What's "left" behind, in the wake of Covid
There's a new radical party to be started, responding to an age of bioshocks. But should it steer clear of the S-word?
As I sit here, pre-test, near the end of 5 days of ruminative, Omicron-triggered isolation, it’s hard to think of any future trend other than the one which kicks the legs out from under the rest. Especially if that future negates civic encounter and deliberation, the street as theatre and zone of experiment, the “city” part of citizenship. How does social progression work if you can’t meet or touch people, for fear of dangerous infection?
In my seclusion, I am reading widely. And I’m particularly enjoying left critics getting their act together on their response to the pandemic, especially the recent work of James Meadway and Richard Seymour. To consume something other than the drip-feed of official announcements, or the Rabelasian hypocracy (correct spelling) around us, or the creeping libertarian paranoia, is good roughage.
Yet the speculative thought that gripped me earlier this week was this: are the times perfectly ripe for an entirely new political party—beyond the old polarities?
This party would be aimed squarely at Generations Y and Z—those whose future is being robbed by the recalcitrance of earlier generations. Its background assumption is that there’s an ever-tougher anthropocene to come. Accordingly, it would present a suite of policy and institutional proposals that directly answered - with no trimming, no compromises - the challenges of a deeply disrupted biosphere.
Politics such as a zero-carbon economic system (not net, but absolute); the transformation of consumerism into userism and makerism; the guarantee of universal basics (of income, housing, digital access) and the instituting of public luxury; AI and automation bent towards the enhancement, not the replacement, of humans; debt forgiveness, social currencies and “qualitative easing for the people” as a reset of economics; a play ethic over a work ethic, a social norm where creativity is expected and elicited. (Please suggest your own, in the comments.)
Yet in my reverie, it seemed very important that this new party did not pay obesiance to the 19th and 20th century traditions and vocabularies of the “left”. Bluntly put: how do you get to functional eco-socialism without using the ideological term “eco-socialism”? How do you argue for the case of progress - steering between the limits of planetary boundaries and the illimitability of computation-driven innovation - without using comedic titles like “fully automated luxury communism”?
The pandemic has given us an experience of the intimate connectedness of all humans, on this puckering biosphere, as thin as the peel on an apple. Surely this planetarity would be enough to send activists searching for entirely new metaphors and stories? That is, other than the ones derived from the shifting debate across a 18th century French assembly? Or those ones somewhat tainted by our experiences of “actually existing” socialism and communism?
In fact, if we’re digging into etymology, why not go for “planetism”, “earthism”, “biospherism”, “networkism”, “whole-system politics”, “wellbeing politics”, “terraology”… OK, now I’m riffing. But I’m also trying to evoke what a new, planet-oriented sphere of public debate might sound like.
What would you call yourself as a new party, if you wanted to be really focussed on how to mobilise populations to survive the coming century of bioshocks? This is maybe a more fruitful exercise than hoping that worsening conditions (and widening contradictions) will realise your dream of the preceding two centuries. (Can we call a moratorium, please, on comparisons with the Paris Commune?)
To be clear: I always include a very big chunk of left thinking and theory in my purview of future trends. The essential reason is that left thinking best illuminates the operations of global and national capitalism: a system which relentlessly seeks to subject every aspect of existence to market valuation, even when that valuation - a whale is worth more dead than alive; your GDP rises with every mangled car accident - is perverse and obscene.
A “left” which understands itself as focussing on how companies maximise shareholder return above anything else - even above the planet upon which their operations depend - can happily retain its label, for me. And a “left” which shows how governmental and capitalist power can aid and abet each other is also very worth having around.
The two writers I mentioned at the start - Richard Seymour and James Meadway - are exemplary left critics, fulfilling these functions brilliantly. Two pieces from Seymour (on Novara and his Patreon platform) powerfully anatomise the “new normal” that the UK Conservative government is building from Covid (with the “left” scrabbling behind them).
Seymour is worth quoting at length:
[The Conservatives are creating] a biosecurity state in which…surveillance through apps and vaccine passports, targeted restrictions on movement and commerce, and circuit-breaker lockdowns, will be used to manage the effects of the pandemic—without building up social solidarity, or institutional capacity in the health service.
This is a project for a more authoritarian British capitalism, with an enhanced role for the state, and a more individualised and docile workforce. This is not only congruent with the reproduction of a particularly brutal form of capitalism, but also with the broader authoritarian turn in border controls, anti-migrant violence, domestic racism and attacks on civil liberties.
The Conservatives have demonstrated awareness of long-term planning for Covid politics, and made the response fit their own prior agenda, in a way that the opposition has not.
Here, at least, is a spectre usefully described—some discernable power structure, which you can now begin to keep under observation.
(I would also note that the political platform The Alternative UK (which I helped to co-initiate with its founder, Indra Adnan) has a relentless focus on “building up social solidarity”, and the new civic processes which may be needed to do so. But this is much more about “social anarchism” and “commoning” than “parliamentary socialism”. A/UK asks: what are the “citizen action networks” (CANs) that might amplify the existing powers and resources of communities? Deliberatively, then structurally?)
James Meadway is even more interesting in his most recent piece - particularly his disdain for what he calls “left hobbyism”, trivially content to expend itself on conducting smug meme-wars across social media.
It was also good to see James (quoting himself from a year ago) suggest the kind of positive policies that I imagine might fit into the “planetary party” I mentioned earlier:
If our shopping is switching online, can we redesign our high streets to create new public spaces? Additional space is all the more necessary if social distancing has to be maintained. If working from home becomes the norm for millions, can we repurpose underused office space?
