The Left and Intangibles

The Left often has a difficulty with intangibles. Often the notion that what is intangible is important is rejected altogether because of an over-insistence on materialism. Acceptance of the importance of intangibles does not reject materialism as the basis for being and so of society and politics. It simply sees the emergence of 'things from things', from matter, as constructions of minds that are material but have evolved into a consciousness that is creative in using language, concepts, the creation of new formations of matter through science and manipulation and new relationships as tools and weapons in the struggle for power, resources and status.

On the other hand, the Left often collapses this analysis into a po-faced Frankfurt School vision of intangibles which is riddled with inappropriate moral judgments that derive ultimately from Judaeo-Christian habits – hence the often trotted out garbage about commodification and objectification as if the concepts meant much more in their hands than the sort of moral disapproval that Jeremiah would have warmed to. The correct approach to intangibles is one that is detached and neutral about the fact of intangibles and concentrates on their actual use in ‘really existing’ human relationships as instruments of power – in effect as weapons and tools.

For example, it may well be (I think it is) true that so-called 'commodification' and 'objectification' are potentially progressive insofar as they are expressions of actual human being. It is the interpretation and use to which they are put by power that is problematic and not their use in themselves. Even consensual pornography, let alone free trade with full information, can be highly progressive if undertaken between equals freely choosing their position. The issue is thus not the fact of intangibles or even their analysis but the ownership of the use of them and the right to choices about use value. The Left has certainly not come to terms with late liberal capitalism’s ability to create and control economic and power relationships based on these intangible weapons and tools rather than on the use of iron, steel and rail.

The current political case study is the violent struggle in America going on at the moment between liberals trying to define their own fake news as truth and conservatives discovering that they can create their own truth with impunity as fake news. The struggle sometimes seems trivial but it is a war as important as the mid-twentieth century ones conducted with bullets and bombs because ultimately it is about control of the levers of informational power and so economic choices affecting the material lives of millions. Both sides are basically lying liars who have got into the habit of lying but this complex eco-system of lies is a good example of the power of intangibles and of the Left's failure to rise above the lying to create the opportunities for the mass of the population in order to derive their own functional truths from full information and a solid grounding in critical thinking.

As we write, the US stock market rises and employment levels are increasing and yet an entirely different vision of reality is presented as truth because it is necessary for some people to believe it is true – the same applies to the persistant apocalypticism about the British economy under Brexit. These are examples of political intangibility distracting us from reality that are as absurd as our uncritical acceptance of brands and the claims of corporate social responsibility going on within capitalism. As invented reality spins away from really existing material reality, so the chances for cataclysm do increase - hence our social progress as a continual two steps forward, one step back amongst mountains of gore and lost dreams. The educational problem is one of lack of critical thinking under complex social conditions and the equally important lack of some sense of the self as more than simply the creature of social conditions - this last lie is the fatal pessimistic crime of the modern intellectual liberal left towards the people.

There is thus a total system of intangibility overlaying materiality with many layers within it, all derived from a materiality for which there is no serious Left critique that is not mired in a priori theory. The dead weight of all forms of essentialism - especially the cant of Kant - gives power to an intellectual class denuded of intellect. Our new critique should encompass our acceptance of the value lying in intangibles in economics, in culture, in social relations and in politics but then explore how to vest the value in the people in general rather than in self-interested classes – including an intellectual class which is highly manipulative of intangibles in its own class interest. In short, the Left has no serious philosophy of the human condition that is not already moribund and it is time to call the universities out on their failures.

Exploring Political Options for Left Leavers - A Discussion Paper

What options are available for a Left Leaver under current political conditions? The vote was for Leave. It is now fairly certain that, without a significant revolt within the Parliamentary Conservative Party (which looks increasingly unlikely), Article 50 will be triggered by the end of the year. Fast-track negotiations will (with bumps along the way) result in a Brexit by the end of 2018 to be followed by a General Election in which calls for a Second Referendum would be distracting, futile and (unless there is a serious economic melt-down) probably electorally counter-productive for whoever took that position. This is the best working model for the near future.

On the other hand, the Left Leaver finds that his or her impulse for democratic socialism is directly challenged by the the Remain or Second Referendum positions of nearly all the official Left political organisations in the country - the Labour Party, the Greens, the SNP, Sinn Fein and the Liberal Democrats. In other words, although large numbers of working people voted to Leave, those parties that appear to represent the progressive impulse have effectively imposed their pro-EU position on their constituencies and now expect anyone of the Left to be automatically pro-EU and for re-entry. This redefinition of the Left as by its nature 'for the European Union' is assumed despite the facts of the existence of Left dissidents at every level, from MPs through activists in the trades unions and constituencies through members and on to the voters, increasing in proportion the further you go down the scale away from closeness to power. So, to quote Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov - 'what is to be done?'

Let us start with some basic definitional ground rules. The first is that a Leaver is someone who places absolute personal political priority on national Parliamentary sovereignty and maximal economic sovereignty but is here unconcerned with cultural issues. If you do not accept this position as a reader, this note is not for you and your comments will simply be deleted because this is a discussion for and between only those people who accept those two political principles absolutely and without equivocation. This is not a debate for emotional Remainers - they have chosen already.

Superimposed on this absolute set of political principles (including the negative one that cultural nationalism is of no interest here) are divisions between people who are more or less revolutionist and reformist and more or less Left or Right in social and economic policy. So, a further refinement of the position is to say that a Left Leaver is one who is a democratic socialist, that is, they seek the decentralisation of power, the redistribution of power and resources within a national commonwealth, inter-nationalism based on purely defensive military arrangements, anti-imperialism and the promotion of peace, secularism and individual freedom subject to the elimination of social harms and so forth. The only difference from a Left Remainer who is also a democratic socialist is that the Left Leaver sees these positive outcomes as best achieved between co-operating nation states rather than through supra-nationalist arrangements and, further, that positive harms will arise from acceding to supra-nationalist economic arrangements. 

However, the national question is an existential one. In a conflict between Leaver values and Left values, the position here is that Leaver values always trump Left values so that there is no question of a 'true' Left Leaver compromising to preserve the Left by accepting supra-nationalism or imperialism of any sort no matter how superficially benign. In strategising about futures, this means that such a Left Leaver cannot reasonably support a Labour Party that is controlled and led by either Angela Eagle or Owen Smith, both of whom are so committed to the European Union that they would also commit to a Second Referendum in a Party Manifesto under conditions where the Party apparat which they will lead has a track record of suppressing dissent on the European issue. If the so-called rebels in the PLP win the current struggle in the Labour Party, there is no future within that Party for sincere Left Leavers with any integrity. They may dream of transforming the Labour Party to a Leave position but the dream would be self-deluding and futile, certainly within the time frame that encompasses the 2020 Election and probably the 2025 Election. By remaining within such a Party, they would have stated clearly that being Left was more important than the National Question and so would cease to be Leavers except as a posture and in terms of a futile hope or unwarranted belief. So where does this leave us? What decision-making algorithm takes us from our situation today through to a fixed political position by the end of the year which is the probable timing of the triggering of Article 50?

