The Press - Problem Rather Than Solution

Those who know their Heidegger will be aware of the concept of Gerede or 'idle chatter', the fallen and inauthentic mode of speech used in every day life. In fact we cannot do without it. It is essential to social cohesion which is an inauthentic necessity as far as the individual is concerned but has its own authenticity as one element amongst many in constructing a framework of relations within which individuality can express itself. To speak of 'Gerede' is not to take a moral or value standard against it but simply to note that it is fallen and inauthentic in respect to 'Dasein' - the human being whose mind cannot be known by other minds and who cannot know other minds and (to express the grim aspect of Heideggerian philosophy) must face their own death alone. This aloneness of death applies to the late Queen Elizabeth II as much as to the man who dies more obviously alone in a hospice in some small town without relatives or friends. Social Gerede includes our commentary on the deaths of others and their doings. 

What does all this have to do with the media? Only that our responses to events as social chatter have always had to deal with a 'higher level' of inauthenticity and fallen-ness which is the chittter-chatter of journalists and intellectuals as 'public discourse' where the cohesion being encouraged is not that of the ordinary human relations designed to help us get things done in the world and survive but the cohesion of a ruling caste that is simultaneously determined on its own hegemony and terrified of losing control of the chatter in case loss collapses that hegemony. The recent Coronation of King Charles II was an object lesson in these matters - private reactions bonding families and communities at the lowest level in a dialectic with a myth in which ancient mystery had been replaced with the magic of 'glamour' and a higher level traditional discourse that bonded society through the marriage of Church and State and the subordination of the political to the socially cohesive irrational.

The mediation between these worlds is (as the word implies) the media but how many of us were thoroughly irritated by the inane chatter from journalists that we heard before, during and after the Coronation - and that we hear before, during and after every major event, inbetween the music we hear on radio and programmed as nothing more than inane chatter on broadcast channels and in newspaper columns. This mental wall paper, democratised through social media (which mainstream journalists use but deeply resent as rival to their hegemonic control of information flows and opinion), is not only inane but serves a dysfunction in simultaneously communicating socially cohesive messaging from above while anarchically destabilising society in order to provide more fuel for the chatter. 

As fossil fuels are said to pollute and heat up our planet so the sheer scale of inane chatter pollutes and heats up our society - and yet, despite the fact that we are told we must restrict ourselves in the use of carbon, there is no attempt to restrain or manage this inane chatter which might be likened to a memetic Ponzi Scheme with the worst offenders now demanding social restrictions on potential worse offenders to come to protect their own collapsing monopoly on idiocy. The mainstream media, in short, and the politicians, in their attacks on the platforms are not interested in turning inane chatter into something educational, analytical, factual and thoughtful but only in preserving their own right to offer what they see as a vaguely more rational form of inanity rather than give that right of inanity to all of us.

Some months ago, journalists got terribly excited about some of their type being picked up by the police at a highly disruptive eco-demonstration. Journalists like to stoke outrage in their readers but are never so outraged as when one of their own gets into trouble. I am not interested here in the specific case. I don't know the facts of an essentially trivial incident any more than I care about George Galloway's or Matt Hancock's appearances on popular TV shows. The probability is that, under pressure, the police made a mistake which they then had to unwind, that the 'Press' were intrusive on an operation in which perhaps lives and certainly individual safety were at stake and that there was no intention whatsoever by the 'State' to limit the freedom of the Press on that day and in that place. 

More concerning should be that a pub which represented the livelihood of a family has had to close down because a couple of holier-than-thou corporations refused to supply them with key product thanks to publicity about a stupid police raid on their collection of golliwogs. The politicians caused the police to blunder, the media created hysteria and the 'corporate liberals' stepped in to destroy a small business. That is the 'regime' in a nutshell - confused authority, inept politicians, narcissistic journalists and complicit Uriah Heep-like capitalists creating a vortex of destruction for the 'little man'. 

We might also cite the idiocy around the Oath of Allegiance to the Coronation. It always was voluntary. It was a relatively minor addition to the Service put forward in good faith by Church and Crown almost certainly at the behest of the former (which has been busy turning the event into a soft power assertion of its own authority). An oath is serious to some (mostly to the military). Trivial to others (mostly the public). It was a nice idea for traditionalists without negative implications for sceptics. If you can't say it, don't take up your invitation to Westminster Abbey and stay silent at home. The media turned something voluntary, restricted in force to a few hundred people in an Abbey and private for most people into a divisive 'story', adding yet another brick of negativity into our dying culture.

