LENIN'S TOMB

Saturday, February 11, 2017

On Forgetting Yourself posted by Richard Seymour

“I had forgot myself; am I not king?” – Shakespeare, Richard II

There are some things (or somethings) that matter more than happiness. Forgetting oneself is one of them.

To remember that one is king – as in, His Majesty the Baby, the primary narcissistic representation at the very start of life – is also to be constantly apprised that one is living under a tyranny, even if it is one’s own.

To value oneself too highly is to live under a one-person dictatorship, with an underground torture chamber for the dissenting remainder. There is death in this. The death-drive, on the other hand, is a regicide plot: and, to that extent, is on the side of living.

It is an irony that when we disappear from the picture, when the self seems to die for a moment, that is when we feel most alive. When we play, as children, we get to forget who we are for a while. Once we are assumed to be adults, we have to find acceptable substitutes for childhood play – the thrilling abandonment of oneself through love, sex, creativity, adventure, or even just the joy of surrendering to a novel and cancelling everything else.

It is a cliché of certain ‘self-help’ literature that we should learn to forget ourselves more often, although they don’t exactly put it like this. Winnifred Gallagher recommends a state of being ‘rapt’, a ‘focused life’ for the sake of thriving. Cal Newport extols ‘deep work’, the state of disappearing into serious work for long periods, detaching from the distracting ‘shallow work’ of answering email and managing social media, in order to be more productive. Usually, this literature has buried in it the idea that you will be happier if you pursue this course. The promise of self-help literature seems to be inherently geared toward the happy-ever-after: self-help books are stories of secular redemption.

Whether or not this has anything to do with happiness seems almost to be beside the point. Indeed, that might precisely be its status: it is adjacent to the purpose, potentially a contiguous by-product, not the goal itself. If we live as though happiness is the goal, we’ll have a greatly impoverished life, forgetting everything else that we live for, including unhappiness. Indeed, having happiness as a goal might be a source of depression. But even if the proposed solution of self-help does make us happy, or at least not unhappy – a self-made anti-depressant, one weird trick, a life-hack – it still isn’t obvious what it is about being absorbed, wrapped up in some great work, going deep, that is so satisfying.

To answer that you get a chance to forget yourself only invites the question, what’s so good about that?

***

"By walking, you escape from the very idea of identity, the temptation to be someone, to have a name and a history. Being someone is all very well for smart parties where everyone is telling their story, it's all very well for psychologists' consulting rooms. But isn't being someone also a social obligation which trails in its wake - for one has to be faithful to the self-portrait - a stupid and burdensome fiction? The freedom in walking lies in not being anyone; for the walking body has no history, it is just an eddy in the stream of immemorial life." -- Frederic Gros, A Philosophy of Walking, Verso, 2016, pp. 6-7.

II.

The term ‘rambling’ partly derives from the Middle Dutch word, ‘rammelen’, referring to the night-time meanderings of animals on heat. It later became a metaphor for incoherent, wandering, nocturnal speech or writing. As if the thoughts were just wandering around looking for others to bump into, and copulate with. The coherence of the self that we present to others precludes such amorous digression, such free association, in normal conversations. We usually have to go to analysis, where it is the rule to fall apart, to have these sorts of excursions.

To ramble now is to walk aimlessly, not so much to copulate as to see what in ourselves we might bump into: to encounter our thoughts like strangers. Writing and walking are connected by a language, and an experience. We set out, initially wary, leaving behind a certain comfort, focused on how unpromising the terrain is and how long there is to go. As we get deeper, and the blood warms up, and thoughts start moving, we start to get an obscure satisfaction. If you’ve done it many times, you’ll recognise this as the early echo of a kind of mild euphoria that you will encounter mid-way through, just after you’ve snacked, when you happen upon something that surprises you with its simple beauty. By this point, you’ve gone so deep that you’ve forgotten the comfort you left behind.

Comfort, it turns out, was nothing other than habit. One of the worst things you can do to something that is truly, ravishingly sublime is to make it into a cliché. That is to destroy it or, more precisely, to destroy your pleasure in it. The creature of habit, who builds a life around a ritualisation of what was once sublime and is now clichéd, is engaged in an unconscious war against pleasure. And the self is nothing other than the organisation of certain habits, “the etcetera of the subject,” as Lacan once put it. By their repetitions shall you know them. Walking and writing, at best, are two ways of digressing from habit, hopefully on heat. We trace out, through the marks we make, not patterns of habit, but routes of desire and its deflections.

Solitude is essential to both. Hunger amid plenty ruins the pleasure in moderation; loneliness amid many ruins the pleasure in solitude. Deprivation makes you want more than you can take pleasure in. But get far enough out of the way, and you begin to recalibrate your sense of plenty. There is something paradoxical about this. For many people, one of the worst things that can happen is that they might be left alone with their thoughts. Any displacement activity, from a worry to a row, is better. A distracted life, overcrowded with stress and hyper-business, is their way of forgetting. But whatever it is they’re forgetting, it isn’t the self: the self is always there as the official business representative.

The capacity for solitude, Winnicott observed, is a sort of power. A child who is never left alone, never finds out about her personal life, or what she might do with independence. Without solitude, she never develops the power not to respond to stimulation, to withhold or delay a response according to her preferences. She never gets the opportunity to cultivate fantasy. And she never finds out that – as Anthony Storr suggested, using the analogy of prayer and mystic states – isolation can be reparative, even a source of revealed truth.

This implies that self is something we need to be occasionally alienated from, in order to think and be creative: as if the observing ego was a kind of terrifyingly efficient system of surveillance and preventive censorship. Logically enough, nowhere is this self more mandatory, and yet more fragile, fragmented and transient, than in that peculiar form of writing we call social media.

***

“The model of ownership, in a society organized round mass consumption, is addiction.” – Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism.