There are a series of decisions that drive the Left Leaver logically in a series of stages from Far Left to Centre-Right, at each of which he may stop and say that, in fact, being Left is more important than being a Leaver. Many will make that decision now and simply give up on the issue of Leave, accept the Second Referendum idea (in the hope of winning a second vote), keep their heads down until it is all over and then resurface if and when we are back in the European Union (a Third Referendum is simply absurd from any perspective) or when the Left has finally accepted that the British people have definitively chosen the Leave option once and for all. This strikes me as a possible strategy but also a cowardly, unprincipled and uncertain one. Either one believes in something or one does not and if the belief in the Left (as currently constituted) is greater than the belief in the Nation, then one should stop posturing and switch sides to Remain under conditions where the Left has become absolutely associated with Remain: a point we have not reached but may have reached as early as September. That would be the brave and honourable think to do. 

So, the first choice, before we look at our decision-making tree, is the simple one whether one is truly Left or Leaver first and foremost. If the former, then the rest of this note is not for you. I have thus whittled us down, as discussants, to Left Leavers who place Brexit as a precondition for democratic socialism as a matter of both analysis and core values. What are our options? What do we do? The trajectory that I wish to explore in this context is expressed in a series of fundamental questions:-

1. Given the impossibility of the Left Leave position being adequately expressed in a Labour Party led from the curent PLP, would it be reasonable to believe it could be expressed in a Party led by Jeremy Corbyn (or John McDonnell)

2. Given the assumption in 1. above and the possible construction of an alternative Party of Democratic Socialism on the defeat of Jeremy Corbyn, could the Left Leave position be adequately expressed within such a Party?

3. If the defeat of Jeremy Corbyn does not result in a new Party of the Left, can Left Leavers safely cross over to become the Left of UKIP if a new Leader of UKIP recognises the importance of changing the culturally right-wing assumptions of that Party's hitherto dominant Right?

4. If there is no place for Left Leavers on the Left (and there is no Left Leave Party) or as equal partners in a National Populist operation that is viable and non-fascist, then is all that is left is a transfer of allegiance to the Conservative party as its advocate for a fairer society, redistribution and peace within the only Party committed to national Parliamentary sovereignty and maximal economic sovereignty - at least until the Left accepts reality and no longer struggles to reverse the decision on June 23rd.

I have made the assumption throughout that total withdrawal from politics is not an option and that it is a matter of personality and duty for a Left Leaver to be engaged in the national political process and to avoid strategies of complete marginalisation in working with fringe parties or engaging in marginal futile blogging and policy wonking that is unconnected to one of the three central political networks available to the English and Welsh - the various forms of centre-left, the national populists and the Conservative Party. Let us look at the options.

A Corbynista Official Left

A decision on commitment cannot be made until the Labour Party Conference in the early Autumn because we do not know who will command the Party until then. This has the advantage of allowing Left Leavers plenty of time to consider their position. In this particular case, the decision tree is fairly simple - if Corbyn loses, then Labour wishes to become a European Socialist Party, a potential subsidiary of a European Socialist Party putting up pan-European Presidential candidates in due course in mimicry of the American Democrats, a party of triangulation and power over principle. The chances of this being reversed at any level of the Party would be minimal. Our decision is made for us. We have to move on immediately to the next possible option.

If Corbyn wins then the decision that arises for Left Leavers is not based on absolutist principles. It has to be recognised that a formal majority of the Labour Party will be pro-European in the political sense (and this will have increased since the Referendum Campaign) and that struggle on this issue will continue. All that can be laid down at this point are some reasonable red lines that enable participation in the Labour Party by Left Leavers and these have to be clear by the time of the Re-Election of the Leader. These are:-

• That the right to dissent on the European Union is recognised as legitimate as an issue of principle and that bullying by Party officials of dissenters (on the basis that X is party policy) comes to an immediate end

• That the Party does not commit to a Second Referendum but accepts the result of June 23rd insofar as it is the will of the people and legitimately seeks to critique the withdrawal negotiations from the perspective of democratic socialism.

In principle, this would not be difficult in theory for Jeremy Corbyn, for John McDonnell and for Momentum (which is relevant for the next option) but political pressures during the campaigning period for the leadership and pressure from the liberal-left media may result in the Corbyn element back-tracking on McDonnell's immediate post-vote position which is aligned with the second point above (the first point may be assumed from the second).

 

If this back-tracking takes place or, equally possible, the Corbyn leadership is ambiguous about the Second Referendum in a Labour Party context and/or actively proposes to put in the Manifesto a negotiation for re-entry into the European Union (and we cannot flaff around waiting to be politically raped with a fait accompli in the run-up to 2020) then even a Corbyn-led Labour Party becomes an utter waste of space for a Left Leaver. Left Leavers face their key existential decision once again - whether to be more of the democratic socialist Left or more of a national political and economic sovereignty advocate. I am of the latter persuasion so I would move on to the next option or jump to the third option (see below) while you may now be leaving the discussion at this point.

 

An Alternative (Democratic Socialist) Left Party

 

One scenario is that Corbyn loses the Leadership election fairly or unfairly and that, instead of accepting the result, he becomes the centre with McDonnell and others of a new Party based on the resources of Momentum or the failure triggers an alternative Party of the Left in which the Campaign Group has no role but which still sees a flow of disappointed Party members and others move sideways into a British version of Die Linke.

 

There are two separate questions to answer here: would such a Party be a natural home for Left Leavers? and  would such a Party be viable electorally and organisationally? Engagement by Left Leavers would be dependent on positive answers to both questions.

In the case of it being a home for Left Leavers, we should not be naive - many of the liberal, young socialist and green supporters of Corbyn are also idealistic if naive Remainers. Practical politics suggests that such a Party unless constituted specifically along McDonnell lines (acceptance of the result and a move towards 'democratic socialism in one country in practice, European socialism in theory') will gravitate towards pro-Europeanism along 'Varoufakis lines' which is not acceptable in itself to intelligent Left Leavers (stupid Left Leavers may leave the discussion now). 'Trimming' in this area is tantamount to opening the door to later support for any Official Labour Party unification strategy for a Second Referendum and re-negotiation.

However, if the Left Party (which we assume to be a democratic socialist party in all essentials) adopts the two principles laid out above in the event of a Corbyn Labour Party, then the balance of organisational power shifts to Left Leavers if existing Left Leaver organisations join it as activists and organisers simply because they might be a larger proportion of the Party activists than they would be in the Labour Party. There is a chicken and egg situation here - the new Left Party will be interesting if it can be restrained through activism and organisation from crossing 'red lines' but the new Party will have to have a Constitution that gives an equal voice to Leaver members over and against Remainer members at the individual level with appropriate guarantees embedded for free discussion and political education. After all, theoretically, all Left Leavers might suddenly become Europeanists if the structure of a new democratic socialist European Union met their otherwise absolute political and economic sovereignty requirements - a Union of Free European States may not be the same thing as the currently structured European Union.

This is all somewhat academic unless and until Corbyn loses the Leadership, then chooses to encourage a new formation or a new formation is created regardless of the Campaign Group where the Constitution of the new Party is fair-minded and constitutionally robust, with the Left Leaver 'red lines' clear and intact within the Party programme.

The second issue - viability - is far more problematic. The further Left you go in the Labour Movement, the greater the degree of activist neurosis and sectarianism. The inability of leaders to let go of sufficient power to permit open debate and political education is as prevalent on the Left as on the Right. There are the issues of the 'social forces' behind the Party, its funding and organisation. There is also the problem that many of the people most inclined to such a party are also those who are most inexperienced in policy, most idealist (which is a disadvantage when you realise that ideals are dysfunctional and it is values that drive effective politics) and least experienced in practical organisation or willing to give their time to the drudgery of organisation and any campaigning that does not involve clicking on something online. The only social force with the muscle to fund and create such a Party is the Labour Movement which will be reluctant to split under any circumstances. It will work hard to sustain the Labour Party and create some sort of practical reconciliation between factions - in which case, one of the first casualties will be the Left Leave position since the Left Remainers are more numerous and aggressive (as well as dirty players when necessary) than the Left Leavers.