The think-tank Autonomy has published innovative proposals for workplaces in such a world, reformatting standard office design and building in safer social contact. If not all work can be conducted from home, can we at least reduce the hours we have to spend at work? The use of furlough and part-time working schemes, unthinkable until this year, could move us towards that.
If instability is endemic, can we make the case for a universal basic income to provide meaningful security? If we are entering a “90% economy”, with future growth permanently constrained, can we learn to use measures other than GDP growth for economic success – just as Jacinda Ardern’s government has moved towards in New Zealand?
More like this, please (Erik Olin Wright used to call them “real utopias”). What I would only ask is: should all of this policy innovation travel under the traditional labels of “left” and “socialist” and “Labour”—other than for reasons of tribal identity and sentiment?
The work of Jason Hickel relentlessly hammers home the point that Western nations have no other option, for serious carbon removal, than to reduce their overall levels of production and consumption. This is not a leftism that Marx, in his expansionist “all that is solid melts into air” mode, would endorse. If so, I’m asking: to what extent does a ritual invocation of “socialism”—even eco-socialism—improve the popular motivation to move in this direction (admittedly, this is Hickel’s own tendency)? Whose engines does it fire up?
In the early 80s, the writings of Andre Gorz were waving “farewell to the working class” (or at least their primacy as a force for change). Gorz was only dealing with the tentative, labour-replacing automations of his era—but he could easily see their endpoint. I’m sure that—faced with the exponential AIs and robotisations of our coming decade, not to mention the ecological limits constraining our commerce and industry—Gorz would have redoubled his rejections of a “work” society, in favour of a “culture” society (see this PDF of Reclaiming Work, p.78).
My biggest underlying question here is this. How emotionally, affectively, symbolically and narratively radical must a new party or political platform be, in order to loosen up the current stuckness, to dispel our dysphoria?
A final admission. I draw the blanket of “being on the left” around my shoulders as readily as any of the writers I admire here. But I genuinely wonder, as we face such a dangerously frozen and immobilising situation, whether we should start to separate the policies from the tradition, the theory from the rhetoric. I’m wondering whether seizing the future comes in other tongues and vocabularies than “the left”. Experiment is required, I’d say.
LINKTOPIA
An overflowing box of Qualia Street
The radical epidemiologist Rob Wallace - extravagantly prophetic about Covid - is featured here in a thrilling discussion with black and latinX religious activists. Shows very clearly the power of faith traditions and radical-science traditions conjoining.
Evgeny Morozov is a very smart left-technology thinker - this is an excellently contextual guide to cryptocurrency/blockchain
I reviewed James Bridle’s haunting, idiosyncratic book New Dark Age a few years ago for the New Scientist (PDF copy) - looking forward to translation to radio of what I called “this original and provocative book, [where] Bridle asks us to observe our concrete social surroundings closely, and be ready for strange forces to step out of the current techno-cultural murk”.
[🐱]/[ ] “The current resurgence of interest in creating quantum phenomena such as superposition and entanglement on large scales is not a chance occurrence — because these are precisely what will be needed if we are going to scale up quantum computers so that they have many thousands or even millions of entangled quantum bits. ‘Quantum technologies will receive dozens of billions of dollars of investments in the coming years,’ said Arndt, ‘and we had better understand the foundations of the theory underlying all these technological hopes.’” Thrilling article, and nutso accompanying animation
TRANSPORT ME NOW
🕸 From Noema: “Discussions about technology are often carved into a binary of power and progress vs. dependence and democracy. This is a false binary: interdependence is power, and moving from brittle autonomy toward emergent and collective answers to complex problems is the path to progress. Pursuing this path will allow us to cast off the eschatology of technological determinism and embrace the ecology of technological pluralism.” [Though the brittle autonomist in me cannot help but mutter: back off, if you don’t mind, thank you. I once explored my grinchiness about assumptions of webbed interdependence here. I may need to update myself…]
All comments welcome below. The Yuletide doldrums may (or may not) take me to the keys next week. Otherwise, have a gorgeous and restorative season, and thanks for reading so far.
Really enjoyed this piece and the blog overall so far, Pat. Thanks for writing it. I’m wondering a few things about this:
I totally agree with the point about new words and metaphors to describe both our planetary identity and predicament. I wonder to what extent do Gen X and Y are concerned about labels like ‘left and right’ at all though - I sense that these distinctions are already so anachronistic as to be irrelevant to many of them, apart from those who already identify as ‘political’ in a traditional sense.
In a similar vein, does this need to be a new political party at all, in the sense that we currently understand parties? Without the support of older generations / media etc it stands little chance of success within the current electoral system. So referring back to your previous idea about a new quasi-religion, could this be more of an emerging belief / values system which manifests itself in different ways - through art, community organising, makerism, ritual and new forms of enterprise - as much as politics?
Is our desire to separate politics out from the lived experience of most people part of the problem we face - the ‘us and them’ mentality which is playing out so damagingly in people’s utter distrust in modern politics. Instead should we be thinking about a new alignment, a new constellation, which informs all aspects of culture and from which a new politics naturally flows? What are the outlines and symbols of this new alignment which we can start to call forth into the world, as McCartney excavated the chords for Get Back from raw creative material?
And on a more gloomy note, and perhaps because it’s the end of the year, I wonder who has the energy or the space to incubate and nurture these ideas, especially in the generations you’re talking about. The pandemic is layering such exhaustion at all levels of society that there’s a danger of dystopia by default, as we struggle to summon the energy for day to day life, let alone high falutin ideas about global solidarity and imagined systems of power. This isn’t to be fatalistic: it’s more a plea that we start talking and acting at this level of thinking, and reaching out to leaders and artists within these generations, and using what resources we have to hold this conversation with and for them rather than solely plugging away at the decaying structures we’ve inherited.