'Round About Midnight: Problems en route to the Good Life
'Once you get that Good Life feeling...'
Throughout the writing of my forthcoming book, The Breaking of the English Working Class, I encountered an array of social and political subjects that looked decidedly different from those which littered the pages of either Marx’s Capital or E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class. In the wake of Thatcherism’s counterrevolution against the emancipatory agents of the Fordist world, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s efforts to manage and discipline the children of those agents, and the slow, grinding disintegration of the neoliberal order into a crushingly impoverished social condition, we now experience an unrecognisably different country.
Today’s working class is stratified by a complex web of work, welfare and border regimes. The social wage has diminished, and our dependence on high interest debt has ballooned. We are sicker, poorer and lonelier than we have been for generations. The legacies of anti-racist struggles and globalisation sit uncomfortably next to a rising far-right, perpetually enabled and fuelled by an authoritarian political centre. We are more socially liberal than we have ever been, but we are also more polarised, along lines of gender, race, culture and class. Distinct experiences of class reproduction, marked disproportionately by space, cultivate different political responses to diminishing life conditions, and agency is tough to discover, even when we know it exists in some fundamental, everyday manner, when the increasingly online noise of rightwards political polarisation crowds out any collective yearning for a better life. Our side has been desperately losing for some time, but not all is lost. As ever greater numbers of people turn to the project of party-building, validating our sense that the current system neither works nor maintains popularity, whilst confirming a strain of faith that institutional politics remains the vehicle for conjuring up mass energies, the socialist movement must ask itself some fundamental questions once again.
There’s a provocation I find myself returning to when thinking about the challenge of crafting socialism. Michel Foucault, in his 1970s lectures on biopolitics, suggested that there was a lacuna in the left’s theory and practice, which begged the question, “What governmentality is possible as a strictly, intrinsically, and autonomously socialist governmentality?” He insisted - against the experience of social-democratic and Stalinist governments reproducing forms of capitalist relations, namely repressive and disciplinary mechanisms - that a new socialist governmentality must be invented.
So if we want a good life, we have to give birth to it. But who are we? The organised left alone can just be fobbed off by the authoritarian state. For socialism to win, it has to be a mass project that moves and compels people. This much we know.
On the part of the left I come from, the anticapitalist left, we tend to put a lot of stock into the notion of reform versus revolution. That is, there are traditions within the labour movement who think it is possible to achieve socialism through the nation state, pulling the great levers of office, and reforming its profit-making, power-producing operations into instruments of working class advancement. It should be said, this is an ideological camp with many different currents, traditions and experiences within it, some on the more transformative end, others on the more conservative and simply ameliorative end. Conversely, there is of course the revolutionary perspective (also with many diverse strands), which seeks to abolish capitalism and the state with workers governing from below, through their workplaces and communities. These two models, at their very best, can be encapsulated in the images of mid-twentieth century Swedish social-democracy on the one hand, and post-WW1 revolutionary Russia on the other.
In terms of thinking about how we get to the Good Life, we have to think about the terms of socialist transition, and reform versus revolution as a heuristic takes on an incredibly concrete meaning in specific moments, events and processes. But it also often operates as a bit of an abstract crutch and we need to add some flesh to its bones, especially in a moment like the one we are living through, where people’s politics are far less fixed and far more fluid than a century ago.
So I want to identify four problems that complicate the journey towards socialism and throw up strategic challenges in ways that typify the dilemmas that anticapitalists have to confront. I want to do this drawing upon Barnaby Raine’s idea of “immanent freedom”. This framework, imbibing the spirit of Marx and his most thoughtful inheritors, demands that we discover what possibilities exist within contemporary subject formation for the transcending of capitalism in our lifetimes. It names the challenge of us and our people seeking freedom within particular contexts circumscribed by how people are made in the afterlife of neoliberal capitalism, how we remake ourselves in the process, and what limits there are to the project of “freedom dreams” within these circumstances. These four problems go as follows:
I want to begin with the late Joshua Clover’s ‘affirmation trap’. For Clover, workers are typically (though not exclusively) dependent on a job to survive and in moments of mass unemployment are compelled to subordinate themselves to their employer as workers in order to retain their job and survive. This was noticeable throughout the period of evolved deindustrialisation in the late 1970s and 1980s, where workers, such as those at British Leyland, were more amenable to forms of industrial partnership, accepting worse terms, conditions and wages than they may have just a few years previously, precisely because the prospect of them ending up on the dole queue was significantly more pronounced once the era of social-democratic full employment had ended. As someone who has spent over half my adult life unemployed, I can tell you, it can really suck. But there’s a fundamental question: who wants to be a worker? The anticapitalist project is geared towards the abolition and transcendence of capitalism. This, I think for the best, involves the eradication of both the employer and the worker as relationships of status and locations of social power and powerlessness. We shouldn’t be in the business of affirming our status as workers as social democracy has so often insisted we do, typically on the basis of notions of race, nation, sexuality and gender. We want to abolish class, we want to create a society where the notion of a worker is obsolete, and people are defined by their character, content and contribution rather than their place in the social hierarchy. But how do we balance this horizon with the reality that our project is reliant on workers self-organising as a class, drawing from our uneven power across the labour market, as labourers, as tenants and as citizens? Yes, we fight for dignity, rights and higher wages at work, but how do we also recover the labour movement’s historic struggle for greater, free leisure time and a non-punitive social wage? And, in the spirit of ‘immanent freedom’, how is that connected to the possibilities that exist in a political moment shaped by surging youth unemployment, high levels of economic inactivity, rising scores of sick proletarians, and demographic aging, where people are increasingly dislocated from the labour market and reliant upon forms of public and privatised welfare? How might we navigate the opportunity for developing a popular politics of transcending class provided by a rising moral detachment from endless work in the post-pandemic world, whilst connecting it to the leverage workers can draw upon in specific chokepoints across the movement of capital?