To summarise, a theoretical alternative option for Left Leavers if Corbyn does not win the Leadership and accept the 'McDonnell position' as a red line, is a new Party of the Left but if and only if the new Party is non-sectarian, accepts the 'red lines', has a Constitution superior to that of the Labour Party in terms of transparency, accountability and fairness and has the basic infrastructure to make a significant mark in British politics (which we would consider to be no less than 50 seats in Parliament by 2025) and pull votes from Labour to limit the appeal of the Second Referendum and renegotiation.

Left-UKIP

Let us now assume that the entire Official Left (including a new Democratic Socialist Party) is fully committed to a Second Referendum and re-negotiation of re-entry back into the European Union and that it is probable that the latter will be Manifesto commitments designed to create a Remain coalition in Parliament prepared to abandon the Brexit model after 2020. At this point, we have now completely parted from those who place being Left ahead of being a Leaver. Those who are Left first will now be a part of the inexorable drive to negotiate a centre-left re-entry into the European Union and other conditions (economic probably) may yet make this feasible. Yet the Left Leaver of integrity is absolutely (not relatively) committed to this not happening. Where do committed Left-Leavers go next if there is no realistic likelood of a viable independent Left-Leave Party for all those reasons implied as problems for a new Party of the Left and given the lack of support from the official trades union movement and no viable source of funding from elsewhere?

 

The one Party that exists and is apparently viable (though unstable) and which unequivocally meets the red line conditions outlined in the previous two sections is UKIP but, to a Left Leaver, it creates new red lines to consider. UKIP is certainly not going to do anything other than fight for national political and economic sovereignty and it is (despite the slanders of its opponents) absolutely democratic, excessively so in the eyes of radical centrists, but it is not of the Left - the formally socialist part of the equation is definitely missing. 

And yet UKIP potentially meets one Left requirement - it is interested in representing the interests of the English and Welsh working class (but so are the Tories and at least some elements of the Labour Party) at a time when most of the intellectual Left is dismissive of and patronising about that class. In addition, its right-wing populist Leader is standing down and a leadership election has to take account of working class UKIP members who are committed to welfarist and redistributive strategies as well as respect for their particular culture. If the Left completely fails the Left Leaver, there is a brief window of opportunity, in parallel with the struggles within the Labour Movement, for UKIP to adjust to the fact that Left Leavers exist and are increasingly being cut out of any influence or respect on the official Left (the Labour Party). They may have no place to go by the end of the Autumn of 2016. A new UKIP leadership sensitive to this new potential vote could theoretically create the conditions for a transfer of votes and activism from the Labour Party to itself if the Corbyn Leadership falls or stumbles and if there is no viable Left Party standing by the time UKIP has presented itself as the 'one nation' defender of the Leave 'street'. 

But we cannot be naive here any more than we could be naive about the Labour Party. The dominant strand in UKIP is culturally conservative and economically libertarian and both these positions are problematic for those who consider themselves of the Left. In addition, even if a new Leader was able to establish a sufficient bridge from UKIP to the working class Left, that Leader would be placed under constant pressure to row back from his position by cultural conservatives and economic libertarians alike. The shift of a Left Leaver to UKIP would be a very cautious matter with a great deal of room for distrust on both sides. The 'red lines' for the 'national' democratic socialist that may be too much for UKIP to bear:-

• The Constitution of UKIP must enable fair and open debate between equals

• Taking UKIP's commitment to democracy as read, a UKIP that tolerated racism, white nationalism or Islamophobia would not be tolerable to a Left Leaver so the first red line would be a Leader who drew his or her own red line between the Party and radical nationalists.

• The Party's economic programme would include defence of the welfare state, redistributive strategies, commitment to education and training and poverty alleviation within the context of restraints on free movement of labour.

If these three conditions are met, especially if the cultural war on migrants as opposed to the political war on migration policy failures is ended, then it is possible that Left Leavers might reasonably consider participation in UKIP against both a Labour Party that has become embedded in the European Project and a Tory Party which may not be trusted and which has adopted a class-based approach to policy, at least until the arrival of Theresa May (see below). The problem is that UKIP itself, even if it did accept these red lines, would not be easy to trust (especially in relation to economic and welfare policy) given the inordinate internal power of its right wing funders and the tight clique around former Leader Nigel Farage who may never actually let go of influence even if he lets go of formal power. For Left Leavers to join UKIP would be an act of faith but also an act of partial despair since the Left Leaver is likely to feel pushed out by the Left rather than attracted by UKIP as it currently stands. Nevertheless, if UKIP can move itself to the centre in cultural terms and share economic policy-making equitably between the Left and Right, it might be possible to see the emergence of a viable Red UKIP capable of defeating Euro-socialism in Labour areas and offering a viable alternate opposition within the Brexit framework to the Tory Party. Reports from those who have dabbled in this area prior to the Referendum are not encouraging.

Becoming a Radical Left Tory

The options are reducing section by section so we come to the point where the Left Leaver has made his or her decision that Leave represents absolute prior values, has no place in the Official left in any of its forms and either distrusts UKIP or finds that its cultural conservatism is impossible to square with a self-identity as part of the Enlightenment Left. It is at this point that the Left Leaver finds themselves with the final choice - whether to withdraw from political life entirely (the 'quietism of the Jacobite') or to follow the logic of an absolute commitmitment to national political and economic sovereignty to its bitter end. That bitter end has to be (if there is to be no quietism) a more or less passive or active engagement with the Tory Party that has emerged after June 23rd on the following grounds:-

• The commitment to Brexit is now as absolute as it is ever likely to be in any major political party that is not UKIP - there will be no Second Referendum under the Tories and no renegotiation unless Tory Remainers force a General Election and commit political hari-kiri for a principle. This leads one to suppose that for dedicated Left Leavers the mission of ensuring that a Tory Government remains in office for at least as long as it is necessary to secure Brexit logically becomes a political necessity. This may not apply once Brexit is secured and there is no reasonable prospect of a Left coalition coming to power on a commitment to renegotiation but the committed Left Leaver, left with no alternatives, is at the least committed to supporting the Tory Party in Parliament until the Brexit result is secured.

• The May Government has shifted direction towards working class concerns because it understands that its primary threat to the Right (UKIP) can outflank it by attracting the working class Leave vote that is becoming disenchanted with metropolitan and cosmopolitan Labour. This means that, although it is still the Party of the propertied and the State, the Conservative Party may paradoxically be in a position to do more for the English and Welsh working class than a Labour Party that is rapidly travelling up its own nether orifice. It could reform welfare in order to preserve it in the long term, maintain the NHS (after all NHS pre-privatisation strategies emeged under New Labour), investing in infrastructure (signally neglected under New Labour), taking some account of working class concerns over the free movement of labour (ignored by Labour) and (post-Brexit) being more open to an industrial strategy (abandoned by New Labour) and to housing (ignored by New Labour): there has already been a turn away from a radical approach to austerity.

•  The Conservative party is undoubtedly democratic but it is also anti-racist, now committed to respect for the gay community and has adopted a broadly social libertarian stance (with caveats). It seems to have more talented women in high office than the second rate make-weights of the Labour Party. It is also internationalist in its commitment to global trading and cultural exchange and it would seem that its new Foreign Secretary appears to have a pragmatic and sensible view of the Syrian and Ukrainian flashpoints.

