ANTI-POLITICS:
ON THE DEMONIZATION OF
IDEOLOGY, AUTHORITY AND
THE STATE

ELIANE GLASER

ANTI-POLITICS:
ON THE DEMONIZATION OF
IDEOLOGY, AUTHORITY AND
THE STATE

ELIANE GLASER

In memory of Mark Fisher

‘What is happening to us in the early years of the century is something that would appear not to have any clear name in any accepted language.’

Alain Badiou, The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings

‘The old gods are aging or are already dead, and others are not yet born.’

Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life

Introduction

This book started life five years ago, when I started observing and commenting on a set of emergent tendencies: the disavowal of ideology, the rise of populism, and a profound confusion surrounding political authority, the kind of democracy we want, and the role of the state in the twenty-first century. It seemed to me that these tendencies were interrelated. They were about a widespread opposition to politics – or at least politics as we know it. They embodied a general sense that our system has become outmoded, defunct and obsolete. And they expressed an uncertainty about whether politics could be revived – and what possible form that could take.

And then, of course, these tendencies burst into the mainstream. Populism is suddenly everywhere, and anti-politicians have taken charge. An American president has set about dismantling the institutions of government. A British MP has been murdered and many others have faced trolling and threats. Westminster is crumbling, literally and metaphorically. Parliamentary democracy is a hollow sham. Professionalised and robotic MPs mouth a series of indistinguishable and mangled propositions. The public is cynical and disengaged. Traditional class identities and affiliations are breaking down. What was once a coherent public conversation on policy issues is fragmenting, as newspaper readership dwindles. Following the shock result of the EU referendum, Parliament has been cowed by a pernicious compound of oligarchy and majoritarianism.

When I began work on this book, the trend towards post-politics was coming from the marketised post-democracy of the neoliberal Right, but also from the radical Left – from what Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek call ‘folk politics’: alternative democratic experiments and the deliberate refusal to make demands. Neoliberalism is now combined with a virulent right-wing populism, and this is both destroying mainstream politics and taking it over. Yet we saw signs of hope in the 2017 general election, with Jeremy Corbyn making unexpected gains, and public opinion shifting to the left. Suddenly it seemed that formal politics was not defunct after all. The implications of this have not yet been absorbed and incorporated on the Left. One of the central contentions of this book is that the Left needs to think in a joined-up way about the relationship between marginal and mainstream politics, and not consign the latter, iconoclastically, to the dustbin. After all, if the political system is a dinosaur, why is it now coming back to life?

With events moving so fast, any book about the state of politics is a hostage to fortune. Yet I believe that to give up on writing about the big picture is to accept that our only possible mode is fire-fighting. If we only write about politics in journalistic form, our commentary will be restricted to the topical and the reactive – we won’t see the wood for the trees. In the all-consuming and all-erasing daily news churn, as Guardian readers reload the homepage once again and Twitter users scroll down their feeds, it’s difficult to get hold of the subtext – to feel situated in a historical moment; to grasp how we got to be in this predicament and what its characteristics signify in the grand scheme of things. This book is a reflective intervention at a critical juncture. It makes the case that we need to ask the big questions, think clearly and anatomise our impasse if we are to strategise our way out of it.

Because for all the commentary about politics in the media and the public conversation, I don’t think we really know how to answer or even frame some fundamental questions. Why has politics, as a ‘thing’, become so toxic that a member of Tony Blair’s cabinet, Charles Falconer, could promote the ‘depoliticising of key decision-making’?¹ If we are all desperate for some sincere idealism in politics, why has the word ‘ideological’ become an insult? If politicians of all stripes and campaigners alike now advocate for grassroots community and local autonomy, what role is left for the public sphere and the state? What is the right size for a jurisdiction: local, national, European, global? What is democracy, rightly understood: representative, or direct and participatory? Does authority have any rightful place in politics? In a postmodern age when history itself seems to have ended and grand narratives seem a thing of the past, is the ‘death of politics’ an inevitable sign of the times; or is it the result of careful right-wing manoeuvring? In other words, is post-politics disproportionately affecting the Left? And is politics per se dead, or just its traditional form? This book attempts to offer some answers, or at least to crystallise the big questions that lie beneath these dynamic, baffling times.