III.

Everything we do on Facebook and Twitter is about, in part, cultivating, tending and refreshing daily, a self-portrait that we can take pleasure in. Far from escaping from the self, we would be horrified to find ourselves digressing too much on these platforms: too many people are watching.

It’s easy to criticise online narcissism, but that is not the problem, as such. However, the kind of narcissism that is encouraged by the ecology of likes, shares, retweets and so on, is the fragile narcissism of the mirror. You find out what you’re like by constantly evaluating the coded and quantified reactions of others.

This form of narcissism was anatomised by Christopher Lasch back in the anti-radical reflux of the Seventies. Lasch was interested in the individualist, consumerist solutions that ex-radicals found to their existential anguish. Building on tendencies already present in counterculture, they individualised and medicalised their problems, looking to est, gestalt, hypnotism, tai chi, and health food, much as your average post-millennium hippy looks to The Secret.

Losing interest in political change, they retreated to the self, just as – so Lasch thought – the traditional bourgeois self was being hammered. The self of mass consumption, (and what are the hippy solutions but variants of ‘one weird trick’ snake oil?), was necessarily ever more fragmented and ever more frail.

This had to do with the experience of being a consumer. Capitalism produces the demand for an object. The demand appears to have something to do with desire, but the two operate at a different level: desire is always more elusive and strange than the formal demand to which it is tied. You might say “I’m hungry” when in fact you’re unloved. So, the object is usually advertised in such a way as to make totally irrelevant links between object and satisfaction through fantasy: so that it is offered as a solution to problems it can’t possibly solve. It is never the object we were looking for, and it can never satisfy us for long. The perception of time therefore contracts: there is only this moment, then the next; this satisfaction, then the next.

Since capitalism says your desire need never be frustrated as long as you have at least a little money, because there is a limitless choice of things even at the bottom of the market, you can be constantly satisfied for extremely short bursts of time. The form of narcissism that began to take root in the Seventies, according to Lasch, was structured by this transience. The ex-radicals imagined that, in their political retreat, they had found a source of wised-up resilience. But their cynicism had in fact deprived them of any project by which they could have any real engagement with the world or hope to change it. Instead, engendered in a war of all against all by capitalism, they became far more dependent on the approbation of peers and authorities, and far more invested in their reflection in the media – the short burst of satisfaction even here was recognised in the idea of fifteen minutes of fame – and in grandiose fantasies of omnipotence. By a strange dialectic, the supposedly weakened self had become more imperative, better at monopolising all the attention, all the energy.

Social media operates on a similar logic. You can, with a small investment of labour, 140 well-chosen characters, generate a predictable flow of satisfactions for a period of time. The exchange is that in so doing, you produce content that will attract eyeball attention for advertisers, who comprise 85 per cent of Twitter revenue. Rather than being paid to write, as you would be if your content was published in traditional media formats, you are offered gratifications of the self.

Of course, the difference between the satisfactions offered by most firms, and the ones you negotiate on social media, is that rather than endlessly flattering you, the latter very often turns into what The Thick of It called ‘the shit room’. Far from being validated, you are execrated. This is something that Twitter CEOs are worried about, although I’m not sure they need to: up to a certain point, it probably feeds the addiction.

***

“The Great Work Begins.” – Tony Kushner, Angels in America

IV.

You create a carefully curated self in the form of an online avatar, with its regularly updated photographs and bio lines, and feed it as regularly as possible: and you get your hits. This might be why so-called ‘identity politics’ has taken on new valences on social media. Often, anti-‘identity politics’ is a kind of straw-manning, a way of belittling anti-racist and anti-sexist struggle as forms of particularism. This is obviously true of the alt-right, and there is a crude ‘alt-left’ whose economism tends in this direction. But supposing ‘identity politics’ came to mean, not political identifications around specific forms of oppression and the lived experience thereof, but a politics of the self and its munification?

Only in this context could alt-right taunting about ‘virtue-signalling’ have any meaning – and even then, of course, it would be entirely hypocritical. It is never going to be straightforward to work out how much this is a real tendency, in part because there is a performative dimension to any form of political speech. And self-aggrandisement has many ruses: violent self-hate can be a particularly obnoxious form of self-love; self-punishment can be self-fortification. Nonetheless, it seems obvious that whatever your social media politics, it is all harnessed to roughly the same sets of dynamics, within the same profit model. To deny that this has effects which we cannot simply opt out of, would indeed be to retreat into grandiose fantasies of omnipotence.

Above all, social media engages the self as a permanent and ongoing response to stimuli. One is never really able to withhold or delay a response; everything has to happen in this timeline right now, before it is forgotten. To inhabit social media is to be in a state of permanent distractedness, permanent junky fixation on keeping in touch with it, knowing where it is, and how to get it. But it is also to loop the observing ego into an elaborate panopticon so that self-surveillance is redoubled many times over.

-->

The politics of forgetting oneself would be a form of ‘anti-identity’ politics. It would be a politics of resistance to trends which force one to spend too much time on the self (which, in fact, would include not just the monopolisation of one’s attention by social media, but far more saliently all the forms of racism, sexism, homophobia and other kinds of ascriptive oppression that necessitate exhaustive work to redefine the self). It would begin with deliberately cultivating solitude and forgetting. It would acknowledge that all labour spent on the self is potentially displacement activity, wasted energy. And that, with that effort conserved, some sort of great work could be done.

Tuesday, February 07, 2017

Brexit, Labour voters and the working class. posted by Richard Seymour

There's a curious article in today's Guardian, written by a senior YouGov person -- the guy who runs UK Polling Report -- about the relationship between Labour voters and Brexit. On the face of it, it is a defence of Corbyn's position on Brexit. But it's a defence that seems to get the data very badly wrong, in a way that I can't make sense of.