Of course, none of the shifts of the May Government towards the needs of the working class in a fairer (rather than rhetorical) 'one nation' strategy changes two truths. The first is that the Tory Party is the Party of the propertied and the State and, second, that the most working class-sensitive Tory Party possible would never be a patch on a true democratic socialist Party. It used to be reliably said that the worst possible Labour Party (we think of Labour under Blair) would always be more progressive than the most progressive Tory Party and so anyone who cared for the working class position in society would accept even the most liberal middle class Labour Leadership in preference to the hooray henries and jumped up car salesmen of Middle English Torydom. But, considering the matter coldly, will that honestly be the case in the next decade if a) the Labour Party persists in either being unelectable or being little more than the Party of choice for the urban middle classes or both together and b) the Conservative Party starts to take seriously its rhetoric of 'one nation' operating in and against an unstable world. 

 

Moreover, if the Labour Party adopts a position that is tantamount to that of the US Democrat Party under Clinton - the party of the liberal middle classes and identity groups - and presents those interests trans-nationally to the utter neglect of the English and Welsh working and lower middle classes, then surely there is nothing in that party for the sincere democratic socialist. If the 'national' democratic socialist finds that all parties of the Left are intent on selling out the nation to supranationalism, undertakes a cold analysis that the Varoufakis option (that the European Union can be turned into a democratic socialist state through democratic means and persuasion) is a pipe dream and that UKIP represents an unacceptable commitment to cultural conservatism, then the last man standing over the next decade is the Tory Party. Left Leavers, beaten from pillar to post by their own side's bullying and disrespect, may at least represent a voice for working class self-determination and the preservation of the welfare state amongst relatively competent administrators who appear to have captured a hegemonic position for at least the next three years and probably (given the piss-poor quality of the Labour Party's leading figures) for the next decade. The role (to put it in the words of a Labour economist friend) of being the radical left-wing of a modernising national Tory Party suddenly appears not merely to be least worst option but filled with theoretical possibility.

The Numbers Racket

We have undertaken a logical review of possibilities for Left Leavers that has taken us in stages through the Labour Party and the Left, through national populism and on to the old enemy, the Tory Party, but the main message is that nothing need be decided for some months. A series of high level operators will create the conditions for Left-Leaver decision-making - first a decision whether Leave is as existential a commitment as the Left Leaver thinks it is and, second, if it is, whether he or she is forced into a trajectory that will reposition him or her in ways not seen since the creation of the Labour Party or the shifts of commitment during the eras of Peel, Disraeli and Chamberlain. Let us run through these decisions and put possible numbers of votes at stake under a series of conservative assumptions. 

 

We broadly know that 30% of Labour voters de minimis (probably higher as working class Labour voters in Northern England, the Midlands and Wales) voted Leave. 2015 (a not notably good year) saw 9.3m people vote Labour. Let us postulate that one third of 30% of these feel strongly enough about Leave not to vote Labour automatically in 2020 - let's call it conservatively 900,000 voters. Failure to meet the red lines (and we are not counting on those fed up with the weak leadership of the party or its internecine warfare or the fear of further uncertainty) might mean a loss of these votes and let's assume that half of those are initially available for a new Left Party that takes a strong anti-Second Referendum line (450,000 - although such a Left Party would also get an accretion of Corbyn radicals so we might imagine an initial vote of 900,000). Let us imagine that 450,000 (not necessarily the same people) might move to UKIP if it got itself sorted and it was the only non-Tory force committed to Brexit: this would push UKIP well over the 4 million mark if the 2015 vote held and reduce the Labour vote to something closer to the 2010 result. Let us imagine that all this happens but that 30% of the Left Leavers find UKIP's cultural politics unacceptable driving around 130,000-140,000 Labour people who consider themselves Left into the Tory Party in a more decisive way - not significant in terms of total election results but significant in terms of new blood and ideas and representing a bloc bigger than the SDLP or the Ulster Unionists. More to the point, such a conservatively assessed bloc would help pull the May Government sufficiently to the Left on some issues that it could create a credible base for attracting further formerly Labour voters if the Official Left persists in its Euro-Socialist pretensions after 2020 despite polling failure or UKIP fails to correct its trajectory towards a harsher European-style national populism. There is thus something at stake in the following:-

• The Labour Party fails to resist becoming an overtly European Socialist Party and threatens to make a 'Second Referendum' and re-negotiation manifesto commitment

• A successor Party fails to create clear red water between it and the Labour Party on Second Referendum and automatic re-negotiation

• UKIP fails to shift itself to away from radical extremist rhetoric and fails to embrace sufficient welfarism and corporatism to attract Left Leavers alienated by the Official Left.

So there we have it - a set of decisions for Left Leavers that do not need to be made today but will need to be made at some stage between the resolution of the Labour Leadership struggle (September) and the formal triggering of Article 50 (December). By January 2016 Left Leavers will have had to have made some existential choices that will dictate their political trajectories for the next decade.

The Eysenck Personality Test and Self-Criticism

My version of a New Year's Resolution is a bit of 'quiet time' and some self-reflection for the re-calibration of the 'self' for the year ahead (unlike post-modern philosophers, I have a very firm sense of the Self and feel sad for those who do not). I usually try and find some tool, something outside myself, to trigger reflection and then note down what I think I discover. It is part of an on-going process - like Petrarch's construction of himself as a living work of art carried through by time to its natural end.

About a quarter of a century ago, I did the Eysenck Personality Test which, without taking it over-seriously, was quite useful in defining onself against what it is to be a 'normal' (aka socialised and habituated) human being, albeit with adjustments to account for its mild American bias. I found the results again this week and recognised the continuities in my character and some minor differences. Out of curiosity, I searched the internet and found an adaptation of it which covered 32 basic attributes of personality under five categories (introversion/extraversion, emotional stability, mastery/sympathy, sexuality and social and political attitudes). I did the test (which took about forty minutes) and recorded the results.

Basically whatever I was twenty-five years ago is pretty well what I am today but with more maturity so there were no surprises there. The analysis struck me as fair and I was painfully honest in my answers (as you should be if you try it). However, this was not a test of who one is but of who one is in relation to the rest of the species so what interested me was my deviance from the norm rather than who I was (since I know who I am and there were no major surprises).

What is it that makes me (or you) significantly different from normality (within which there is still a fair range of personality differences) and so often misaligned with the social (for the record, a position where I am more than happy to be found)? What does this tell us about our 'adjustment to society' and what about our perceptions of the maladjusted nature of society to what it could be rather than what we are? So, this test is best regarded as just a statement of difference that tells us where we are within our species, where we are as 'rebels' whether on the cusp of normality or actually 'abnormal'.

In my case' abnormality' applied to 14 out of 32 attributes (of which six were 'on the cusp' and so possibly within the bounds of 'normality). Five (the full list) were related to social and political attitudes. In other words, a chunk of my 'abnormality' is socio-political (which will be fairly obvious to regular readers of this blog) and I am around 30-40% 'abnormal' to some extent. I am more than relaxed about this. I am interested only in the insights of the test into one's position in the world and why one acts as one does.