Stealing an insight from the London-Edinburgh Weekend Return Group and their seminal pamphlet, In and Against the State: Discussion Notes for Socialists, we have to bear in mind that, ‘resources we need involve us in relations we do not’. This was sharply apparent in the 1980s as some black radicals found themselves becoming dedicated social workers trying to meet the needs of their communities, seeking funding and state support on an ethnically stratified basis which dissembled prior black radicalisms. It is also apparent in New York today, with Zohran Mamdani delivering on some of his promising policy agenda whilst seeking amicable relations with the racist and repressive New York Police Department he had once sought to defang. The question beckons, what kinds of ecologies and movement capacities are we building that can counteract the total absorption of left electoral projects into the state, and produce forms of politics independent of, and ultimately against the state? How do we navigate the contemporary hyper-political experience which produces Events, in the classic Badiouian sense, capable of transforming the cultural landscape, but too often flattening the processes which make them possible and enduring? And how do we take maximum advantage of these electoral openings and their opportunities for improving people’s lives and building popular power, whilst also garnering support for the radical succession of these forms of institutional leftism?
At the end of the fourth chapter of a little known pamphlet released in the mid-19th Century, two fellas called Karl and Freddy, had a mic drop moment and declared, “Workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains.” Today, we should ask ourselves if that’s really true anymore. When Engels argued with one of the fathers of Anarchism, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, he was rightly taking to task the petty proprietorship of the French Anarchist, demanding that the communisation of urban spaces and housing be the left’s watchwords over and above individual home ownership. We don’t live in that world anymore. Across large parts of the globe, huge slum populations are paralleled by mass home ownership, indebtedness, and the proliferation of cheap consumer goods. Now this settlement is certainly creaking, particularly in the global North, as house prices, rising interest rates, and war and climate change-fuelled inflation undermine the neoliberal social contract. But how does the anticapitalist project attract popular support despite wanting our people to have a richer sense of the Good Life which swaps private living with communal freedom? What kinds of collective organisation and popular initiatives can produce cultures of association which undermine the privatisation of life, the sale of our futures, and produce communities independent of capital? What is the strategy in a world where workers do have more to lose than their chains?
The famous Marxist geographer David Harvey caused great consternation a few years ago when he argued that global revolution is a “communist fantasy” and “capitalism is too big to fail.” Now, I don’t have much truck with us distancing ourselves from revolutionary horizons, but as imperialist war and climate catastrophe demonstrate the brittle interdependency of global trade systems, it is absolutely the case that huge parts of the world are left deeply vulnerable to global supply chain shocks. Today, we witness a potentially devastating disruption to global food and energy systems as the Iranian state defends itself against US imperialism by blockading the Strait of Hormuz and the Panama Canal is drained dry by rising temperatures. Both embody the exhaustion of our planetary ecology and the fragility of our commodified interdependence. In this context, is it possible for coalitions of people to produce our own forms of sustainability and life-making, independent of capital, such as the demands expressed in the Right to Grow campaign, which gear our people towards the project of practical self-governance? And how do cross-border, internationalist alliances respond to an uneven global political economy which results in parts of the world suffering as a product of dislocations elsewhere in the world? How does the anticapitalist project make global solidarity its watchword and not the source of imperial politicking it became among the lion’s share of Soviet states throughout the late twentieth century?
These dilemmas are by no means exhaustive, but they are real. If we take seriously the relationship between the possibilities of socialist transformation and the composition and consciousness of that transformation’s agents, we must ask ourselves big questions about the obstacles and opportunities our movement might face if our proximity to freedom increases.