Let me just make a few points.

Traditional working class
First of all, the article acknowledges that 65% of Labour voters supported Remain, as Corbyn asked them to do. But it then asserts that the 35% who didn't represent more closely "the traditional working-class Labour voters the party is struggling to keep hold of". If you go and look at the early post-referendum data being cited here, it's clear enough what he means: disproportionately, those who backed Leave are from social grades C2 and DE. ABC1 voters, described as the "professional classes", backed Remain. Thus, some sort of commitment to some sort of Brexit is needed to placate 'real' Labour voters.

Leaving aside the practical conclusion for a moment, the analysis should be rejected. We should stop putting up with outdated social grading systems, developed purely for the non-social scientific purpose of flogging stuff to people, as proxies for class. Most C1 voters are not middle class professionals. When I worked in market research, the list of occupations ranked as C1 were mostly menial, low-skill, low-level, low-wage, but considered 'white collar' because you didn't have to get your hands dirty. Call centre workers, the epitome of the exploited, precarious worker in this day and age, are C1. Most of the so-called middle class professionals in the Labour base who backed Remain will just be workers. And that means that the working class was split -- a split that was partly right-left and partly regional.

This isn't just a wonkish detail: polling results and their representation play a critical part in the cultural battles of our age, which attempts to reduce the working class to one of its sectors (those workers stuck in the most declining, provincial, isolated parts of the country, and those who tend to skew to the political right), while overstating the size and relative progressiveness of the middle class. This leads to the kinds of toxic politics wherein some middle class progressives, with a tragedian sniff, accept the need to go along with racist, anti-immigrant politics to keep the poor white workers on board.

Lost Leave Voters
Secondly, the article asserts that:

"Among 2015 Labour voters who backed remain, 60% have remained loyal to Labour, and would vote for them tomorrow. When it comes to leave voters who backed them in the last general election, only 45% would vote for the party now."

The data cited doesn't show anything like this, and it is bewildering to claim that it does. What it says is that among 2015 Labour voters who backed Remain, 74% would vote Labour tomorrow, and among those who backed Leave, 63% would vote Labour tomorrow. The claim that Labour has "lost the majority of its leave voters" is simply not true. Labour has, in large part as a consequence of the coup which triggered a precipitous collapse in its share of the vote, lost a minority of both Remain and Leave voters. There is a gap between how many Leave voters and how many Remain voters have abandoned Labour, but it is nowhere near as polarised or as catastrophic as the article suggests.

Stay or Go
Thirdly, the article identifies a divide between Labour Leavers and Remainers over what Corbyn should do about Brexit:

"Remainers predictably go for opposition to Brexit. Some 50% of people who voted Labour and remain want Labour to have a policy that is anti-Brexit (23% are for total opposition and 27% want a second referendum) and 30% want a policy that is in favour of Brexit.
Labour Leave voters are just as predictable – 69% want Labour to have a policy that is pro-Brexit, and either seek a purely trading relationship with the EU (46%) or a close relationship outside the EU (23%).
Can Labour find a policy that doesn’t wholly alienate one half of its support?"

First of all, as YouGov's data shows, it is not a relationship of two halves. Leave voters comprise a minority, one third, of 2015 Labour voters. The reason why this matters is that when YouGov tests various solutions with its respondents, the article concludes that Labour campaigning for Remain would be the "most divisive policy", while supporting soft-Brexit would be the policy most likely to reconcile the party. But this depends on treating Remain and Leave constituencies among Labour voters as equivalent, which they aren't. If you review the data for yourself, you'll see that in fact, a Remain campaign gets the support or acceptance of 54% of 2015 Labour voters overall, while 24% would be angry or disappointed with such a stance. Soft-Brexit would have more support overall (57%), but for some reason it would also make more people (31%) angry. The option that gets least support or acceptance (48%) is hard-Brexit, with 35% clearly opposed. But interestingly, the option that really annoys the most people (37%) is a second referendum, which nonetheless gets the support or acceptance of 53%. Just looking at explicitly positive answers, 45% are outright positively for Remain, 42% for a second referendum, 36% for soft-Brexit and 28% for hard-Brexit.

As always, the opinion presented here is just a snapshot of raw material. There are a lot of "don't knows" and people wavering in the middle, so the field is open and malleable -- how Labour voters feel in 2020 depends a lot on how Labour's leadership campaigns here and now. There is also the question of which voters Labour wants to win over by 2020, to expand on the 2015 vote (supposing that's possible). To build in Scotland, you might fish for Remain voters. To build in provincial England, you might look for Leavers. It's a much more indeterminate and murky situation than pollsters and some pundits would have you believe, and all options have their own hazards. None are particularly good. The interesting thing is that what pisses off most voters, more than anything, is seeming indecision -- being asked to vote again on a referendum question they've already answered, or being sold a soft-Brexit that looks like a fudge. One of May's advantages is precisely to appear decisive on this question, even if her decisiveness is brutal.

And, to be clear, while it's obvious that Labour's 2015 voters skew toward Remain, the difference in the overall balance for each of these options is not massive. So, there are choices. What overall strategy Labour now decides to adopt is not primarily an issue of how to reconcile a divided base, because there are different ways to do that badly. If it opts for soft-Brexit, as it is doing, that is because it is in a purely defensive position. It is unable to advocate Remain given the result, and has no viable economic programme for any kind of left-Brexit, and none of the political or cultural resources to sustain support for such a programme.

The narrative according to which Labour's proper working class supporters are Brexiteers, and thus that Corbyn's job is to win them over, is basically one variant of the "white working class" thesis, which explains reactionary politics in terms of workers being 'left behind' by globalisation, and as such it should be rejected.

