Mourning Star: The Cul-De-Sac we’re in.
—I see the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, smacked up on Marx and Badiou.—
It seems that there is a ‘genuinely combustible left‘ emerging across Europe, though in what way it will combust is anyone’s guess at this point. The much wished-for platform from which to again mount a socialist opposition to capitalism has arrived, – coming from the student and academic fraternity, in the form of opposition to an increase in top up fees – yet caution must be exercised, for it seems that all too easily issues are being grouped together under an anti-capitalist or socialist banner with little consideration for desired outcomes. The ‘genuine’ left understandably returns from its exile from the political scene as consistently opposed now to any form of payment for further education as it always has been. However what surprises is the way in which leftist policy as a whole appears to have changed little. Arguably this is due to the fact that modifications to leftism over the last 15 years have marked in reality a slippage of the left towards Liberalism, via a ‘Third Way’ system of politics championed on both sides of the Atlantic. With the modification of the left monopolised by the New Labour movement it is natural that, following the catastrophic failure of the modernisation process, – and to be sure, ‘catastrophic’ is no exaggeration, two wars in, with civil liberties severely curtailed and a relatively poorer ‘middle’ and ‘working’ class – the left understandably finds itself in a pre-Blairite frame of mind. Yet it will here be argued that this is a reactionary path which should be curtailed in the interest of freedom and equality, rather than being a revolutionary path leading to retribution for the long mourned after collapse of the promise that Marxism once held.
Free tuition was ended in 1998 by Labour as a ‘contribution’ to fees was demanded from students whose parents earned above a certain income, whilst maintenance grants were simultaneously abolished, with actual ‘top-up fees’ – as an extra contribution to fees chargeable by individual Universities – being introduced in 2006. Certainly the introduction of fee contributions and top-up fees appears to have been as ideological then as they are now. And for that reason it is reasonable to look to change the system which demands that top-up fees are raised, rather than merely ask for a reversal of the decision to increase fees, or, indeed, charge them at all, because that system will continue to fail us one way or another. However, those who already smell blood should be wary, for a change in government would achieve little in the long-term, even if such a move entailed a dropping of the proposed top-up fees increase in the short-term. In fact, a change of government would send a disastrous signal to the Labour Party, who have far from even begun the soul-searching demanded by their wrecking ball of a tenure in government, that they might continue in the same vein as before. Moreover, it would send a signal to the left that they have won a victory – which would , as will be made clearer throughout, be short-lived -, bought about by pursuing old-leftist policies and tired activist methods.
The problem here can be thus described: as is often said, it is perhaps easier to envisage the end of the world than the end of capitalism, yet the bind here is that the world is capitalist, not that, as is implied by many a leftist academic, the world is potentially socialist, communist, but has been made sick through an un-shiftable capitalist virus which has made it host dependent on it. To be sure, it is true that the world has been made sick by capitalism as an un-shiftable virus, but that does not mean that socialism is the cure. Socialism has been trialled out as the cure for two hundred years, was dropped for its ineffectuality for not quite fifteen years, and now has been retaken up, without modification, and without other options being considered. This is nothing less than suicide. Who, except for perhaps a capitalist pharmaceutical company, to be fair, would knowingly prescribe ineffective drugs for the treatment of a cancer? Whoever, they would indeed be aiding the cancer, not the patient.