The non-socio-political abnormalities are pretty easy to summarise: A risk-averse (meaning physical risk), cautious (in terms of action), highly responsible and undogmatic (though with a few fixed ideas that I shall never shake off) personality with high self esteem and virtually no sense of guilt. My attitudes to risk, my cautiousness and my level of dogmatism are 'on the cusp' so the key difference markers are self esteem, responsibility and lack of guilt - all very existentialist! This implies that most people I deal with are going to be less responsible (which may explain my disappointed distrust of others) and suffer from less self-esteem and have more overhang of guilt (which explains my frustration with people's inability to get a grip of their lives). This may also explain my almost crusading zeal to help others realise that they are better than they have often been labelled by family and society and that they almost certainly have no reason for the vile vestiges of Judaeo-Christian or familial or sexual guilt in their lives. I would arrogantly like to pull my fellows into my territory so that the 'normal' could be changed to one of a higher self esteem and 'joy' in the complexity of existence, something our culture seems actively to discourage.

The socio-political differences arise from this possibly foolish mission. My different take on the world seems to derive from an aspiration for a better world that is probably not possible given 'the crooked timber of humanity'. In this area, I am foolish and not wise but it is who I am. I am highly sexually and socially permissive which does not mean I am myself anything more than a rather dull vanilla person when it comes to sex and social behaviour (I am, in fact, very dull nowadays). I am strongly committed to a broadly libertarian position on individuals in society and the choices they make. Indeed, my attitudes are classically anarcho-socialist to the extent that I am on the edge of (possibly the foolish part) denying the necessity for aspects of the social order required precisely because normality contains a majority of people with lower self-esteem and problems with guilt of some kind (and who are likely to be more dogmatic, more neurotic [in terms of guilt] and less responsible).

It could reasonably be argued that a society built on dogmatism, short term self interest and neurosis can only be managed with an element of the whip and the jackboot and, to be self-critical, I am probably far too soft on this score, expecting more of our species than may be possible. I add to this foolish belief in the possibility of a better world (which I cannot shake off) a set of progressive attitudes that seem stronger in me than in the 'norm' - anti-racism and, to a lesser extent, pacifism included. Like the pacifism, my 'socialism' is 'on the cusp' so the personality 'abnormality' really lies in my radical libertarianism. This explains my love/hate relationship with the British Left which strikes me as more riddled with authoritarian prescription than I am comfortable with and yet still the better hope for a better world if only 'normality' could be shifted a degree or two towards an emotionally stronger and more intellectually flexible electorate (and activist base). The modern Leftist activist is almost the epitome of dogmatic neuroticism.

However, this belief in a better world is not a belief that can be seen as more than a sentimental prejudice since I score very highly on scepticism - that is a belief in my own logic, observation and intelligence gathering rather than the claims of authority or others (basically, I do not trust the 'normal' very much). My analytical side sees the world and knows it for what it is - hence my outbursts of clinical rationalism that appear to sound a classically conservative note about the human condition. I know my core belief in a better world is absurd but I am true, in this respect, to my only remaining 'faith' - that of existentialist choice, if necessary for an absurd proposition such as this one. I also distrust the State (though consider it necessary) in particular because it is run by 'normal' people for 'normal' people and normal people, as we have seen, tend to lack self esteem, be neurotic (in terms of guilt feelings) and be dogmatic. Ergo, the State is likely to react to these aspects of normality - playing on peoples weaknesses and neuroses in order to manage them better yet without any aspiration to lift them out of their situation in order to create something better. I have little respect for authority for the same reason - authority is generally not logical and based on evidence but is based on dogma and the neuroses of the authoritarian.

So that is the 2015 self-criticism over with. I quite like me and I hope everyone else gets to like themselves too but I know I am a little out of kilter with the way my species organises itself socially and politically. It is bigger and more powerful than I am. My radical libertarianism might be regarded as a defensive manouevre, maintaining my small bit of territory against the encroaching empire of authoritarian neurotics. Conservative pessimism and social progressivism are the thesis and antithesis whose internal contradictions require a new synthesis.

Utopianism and Anarchism

(The following paper was to be given at the London Anarchist Forum Meeting on June 12th, 2009 but, circumstances beyond the control of the organisers meant that it could not be presented. However, I was grateful to the LAF for triggering this paper which looks at anarchism from a contemporary democratic socialist point of view, with special thanks to Steve Ash now deceased who suggested it. It is really here just as a matter of record and I have added notes in italics where I have changed my mind in the intervening half decade or have something to add or something needs contextualising or explaining)

The Current Crisis - A Challenge to the Utopianism in Anarchism

I am not going to speak as an anarchist but as a mainstream democratic socialist who is sympathetic to the anarchist tradition from the libertarian Left - and who thinks that far more was lost than was gained when the Left made its successive turns towards sole concentration on Parliamentary action on the one hand and towards Marxism and vanguard parties on the other.

I do not think that the decision to organise in political parties was entirely wrong but the nature and purpose of those parties has clearly become corrupted so that what passes for the Left has become degraded into a professional political class seeking to administer the state for its own benefit - far more than for that of its own constituents.

Similarly, the impatience and a-morality of Marxism created a monstrosity in the consequent management of the 1917 Revolution, even if a lot of the terror must be put down to the determined attempt by the Western liberal powers to strangle what started as a people’s rising. In the pantheon of cowards, Kerensky must go down in history as a man who failed to seize the moment for peace and land redistribution.

In other words, the victors over the nineteenth century anarchist tradition have proved worse than flawed, they have proved themselves either self-regarding opportunists or vicious tyrants. But what do both have in common that gave them the energy to overcome the fluid leaderless resistance of early anarchism? They had a commitment to hierarchical organization.

They introduced both solidarity and a fixed ideology and this allowed some to step over others to acquire the sort of centralized power epitomized by Blair in the one tradition and Stalin in the other. The similarities between these monsters are greater than we may think – centralization led to sclerosis and ultimately to failure.

Greed for power and office and incompetence are built into institutions that set the rules for themselves. Just as the Communist Party of Russia set the rules for a whole society, so Parliament sets rules that allowed its members, in secret, to take what it wanted as if of right [1]. In both closed societies, the perpetrators had no consciousness of their having done any wrong.

They had literally become institutionalized into crime – the Vatican gives us another example. Think of the link between the Catholic Church and the Inquisition or the Ustase and then think of the ideals in the Gospels. This is the common theme of institutionalisation – the perversion of fine theory into cruel practice.

But this is precisely where anarchist utopianism gets challenged.

First, if anarchism is so good why does it rarely win a straight fight and then, if it does, not for long. The experience of the communards and of POUM in Spain suggests that others tend to win in a fight and, unless you are prepared to rely on some abstract theory of evil, there must be some reason for this in history. It may be different in the future and we will come on to that but history tends to show that anarchists don’t win for long [2].

Second, the conduct of MPs in modern Britain and of Communist Party cadres in twentieth century Russia shows very little sign of human nature being benign. Of course, the anarchist argument is that the system makes the man and that if you removed social and institutional pressures on man, the natural co-operative spirit of mankind will out. Unfortunately, this sounds rather like the essentialist fallacy of human nature that the Communists themselves held to when they stated that a New Man would arise from a change in the conditions of the working class.

This was perhaps Marx’s own transfer of the romantic imaginings of Rousseau via German Idealism - a nod to anarchist ideals - when he proposed that the state would wither away when the dictatorship of the proletariat had been established. It is not that there is no evidence for this misreading of our animal aspects but that the evidence of psychology in recent years is in precisely the opposite direction.

Stanley Milgram’s experiments demonstrated what cruelties we will undertake if sufficient authority is applied to us. To the anarchist mind, this might merely show that we should seek a state of no authority, yet other experimentation and observation tends to tell us that differential intelligence and personality will lead to manipulative exploitation. Some will always fall into that class of sociopath that is so problematic for those who believe that humans are intrinsically good.