In the eco-case, the poor Plods were trying to find a way to restore the freedom to travel safely of significant numbers of people while not endangering the life of any narcissist who decided to protest at their expense. The arrests of protesters before the Coronation are more troubling perhaps except that, on further thought, this tiny minority of activists were not actually putting forward arguments for republicanism and creating a political organisation capable of winning elections to impose it in accordance with the will of the people but simply ruining the day for a lot of other people and risking violence and disorder during a difficult high security operation. After all, there are some worse people even than activists and journalists out there.

 

Perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps the police are on the verge of imposing monarchical tyranny (rather than rank stupidity) and perhaps the Press are the only effective barrier between ourselves and authoritarian rule but I think not. England is England, marked out more by blunders than malice. The Press have no interest but advertising revenue, jobs for journalists, telling tales (rather than the mysterious 'truth') and allowing their posher end to rant at their owners' expense. The frustration for the public was that the eco-protests caused real distress and misery for many individuals and that they existed in good part because of a collusive relationship between protesters and the media, creating a vicious cycle in which more outrageous protests get more publicity which encourages more protests. Instead of a cycle of socially cohesive idle chatter with space for criticism, a transmission belt from below as well as from above in stabilising society and reforming it, we have cycles of inane chatter which destroy social cohesion and block off intelligent analytical criticism of society when and wherever it fails. There is a sound criticism of monarchy in the UK and there are dipshit protesters at the margins and the latter always destroy the ability of the former to be heard.

Here is another example. If you believed the media, the Passport Office is in total disarray and the civil service is falling apart. This is the accepted version doled out to people with no immediate connection to the service based on the complaints of the few in a genuinely complex system. Yet, in our household, two passport applications were handled effectively within three weeks and my request for some facts on pension arrangements was delivered in writing within the promised time-scale. Freedom increasingly seems to be defined by the 'right' of activists to engage in performative street 'art' at the expense of others and by the 'right' of the media to tell 'stories' where stories are as likely to mean 'lies' as the word is often used in popular parlance as not. The half-baked accounts of the Ukraine War are simply the relation of one-sided dossiers issued by psychological operations specialists. NGOs produce 'papers' designed to manipulate. Journalists lap up PR material. We live in a miasma of story-telling.

 

This 'freedom' to engage in a concatenation of half-truths helps to enable a presumed right to interfere in other peoples' lives, insult their values beyond fair reason (of which Pussy Riot behaving badly in an Russian Orthodox Church must be exemplar) and place people at risk. All on the dubious basis that (for example) direct extreme action (say) got the women the vote as opposed to reliance on civil disobedience, peaceful protest and political action ... you know, the hard way but the sure way. African-American strategies to win civil rights are models of their kind in which major social change took place because a mass of people (like women) needed it and not because a few crusties or obsessives wanted it. In fact, extreme direct action put back the suffragette movement whose final victory was inevitable on the strength of the social forces involved.

 

We have seen a similar destructive relationship between terrorism and the media. Terrorists can be assured of sometimes hysterical coverage creating fear and anxiety that then expresses itself in over-reaction by the authorities who then restrict the civil liberties of everyone except the media who are at the root of creating the initial crisis of anxiety in the first place. Unlike most people, I am not hysterical about terrorism. Exhausted doctors and truck drivers are more of a threat to me and my family than loons with a bomb. But the Islamist errorist wave of the 1990s and 2000s was never adequately analysed in the media as a) the fruit of inept foreign policy, b) a marginal threat to the vast majority of the population for the vast majority of the time, c) an opportunity to whip up hysteria by special interests to ensure budgetary allocations and d) a greater opportunity for ambitious technocrats to get their noses in the trough. The media never really exposed a) or made b) clear and were wholly complicit in the pursuing the ambitions of those concerned with c) and d).