Monday, February 06, 2017

Stoke posted by Richard Seymour

Clive Lewis, with perhaps one eye auspiciously assaying the Labour leadership, claims that UKIP are dangerously close to taking Stoke Central from Labour. Ironically, in saying this as a shadow cabinet minister, he is contributing to a general media buzz that is giving UKIP far better chances than it would otherwise have. Still, I think even the multiplying villainies of hype and nonsense will not turn Stoke UKIP.

A few points to this effect.

The bookies who are predicting a UKIP victory are terribly unreliable, and there is no reliable polling about Stoke Central. The basis upon which betting shops favour UKIP is that Stoke is a Leave constituency. The trend since Brexit has indeed been for a certain realignment, but not one largely benefiting UKIP. 'Remain' Tories have tended to swing behind the Liberals, without 'Leave' Tories swinging behind UKIP. UKIP's results since 2015 have not been good. In 2015, UKIP scored 22.5% of the vote in Stoke Central, and I would expect many of these voters to go back to the Tories. To fixate on UKIP, after all, is to overlook the extraordinary efforts by Theresa May to make the Conservative Party a welcoming place for racist voters, and even to borrow some of the right-wing class politics by which UKIP have sought to cut into the working class vote.

Labour has the biggest organisation, and the biggest single bloc of votes, in Stoke. The organisation has grown under Corbyn. The candidate is no longer a posh Blairite celebrity, but is a local politician, broadly of the left. Why do we imagine, then, that urban Labour voters will do for UKIP what right-wing Tories haven't? The "white working class" has not yet proved the univocal beast of nationalist reaction that pundits have hoped for it to be -- no, not even in Oldham West, which turned out to be as much a Leave constituency as Stoke Central. Of course, there have been two major changes since Oldham West: the Brexit vote, and the Labour coup, the last following hard upon the first. We don't yet know what difference that has made. But thus far, where UKIP has made gains in northern Labour constituencies, it has primarily been by assembling a coalition of existing right-wing voters rather than by shaking loose chunks of the Labour base.

Paul Nuttall is no Nigel Farage, having neither the charisma nor the game. He is far more openly doctrinaire, far less versatile in his use of language. Yet, we are supposed to believe that he can do for UKIP in Stoke, what Nigel Farage could not in Thanet. Setting aside the kind of tactical carelessness which resulted in him being subject to a police investigation for false reporting, his strategy is implausible. He says that Richmond was won by the Liberals, because they made the bye-election a referendum on the referendum; thus, if UKIP can do the same in Stoke, then they, as the Brexitiest party, win. Richmond, a Liberal-Tory swing constituency, was about far more than that -- not least Zac Goldsmith's disgraceful mayoral campaign. The Labour vote in Stoke Central dropped from over fifty percent to under forty percent when Tristram Hunt was helicoptered in, but still it has been a Labour constituency for some decades. For it to go UKIP would require far deeper changes than anything we saw in Richmond.

However. All prediction is a defence against the future which, by definition, contains the unpredictable. IF Lewis is, by some unfortunate coincidence, right, then all calculations have to immediately change. The realignment that would imply, would signal a tectonic shift. Corbyn's leadership of the Labour Party would be at the stake, and the Left would have to gird itself for crushing defeats. Fascism would be far closer than we had realised. Racist nationalism would have won far more completely than anyone knew, trumping all. In which case, mollifying the monster for immediate gain, trying to bargain with racism, would be like trying to tame the Furies by stroking their bloody jaws. There would no faster way to be brutally disarmed.

Sunday, February 05, 2017

"Hard arguments" posted by Richard Seymour

I.
A boycott is just a tactic, like any other.

There was a fairly large protest against Trump in London yesterday, part of the ongoing wave of protests which is galvanising an otherwise despondent Left and giving it some purpose and direction. It's a good, hopeful sign that this is happening.

The catch? The protest was organised by a number of groups including, 'Stand Up to Racism', which is dominated by the SWP. And on that ground, some people sought to organise a boycott of the event. This post is about that tactic. Not the decision of individuals not to attend the protest, but the proposition that everyone should boycott it as a matter of policy, the context for it, and how that debate is handled.

II.
You remember the SWP. The SWP leadership worked to cover up rape and sexual abuse allegations. Not only did they try to cover them up but, in the process, by way of rationalisation, they began to spout utterly barbarous things. They mobilised a creaking party apparatus and an army of 'living dead' members whose sole purpose in the organisation seemed to be to defend the existing leadership by the usual amusing expedient of packing out meetings. Individuals, especially women and younger members, who stood up to this were frequently bullied. The women who made the complaints against 'Comrade Delta' were bullied, and the most extraordinary, unbelievable bureaucratic manoeuvres pulled against them.

There ensued a nasty, poisonous fight. Lifelong friendships were torn up, relationships ended, some people were threatened, others suffered serious mental and (concomitantly) physical illness, many people gave up politics, and there were two major splits, with toxic spillover. Speaking for myself, I became physically ill, and began to fall apart right in front of those who knew me -- but I was one of many. All of this very British carnage was wrought for the sake of one man who represented something that the leadership valued over almost everything else, above all the rights of female comrades not to be sexually assaulted. What that something is, is hard to express in a few words without simplifying, but it could be put as their perceived right, justified by accretions of dogma and delusion, and a certain idea of revolutionary realpolitik, to preserve ownership of the organisation by whatever means necessary.

Those of us who left the party were simultaneously dazed by the experience, and left desperately trying to work through what it all meant. That this could happen, surely said so much. We had to go back to first principles, review our entire political tradition, rethink our attitude to feminism, read up, form new alliances, and digest all the emerging ideas about 'intersectionality' and 'privilege' politics. Above all, we tried to begin the process of rebuilding. The SWP was surely dead as a viable organisation, we reasoned, and so it should be. Something else -- more democratic, more intellectually open, more honest, more feminist, less bureaucratic, less defensive, less dogmatic -- would have to emerge. Why? Because the field of the British left, at that point, was not exactly crowded with effective, democratic organisation. And without something like that, the rump SWP, with its funds and discipline, would continue to dominate the terrain, even if not to the same extent. Some of us thought it was our responsibility to try to assemble the most forward-thinking parts of the left in a new organisation.