To be sure, in line with Mark Fisher’s comments here, the ConDem coalition is a weak government that could fall, and could indeed be pushed over the edge by the student movement. Though again one must be careful here – and this is really the crux of why I am dubious about today’s leftist movement – for the proposed top up fee increase that the ConDems wish to implement was conceived following the findings of a report commissioned by Labour. We cannot wish for a return to the party which gave us fee contributions, gave us top-up fees, then gave us the idea that these fees should be increased, without being capped. Labour had to go, and tuition fees indeed were the least of the reasons.Even though we know that the Tories would have entered into the Iraq war had they been in power in 2003, the party that took us in, and which removed many of our civil liberties, had to be removed from power as an indication of public discontent. The fact that the Conservatives received no solid mandate to rule says, if anything, that the voting public were aware that all options were equally limited. Sensing that we are on a fast track towards ever more capitalisation of services, ever more inequality, basically a perpetual fine tuning of the capitalist machine, oiled by deception and hypocrisy, voters could little bring themselves to award anyone the leadership of our country. Given this it is sad to see the limited scope of opposition to what abounds for all to see; a capitalist continuum which has no one at the helm, and which is merely ridden for a while here and there by ruling elites and governments who no longer really rule, but administrate on behalf of the business class. The very reason that the public voted so cynically is the reason why new and bold initiatives are needed in tackling what are clear injustices. I do not see this in the protests taking place, even in the novel protests staged by groups such as the ‘University For Strategic Optimism‘,which has made a name by staging ‘lectures’ in public places such as banks and supermarkets. Certainly the University For Strategic Optimism appear to want to find genuinely new optimistic strategies, as stated at the end of its inaugural lecture, held in a branch of Lloyds TSB: ‘There are many good reasons for strategic optimism. There are alternatives. Join us in looking for them.’ Yet,methods employed appear, if anything, thoroughly pessimistic so far as they aim at pressurizing through spectacle (no bad thing in itself) the government and ruling elites into reversing their decision to raise top up fees, whilst providing access to information relating to the ills of capitalism in a free, no cost and open space (the emphatic ‘No!‘ to proposed government cuts stated on their website). Though the pessimism here resides not in the policy message, or even the means of deploying it (though more on this later), but in what is missed here: the University for Strategic Optimism sets up a free ‘University’ to demand that tuition be paid for by the State. Yet if it were truly possible to run a free University, free of cost, or certainly at a low-cost, and free of State intervention, then surely there need be no recourse to the State, which is a puppet of big-business, in any case. The alarming lack of imagination here can be identified as the polar thinking of people clearly well schooled in leftist critique versus capitalist business culture. The second Lecture delivered by the ‘University’ in a branch of Tesco’s pours scorn on ‘corporate degrees’ unveiled by the international supermarket and points to the failings of a completely commodified tertiary education system. The mistake here resides in an overwhelming negativity often associated with the left. Because to be frank if Tesco’s want to provide vocational degrees and the government are willing to go down this road the alternative cul-de-sac of bleated criticisms, and begged policy reversals, makes for an ineffective counter, especially when you ask that it be financed by the very system you find fault with. If the University for Strategic Optimism has a role, might it be in providing an education, the one they bemoan the loss of, or in thinking how it might be provided? For whatever the rights and wrongs of the government’s withdrawal of education funding, we simply cannot keep asking that they keep sustaining us, being as they don’t want to, and being that a great many of us clearly have contempt for them,whoever they are (the long-standing myth that only the Lib Dems could save us has now been blown out of the water). In short, there seems to be a lack of coherence here; either the leftist movement is hubristic, imaginative and forward-looking, or, as suggested, it is weak, dependent and backwards looking in it activist methodology and policy outlook. Another group, the Really Open University (ROU) look promising, in that they seek to engage with new ideas in order to create a ‘free and empowering education system where creative and critical thought is fostered’ whilst changing ‘the expectations that people have of higher education, and by extension, the rest of our lives.’ Yet their employment of the tactics of ‘strike, occupy, reform’, quite unnecessary to the intended outcomes, puts paid to an otherwise sound call for passive resistance and reform.
As Zizek says in the trailer for ‘Marx Reloaded’, ‘We are in deep shit, and we know it’. Indeed we are, but as much due to the sorry state of the academic left as to the dismal direction of the right. Yet whilst we expect the right to be ineffective in maintaining a fair society, we ought to demand that the left is effective at campaigning for, and implementing one. To be sure, we live in a completely commodified society (we see this in education, health care, law enforcement, in every aspect of life), and here one could mount a defence of Adorno, who refused to side with his students in 1968, precisely because changes to a completely commodified society would be changes within a commodified society and not away from one. To admit of the problem of total capitalisation is to admit that socialist activism is merely a part of the capitalist whole. Further to that, even stripping away the aspect of commodification, we still need overcome the inherent tendency towards domination, of man over nature, of man over man, and of capital, as a runaway train, over all men. Anti-Capitalist activism is but an Incorporated aspect of the whole. Those who think – John Pilger amongst them – that student tactics have taken the system by surprise, seriously underestimate those who plan for power. That unfair fiscal and spending policy would lead to protest was the only given this year. That they would be student protests hardly surprises either. All that is missing in this historical puzzle is the ensuing and, yes, appalling victory of the right, and a simultaneous entrenchment of the left, who in their resentment will be further convinced of the justification of their theories and methods.