 

It seems that terrorism was also a terribly convenient excuse for the authorities to impose excessive surveillance and social controls and to build huge industrial-security complexes creating jobs for the pals. The media have been as important in creating a less pleasant and authoritarian society as they have been in stoking up the war-mongering of the neo-cons and the absurd foreign policies of a bunch of NATO incompetents. Radically, I would go so far as to say that the role of the media is also to ensure that we forget the right of violent resistance where there is a radical imbalance of power and where power resides in an authority that is not accountable to its subjects. Let me explain the issue here which is that any regime must work or be subject to the Mandate of Heaven and fall. Western liberal democracy today and its accountability is a Potemkin Village, We have reached the tragic point where only the media may be gluing the paper together at the same time as it is playing with matches around it. 

 

The media have taken on the role of making power accountable on paper but they do nothing of the kind in actuality. Indeed, the media is part of Power. Its interest tends to be merely in maintaining politics as a soap opera and getting political scalps in an eternal game of political musical chairs. National liberation remains a worthy struggle as does the overthrow of tyrannies from within (without foreign interference) or foreign occupation but, honestly, Britain today is, if anything, at the other end of the tyrannical spectrum, not a tyranny but an unstable mess. What we need now is to face this fact and start to reform how we do things within our ancient traditions where they do not get in the way. It is the media that are getting in the way.

 

Britain is a failing State led by bunglers but with the opportunity for us all (even if inadequately taken) to overthrow the bunglers through effective political organisation and persuade the slightly less stupid bunglers through argument and peaceful protest. Of course, the fact that we invariably replace one set of bunglers with another is not the point ... being a democracy, we could theoretically remove all bunglers if we were not so lazy, distracted and poorly educated even if we did not do so. We willnot do so because we are lazy, distracted and poorly educated and that's just how it goes. But we could still have a more effective, more intelligent and more capable elite whose first allegiance was, at least in principle, to the People rather than to its own class or to the liberal internationalist and neoliberal ideologies that got us into the mess we are in in the first place.

 

A strong State serving a strong People would place social cohesion alongside justifiable analytical criticism (not emotional performance art) at a premium. The media has become complicit in our collective weakness and so complicit in the dodgy panicked attempts of the authorities to plug holes in the dam holding back anarchy instead of building new and stronger dams. Our freedoms are in danger because of the media more than we will accept. As we say, the issue must be whether our ruling caste has the Mandate of Heaven or not. If it does, it should be accepted, If it does not, it should be overthrown. We are at the point, thanks to weak politicians, narcissistic activists and the media, where what should be preserved is moving into territory where overthrow becomes not merely a possibility but may become a duty one day. We are not there yet but the almost inevitable failure of the next Government and world conditions may bring us close to the precipice ... pushed constantly in that direction by an irresponsible media!

Of course, this problem of the media as hysterical licence in the face of a weak State holding together a collapsing society is probably not fully resolvable in a free society and freedom must remain a core value in our society. But freedom always collapses when society collapses. Perhaps the chaos of social media will do the job for us. The benefits of a free and open media usually and generally outweigh the risks created by such a media and the benefits of freedom of speech, responsible protest and free political organisation are unarguable but we should be under no illusions about what is going on here. The mainstream media have become a socially corrosive and destructive element in society (far more than the claimed negative effects of social media) about which nothing can be done under the current regime just as, ultimately, a weak State can do little effective to deal with social corrosion - whether poverty, illegal migration, administrative incapacity, lack of resources, terrorism (when it is determined enough), organised crime or destructive protest. 

 

Why? Because certain liberal interest groups ensure that it will not even discuss appropriate and proportionate action in legislatures. (The appalling quality of our political class is another issue for another time). We are slipping into a vortex of social collapse as a result. The media represent an important trigger for that collapse because it self-censors any radical voice with the ability to deal with the issues head-on. New ideas are systematically silenced as inconvenient or uncomfortable. The media are no longer (to the extent that they ever did) acting as responsible reporters of fact and analysis but, instead, only as hungry creators of narratives designed to excite and trigger strong emotions in order to attract eyeballs. We are now all supposed to emote and judge complex political and international issues on the basis of individual 'stories' which appeal to our 'humanity' but apparently not to our reasoning capacity. As a result, we get fables, fairy stories at worst and the 'profession' (actually a 'trade') is filled with desperate narcissists looking at the main chance because their employment is precarious and their moral sense is constructed from the rules of their profession and nothing higher.