* * *

It’s curiously difficult to encapsulate in words what’s happening to politics. In part, this is because so much of it – Brexit, Trump and so on – was not predicted. This is in itself dismaying: after nearly four decades of neoliberal dominance, why would people assume the situation was set to improve? Yet although such events may have seemed unthinkable in political and journalistic discourse, in literature, film and TV the dystopian despot is a tired staple – from Citizen Kane to The Simpsons. The media has not built up its capacity to anticipate and critique these figures; yet they are also somehow too clichéd to even parody. Furthermore, the protagonists we wish to lambast have already got there with the self-aware irony: Donald Trump has said that his own favourite film is Citizen Kane – a Putin-esque theatrical reflexivity that makes critics look po-faced.

Furthermore, journalistic commentary can’t help but take on the received terminology of the day, which is opaque, circular and constrained by the ‘Overton window’, a concept defined by the political scientist Joseph Overton as the range of ideas the public will accept. As the philosopher Roberto Unger notes, the Overton window is not in reality fixed; it’s ‘a bastardised conception of political realism which is proximity to the existent’.² The word ‘Brexit’ is an example of this – a word that gains currency, validation and meaning it doesn’t deserve through frequent political and journalistic usage. It characteristically combines the mangled zombie lexicon of Westminster briefings with the veneer of vernacular informality. Deploying the accepted terminology defines you as part of the conversation, but the conversation is not connected to any theoretical or historically contextualised understanding of what is going on. So much of what we see around us is paradoxical – the people just want to see the system shaken up on the one hand, or the people just want a confident leader on the other. The media deals alternately in these utterly opposed clichés, without joining the dots and questioning the cognitive dissonance.

In my previous book, Get Real, I wrote about how political language – particularly the language of the Right – not only obscures reality but turns it on its head; often by co-opting progressive language. The strategic use of concepts like ‘engagement’, ‘participation’, ‘people-power’, ‘authenticity’ and ‘revolution’ signal this manoeuvre. The Conservatives are now the self-proclaimed representatives of ‘ordinary, working people’. In addition to these Orwellian and Humpty-Dumpty inversions, many contemporary political phenomena are reaction formations: equal and opposite responses to the overriding reality. So if there appears to be an upsurge of nationalism, this is taken at face value as a contemporary phenomenon, when in fact it is also a response to the breakdown of the nation state as a unit of jurisdiction. The prevailing tendency is sometimes the reverse of what we see.

The difficulty of getting a handle on the current situation and providing an effective critique is compounded, therefore, by the fact that many of our political problems masquerade as the solution. The new breed of authoritarian right-wing populists – Steve Bannon, Robert Mercer, Nigel Farage – pose as new brooms, sweeping away unaccountable leadership, the chronic neglect of working-class communities, political spin and the decline of rigorous journalism. Donald Trump tweets: ‘The media is FAKE’ and asks ‘Are we living in Nazi Germany?’ Trump causes outrage, but he thrives on outrage. Similarly, the ubiquitous journalistic commentary on ‘post-truth politics’ appears to analyse and counter the problem, but it actually serves to normalise it, compounding it further. The populist anti-politics we have now is the symptom and the fake remedy in a single package. So in order to write or talk about this surreal era it’s necessary to first undertake the labour of translating the accepted terms into their real meanings.

* * *

It may seem ironic that the subject of this book is anti-politics. It sometimes feels in fact as if we are saturated with politics – what some have called ‘permalection’. As Brenda from Bristol has said, ‘There’s too much politics going on at the moment’. For me this is not a sign that politics is alive and well, but rather an unhealthy rearguard action, indicative of a lack of confidence on the part of politicians, who keep asking for reassurance and verification from the public. Politics is in a bad way, but – as I’ll argue in this book – while the solution is not more elections, it’s not anti-politics either.

