarrassed or made uncomfortable by the male or indeed female gaze (and good manners suggests that they should not be so embarrassed in private relations), many others take immense pleasure in it.

The ultimate absurdity lies in a male critic, John Stoltenberg, who condems as 'wrong' (where do they get their ethics from), any sexual fantasy that involves visualisation of a woman. This is so anti-human as to beggar belief. This could be a saint in the desert. Objectification is just what all persons do and it should be embraced not as unethical but as challenging.

The real issue here is understanding the line between reality and fantasy. The fear of the feminist and their fellow-travellers is legitimate - lack of equal regard and coercion - but their consequent analysis is quite simply ignorant.

Fear and Coercion
  
The radical feminist theorist lacks judgement and balance. So terrified are they that thoughts about inequality and coercion might lead to actual inequality and coercion that one suspects that the theory is about their own anxiety in this respect more than it is derived from any real understanding of how most persons understand that boundary.

Stoltenberg is an extreme example of the dehumanising tendencies of this deep neurosis amongst people of the text, one which derives from their deep belief that texts matter. To them, if texts matter, then thoughts which are made up of the same material (words) matter - and thoughts that lead to texts must also lead to acts.

Of course, in the real world, things do not work like that. Texts are not quite that important any more but, more to the point, thoughts are often substitutes for acts and ensure that acts are not perpetrated  - while acts are often thoughtless. Unravel the primitive humanist belief in the validity of the text, the delusion of the educated and suddenly a lot of the problem evaporates as mist drifts away in the morning sunlight.

The culture of the intellectual confuses act, text and thought into a false coherence that excludes all ambiguity despite the fact that all actual human relations are about ambiguity, confusion and compromise. All intellectualisms that have not understood this, particularly Platonic, Kantian and Marxist thought, build an entirely false picture of social reality - and from that great pain and suffering has resulted.

Text, Thought & Act
  
To actual persons engaged in the world, however, act, text and thought are very different, with text both a technical manual for action and a means of inspiring thought and imagination. However, words themselves limit action and people engage in consensual objectification in very precise contexts.

What is more remarkable, given the frustrations of modern life, is the lack of viciousness on a day-to-day basis. Even the most cursory of reading of the history of erotica will indicate that viciousness increases to the degree that sexuality is repressed and all sexual expression involves a degree of objectification.

Camille Paglia, a feminist to be admired in this respect, puts it well: "Turning people into sex objects is one of the specialties of our species." To try to change this is to try change humanity which, given the nature of our evolution, means, in effect, a cultural Sovietisation of sexual relations. A grim prospect indeed!

Paglia understands that humans are defined in part by their ability to conceptualise and to make value judgements about the beautiful to which I would add their ability to contextualise themselves and to differentiate between various functioning realities in different contexts.

Objectification Theory - An Insult to Women
  
The theory of objectification ends up as deeply insulting to women - not only because it removes choice (in itself an assault on their rights as persons) but because it has an abstract theory dictate that choice in regard to the use of their bodies as well as their minds and deeper nature.

Yes, we (and not just girls and women) develop our view of ourselves from the observation of others and, yes, the whole person questions this and challenges those views in their own inner interest but, no, the social construction of ourselves is not a bad in itself if it is critically challenged not on the basis of theory but of that of personhood.

What happens in much feminist theory is that a wholly theoretical construct of what it is to be a woman - an essentialist construct - is positioned outside society and beyond the individual. The way that feminism has distanced itself from the existentialist critique of De Beauvoir is downright embarrassing. A woman is ordered to comply with that essentialist positioning. She is, in effect, dragged into a theoretical future and away from herself.

A Caveat on Body Image

Now a note of caution is required. All this is not to say that a false relationship between one's own body image and social expectations is not a serious mental health issue in some cases but these are cases of personal adaptation in which the person is not critically engaged in their own being or has suffered some negative private psychological pressure.

Personal issues which seem to be aligned with feminist theory must be taken into account but we must look on these as problems for persons which have objectifying aspects. In other words, there is not a crisis of objectification but a failure of healthy objectification, indeed probably a crisis of healthy desire and playfulness.

The body image issue in such cases is vitally important but it is specific and not general. The imposition of strategies based on objectification theory to all men and women in this context is as absurd as dictating severe diet or lifestyle changes to all persons because some persons suffer serious physical health from specific dietary or lifestyle problems.