To that end, I was one of the founders of a small splinter organisation with (for me, at least) grand ideas about realigning the left. In that false spring, many many good people approached us, wanting to work with us, and maybe even be part of anything we might set up. There was an exuberant moment of 'unity' and hope. But despite our early bouyancy, we underestimated just how fucking traumatised we all were by the shock, and how difficult what we were trying to achieve was, how small the window of opportunity and how large the obstacles. And all we did for months afterwards was tear each other to pieces, often over imaginary or overblown offences and perceived political dangers. We had been united only by our common fight against the unacceptable: rape cover-up and the sexist apologetics propagated in its defence. Beyond that, we were pulling in radically different directions and we were shocked to discover how much we hated each other. And bitterly depressed to harvest nothing but ashes for our trouble. Some time after I left that splinter, I found out that it had its own rape cover-up.

III.
I sketch out the rudiments of that experience and its afterlives, so that you understand the context for the current argument about a boycott, and also to illustrate two things very vividly.

First, not a one of us, to my knowledge, has any desire to revive the SWP. Some of us are more gung-ho about it than others. And we've often argued with what seemed to be bad tactics, especially the sort of ineffectual machismo that leads to people overturning SWP tables and so on. But no one is eager to give any new life to the zombie party, and most wouldn't go near one of the party's meetings or conferences. Speaking for myself, I take the issue of violent sexual assault very personally, and if this party has turned out to be less dead than undead, I consider that a defeat -- a byproduct of our failure to build a viable alternative. Second, experience illustrates that you can only get so far through exhortation, and being on the right side of the argument. Being right is no guarantee of success. That being the case, people who agree on a principle, have to be able to disagree on the tactic.

To return to yesterday's protest, as I said, the SWP played a leading role in organising it. And on that basis, there seems to have been a current of opinion formed around the idea of boycotting it. This would be, I think, the first time that a protest, rather than a meeting, has been targeted for a boycott for SWP involvement. I'm sceptical. Not hostile, but sceptical. Having for the last few years begged people not to speak at SWP events -- yes, effectively to boycott them, in the spirit of SWP delenda est -- I am hardly suggesting that we should cuddle up to the party. But there are a number of reasons why I think this particular kind of approach was never going to work.

I take it as read that there will always be public protests, strikes, occupations, and so on, where SWP members will be unavoidably present and sometimes even prominently involved, which we would be foolish to boycott. Even the Stop Trump march in two weeks time, preferred by today's boycotters, will have SWP members very visibly present. The issue in this case is not so much that SWP members will be there, but that the SWP has played a role in the organisation of this protest, and will try to claim as much credit for it as they can. There is also a worry about the SWP recruiting people who might then find themselves in an organisation that is not safe because it has committed itself institutionally to ideas and practices that effectively legitimise rape.

So who could argue with that? Well, the problem is that boycotting this protest wasn't going to stop people turning up. Some of us have spent a long time trying to persuade trade unionists, intellectuals and activists not to speak at SWP events or front events -- not always successfully, even with all the front page headlines and the stigma. But trying to persuade tens of thousands of random people -- who are itching to protest now, not in two weeks times, yesterday if possible -- not to show up to a public space because one of the organisers of the event is an SWP-dominated front organisation, seems inherently quixotic.

This is not because of the SWP's overweening strength. They have money, a disciplined cadre, and relationships with some leftwing politicians, trade unionists and intellectuals. However, even at the height of the SWP's influence in Stop the War, when it had far more clout and many more members than today, it didn't grow as a result. It stagnated, and declined. It went into crisis. I don't think the SWP is more powerful, attractive and dynamic today than it was back in 2003. Far from it, it is a degenerating organisation, whose ability to reproduce itself through the usual means of student and public sector recruitment is increasingly in question. It might be noisy and visible at protests, but I doubt it is recruiting very many people, and its tactics are by now stale and routinised. It is not capable of attracting the kinds of new members capable of making it an attractive organisation, even if one didn't know about its history. So, it's not the power of the SWP, but the weakness of the tactic, that indicated it would fail. Most people likely to attend just wouldn't be reached by a disorganised boycott taking shape on social media by left-wing Twitter celebrities or, if they were, persuaded not to go purely on that account.

You would thus be boycotting, not primarily the SWP, but a whole range of forces whom you probably want to work with. Of all the axes on which to try to isolate the SWP, this was surely one of the least precise, and least effective.

In the end, predictably, the protest involved far more diverse and numerous forces than the SWP. (Had it just been the SWP there, it would have involved a few hundred people.) Those who went, did so not to defend rape or cosy up to the SWP, but to volunteer for the fight against global Trumpism. And we should be glad that they want to protest: it's hardly their fault that the SWP made a cult of itself, and that we failed to replace it. And what did boycotting the protest achieve? It didn't separate the SWP from thousands of activists; it separated some of the SWP's notable critics from thousands of activists. It didn't stop anyone from joining the SWP, and indeed some of the people who might have argued with activists not to join, boycotted. And the SWP still got to say they organised a successful protest. Now people have every right to decide not to attend a protest without justifying themselves. But anything that is represented as a policy that others should support, has to be susceptible to critical scrutiny: so who won, and who lost, from that?

As I say, I'm sceptical of this tactic; I can't see how declaring a boycott in this case was ever going to work. I suspect that if we want to isolate the SWP, we're just going to have to do the hard work of building the alternative organisation and persuading people that it's better.