(I don’t want to get into the problem of evil, sin and the fall of man here because these are just attempts to create a moral explanation from outside of man for contingent facts about what it is to be human.)

Perhaps the most devastating account of human cruelty does not lie in the bare account of bureaucratic murders in the last century or the savage conduct of so-called barbaric peoples but in the most disturbing book that I have read in a long time because it is made up of the testimonies of individuals who were victims and perpetrators on all sides of what happens when the rule of law really is removed completely – the conditions of the second world war in two theatres.

This is Laurence Rees’ 2008 book, ‘Their Darkest Hour’, which demonstrates the co-existence of great altruism and exceptional sadistic cruelty but certainly gives no cause to believe that a society without law would not be anything other than a vicious jungle. Human beings are complex and only contingently ‘good’ (if good means co-operative and engaged in non-exploitative conduct, without us even getting into the possibility of altruism).

There is no reasonable condition of life, including the unlikely situation of no competition for basic resources, which would not involve some form of psychic vampirism or exploitation by some over others because our minds are structured to be limited in perception and to react to events according to past experiences – unless, that is, we are prepared to countenance some drug-induced social control such as that envisaged by Aldous Huxley in ‘Brave New World’ or see the ‘withering away’ being undertaken as a massively long evolutionary process. Unfortunately, politics is immediate and messy ....

So we have the problem that progressive anti-anarchisms have failed because the human condition expresses itself as egotism within theoretically otherwise benign systems, but that anarchism itself cannot succeed in political practice for long because of that same human nature in its competitive and reactionary mode. There are even libertarians who would claim to be brothers and sisters of anarchists but are in direct opposition to them as persons who see the good society as one of dynamic competition rather than collaboration.

Are we to be left with conservative pessimism then? Is the Left project, essentially one of liberation, equality and of fraternity, doomed on the altar of our animal nature. I think not, not because I am a utopian but because I am an anti-utopian. The findings of psychologists about the unthinking or limbic aspects of human nature and their ineluctability and their ‘unknownness’ (we cannot know other minds and we are certainly not fixed essentially in any particular moment of time) provide an argument for a politics that is much closer to anarchism than it is to organized socialism as it exists today within (say) the British Labour Party or the European Socialists [3].

It is socialism that has to adapt to anarchism more than anarchism to socialism to create a workable Left project. The introduction [4] referred to my co-ordination (over a decade now ago) of the Centre-Left Grassroots Alliance within the Labour Party. Its failure was instructive on two grounds.

First, it did not fail from within. Very disparate left-wing groups with a radical democratic model of party reform were able to collaborate on a very limited programme and operate against the party machine to a very high level of propaganda success (including a supportive editorial in the Guardian) through using new technologies. The campaign was an early user (1995/6) of e-mail as a consultative and decision-making tool.

It failed eventually because a deal was made in a smoke-filled room between the rising faction in the party and the political officers of the union backers of that party. The rising politicians were engineering a deal to remove themselves from membership scrutiny, indeed from all constraints. They traded a special interest agenda with executive officers who operated without reference to their own union members.

The lesson is that people can self-organise effectively BUT that they are soon faced with structures that hold power so tightly that no protest, demonstration or campaign can break the hold of those few who command it. This was brought home to people in the massive anti-war protests at the beginning of the century - the public was simply ignored by the decision-making calculation of, in fact, one man and those close to him. A traditional revolution, under these circumstances, merely replaces one set of the few with another … the control systems remain.

This coup by New Labour gave us twelve years or so of the most viciously anti-libertarian non wartime government since Castlereagh and the most war-mongering government since Salisbury or perhaps Palmerston. The harvest was reaped only in the last few weeks [5] – not only in a devastating defeat for it in the political field, the democratic equivalent of the Fall of Berlin, but a defeat that has given legitimacy not merely to the centre-right and to the propertied interest but to a vicious racist rump (the BNP)

What happened in 1996 when the CLGA failed and events today are intimately connected [as argued in Lobster 55]. Political recovery on the democratic socialist Left is going to require the spirit of the anarchic to overcome it. Let me explain. The current crisis is a crisis of big-ness and centralization. Globalisation has created a need for technocratic institutions at a global or regional level that can never be properly scrutinised by anything other than other experts of a similar degree of alleged sophistication [6].

An argument that such institutions cannot be democratic and must work against democratic and popular accountability does not need to be made to this audience. The people becomes a mob mediated by, yes, the media. This is the politics of Berlusconi yet, in a sense, it is more authentic than the cod-progressivism served up by contemporary liberals.

The strategy of post-Soviet socialism has been to try match the technocracy blow for blow, to capture its commanding heights and to turn it to ‘progressive ends’. But such a strategy means bigger and bigger trades unions, NGOs and political parties whose ruling membership is self-appointed, and often interchangeable with each other and even with the big business that it purports to contain and restrain.

For example, a typical career path today might involve a young trades union bureaucrat getting into Parliament in early middle age and then advising a corporation as a public affairs consultant to a corporation. Another might involve a young public affairs consultant entering Parliament and then running an international NGO. Under such conditions, group think and acceptance of the status quo must be the normal way of doing things. It would be like the flow of think tank professionals, military men and party officials in Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia.

Through the Parliamentary and party process, State, progressives and institutions become one liberal totalitarian whole. Since the totalitarian process is nearly indistinguishable after a while between ‘progressives’ (whether called Democrats or PES) or ‘conservatives (whether called Republicans or the EPP) [7], it is no wonder that effective resistance to this cold machinery comes only from the Far Left and the Far Right or from the many differing types of economic, political and social libertarian.

The Ayn Rand worshipping radical free marketer, the polyamorous or transgendered sexual revolutionary and the political anarchist or dissident democratic socialist, let alone neo-pagans and thelemites, will have more in common as dissidents against liberal orthodoxy than they do with the system against which they struggle.

Excessive regulation that levels people down and assumes that no one can be trusted, a sexual culture of licentious imagery and commodity fetishism instead of natural sexuality, centralized power and bureaucracy and the presumption that unaccountable theocratic appointees can represent more than themselves … all are part of the same general culture which turns people into stereotypes, none worse than that of leftist identity politics.

The socializing tendencies of the machine means that the real resistance will now always tend to come more effectively from the Right [8]. David Cameron may be more acute than liberal commentators think in associating himself with euro-critical Polish and Czech parties than with those who take all this at face value. Berlusconi adopts yet another model of resistance – nationalist populism that operates with almost carnival flair to pinprick the po-faced political correctness of his dull opponents [9].

Since entrepreneurs, artists and dissidents are generally ineffective political organizers, the bureaucratic Left steadily cedes ground to the populist Right which offers a moderated social and economic freedom in return for authoritarian state governance.

Berlusconi may protest at pictures of his nearly erect willy in a Spanish newspaper but it does no harm to his electoral fortunes anymore than racism did to the BNP’s or Jobbik’s. When excluded from any power, the public starts to get a taste for sex and violence. As Disraeli said of old Palmerston when it was revealed that he was allegedly having an adulterous affair, “Let’s hope that it does not get out or he’ll win by a landslide”. In despair at progress or under threat, bloodlust soon becomes normal – give me an imposed Roman Peace and I shall soon give you the slaughter in the Coliseum.

Socialism has thus lost the plot for the third time in history. The first time was when it dropped its international trousers in 1914 and allowed itself to become the catamite of militarists. The second was when it adopted vanguardism and cornered itself into state terror and trying to explain complex political philosophy to peasants. The third moment is now – when it tries to enforce good on a population that is not ready to be bored in heaven by choirs of angels.