As in physical health public policy planning, there is a severe danger here that progressive rationalists chip away at the freedoms of the many in order to deal with the problems of the few and so begin to undertake social engineering that relates to their own political aesthetic rather than to the real needs of the many.

Understanding Americans - Some Key Texts

The cultured English mind, until recently, could be defined as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton and Bunyan, the Romantic Poets, the English Novel and the War Poets with Kipling, Sherlock Holmes and HG Wells added to taste. But Americans are not Englishman. Although there is a common linguistic culture and both cultures are being transformed radically by the internet-driven shift from word to image, there is a cultural continuity in liberal America that outsiders need to understand before they accept or contest it.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

There are key texts that emerged from within American culture and took hold of the American imagination in a way that helped define this curious half-idealistic empire. Political texts such as the Declaration of Independence or the Gettysburg Address and general journalism and propaganda (which is the origin of the Federalist Papers) are taken as read. Similarly, we are speaking mostly of language although we include three films in our mini-canon.

Like all cultures, American culture is multi-faceted. Every generation produces its unique masterpieces and its defining forms but what we are interested in are the pivotal points where an entire culture shifts direction rather than sanctify some text which liberates or changes just a component of it. In that context, I suggest that there are three key phases in the formation of the American liberal mind which must be seen in the context both of official ideology (the political texts) and an equally important 'intellectual silence' from the conservative Right, seen as anti-intellectual by liberals but also representative of a small town and conservative culture of doing and believing.

The First Phase: The 1850s - Setting the Texts for the Cultural War Against The South

The surge of creative writing in this period (we must not forget the genre-creating work earlier of Poe) may now be seen as a concentrated revolt against puritan authority that was inherited from, but out of time with, English mores of 150 years previously - not in the direction of European materialism (Marx) and existentialism (Kierkegaard) but towards transcendentalism.

This is the point at which the Northern (but not the Southern) culture of the United States moves from being a dialectical variant of European culture into something new and distinctive. It is the point at which American idealism and commitment to absolute moral values turns from aspirational political theory into cultural reality.We may take the major texts, read in schools later, as these five:

• Nathaniel Hawthorne - The Scarlet Letter (1850): Questions are raised about communitarian authority.
• Herman Melville - Moby-Dick, or The Whale (1851): The intensity of questions of good and evil.
• Harriet Beecher Stowe - Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852): Sentimentalism in the cause of the good.
• Henry David Thoreau - Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854): American individualism bonds with the land and with the ideal.
• Walt Whitman - Leaves of Grass (1855): The poetic lauding of American earthiness

This immense flourishing of literature on the US East Coast in scarcely half a decade represented an America that was still an offshoot of British culture but that now asserted a distinctive urban liberal and democratic mentality that, in parts, and mostly unintended, helped to fuel the moral fervour behind a bloody war of conquest that was to be touted as a war of liberation after the fact.

This culture was later to invert itself somewhat into philosophical pragmatism as a result of horror at that war (as ably outlined by Louis Menand in 'The Metaphysical Club') and react against populist enthusiasm for moral absolutes but both the belief in force as agent of moral right and a measured antinomian belief in justice and rights over the forms of law has been a persistent value that drives American political action at home and overseas even today.

The Second Phase - From The Late Nineteenth Century to The Mid-Twentieth Century - Understanding & Reforming The Imperium

The first phase was a concentrated burst of generational energy based on an idealistic response to imposed authority from above. It ended in a brutal war that was pursued, albeit not always idealistically in practice, increasingly for 'moral' ends as it moved forward.

Henry James

The next phase is a coming to terms with the expansionary but increasingly anomic ever-expanding federal state that emerged from the crisis. It consisted of two  parts - a mainstream concern with American exceptionalism and how to make it moral, increasingly through a progressive discourse, and an attempt in relation to the South to include a still-alien culture in the whole.

Again, the critiques of capitalism in America are wholly unlike that in Europe. In Europe, there is a war against capitalism as a fundamental socially organising concept from both the Catholic or Fascist Right and the Socialist Left but, in the US, progressives are not arguing against capitalism but against 'bad' capitalism, against monopolies and for smallholders and the 'little man'. The attitude is more one of observation for reform than rage for revolution.

The texts to be read in schools today tell us that, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, the US is not all that it could be in the eyes of thinking liberal men.