IV.
Note the sequel. Having mulled this subject over for a few days, and asked comrades about it, and watched the debate on social media, and been asked about it several times, I tried to sketch out this view on Twitter. I finally said that I thought people should probably go on the protest, ignore the SWP, and refuse to take their placards or literature. I said that I understood more than most why people would find the SWP problematic, but that this protest would be much bigger than the SWP, and I didn't think this boycott would work.

Trying to explain any point of view on Twitter is a perilous undertaking. Concision isn't kind to detailed arguments. There is always creative misunderstanding, people a little too quick on their high horse. There are the aggressively moronsplaining -- those who earnestly explain what you already know, without having any idea what they sound like. There are those who steamroller discussion with oblivious, unearned sanctimony, eyes closed, mouth open, without caring what they sound like. And there are those who are forever building vampire's castles in the sky.

But even bearing that in mind, the unseemly haste with which some people, who appeared to know next to nothing about it, started to issue ex cathedra denunciations was extraordinary. The gist of it was that I was supposedly saying: "ignore these silly women and their silly divisive issues, chaps, there are bigger fish to fry". In any other case, this would just be standard, high-handed, disingenuous, snarky Twitter bullshit. In context, it is jaw-droppingly oblivious.

But the symptomatically interesting thing was that many people, smart people, didn't want to admit that this was a tactical debate. In effect, they were saying, if you disagree with us on the tactic, you disagree with us on the principle. If you think this is a tactical mistake, you must not think the issue of rape apology matters. There is, by implication, no intelligent, non-sexist, non-oppressive way to disagree with the tactic of boycotting this protest -- notwithstanding that it predictably didn't work.

That is obviously not a position that can be engaged with, but it has a clearly defensive function: it says that it is disagreement with the tactic, not the tactic itself, that has to be justified. That reverses the usual situation, and it's a deflection that I've seen many times on the left. (In the argot of Trotskyist dialectics, I could never work out whether principles determined tactics, or tactics were independent from principles. It was definitely one or the other, depending on what ineffective tactic had to be defended -- by means of what was euphemistically called "hard arguments".)

And I think that's a position you get into when you're not entirely convinced of the tactic yourself, but don't really know what else to do.

Tuesday, January 31, 2017

Against omniscience posted by Richard Seymour

I.
There is a style of political reasoning which the Trump moment lends itself to, which can be called conspiracism.

The Trump base is itself galvanised by some quite outre conspiracy theories -- Obama the secret Muslim, covert socialism in the highest reaches of government, cosmopolitan elites screwing over American workers to fund the rising Asian middle class, and so on. And at times of crisis, this paranoid style can seep into all political tendencies.

Is this because, during a crisis of politics, all tendencies undergo a crisis in their forms of reproduction, and in their modes of representation? What happens, after all, when the old ways of doing things, and saying things, no longer work? We struggle for coherence, try to reassemble the pieces to make sense, to orient ourselves in action. This struggle lends itself to abbreviation. We move too quickly to totalisation, to forcing events into a coherent framework. We lose sight of the necessary openness, indeterminacy and opacity of political situations. We forget that there is always an element of chance in everything that happens, and that not everything that goes on is legible.

II.
I have written elsewhere about the logic of conspiracism, so I will only offer a précis of the argument here. To wit, conspiracism is a way of reading the tea leaves and devising patterns such that everything seamlessly fits together. And the problem with conspiracism is not that it involves 'conspiracy theories' -- everyone has their favourite conspiracy theory, and some of them are even well-founded -- but that it collapses politics into conspiracy. The networks of conspiracy do all the explanatory work, and the colossal, embedded, structuring role of social, economic, political and cultural systems are at best raw material for the conspiracy.

As such, conspiracism enacts a displacement and an externalisation, allowing us to explain complex processes, usually involving the breakdown of an old order, by reference to a simple scapegoat, which acts as a metaphor for all that has gone wrong. Unsurprisingly, this sort of thinking is classically situated in reaction -- the Spanish response to Dutch iconoclasm, Burke's response to the French revolution, endless antisemitic conspiracy theories about the Russian Revolution, Cold War paranoia about Russia, and so on. Yet, as I say, in worlds of breakdown and chaos, the tendency spreads.

We have already had, as one expression of this tendency, what Sam Kriss dubbed the "alt-centre". Unable to apprehend Trumpism by the usual expedients, many liberals adopted a Manchurian-style approach, attributing extraordinary powers to the intervention of Russia, an economic basket-case that is far weaker than the United States. Rather than bespeaking the fragility of the old political order and its complex fall-out, the weakness of the nascent Left and the exhaustion of managerialism, Trump's victory tokened a Russian coup -- a comical reiteration of Cold War paranoia. And there is a danger of "the resistance" to Trump forming an "alt-" wing.

III.
Here are two popular recent articles which, lucidly enough, ultimately boil down to this case: the Trump administration is playing us all for suckers. They expected these protests and the judicial opposition. They are testing the ground, seeking out their allies and smoking out enemies, exhausting public opposition, exaggerating their objectives in order to beat a safe retreat. We, pawns in their little game, are giving them what they want by demonstrating and raising as much vocal opposition as we can.

This style of reasoning is problematic for many reasons. Not the least of these is that it can be politically paralysing. Resistance is taken to be already seamlessly factored into the strategy of the Trump administration, and yet there is no obviously concomitant strategy for circumventing this. But that is a reason why the conclusions following from the argument are problematic, not an explanation of why the argument itself is flawed.

The more substantial problem with the argument is that it makes an assumption of omniscience. You may well claim that sizeable demonstrations and judicial and legislative opposition were a predictable response to hastily imposed executive orders, introduced without any consultation with state actors, and without even providing them with the information they needed to actually implement the policy effectively. However, no one anticipated that three to four million would protest during the inauguration weekend, nor that there would be protests (in many cases illegal) at airports all over the country. To have foreseen all this would indeed be to experience a kind of omniscience, accessing a total reading of all the tendencies, subjective and objective, unfolding at breakneck pace now, in a vast, intricate and unusually unpredictable social order.