On activist methods, Fisher has said recently that a growing sense of anger gives rise to optimism, and I will repeat what I said separately on the pages of Facebook to him, in a discussion that I feel was public enough to cite:
“And as for anger, maybe sometimes it can provide an added burst of energy, more fuel for a tough battle ahead, the impetus and courage to see things differently. But often it leads to poorly informed emotional responses to social and political situations, the parroting of lines and postures associated with resistance and opposition, nostalgia, seeking refuge in like-minded groups (which won’t help if you have the wrong idea in the first place).”
Unfortunately, anger will lead to aggressive acts, real and perceived, and the media machine is more than capable of twisting these acts to their benefit. It also clouds the ability to think and leads to passionate and nostalgic deployment of arguments and actions. This is sad as what is clearly needed, and Fisher and the University of Strategic Optimism seem to concur here, is new ideas, and whilst these can develop out of anger, such an anger is a quite different kind to that expressed on the streets. Directed, well focused anger can lead to moments of lucidity, and there is much to be angry about. However, it seems there is also much confusion circling around with regard to what constitutes reasonable anger and, indeed, violence in these extraordinary times which demand, undoubtedly, a genuinely combustible new political idea.1 That is, an idea that catches on and ignites a change of direction in the world. There is more chance of this happening as a result of the activity of WikiLeaks, and similar technology led manifestations of the will to freedom – and who would doubt that recent events mark a kind of revolution? – than as a result of occupations and marches.
An overthrow of the State and of the business class could indeed not come about without a deeply violent period ensuing, and it would not be a battle which could be won by the left, for less powerful States have fought off the threat from much more powerful opposition movements many times in the past. Indeed, at this point a passive resistance movement, defined as such, is called for. Now, undoubtedly the student protests are by and large peaceful, but they are not actively so. If, as seems to be the case, and rightfully so, the issue of fees is to be amalgamated with the wider issue of capitalism and its unfairness, then the issue of violence cannot but be addressed, both in the Zizekian sense that a kind of violence cements capitalism continually, and in the sense that conflict between interest groups, between classes, and between, indeed, man and unfettered nature is always a violence. The question is over what is aimed at with aggressive sloganeering, with occupations and impromptu ‘in joke’ gatherings and actions in the public space? These actions do much to excite the participants of such actions, and naturally anger the institutions against which they are aimed. Yet for cunning and efficacy such actions score a ‘zero’, and, even though they are peaceful, aim at an alienation of an already alienated public.The trouble is that the left appear to be again going through the motions of ressentiment, as Nietzsche would have it, a re-feeling of the pain of failure and loss that ‘fair minded’ people have felt for the whole of history. This indeed is the trouble with clinging tightly to the policies and trappings of communism as we approach a capitalist system which has moved on unimpeded during over a century of leftist failure. Last year’s ‘On the Idea of Communism’ conference, attended by Badiou and Zizek, might have set us free from this trap, but predictably it was decided that we must retain ‘communism’ as a word so that we might ‘own’ a history which we could reflect upon and grow from. Such stupidity has gone largely unchecked, though it would be interesting to see what might have happen if the world’s greatest minds had gone about re-formulating the left from the bottom up. I say stupidity, because the history of communism is checkered with failures and is, after all, only one manifestation of the desire for a fairer, more humane, world.
Whilst the right has moved seamlessly with only temporary setbacks on the way to realising a complete commodification of society, the left gets repeatedly stuck, for lack of ideas, for emotionalism, for constant triumphalism, the left, indeed, seem a bit like the English football association and its die-hard fans, in that they laud long past grand victories, take excessive confidence from occasional lesser victories, fail to understand what decade or even century we are living in, get given a bad press for the actions of the violent few within their ranks that they somehow can’t shake off and, most significantly, cannot read signs pointing to impending failure though the same signs come about decade upon decade. They tend, indeed, to say thing like, ‘well in 19– we had a similar situation and that went well for us, so now in 20– given the similar favourable conditions we can assume a victory’, yet the logic of Alan Hansen, which does not in itself work for football – he and others often miss that small victories were usually eclipsed by the same adversaries, or by the same weaknesses in the national side – cannot be the logic of the academic or street-level left.