So, let journalists fight the struggles for other journalists' 'freedoms' but I suspect many of the rest of us may think there are other more important battles to fight. We might be inclined to fight their own solipsistic wars about Freedom of the Press more vigorously if only the media itself was a little morally correct and a lot more active in supporting the real heroes who are prepared to strip away the hypocrisies and lies of official systems (such as Assange) rather than dedicate their limited resources to promoting extreme actions by non-state small-scale actors and attractive figureheads like 'Greta'. 

 

The flow of journalists in and out of political offices also creates embedded conflicts of interest. There was the depressingly easy acceptance in the Thatcher era of 'honours' by Editors. There is the noticeable and shameful degree to which the BBC bends itself to the narrative of the political establishment. There is the flow of funds into 'campaigning' journalism that clearly meets the agenda of Western fixers in the international relations world. There is the back-scratching and back-biting involved in leaks and sources designed to break this or that political spine or promote the career of this or that rising manipulative psychopath. There is the aura of terror for individuals and corporations if some small blunder is exploded into a 'story' that wrecks careers out of all proportion to the 'crime' and disrupts any ability to solve a problem and move on. We often have visions here of the media with firebrands and pitchforks setting out to vanquish a monster as if we lived in a Universal horror movie.

 

And yet so much is swept under the carpet or not investigated because it is too complicated or inconvenient for the short term mentalities and butterfly minds of the media. There is the length of time it took to investigate child abuse in the care home sector, the lack of interest in the details of the crisis in the NHS rather than its results, the lack of interest in the weird and wonderful financial wheezes that pop out now and then to threaten the stability of the capitalist system on which we all currently depend to survive, the easy acceptance of any bit of propagandistic crud issued out of Kiev, the lack of investigation into the relationship between inflation and dumb foreign policy decisions and the utter disinterest in the structures and meaning of organised crime and its relationship to illegal migration until thousands start bobbing in little boats over the Channel in a perverse parody of Dunkirk.

 

As to the lost heroes, Julian Assange is now in danger of being sent to rot in an American jail after many years of vicious persecution yet he exposed serious wrong-doing in a way rarely done by a mainstream media protective of its symbiotic relationship with 'sources'. He is flawed but has not deserved this level of cruel and vengeful persecution. Instead of fighting for Assange (after all, he is not 'one of them'), the mainstream media ignore him as inconvenient. They prefer to worry not about getting more honest truths out of a dodgy system but 'maintaining their sources' and backing manipulative campaigners trying to provide us with yet more half truths to pile on the punter like Pelion on Ossa. It is a system of complicity in which a game of mutual manipulation has long since departed from both truth and social responsibility.

Journalism seems to have become a closed world of mutual back-scratchers, fundamentally irresponsible, as careful of its 'rights' as any factory shop steward but also incapable of understanding how its publicity can trigger dangerous extreme actions in the political process, encourage extreme illegalities and disruption and yet fail to support serious exposures of wrong-doing in the political and social structures into which it is embedded and on which it is as dependent as on a Class A drug. Contemporary journalism has long been part of the problem rather than part of the solution. Something must be done ...

The Indiscipline of Protest

There have been at least two great intellectual failures in the last hundred years - the first is Marxism-Leninism and the second has been the liberal rejection of some of the central insights of the Marxists.

Class But Not As We Know It, Jim

This is not to praise Marxism except as an analytical tool under defined conditions because Marxism is, fundamentally, a poor guide to our human condition. Despite its alleged materialism, it is an idealist philosophy which has been quite historically effective for seizing power. But idealism is intellectually sanctioned lying about the world. Marxism is Hegelian which, in turn, is an historicism derived from the Western Christian tradition which, in turn and philosophically, is ultimately an adaptation of Platonism.

The trajectory from Plato's Cave to the Gulag has been well if simplistically argued by others but the summary is that this Western tradition of idealism is ultimately religious and 'spiritual' and that it can kill when brooked. But the proverbial baby has been thrown out with the bath water in at least two respects. We have forgotten Marx' and Engels' insights that politics and culture derive intimately from economic conditions and that, though each person is greater than his class, there are class interests in politics.