It might be argued that I'm straw-manning here. That these pieces concede that the administration acted as it did precisely because it lacked important information, and has been engaging in an elaborate, carefully phased experiment with the American political system to get this insight. This seems more superficially plausible, but only until you ask how Bannon and the Trump inner circle were supposed to be able to calibrate everything such that the opposition would fall out exactly as they needed it to. This necessarily implies a degree of legibility in societies that cannot be assumed. It would be as if American (and therefore global) politics were basically an elaborate three-dimensional chess game, in which all the information needed to calculate is all there for those sharp enough to read it.

IV.
It is because we don't have omniscience that we need the guidance of theory. We need to have some criteria of interpretation, axioms against which to judge concrete situations. That is why we should pay close attention to the theories of the "alt-right".

Just to take one example, Bannon subscribes to a peculiar theory of American history according to which, for reasons which are unclear, it experiences a major crisis every eighty years or so, in which it is possible to radically remake the social order. The current crisis of politics, coming roughly eighty years since the New Deal era, is thus read as the proof of that theory. (Alarmingly enough, Bannon, now freshly ensconced in the National Security Council, takes this to mean a major global war, bigger than the last world war.) This is the basis for Bannon's confidence in action, but also his urgency -- since there is only a limited historical window in which to act before the initiative passes to someone else, or the crisis runs out of steam.

This makes Bannon, not a master manipulator, but a dangerous mystic and a gambler. He might as well base his actions on the idea that the crisis betokens Rapture. This is not to say that he is stupid. The obverse of conspiracy theory is the complacent view that the Trump team are straightforwardly incompetent. Their lack of professionalism by the usual standards of statecraft, from this perspective, allows one to think that they must not know what they are doing, and will destroy themselves with their own hubris. This misses the fact that all political intervention involves a roll of the dice somewhere, and the metapolitical assumptions guiding every wager are usually founded on a faith of some kind. The very fact that mass protest, acting on and exacerbating divisions in the ruling class and state elites (as occurs with all successful social movements), could not be anticipated means that it was not inevitable.

It is to say that any account of politics that does not make room for the aleatory, that is for the encounter between fortune and a politician's virtù, will either tend to collapse into fatalism or conspiracism, or some combination of the two. Either way, we will not see what tremendous risks the Trump administration is taking, or understand why they've raised the stakes so high, so early.

Sunday, January 29, 2017

Under the sign of Saturn, a movement is born. posted by Richard Seymour

There has been non-stop chaos in the American state since Trump took office. This is partly, but not primarily, a matter of incompetence. There is no doubt that these moves could have been prepared for a lot better by the incoming Trump team.

Yet, I think it is also a deliberate offensive, the chaos a welcome element in the attempt to disorient enemies within the state apparatuses and, by forcing a rupture in which normal rules are suspended, change the balance of forces condensed in the state. The promotion of Bannon, a mere fascist propagandist before he had Trump's ear, to the National Security Council is an extraordinary manifestation of this. The joint chiefs of staff and director of national intelligence are being sidelined. The State Department has been purged of figures likely to impede Trump's objectives, even at the cost of leaving the bureaucracy dysfunctional. Clearly, the administration inner circle is looking to assemble their allies within the deep state quickly, both to forestall any challenge to their own operations and to advance their countersubversive goals. The New York Post gets the idea: "A clean sweep may mean some chaos — but a new start has virtues of its own."

But planned chaos might still be a strategic blunder. All the signs have been that while Trump is an excellent salesperson and orator, he has none of the qualities one would need to run a capitalist-democratic state. He can't hope to run these bureaucracies like the Trump Organization, relying on a trusted inner circle to advise him. The American state is probably the most bloated, labyrinthine bureaucracy in the whole world. It is necessarily a fissiparous institution riven by factions and the play of opposing forces. While the state is necessarily a state 'under law' (so that a degree of predictability is imposed by judicial reasoning, unfolding from established legal axioms), it must also be a disciplined apparatus. And that discipline comes from the political direction of the executive. Or is supposed to.

In the absence of that, Trump risks a backlash from within the state.

II.

Trump's 'executive actions' were designed as both propaganda and deed. They gave the appearance to his base of decisiveness, of winning, of so much winning that they're going to get sick of winning. They also risked actually winning. There was no guarantee that any significant resistance would appear, and they already began to have a material impact on people rounded up at airports -- which can be quite frightening places in normal times.

And there was certainly no guarantee that any part of the ruling class would lash back. The interesting thing about the US ruling class response to Trump has been its bifurcation. On the one hand, seemingly gracious concession of his legitimacy, pleas to 'give him a chance'; and on the other hand, quite a crazed campaign against (dixit Keith Olbermann) "RUSSIAN SCUM!" The former, indicated by Clinton and others who cheerfully joined Trump's Imperial Death March inauguration gala, has run out of steam remarkably quickly. Although it was strong enough to ensure that Trump's nominees were voted through, including the extraordinary Betsy DeVos and the very dangerous southern reactionary, Jeff Sessions.

The latter, while popular with certain game theory types, is not the sort of perspective that could sustain a mass movement. In fact, it could be quite ruinous. In the first instance, because it depends on the actions of deep state agencies which are of course utterly untrustworthy, it risks making people passively indignant rather than stirring them to action. Secondly, because it would involve an undemocratic challenge rather than a democratic encirclement of Trump and his Philistine Army, it would likely energise the right-wing, give them reasons to experiment with new tactics of disruption and terror. It would legitimise all that incipient militia-type energy.