Leon Trotsky, one of the leaders of the Russian revolution and a Marxist whose intellectual legacy I impulsively feel ambivalent about, once remarked that the revolution had not produced a great deal in terms of art, precisely because the revolutionary process absorbed all the raw materials which would, in ordinary conditions, feed art. In this transformation, as French left-wing leader Jean-Luc Melenchon has pontificated, life had become art, with a great revolutionary feeling sculpting an emancipatory world. The questions I ask, perhaps only solvable by experience and experiment, reflect some of the challenges that will prevent us transforming our lives into the beautiful, ever-evolving pieces of art that our people deserve.
All of this begs the question, the first task of political strategy: if you want to grasp what the process of socialist transition might look and feel like, its politics, leanings, and the potential for a genuinely socialist art of government, you begin with the possibilities available to today’s radical subjects - the grave diggers perhaps, but also the nurses, cooks, artists, and obsolescent humans of our moment - and how we might transform both ourselves and our world, realising not just one, but countless good lives.
As historian Ewan Gibbs has alluded to, in a twist on Raymond Williams’ classic 1960 text, The Long Revolution, Britain has witnessed a long counter-revolution over the past four decades. For the Welsh Marxist, these long revolutions are overwhelmingly shaped by the intermeshing interests of the complex whole, from the means of representation to the means of production; the complicated reality of knowledge production in the midst of rushing moments (or the state of ‘in medias res’ to steal from Adam Tooze); and the human experience of living through it, making sense of it, and acting within it. The challenge of this moment, saturated as it is by an endless stream of online slop, is that it becomes incredibly difficult to escape this long counter-revolution’s thrall. Although I would not dare dismiss the interwoven relationship between Events, in the archetypal Badiouian sense of seismic ruptures, and the processes which make them possible, we will not reverse a lifetime of defeat without situating ourselves, our practices and our strategies within a generational process of revolutionary reconstruction which connects the circumscribed experiences and possibilities of today with the ‘freedom dreams’ of tomorrow.
For Williams, industrialisation, democratisation and the massification of culture constituted the grand strands of this ‘immanent freedom’. Today, we face our own terms. Firstly, and chiefly, the rapid boiling of the planet, the threat it poses to life on earth, and the efforts by elites and states to preempt the hastening movement of people by gravitating towards increasingly authoritarian and fascist methods of population control. Secondly, the concomitant exhaustion of capitalism’s productive capacities across vast parts of the world is mirrored in slum populations in the global south, relative surplus populations in the global north, demographic aging, and the enormous expansion of speculative bubbles in property and Artificial Intelligence. Thirdly, the disintegration of the US-led imperial order under the weight of China’s rapid rise as a major geopolitical, technological and military power, the plummeting legitimacy of American global standing in the wake of Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people and the spectacle of Donald Trump’s gunboat diplomacy, and the developing provincialisation of Britain and Europe. And fourthly, the calamitous effects of the internet’s proliferation, in particular through the growth of platform economies and smartphones, transforming our social world into a lonelier, more competitive place, breeding new alienations and psychic conditions with which we have to wrestle.
The end game has been to produce a global majority of proletarians whose necks are squeezed under the heels of states, asphyxiated by zero-sum fiscal conservatism, fleeing lifeworlds devastated by empire and climate, only to enter lifeworlds subjugated by capital and abandoned by the state, struggling to breathe freely. In Britain, our mission is to build a coalition unified in their sense that this state of affairs, this way of living, is intolerable and must be changed. We need a politics which prioritises the struggle for free time, a green economy predicated on care, community and global peace, and a regime of popular multiracial sovereignty. But its realisability is dependent on our movement building a side that consolidates its growing strength in the larger metropolitan centres, among downwardly mobile graduates and the multiracial working class; tries to build outwards across the urban conurbations of the country’s postindustrial towns and cities, explicitly confronting organised abandonment and racialised segregation by organising for a redistributive urban cosmopolitanism; and, as James Meadway has argued, takes seriously the increasing collision between class and climate change across parts of the English South experiencing environments more akin to Southern Europe whilst also becoming home to Londoners priced out by gentrification. The unity of these fractions is the job of left majoritarianism in our moment. But it relies on the strengthening of ‘communities of resistance’ that have fought abandonment for decades, and fight it in new forms today, articulated alongside ‘essential workers’ such as nurses defending their right to save us, pro-Palestine organisers and climate activists putting their bodies on the gears of the machine, tenants’ organisers rebuilding a militant housing movement, and new moral economies which are gently emerging around affordability and our relationship to work.
David Marriott, a scholar on Frantz Fanon, has characterised the Martinique psychoanalyst’s ideal as ‘repair within revolution’. The task of the long revolution today is to organise for popular experiences of freedom and sovereignty which permeate people’s lives, resonating through a practice of repair which rewilds our relationship to time, nature, ourselves and one another. When we think of the four problematics at the centre of this essay - the affirmation trap, state absorption, everyday commodification and negative planetary solidarity - the centrality of repair stands out as a key method in our era’s long revolution, rehearsing forms of self-governance which might create the possibilities for an eventual rupture from this exhaustingly nightmarish social system.