At the same time, since the financial crash of 2008– 09, there has been a resurgence of positive political energy, particularly on the Left. That is what prompted me to get involved in political activities and indeed to begin work on this book. One of my central arguments, however, is that unless these groupings abandon the anti-political and post-political tendencies that have become dominant in recent years, they will not make meaningful headway, and they will not endure.

Of course, we are not and cannot ever be post politics. Politics pervades every aspect of public and private life. We couldn’t get beyond it if we tried. Politics is in every choice, every obstacle, every act of pulling rank and every gentle nudge. It’s in the courtroom and the canteen, the boardroom and the bedroom. But somehow, we have come to hate politics as a thing, and also to declare that it is dead. This combination of statements is contradictory. If it is dead, why should we have to hate it, or kill it off? But that is axiomatic of political and public discourse now: we say ‘the elites’ or ‘deference’ have had their day, that they are obsolete dinosaurs; yet that is a pretext to knocking them off their pedestals. If they are already obsolete, why should we have to attack them?

I have always been hooked on politics. Not in the sense of addiction, or even attraction, but in the sense of a hook, a snag. When you can see something as political, it has purchase – it has bite. I’ve always got immediately interested when you can look at a statement or a stance – particularly when it’s framed as neutral and unmotivated – and say, actually, that’s political – meaning that the situation has political dynamics; it’s animated by identifiable positions and agendas. Things come alive: they have meaning and differentiation.

In this book I am going to argue that although it’s impossible to be beyond politics, our antipathy towards politics as a category, and the parlous state of politics in its organised form, is detrimental to us humans in our individual and collective lives. In some ways, this book echoes the defence of politics by the late political theorist Bernard Crick in his 1962 classic, In Defence of Politics, which argued that – with all its messy compromises – politics is still the best and only defence against despotism; although I depart from Crick’s rejection of ideology. Crick’s book was updated for the modern political scene by the politics professor Matthew Flinders in his 2012 book of a similar name.

It’s true that politics has become so remote, abstract, dreary and masculine that we’ve forgotten what the word even means in its neutral state. As the OED reminds us, politics means a lot of different things. It’s the business of governing, it’s about leadership and about how power is organised, it’s about the distribution of resources and – via the state – the provision of services. It’s about the structure of power relations and the play of power dynamics. And it’s also about division and debate, sets of beliefs or principles, and competing visions of how the world should be. It’s about agency and solidarity, but also the disagreements that animate us and define who we are and who we are not.

The concept of politics takes us into really fundamental territory: the relationship between words and meanings. Perhaps more than other words, the word ‘politics’ – along with the word ‘democracy’ – describes a de facto arrangement or system. It’s rather like the ‘Overton window’ – what comes to be regarded as a set of acceptable policies. But at the same time, politics is also – confusingly – supremely abstract. It describes a theoretical blueprint that could come into being if the will and the vision were there. Could we collectively transform politics so that it came to mean agency and solidarity, and creative and idealistic change; or is there actually something fundamental about politics to do with grubby power struggles and a pragmatic cheapening and the corruption of idealism that defines its essential nature?

Curiously, politics is both the reality and the analysis of that reality. It defines the status quo and how we critique the status quo – as well as how we transform the status quo into something better. If we are post politics, we are post all these things: we’ve given up on government as a way of running our society, on visions of how the world could and should be, on beliefs and principles. And we have given up on power analysis, the ability to call attention to the disavowed forces that dominate our world. We need to remember what politics is, to realise what we’ve lost. Anti-politics throws into relief what politics is, and why it’s intrinsically valuable. Of course, those who critique our system would not necessarily say they are post politics per se, but – as I’ll argue in this book – there’s often a practical and a theoretical slippage between the two that needs addressing.