Modern liberal democracy has tried to eliminate the language of class because it is not convenient for its preferred model of professionals organising functional coalitions of special interests and lobbies to share out the benefits of growth - but when growth falters, then Marx becomes analytically relevant.

Where Should We Be Looking

For this reason, in trying to understand what might develop out of the continuing economic crisis, we have to return both to theory and to what is happening where we are not looking - much as in 1910, we might have been wise not to ignore intellectuals in Zurich or school teachers in Bavaria. We should be studying not the machinations of the ideologues of the future (that is the job of the security services) but what they are saying that resonates with those who are either resentful of the current order of things or who are suffering and have the energy to do something about it.

It is that last clause that matters 'who 'have the energy to do something about it' - because there are an awful lot of resentful older middle class people, intellectuals and poor and vulnerable people who sit in their armchairs or on their sofas and have neither will nor ability to act. Liberal democratic hegemony (indeed, all hegemonies) ultimately relies on inaction - that moan in the pub, grumble in front of the TV, meaningless letter to The Times, rant in a Facebook comment. None of this morphs into organisation or action. It is the 'art of being ruled' (Wyndham Lewis' phrase).

In this context, the Occupy Movement, the hackers of LulzSec and the Anonymous operation both fascinated and appalled the establishment some years ago. It alternately tried to contain them within their laws and infiltrate them with progressive rhetoric or secret policemen (the Tsarist model). In the end, these 'protest movements' seem to have collapsed of their own volition, achieving very little.

Who Are These People?

But who were these failed protestors as a class? Not who was behind the 'attacks' or 'occupations' (some might as easily be provocations by the establishment as genuine acts of revolt) but who was participating not only in 'new' models of political action but in confused riots as states weakened? We have written elsewhere about the new anarchism but it is the class base of this movement that interests us here - and further investigation suggests that we were not seeing something new but something very old, the blockage of the aspirations of an educated young by the failed old.

This was a movement of graduates and not of workers (though there is a separate union-driven public sector defence movement whose self interest is so apparent that even middle class liberals can resent their claims) and of persons who are 'cleverer' than their parents. We get back to Marx. As in the print revolution of the 1500s, a revolution in communications has created a new technological and economic structure where value has shifted from one generation to another but where the necessary political or cultural change is lagging.

It is an old theme of these postings. The new technologies are not so much removing the ability of intermediaries to create value for themselves out of their oligarchical control of knowledge (the professionals, if you like) but are making intermediaries of all sorts potentially wholly redundant.

Paul Mason's Analysis

The young who know things the old do not know, including the absurdity of many of the rules designed to hold the old system together, were starting to use new technologies to combine and protest in ways that were entirely new. Their failures hide the fact that methods may have failed but the intent and the revolutionary potential for technology remain. A February 2011 analysis by Paul Mason of BBC Newsnight gave a number of reasons why this needed to be understood and, to a degree, embraced if we are to transit from one world to another without repression and killing. This is our gloss on that work after four years had passed.

• Young graduate women are emerging who are not stuck in the specific feminist resentments of the older generation but simply get on with practical organisation in their own interest and what they believe to be right. Mason was right that educated women were at the core of protest but what is interesting to observe since his analysis is that the 'feminisation' of protest, conducted in 'feminist' language has developed a counter-reaction from young males not in terms of reactionary politics but political disinterest, a sort of 'why bother?'


• Ideological formulations are dead as organising principles. There will be Marxists, conspiracy theorists, faith-based loons, environmentalists and liberals but none of them can control a propaganda process or impose an organisational model that can stifle internal dissent or insists on a 'line' to assert political discipline. The very fact of seven party leaders with different interests and ideologies sitting in a row on TV last night (in the UK) to present their wares to the public when only two realistically represented the possible ideology of governance for the next five years (and both of those agree on more than they disagree) tells you something about the emergence of hyper-real politics disconnected from the actual levers of power.


• An international 'elite' of protesters seemed to be emerging in the immediate aftermath of the 2008 'crash'. They operated quasi-professionally across borders or supplied technical skills across a borderless internet. This is an analogue with the intellectual diaspora dissidents who fuelled the rise of anarchism and Marxism-Leninism. Unfortunately, it became clearer that their history was not only one of political development a decade before (that is, they were ideologues exploiting a situation rather than emergent from the situation) but that a proportion of them were trained and managed during the Arab Spring by State actors seeking easy wins over rival States.