So let’s get back to anarchism. While socialism has made three attempts at changing the world – in one country, through global revolution and through progressive internationalism – anarchists have contemplated their navels or engaged in hobbyism. Read any text on anarchism and you see nothing but the small scale up to a point. This is good. This is of the essence of anarchism but it is not doing anything to drag the mass of the world’s population out of poverty or redistribute wealth and power in the first world.

What is happening is that anarchists are pauperising themselves to live a dream, abstracting themselves from a wasteful and incompetent global system and perhaps hoping it will all go away. But be warned, if the fascists, communists or even progressive liberals seize the organs of state and the monopoly of force, then the fate of anarchists is extinction - whether by aggression or stealth.

The general population will be sucked into the totalitarian mind-set and, for them, it will be just a case of waiting for the wheel of fortune to turn again and give them some new noble lie, some totalizing world view that tells them what to think and what to be.

So, if anarchists have a wrong-headed view of the essential niceness of the human condition and seem incapable of moving far beyond stunts, localised insurgencies and happenings and if socialists have proved malign, incompetent and authors of their own destruction, where do we go from here …

My proposal is that anarchism does NOT change its essential nature, which is self-organisation, nor its default position in favour of collaboration and altruism. What it should be looking at now is having the courage to return to the experience of POUM in Catalonia which was snuffed out by force and to the techniques (though not the ideology) of urban welfare systems like those of Hezbollah and Hamas. Yes, you heard me right. Though common sense suggests that guns should not be part of the equation.

The BNP has overlaid its gangster class on very real distress and anxiety amongst the weakest sections of the urban working class. The Labour Movement, though not the socialists (i.e. the 3% of the vote that emerged last week), has abandoned them and no longer has the will or the manpower to organize them. If the Left does not adopt an organizing approach to these communities, they will turn to fascisms or populisms with more determination than we have seen to date.

This is a rare opportunity to apply anarchistic organizational principles, even along the original rather than the debased model of the Soviets, to real social problems and to create an organizational structure that, in non-sectarian alliance with democratic socialists, can create a non-racist and non-authoritarian model for localities under pressure – one that can put the fear of the people into the liberal establishment, the opportunists in the political class, the State and the fascists. [10]

This is true revolution from below and it has a place for direct action strategies. Indeed, direct action strategies like Raven’s Ait and the Tyting Farm Community [11] and the organization of economic and anti-war protest, will be more effective to the degree that they have a sea of support in which to swim. The alliance underpinning the campaign against the third runway at Heathrow in which middle class residents and street environmentalists is one to watch [12].

In the event, Raven’s Ait was re-occupied with impunity and its bland Liberal Democrat MP reduced to mildly sympathetic impotence because the assumption in society was that the island involved could only be administered through procedures far distant from the community in which it was situated.

But there is a price anarchism will have to pay … It will have to cease to be hobbyist. It will have to cease to be utopian. It will have to cease to be an aesthetic position. It will have to realize that the dispersal of power means the acquisition and management of power and that the control of opportunists, incompetents and exploiters from below needs to be, yes, institutionalized in a demotic form of the original liberal vision of 1688.

What we are talking about here is the next stage in the slow evolution of that long revolution from Magna Carta through 1688 and on to the welfare state that started to go into reverse under Thatcher and which reached criminal levels of reaction under Blair.

The point is that positive democratic, social, economic and legal reform was bought at the cost of the steady centralization of the State and of culture. This has proved to be a devil’s pact, the sort of devil’s pact that could order its young to die for diplomatic misjudgements, listen to only four national radio stations and take that as arbiter of culture and give, in return, decent welfare provision. Bismarck did something similar without having to piddle around worrying about democracy.

National welfare was traded, quite legitimately up to a point for many working people, for decreasing freedom. The pact was a balanced one, a social democratic one. But when the system decided to start to remove key freedoms and community institutions in order to permit market-led social and economic changes, the pact was broken. Working people have got neither welfare nor democracy and our Roman Peace is now inclining them towards a limbic rage about their condition [13].

Yet the collapse of the shared social democratic (or was it national socialist?) political structure also meant the collapse of strategies of moderate resistance. Freedom is not a matter of liberal constitutional reform, of proportional representation, republicanism and bills of rights, or the current tinkering of Gordon Brown – these merely lock in the power of the propertied. It is about the seizure of power from below in an orderly and sustained way. It is truly revolutionary, preferably bloodless.

There is a great deal at stake here. An established constitutional state, such as the US, can apparently lance the boil of mass discontent with a decisive victory for a President but the UK’s informal constitution and Europe’s half-baked constitution provide an unusual opportunity for constructively disruptive action. If the liberals get their way and impose a written constitution or the Lisbon Treaty is imposed on the constituent states of the EU through the rank treachery to the people of their political classes, the game is probably up.

If either happens, anarchism may as well abandon any pretensions in the developed world to a political life and revert to alternative lifestyles, aestheticism and community work. So the urgency is clear. Anarchists, if they have a political sense, need to work in an organized way with libertarians and socialists against both the Lisbon Treaty [14] and similar attempts to create a federal state and against the liberal elite’s attempt to give itself cover through regulation and legal structures that will enable a permanent state of manipulation of us by them.

If they succeed in these plans, political anarchists, libertarians and 'true' socialists will become neutered or forced into insurgency – or, in modern parlance, they will become ‘terrorists’. And, before you think this fanciful, consider the amount of effort going into intelligence-based policing against dissidents and protesters, often at the expense of the basic maintenance of social order in the inner cities [15].

But what I have not referred to is the ‘good society’ and what it comprises. I have taken a fairly negative view of human nature but this is not a true reflection of my views. My view is similar to that of many sensible anarchists – that we are neither good nor bad in essence, just human, and that our actions are directed, by chance and necessity (including poverty and history), down channels that may be good or bad for others or for ourselves.

We are good and bad only in contexts and in relation to others and our own true will. This is where society comes in because it is the context against which we measure our true will. It can enable and it can repress. It can be fair or it can be exploitative. The good society is one where all are equally enabled and none are exploited. And the best judge of what is good for me is me and not some cod-progressive in an office in Whitehall or Brussels.

The difference between me and many anarchists is only in emphasis and means, The libertarian in me sees the only structure for the good society as being one in which I have a voice and a stake and which minimizes its interference in my life and that of others.

However, the issues surrounding enablement and resistance to exploitation require, for me, some sort of governance, a framework with a rule of law. That is where we may agree to disagree because at the end of the day that framework has to be democratic (based on the collective will of the population at large) and socialist - or at least welfarist (representing the interests of the whole community).

The great political parties are broad churches and there is no reason why the resistance to them, to the state and to exploitation should not be a non-sectarian broad church as well. Contemporary technology – from contraception through medical intervention to internet communications – provides much greater opportunities for self-awareness, self education and self determination than at any other time in history [16].

This is the essence of the current potential for revolution. We are not now free because we are told that we are free – whether by Rousseau or Marx – but we are free because we are actually free, not potentially but actually, sexually and in our right to self-expression as much as in any other respect. We are not beyond good and evil but we are beyond convention and custom.

For some reason, the ‘authorities’, perhaps existing as no more than a neurotic authoritarian mind-set, are becoming deeply frightened by what this may mean in terms of our willingness to be taxed and told what to do [17]. Their entire machinery is designed to constrain and contain our free spirits. Our freedom is contained within a ready-made mass culture of titillation and received ideas, an overt sexual culture that is observed rather than lived [18], and a rhetoric of rights and democracy without the practice.