* * *

Since we no longer seem to know what politics is, we fail to distinguish between what it is and what it has become. Should we regard the system we currently have as politics proper, or is it a corruption of what politics should be, in its true nature? Did politics used to be better, and how does that sit with our powerful sense that things always improve over time? Does improving politics mean taking it back to an earlier state, to some neutral mean, or imagining it anew? Those who criticise our current politics and politicians don’t seem to know whether the problem with politics is inherent or circumstantial: whether the system needs taking over, or replacing altogether. This ambiguity is paralysing our attempts to identify both problems and solutions.

The following chapters will address these vital questions. And they will explore the prospects for detoxifying and rejuvenating politics, so that it can once again function as a tool with which to create a better world. I will consider whether post-politics is about being post politics as it is currently practiced, or being post politics as a formal category – entering a future which regards itself – dangerously in my view – as being devoid of politics. Right-wing populism has taken us into that era, at least ostensibly; it is open to question whether a resurgent Left is reintroducing politics, ideology and indeed history to the public conversation. As I’ve said, politics is very much alive, whether overt or covert – and we will always need it. But it’s tainted in a way that seems to threaten its very existence. What is not yet clear is whether it needs to be restored, redefined or reinvented from scratch.

These issues have been addressed by a number of political and cultural theorists of a left-wing persuasion, such as the late Mark Fisher, Slavoj Žižek, Jodi Dean, Wendy Brown, David Graeber, Jeremy Gilbert, Nina Power, Erik Swyngedouw, Aaron Bastani, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams. But to the general public they remain largely opaque. As far as more mainstream political theory is concerned, it is often dry and detached from radical theory, from the public and from politics as a practiced business and a vital force. As the philosopher Lorna Finlayson argues in The Political Is Political, political philosophy has itself been depoliticised, along with the rest of the world. Political theory is not, furthermore, in the habit of perceiving politics from the outside, as a category – and this is especially important at a time when politics as a category is reviled by the public and is suffering an existential crisis.

While this book is influenced by the thinkers I’ve just mentioned, it does not offer a digest of the relevant theory and it is not formally situated within that body of work. Instead, I offer a fresh perspective as someone who is trained in detecting and identifying tendentious strategies and hidden agendas, and who has spent the last five years analysing and participating in a number of left-wing campaigning and think-tank groups – often in and around Compass and the New Economics Foundation. I have absorbed and contributed to debates about ideology, democracy, leadership and strategy. My experience has provided me, therefore, with an unusual vantage point from both inside and outside left-wing organisations from which to examine the advent and nature of anti-politics and post-politics, and assess the prospects for politics’ renewal. My focus is primarily the UK and the US, but I will also refer to other countries in Europe, and beyond.

One of this book’s central themes is that while anti-politics and post-politics are in some ways general trends, they appear to be impacting the Left in particular. Compounding this, I will argue, is that the Left’s response to what’s happening is often inadequate, even counterproductive; in some ways it has played straight into the Right’s hands, unwittingly reflecting and contributing to the very anti-political tendencies that are so limiting to the Left. I discuss the shortcomings of the Left’s current modes of operation and the options for its future.

Can we begin to see an alternative, positive meaning of post-politics: taking politics beyond the current stalemate and into new and different forms? The fascinating paradox about politics is that it’s about dry structures and institutions, but also about the explosive energy that disrupts them when they are revealed to be inadequate. Likewise, post-politics – and anti-politics – represents the apparent death of politics, but also its possible rebirth. Is it the case that these apparently destructive trends signal the return of politics proper – that the post-political is the most political?³

* * *

Each chapter of this book is an iteration of its central premise – that our critique of what has happened to our political system has come to cloud our view of the system itself. We are witnessing a perfect storm in which the big institutions – those of politics but also the media, culture and higher education – have been corrupted by finance power and marketisation, and at the same time, the Right has turned the public against those institutions when they are at their most vulnerable. Public anger is directed, therefore, at the effects of the problem rather than the cause. In response, we need to not throw the baby out with the bathwater and junk support for those institutions, but rather to strengthen and reclaim them.