• The central economic issue remains State and personal debt at a time of lack of employment opportunity. The protests might rapidly disappear with job creation or free education and debt forgiveness but States are in no position to deliver these during the current crisis. The resentments of the young are real but it is not being expressed in revolutionary politics but in evolutionary democratic politics if at all. The real impulse here seems not to be engagement but gritting teeth, getting on with the job and waiting for a righteous revenge when the old codgers start to die off and inflation transfers wealth from the old to the young as recovery gets under way. It may be easier to get on a boat and plane and find a new home than stay in the old one and be left with the burden of paying for the profligacy of parents. Many young people are just voting with their feet.


• If this problem of a generation without prospects and with old codgers getting in the way is causing difficulties in the West, then it is boiling up to violent proportions in the many countries where there is now a massive demographic bulge of frustrated urban young. And yet this explosive material which might have been assumed to have been progressive because it was young, now turns it to be just as likely to be traditionalist, nationalist and even fascistic when it decides to get off its behind and do something. It is not just that ISIS and other insurgencies are fuelled by the young but that a 'fascist' Maidan 3 lurks around the corner and that the student leaders of the Hong Kong revolt are not modern secular atheists but as likely to be Christians with a hot line to the local CIA man.


• Organised labour is pretty well bankrupt as a revolutionary force. It has been a conservative force against 'clercs' (socialists) since the 1940s but it has degenerated further into being representative largely of those who are already ensconced within the State since the 1980s (in the UK) - a truly conservative interest at this time. Yes, there is a slow, steady movement by which a new generation of trades unionists (including a strong feminist element linked to the low paid private and public sectors) is reasserting their position on the centre-left but this is happening just as the official centre-left is beginning to crumble under the burden of managing austerity-lite because of the trap it has got into as the primary promoter of 'capitalism with a human face'. 

As for protest as 'fun', this should not be underestimated because contemporary protest seemed to permit people to 'take a day off' and join a camp. There is a history of carnival and, of course, situationist theory to fall back on, quite consciously so amongst urban anarchists. But four years on, the fun has gone out of protest - in the non-Western world, it is clear that people can get killed and, in the West, the magistrates are minded to take a dim view of carnival that destroys property

The educated young activist now has a better understanding of power relations than his forebears and has learned a lot since 2008. Most of it has been a repetition of the lesson of the 2003 Iraq protests - that the system is not responsive and will do anything to ensure its own survival, including violate whatever human rights are to hand if necessary.

The alternative is a level of commitment to organisation and discipline that just does not seem to be worth the effort compared to having fun, mating and building tradeable skills for the future. The young do not run on hope any more but on manipulative skills as effective as those of their opponents - it is just that they are choosing to re-direct those skills now to the game of life rather than political change.

There are mobilising exceptions - such as the Scottish Referendum - but the exceptions point up the problem: elites have to concede the opportunity for change. The moment cannot be seized independently. There is no ideological movement seeking to mobilise the masses for change, just minorities of 'activists' ducking and diving between methodologies and compromising with the very system of power they claim to despise.

Internal Contradictions

The fluidity and lack of ideology is the central weakness in the street. Occupy events proved weaker on the ground than they might have been because they attracted every type of conspiracy nut, weak-minded New Ager and middle class narcissist looking for self-expression. It also brings us back to class because young activists are driven by some understanding of power but not by allegiance to class or, bluntly, any real comprehension of economics.

The situationism in contemporary revolt is there for all to see. I am certainly not saying that the young should adopt Marxist models for success, quite the contrary since the end result would be bureaucratism, authoritarianism and soullessness, but there are issues here of organisation. We are only suggesting, by referring to Marx, that this is, despite its lack of self awareness, a form of class action because it is based, despite itself, fundamentally on economics and on technological changes to the means of production and that this leads to some interesting 'internal contradictions'. The protestors rarely seemed to understand their own condition - they could soon become manipulable mobs.