Now is the time to say that we will not take any more and that anything, I say again, anything, is permissible to preserve our real freedoms.

So I shall end there … if you think I have a point, then it is time for anarchists to start to consider how they will organise themselves at this critical time.

And if you do not, then I thank you for your time and advise you to abandon political dreaming and make pots or take up flower arranging.

NOTES

[1] The reference here is to the then-recent Parliamentary expenses scandal.

[2] A current case study in this is going on, while we write, in the streets of Greece where a non-anarchist neo-socialist movement is facing the might of institutional capital after serious errors of judgment by pseudo-socialists in the preceding administrations. If such an organised alternative to anarchism and to neo-liberalism fails to achieve anything at all in defending the Greek people from the past mistakes of their own ruling classes, then we are in very murky waters indeed, driving, perhaps, populations to total submission to undemocratic technocracy, to neo-communist alternatives or to social and political breakdown.

[3] Close but not identical with - Syriza seems to have some anarchistic elements within an essentially socialist structure while the Russian Marxist Boris Kagarlitsky has recently offered us a Marxism that makes significant concessions to the anarchist position on social structures.

[4] This refers to an introductory political biography to the talk. 

[5] This was a reference to political conditions at the time which saw a rapid rise in the vote for the Fascist BNP and its subsequent rapid fall. In fact, I was on record in other papers as dismissing the BNP threat and condemning the liberal-left hysteria surrounding, as, more recently, I have comndemned the hysteria surrounding the Charlie Hebdo hysteria. However, June 2009 saw massive falls in electoral support for Labour in the European and local elections and, although not sustained for the 2010 Election, Labour lost power to a Conservative-Liberal coalition a year later. I probably over-egged the crisis for the Left for the audience but it was a shock that eventually resulted in a slight shift to the Left in the Party with the election as leader of Ed Miliband. 

[6] Events since 2009 appear to have confirmed that the international institutional infrastructure that was being built up in the decades before the 2008 crash was coming under severe strain half a decade later. This 'not fit for purpose' aspect of the attempt to contain and control globalisation through liberal institutional structures is self evident to anyone observing the cracks in the system appearing in every direction - political, social and economic - and yet the liberal centre ground persists in avoiding and evading analysis of the facts placed before them by history. 

[7] To some extent we are seeing changes in the cosy situation where global governance is a matter of the competition betwen two bourgeois factions of the same global centrist party. In the years since the talk was drafted, the main revolt has been on the national populist Right represented by non-fascist entities such as the Tea Party, UKIP and the National Front in France as well as national and more neo-nationalist and quasi-fascistic operations in Eastern Europe and Greece. Only recently have we seen a countervailing Left populism emerge with Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Italy and perhaps signs of incipent organisation in Italy and in the US. Taken together, the liberal bourgeois centre faces a war on two fronts but one where the Right is more destabilising and driving power to the liberal-left whose instincts are to ignore reality and expand provocatively their international liberal internationalism - at obscene cost in terms of human suffering on the Western periphery. 

[8] This was definitely true in 2009, especially as Occupy and Femen represented the height of middle class liberal posturing. However, there are signs that the Left is now beginning to even up the resistance score as the centrist model continues to fail to deliver economic growth, the posturing liberals dig themselves into ever deeper holes and the centre appears to have no option left according to its own rules of engagement but to drive an austerity programme that seems to be unfairly directed at the weakest and most vulnerable. 

[9] Berlusconi, like Dominique Strauss-Kahn, eventually fell victim to a centrist liberal strategy of using the law to discredit inconvenient persons and there was a natural end to his tenure because of age but the principle he represented not only persists but flourishes in the smaller European countries whether directed at neonationalism (as in the Czech Republic or Hungary) or a curious form of hyper-liberal Westernism linked to NATO (as in the Baltic Republic and Poland). 

[10] The point I would have made more strongly here (and bear in mind that the rhetoric at this point has moved into persuasive mode designed to shake up anarchists from their torpor) is that the liberal Left took a dramatic wrong-turning with the adoption of identity politics as the basis for coalition-building to the exclusion of locality, family, cultural tribe and work-place organisation. It 'went against nature' by encouraging the attribute of a person instead of the person as the core unit of society. 

[11] A matter of local concern to London Anarchists at that point in history.

[12] This, resistance to Cross Rail and the Gatwick extensions are still ones to watch. Fracking would have been added to the list except that Cameron suddenly back-tracked from the aggressive promotion of the shale gas industry in anticipation of its effect on the Southern English vote in core Tory areas. The plan was to come back to it after the election with a solid majority and damn the hides of the English middle classes. If he had not drawn back, the Greens might be more of a threat than they are and built up a 'Blue' Green support much as UKIP has defied its right wing tag and built a 'Red' element. 

[13] In fact, as the last 2015 Election TV Debate showed, the limbic rage has moved up the social scale to the articulate middle classes. 

[14] Unsurprisingly, the Lisbon Treaty came into full force at the end of that year (2009) and the post-Crash European Union has looked increasingly ramshackle ever since, hanging on to its constitutional position as substitute for any form of policy that would offer democratic solutions for problems to its population. Needless to say, it was the bankrupt centre-left (or rather 'radical centre') that engineered this farce and so the resistance to its failed model has fallen to the populist Right rather than to the popular Left. 

[15] This was a very serious concern at the time - at a point where the structures imposed on society by the rather spurious 'war on terror' overlapped with the panic in the system about a crisis in the very means of production and distribution. The legislation is still in place but the middle classes themselves started to baulk and fight back at the implications of the security agenda - at least in the UK and Europe if less so in the US. The moment has probably passed for the worst to be imposed, It is fascinating to note in this context that the attempt by NATO to drive public support for its forward policy against Russia has failed in the West of the Continent, including usually militaristic Britain, and that the heavy lobbying for guarantees on defence spending achieved nothing but the opportunistic appropriation of the policy by UKIP. 

[16] Since this was written, we have taken an interest in the rise of transhumanism and the formation of Transhumanist Parties across the West. Our judgment is that these are single issue parties that repeat the intellectual errors of the Greens but the application of technology for the benefit of humanity is a serious issue that deserves being higher on the agenda as a matter for community action. The anti-technological position of the neo-conservative (not in the US sense of the term) environmentalist Left has gone too far. 

[17] I think this fear of the people is the defining aspect of the politics of our time. Though the 'system' has a monopoly of force and could do terrible things if it wished, the complexity and interdependence of society has made the risks of doing so far too great for the safe survival of elites and States.  It is not that the people can do much about their situation in a positive sense at this point in history but the disruption caused by non-compliance, selective resistance and sheer bloody-mindedness to a weak and vulnerable system gives it a sort of negative power based on its lack of predictability. This helps to explain the State's obsession with surveillance, Big Data, nudge and behaviourial psychology ... it hopes to manipulate rather than force us into compliance. It is probably a forlorn hope because complexity is not only built into the system but is growing exponentially - the arrival of artificial intelligence is expected by the authorities to be a means of exerting control again but this is to be doubted. AI merely adds another layer of complexity. 

[18] This should not be misunderstood as socially conservative statement - quite the opposite. The fact of an increasingly sex-positive culture is to be applauded. The argument is the opposite - that repression has merely been replaced by voyeurism and that a form of cultural self censorship in the population means that people are still hiding behind the curtain watching others have fun rather than having fun themselves.

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.