As I’ll argue, there are a number of ways we can attempt to get beyond post-politics. First, we need to understand the insidious workings of neoliberalism, which are virulently political and anti-political at the same time. Neoliberalism has placed both past precedents and macro solutions seemingly out of bounds. In response, we need to think deeply about key questions of temporality, history and progress – to decide whether we need to restore politics proper, or whether politics – and the Left – needs to be transformed into something new. As well as thinking temporally, the Left needs to start thinking structurally and spatially. We need to resist the neoliberal depoliticising drive towards fragmentation and think about organisation, co-ordination and jurisdiction. While the Right denounces politics yet quietly takes it over, the Left stops at denouncing it. We need to think collectively, holistically and strategically; and distinguish between what is really obsolete and redundant, and what has been unfairly rendered so by the Right. If we are to remake politics for new times, how can we find a new language with which to articulate it; one that is palatable to a jaded public?

I begin by analysing our current anti-political and depoliticised predicament; in particular, the rise of populism. I then describe how we got to be in this situation, and critique elements of the Left’s response. The next four chapters focus on areas where I believe the Left has to rethink its position in order to get beyond our apparently post-political malaise: authority, the state, democracy and ideology. I conclude by assessing possible pathways to a better political future. ‘It’s time for a new politics’ is a regular refrain in political and journalistic commentary, but what are the grounds for this actually coming into being? And is newness even really what we need?

CHAPTER ONE

Our Populist Predicament

Populism is the primary symptom of anti-politics, post-politics and also politics’ revival. It has erupted all over the world, from Nigel Farage to Donald Trump, France’s Marine Le Pen to the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders, Hungary’s Viktor Orban to Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and India’s Narendra Modi to Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Yet there’s still relatively little widespread understanding of what populism is, and why it emerged everywhere at around the same time.⁴

Populism is a curiously mercurial phenomenon to grasp. What is the difference between democracy – which after all means rule by the people – and populism? Is right-wing populism qualitatively different from the left-wing version? What’s the relationship between populism and authoritarian and charismatic rule? And what’s distinctively new about contemporary populism?

As frequent references to Hitler remind us, populism has been around for a while. The word was first used in the late nineteenth century to describe the left-wing People’s Party that emerged out of agricultural communities in America in response to economic turmoil and rampant inequality. These populists championed small farmers who believed that the banks and big corporations had seized control of America’s government. They advocated nationalising railroads and strengthening union power. In the twentieth century, the term populism was co-opted as a rhetorical tool by Hitler, Mussolini and Juan Peron. There are some parallels between the disingenuous right-wing populism of early twentieth-century fascism and the contemporary phenomena of Tea Party Astroturf campaigns, blue-collar conservatism and Trump’s demagogic tendencies. But it’s important to be precise about the similarities and differences. Unless we understand the relationship between then and now, we won’t really know what political moment we are in.

Politics seems to have been completely transformed in the last five years, but actually the right-wing populism that we see around us has been here for a while – it was there in Thatcher’s lower-middle-class posturing, Rupert Murdoch’s instrumental iconoclasm and John Major standing on his soap box in Luton high street. There does seem to have been a gear change following the Great Recession, which fits with the fact that populism tends to emerge at times of economic crisis. Contemporary populism also seems to be a response to seemingly unprecedented conditions: globalisation, financialisation and post-ideology. Populism traditionally has a cyclical relationship with democracy: it emerges whenever the system of representation atrophies; when the bottom-up levers of influence start to fail. But this seems to be a particularly anti-political or post-political reaction. So have we, in our general turn away from history, forgotten past precedents; or is it really different this time around? Does twenty-first-century populism, in its ubiquity, betoken the dying gasps of politics as we know it? And is populism doing away with a system of representation that’s had its day, or is it reinvigorating that system, insisting that it function in the way it was intended?

A central theme of this book is the ambiguity surrounding political roles themselves on the one hand, and the people occupying those roles on the other; about the structures and the way those structures have been distorted and corrupted. In this chapter I argue that in its combative stance towards the political system as a whole, populism prevents us from distinguishing between the elements of the system that are valuable, and those that need to be reformed or replaced; and that it diverts us from the important task of bringing left-wing people and politics into that system.