The intellectual base for rejecting Marxism as anything more than analytical tool is well summarised in a quotation from a French intellectual that Mason offered. Foucault advised Deleuze:

We had to wait until the nineteenth century before we began to understand the nature of exploitation [a nod to Marx], and, to this day [second half of the twentieth century], we have yet to fully comprehend the nature of power.

The problem of organisation is a profound one because the current model of power relations only offers inclusion within liberal democratic coalition-building or the sort of bureaucratic organisational ability that allowed socialists to out-manouevre the anarchists between 1910 and 1940.

This is at the very heart of the debates already current in the British trades union movement at the turn of this century. The decision to go the way of a dogged turning around of the official Left (which has nothing much to say to the wider population as we can see in the lack of enthusiasm for Ed Miliband the front man of the movement) rather than recreate a socialist-labour movement to challenge capitalism was inevitable under such conditions. The Labour Movement might effectively and ideologically 'run' the next British Government and yet, while many individuals will benefit in the short term, nothing will have fundamentally changed at the end of their Party's' term of office. The objective conditions for change are simply not present.

The New Anarchism?

The logic of recent protest was different from that of the 'insider' approach but it is was soon very unclear how it could 'organise' anything at all. The fundamental self interest of the young and the Darwinian struggle between memes within that generation suggest that their primary tools are little more than their effect on the market (the rhetoric of action) and withdrawal from the law.

By withdrawal from the law, I mean not lawlessness but something entirely different and potentially more dangerous to the system - forcing the elite to acknowledge that its authoritarianism is unenforceable in any practical sense. The internet language of 'work-arounds' when systems fail springs to mind. But it still requires courage and involves risk in dealing with a system that likes to make examples of people and frighten the rest by publicising their exemplary law enforcement actions.

Solidarity is required to resist the tactic of control through exemplary fear. The fate of recreational drug users provides the template for the failure of an element in the community to challenge their masters through evidence-based analysis and organisation. The protests of 2011, we were told by Mason, were based on 'autonomy' and personal freedom within a democratic framework and (self-evidently) on opposition to state-protected special interests such as Wall Street and the finance markets. But this was the autonomous behaviour of very few people.

Four years on, nothing (and we mean nothing) had changed in regard to those ultimate power relations. Where the agenda had changed (as in the tax avoidance campaigning), it turns out that the prime beneficiary of increased taxes was only indirectly the people - the prime beneficiary was to be the State in its fight to deal with deficits and maintain social cohesion and its war machine.

This is where things start to get confused because if Anonymous and libertarian socialists are anti-capitalist, it is also clear that the Greek riots around the same time (2011) were also about preserving an economic system that was socialist in the worst sense - corrupt at every level including the level of the working classes themselves.

Syriza has proved to be far more interesting since then, offering perhaps the opportunity to structure an anti-corrupt anti-austerity model but it has had to do so by taking on the Goliath of the Franco-German European Project as a David looking for a Deus ex Machina to emerge out of the hearts of stern-faced Teutons and the opportunists in Moscow. This is David without a catapult.

The young Italians coming to London to escape local corruption are in direct class opposition to the public service workers at home expecting to be feather-bedded for life. Anonymous was with the first and Occupy was increasingly representing the last. This was an internal contradiction within the Western protests that was never resolved, any more than the contradiction was resolved between young liberal middle class liberals in Tahrir Square and young and hungry working class Islamists wanting bread and wives.

Conservative Welfarism And Personal Autonomy

On the one side, hackers, anarcho-libertarians and situationists and, on the other, a special interest socialistic coalition of state workers, liberals and communitarians. On the one side, bourgeois liberals wanting a comfortable freedom and, on the other, traditionalists wanting a legal system and socio-economic structure based on Iron Age texts. These are very different movements and they cannot work long together. The 'neo-socialists', for example, tried appealing to the police by saying that they were protesting to protect their pensions (and making headway with that argument), while the libertarians were wondering what the police were doing there anyway.

The State also needs economic growth and surplus capital to impose law and order. Reducing the need for law and order to its core becomes necessary - and this is why we now have a serious public debate on the treatment of sex workers and the war on drugs. Scarce resources were looking at solving the wrong problems - social cohesion and warlord organised crime are now more of a threat than the pleasures of layabouts. There is some complex intellectual negotiation going here - between justification for tax expenditure on guns and butter, about what constitutes threat to the people and what constitutes threats to the State and about public intrusion into private life.