It is flawed but it is exceptional and it could be better by returning to its original intentions, the intentions, in a strange piece of patriarchal conservatism, of the Founding Fathers or the free-born settler. This is a liberalism that might be considered very conservative and nostalgic in Europe:

• Henry James - Works (1871-1911): Anglo-American subtleties and differences
• Mark Twain - Adventures of Huckleberry Fin (1884): A nostalgia for freedom
• Frank Norris - The Octopus (1901): The progressive critique of big business
• Sinclair Lewis - Main Street (1921): The dead weight of small town America
• F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby (1925): The corruption under the glitter
• Norman Mailer - The Naked & The Dead (1948): Americans at war

The Southern Response

The 'Southern Response' is not so much a response by the South, which is a cultural back-water, but about the South. A choice is made in the early twentieth century not to integrate the black people who live there and in the Northern cities but to mythologise the culture romantically as a lost cause, a cavalier planter culture beaten (as they should have been even in Marxist theory) by kinder bourgeois roundheads. In doing so, the South is pickled in aspic in order to be integrated into Yankeedom while remaining segregated at home:

• Film - The Birth of A Nation (1915)
• William Faulkner - Works (1926-1962): The mythologising of the Deep South
• Film - Gone With The Wind (1939)

It is no accident that the process is book-ended by two major block-busting films. The first rewrites the civil war as a war of resistance on the lines of other doomed tales of resistance much loved by Anglo-Saxons - from Hereward the Wake onwards - and the second shows the romantic but wrong culture of the feudal South as ultimately ill-fitted to the modern world: 'frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn!'

Distracted first by war and reconstruction, the nation-creating liberal texts of this middle phase displace resentments in the defeated South and divert a troubled national liberal culture, confused by its own victories at times, into hand-maiden to a State that could ambiguously be an agent for or against the people.

The Third Phase - The Sixties - The Creation of the New Liberal Mind: Fear, Anger & Guilt

The final phase is the one most of us are familiar with. Like the 1850s, it represents a point of concentrated energy that shifts the ground within the culture, creating the Democrat Party of today and the resentments of small-town conservatism that fuel Republican revolts. The texts below cover the three key psychological developments that rule liberal thinking today - environmentalism, feminism and a passion for indigenous movements as somehow more pure than urban man. These are three centres of contemporary radical thinking in politics and the media.

Notice that the works of sexual and 'negro' liberation - though important to those communities - are not on the list because these were primarily matters of direct action and not texts, though the texts were many. And we have two women on the list for the first time - third phase liberalism is increasingly driven by women and women's values to the extent that the crisis of support emerging today lies in the alienation of working class men who could be taken for granted in the first two phases as supportive of their bourgeois betters' aspirations for rights and reform.

Rachel Carson

And there is one film on the list that has almost been forgotten now but, at the time, brought the message of Dee Brown about forgotten history into exceptionally gory focus for a mass population:

• Rachel Carson - Silent Spring (1962): An environmentalist ur-text
• Betty Friedan - The Feminist Mystique (1963): Hardline quasi-Marxist introduction to feminism
• Paul Ehrlich - The Population Bomb (1968): Existential panic over scarce resources
• Dee Brown - Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee (1970): Guilt at the genocide of the indigenes
• Film - Soldier Blue (1970)

The sixties are rightly regarded as a cultural watershed. These types of text and film helped to create a new liberal ideology of rights (especially for women and then for a range of other identity groups based on gender and orientation), imperial guilt and existential fear that drove the babyboomer political project and the opposing conservative communitarian reaction to contest each other right up until the age of the internet.

For those who have not spent time in the American school system (as I have) and are puzzled by the American liberal response to the world, a world which such liberals persist in not trying to understand in its complexity, these three phases may help comprehension of what they are dealing with.

The first phase gives us a genuinely liberal moral absolutism and sentimentality that the world is not what it should be and can be put right by individual endeavour and sentimental good will.

The second long phase shows a determined commitment to mythologising history in order to make things right, a progressive optimism that struggle will return the world to what it should have been if there had been no 'fall' and periodic, latterly apocalyptic, despair at the world as it is.

The last phase focuses on the moral wrongs that are to be found everywhere - in the world as a whole and not just the american world - and that our environment, equality and protection of the vulnerable are 'causes' where, perhaps, facts are not the issue but the will to change things ... which brings us back to the impetus behind the transcendentalism of the 1850s.

And the rest, as they say, is history ...