Problematically many people are even in this day and age incredibly loyal to the political cause they follow, making Bush’s ‘if you are not with us you’re against us’ appear as the unspoken refrain of the leftist movement. It seems to be this which hampers any progress with, worryingly, some students complaining that their University occupation has been gate-crashed by unwelcome causes, meaning, that not only are the old guard misled, but they seek to mislead. From the Guardian’s Patrick Kingsley:
‘Longhaired and big-booted, revolutionary socialist Luke stands up in front of a meeting at the Leeds university occupation, and prepares to speak.
“Comrades . . .” Luke begins – and, from the back of this lecture theatre filled with 200 undergraduates, school students, trade unionists and parents, comes an instant, shouted response.
“DON’T CALL ME COMRADE.”‘
The article goes on to say that for many people it is the school children, often bunking off from school, who are bringing the real optimism to debates, and, fortunately, we have a generation who have not been brainwashed by leftist rhetoric, but who have grown up under a more uncertain, and no more feasible pragmatic politics. They have grown up media savvy, and will find it hard to believe much of what they are told by anybody. Indeed, capital has taught us to be incredulous towards anything and everything, in part as we have learned to see through the various ruses that are thrown our way daily, in part because such a level of uncertainty is conducive to the growth of capital. Where possible, despite the latter negative connotation, this must be taken as a tactical advantage by the left, and in this way the left cannot be seen to fail an innocent and open-minded generation with back-slapping rituals, close-mindedness to innovation, a tendency to fetishize the symbols of revolutions past, and triumphalism at every juncture, something very much sensed in the comments of prolific bloggers, journalists and activists. In fact it seems, to draw close to psychology, that every generation re-lives the failures of their past, of their parents’ past, and passes them on to an unsuspecting and undeserving younger generation, but this is a cycle we don’t have to repeat.
It must be noted that whilst many feel they can smell blood, it may be that the ConDems survive this battle, and if they don’t whatever concessions they make will soon be overturned one way or another. Fees for tertiary education have been opposed at every juncture since the 1990′s and concessions and assurances have been made all along the way – and yet they have rises, and will in all probability continue to rise. And this last observation does not derive from an acute cynicism, but from the mere realistic observation of history; that every concession by the right is temporary and incorporates itself within the patient, steady onward march of capitalism. Often, continuing on this subject, but diverging briefly, the Poll Tax riots are taken as a successful example of protest against capitalism and Toryism, yet the Poll Pax was effectively continued in any case, as the Council Tax, and was revoked in name only in return for a 2.5% hike in VAT, which will soon rise to 20% (from its temporary ‘low’ of 16%). The reality is that there are few successes for the left to speak of in real terms, given this fact it is time for people of conscience to radically rethink their strategies, for to do otherwise will waste an opportunity for change which may be our last. Put succinctly, if capitalism is violence, and if the whole of society is capitalist, then everything that does not challenge and convert capitalism – leaning on it with cunning, to diversify from a pure pursual of capital, to an engagement with equality of opportunity and resources – contributes to violence. In this light the left has to be very careful not to squander this moment playing a role rather than taking decisive warranted and measured action based on sound ideas.
The tools of capitalism must be turned against it but without making victims. A mimesis of the means of capitalism – which thus, as mimesis, evades a backlash from capital against its overturn – with concessions made towards ethical decency is possible. To use one example, a lightweight model of education, free of the costs of excessive administration, building maintenance and too many support staff is conceivable, employing a mixture of peer review, internet delivered learning material, local support networks, remote and local supervision. Such a model would find funding, and it is within such a system that strategies for a fair just society could be explored, ones which don’t involve selling the philosophical farm and reverting to knee-jerk calls for socialist or communist governance. That this is not more closely explored, as one of a number of initiatives which remove creative forms from the auspices of the State and pure-profit seeking oligarchs is a crying shame, and tallies on the whole with the embeddedness of the left and of academics within a system which has no interest in their success. What is now risked is that the left loses this battle, either now or a few years down the line, yet continues within the academy, repeating age-old doctrines in an apparent defiance of a system that it is ensconced within.