States & Protest

In both the West and the emerging world, it is likely that States and foreign powers quickly started to identify elite operatives in protest networks and became busy in not merely tracking but 'turning' and infiltrating them. Some of the operatives are often well-heeled and not representative of most of the young by any means - state funds can permit other new entrants to rise rapidly. There is also a rather sinister potential turn to events that the more naive activists may not see. As we noted above, State bureaucrats may see protesters as allies in bringing the market to heel and protecting the tax base for precisely the sort of activities that Anonymous was set on exposing.

We noted this as a possibility three or four years ago and the populist assault on HSBC suggests that we were right - and there is more to come. Radicals are easily diverted into a global rights and anti-corporate agenda that neuters any serious opportunity for changes in the structures of power at home and helps to extend markets for domestic corporations. We predicted that an alliance with liberal NGO-based coalitions might be rather convenient for authority when faced by the demands of finance capital so that the heirs of the Occupy and Anonymous movements might become useful in shifting the terms of political trade back towards auctoritas. And this is what was to transpire.

But, yet another issue identified at that time for the protest movements is one already well identified in the mainstream media ... er, what do they actually want? The 'internal contradiction' here is that much of the rhetoric is anti-State and yet jobs and free education can only be provided by a strong State with a decent tax base. Here we have another possible convergence of State and liberal aspirations at the expense of personal autonomy and libertarianism.

Liberty or Jobs?

In both New York and London, the Occupy protesters appeared to be targeting finance capital rather than government and to be drifting from the territory of Anonymous (which emphasised state action as generally 'wrong') to territory associated with socialism and social liberalism (more state is needed). This internal contradiction is profound, mirroring that between anarchism and socialism in the late nineteenth century. It represents the difference between left-libertarian ideology and the self interest of the coalition of the vulnerable threatened with penury by the current crisis. We certainly saw libertarians moving away from the British Occupy Movement as it fell into the hands of the traditional Left (not helped by an Archbishop backing it).

The real reason we are in economic crisis is not 'imperialism' (which is unwieldy and expensive but probably pays its way in market access and access to resources) but the massively greater social spending and job creation programmes of social liberal states without the investment in infrastructure to support it. When Anonymous strikes at US behaviour in Iraq, it is striking at the State as both imperialist and liberal capitalist (including its size and welfare basis) whereas when Occupy protesters seize territory, they eventually want the State to remain big but do the 'right thing' i.e. give them economic prospects and security. But States do not do the right thing. They never do the right thing. They exist to exist and aggrandise power. This is a lesson the Left should have learned from 1917.

Anarcho-Libertarianism or Neo-Socialism?

This internal contradiction is so profound because it is about whether a new generation will be led by neo-socialists wanting to over-turn capitalism by means of the State or anarcho-libertarians wanting to get the State out of the market and stop supporting big capitalists so that communal self-organisation can take place in 'safe space'. Occupy people reluctantly vote Labour or Democrat (or possibly Green) but Anonymous people probably don't bother to vote at all. Anonymous may be the wiser when faced with rule by a Clinton or a Milliband ... The unpredictability of things lies in another point made by Mason back in 2012 - that there are a multiplicity of narratives from which both the young and dissatisfied older citizens can draw. Fundamental world views do not change but the expression of those views can change very rapidly under the influence of the internet. Support or withdrawal of support from causes no longer takes place within a narrative of 'solidarity' or 'loyalty' but one of 'truth' or 'effectiveness'.

This is why older generation liberals are confused and are becoming reactionary. There is now no fixed feminist, black or gay narrative any more than there is a nationalist or working class narrative. There is just 'my' or 'our' narrative according to who I am or to the interest of my adoptive tribe. Constant self development and neo-tribalism mean enormous adaptability and flexibility but they also mean difficulty in pinning people down to organised collective action as opposed to participation in an action organised by others from which they may withdraw at a moment's notice. In this struggle between modes of resistance, nothing is as yet predictable. Church, unions, police and military may join the protesters for a neo-socialist solution or States may have to adapt to situational anarchism by reducing their scope and being better at what they do. Either is possible. We are in flux.