And yet, a mass opposition has emerged. The inauguration of Donald Trump was closely followed an unexpectedly huge women's march, maybe including 3 to 4 million protesters across the country. By the accounts of participants, it was energising. It gave people a sense of their power. Millions who would never attend a protest in their lives, suddenly had a sense that they could actually do something about this. And if about this, why not other things? Why not, indeed, Black Lives Matter, as many people have been suggesting?

Now, the implementation of the 'Muslim ban' has provoked protests at airports across the United States. These have been mostly illegal gatherings, act of civil disobedience. They are ongoing today, and there is another protest taking place in the capital. Suddenly, masses of white people are protesting for Muslim Lives Matter. An excellent start. This dynamic has given confidence to the ACLU, which has thrown its clout into a serious legal challenge to the 'Muslim ban' -- ultimately successful.

Of course, the effect of the Trump victory can be seen in the fact that some law enforcement officers ignored the ruling and acted on what they interpreted as the effect of Trump's executive order anyway. The re-deployment of legal/police networks, will rely on key actors willing to resist orders from the courts, or at least passively circumvent them. Nonetheless, the attempted blitzkrieg in the apparatuses hasn't stopped bourgeois legality from being effective yet. The Department of Homeland Security has indicated that it will comply with the court's ruling.

This indicates the problem with Trump trying to exacerbate fissures in the state too quickly. He has over-reached. It is not he, but his opposition who now seem most able to exploit these fissures. He also over-reaches in continuing his war with the capitalist media, which are sources of powerful institutional legitimacy, closely looped into the reproduction of the state. (Indeed, following Althusser, we should just say that media apparatuses are state apparatuses.) He behaves as if he has an alternative source of political authority outside the state, an alternative ideological legitimacy capable of rivalling CNN and the New York Times. He doesn't. He is premature in that respect.

We await the backlash, and there is a degree of unpredictability in this situation. There are fascist potentialities here, and they are alarming in their current proximity to governing power. But thus far, I would suggest that Trump has played his hand badly, not well. If things continue like this, I don't rate his chances of achieving the $10 trillion cuts he is seeking.

III.

There remains the question of Trump's overseas alliances. There is, of course, a global dynamic of which Trump's success is only one part. The latest Salvage perspectives puts it like this:

"Not since 1943 has there been a better time to be a fascist. The ‘liberal order’, the demise of which has been the subject of ruling-class hot takes for some years now, does indeed appear to be in a shabby state. Trump’s election – on which more within this issue – follows on from the vote for Brexit as a body blow to the politics of the ‘extreme centre’ in the very lands in which it was born. Victory for the far-right Freedom party in Austria’s presidential election was very narrowly averted: should Marine Le Pen win the forthcoming French presidential contest, against which no sensible punter would now bet, the resulting scrap of hard-won relief will evaporate. Then the UN security council will be led by the fascist- through hard-right of US, French and British politics, plus the distinct market-Stalinisms of Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. In the second rank will be the hard-right Narendra Modi of India, and the Brazilian inheritors of a soft coup for austerity. This is not a world in which it is growing easier for workers to organise economic self-defence, or develop political organisations to achieve class demands."

There are some sources of liberal opposition. Angela Merkel has criticised Trump's 'Muslim ban'. Hollande is critical, though he is almost dead and it won't matter if his successor is Marine Le Pen -- as it probably would be if the choice were between Fillon and her. Justin Trudeau, whose record on refugees is nowhere near as good as his reputation, has been hammering Trump these last few days: and such statements matter. They will matter more so if Canadian social movements compel him to reverse recent policies that would make a nonsense of his promise to take in refugees denied by Trump. Trudeau, notably, is one of the few surviving liberal leaders because he pitched to the left, and spoke in an anti-austerity language.

Where, though, is Britain in all this? Under May, it is trying to have its Trump and eat it. May, despite flirting with the Trumpian register, is neither a protectionist nor an isolationist. She wants Britain to play its traditional role in supporting global liberalism of the Washington variety, and for that needs the US to continue its role in managing globalisation. Her plan for hardcore Brexit depends on it, and she cares about this far more than about sentimental ideas of human rights.

However, while she may have thought she ducked a punch by refusing to comment on Trump's 'relations with Mexico', and tetchily having 'no opinion' on his policy against refugees, she made a big mistake. She invited Donald Trump on an official state visit to the United Kingdom, a chump move that has provoked a gale of fury and a petition supporting Corbyn's demand that Trump be banned for as long as the 'Muslim ban' is in place -- which is currently signed by more than half a million people. If Trump comes to the UK, he will be met by large numbers of protesters, probably anywhere he goes; if the invitation is rescinded, it will be the first victory Corbyn has enjoyed over May. May has been forced to claim she now disagrees with Trump's refugee policy, but has painted herself into an unsightly corner.

IV.

The anti-Trump protests on the inauguration weekend were global in spread, but concentrated in those parts of the world most closely tied to the US through military alliance, trade, political history and culture, above all in Europe and North America. That makes a certain sense. Trump is, as the fatuous phrase goes, "the leader of the free world" now. He has assumed command of a set of global relationships and institutions backed by US political, diplomatic, economic and military power. He leads a state that has penetrated other, allied states across the world. As such, whatever he can get away with is potentially epoch-making for all countries most closely bound up in those relationships -- for the shape of their class politics, the forms of their state legitimacy, the plausibility of racist nationalism and of outright fascist options, etc.

Still, as we have learned, Trump was actually serious about sending the army to steal Iraq's oil, serious about reconstituting the black sites programme (despite opposition from within his cabinet), serious about his sinophobia, and serious about his flirtation with Putin. This is going to lead, if he isn't deposed in favour of Mike Pence at some point soon, to a serious and unpredictable and dangerous international conflagration. One wonders if, more than even Bush did, Trump will summon into being world public opinion as a genuine counterpower.