* * *

Political orientations were once mapped onto economic interests. There was a clear, productive opposition between right and left, rich and poor, capital and labour. But in the new political era defined first by triangulation and post-ideology, and now by Brexit and Trump, those old divisions have given way to the confected and corrosive opposition between ‘the people’ and ‘the elites’. Populism relies upon and promotes a mythic construct: it imagines ‘the people’ to be a homogenous group, without internal political divisions, defined in opposition to either a corrupt elite or to outsiders. Left-wing populism correctly identifies the problem that whereas the political system should dis interestedly represent the interests of rich versus poor, in practice, the system itself has been captured by the rich. Left populists define the ‘other’, therefore, as the corrupt elite. Right-wing populists also attack the political elite, but their critique is drained of economics: they have no problem with political leaders who are rich – the problem is with political office itself. Right-wing populism is triadic: it’s aimed downwards at outsiders who are immigrants, but also upwards at the political elite who supposedly harbour and mollycoddle them.

In the era of right-wing populism, the super-rich masquerade as the friends of the (working) poor, whose legitimate grievances are weaponised not against the real elites but against the already squeezed middle. The populist Right have co-opted a legitimate critique of money and power and converted it into a vicious anti-intellectualism, a bullying attack on ‘experts’, professionals, academics and journalists. Those who think for a living, uphold the rule of law and hold power to account are now framed as ‘enemies of the people’. The populist Right have also converted a critique of corporate and economic domination into an attack on politics itself. This strategy underpinned Trump’s inauguration speech: ‘For too long’, the supposed buffoon shrewdly intoned, ‘a small group in our nation’s capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have bore the cost. Washington flourished, but the people did not share in its wealth. Politicians prospered but the jobs left and the factories closed’.⁵ The spotlight of public criticism is thus turned away from financial elites and onto political elites; and in particular, the Left, because it embodies a kind of statist support system that is designed to help people, but is framed by the Right as patronising. Thus the critical response to economic inequality is directed at the very people who work to eradicate that injustice. In this new, topsy-turvy world, the implication is that a ‘liberal elite’ is riding high and must be humbled, as if the Right had not been overwhelmingly dominant over the last four decades in the West. Politics itself is framed and denounced as left-wing.

According to one definition, an elite is a member of the privileged class who believes themselves to be intrinsically superior to everyone else. But in its original meaning it referred simply to a set of elected representatives. Politicians are indeed nowadays drawn from a narrow and privileged background – but it doesn’t have to be that way. This subjective reality doesn’t necessarily mean we should dismiss politicians’ roles and authority out of hand. Populism is essentially reactive; it lives in the moment and is unable to state whether it is pragmatically or inherently anti-political.

The problem with our politics is twofold. It is remote, unresponsive, unaccountable. And it is right-wing. This distinction is rarely made, yet it is essential. We must be able to distinguish between the system and the political allegiance of those who currently dominate that system. But politicians and journalists routinely state that ‘Right’ and ‘Left’ are no longer meaningful categories. That removes a vital plank from any analysis. And it has enabled the rise of the populist Right, who have managed to convince everyone that the problem we have is the political system itself rather than right-wing monopoly, social injustice and the prevalence of financial and corporate interests; that the reason why the Democrats lost the 2016 US election was because they were elitist politicians. And this has left us with no way to recapture politics or reimagine it, apart from abolishing it altogether. Instead of being anti-right, we are anti-politics. It’s true that people are not being represented, listened to or involved in the political process. It’s true that there is great social and economic inequality. But although these are overlapping problems, they are not the same. And if we get rid of politics, we won’t be able to tackle inequality.

Representation used to be a political function; now it’s regarded as symbolic: when the right-wing press tells us that Jeremy Corbyn doesn’t ‘represent’ working-class voters, they are trying to shift the emphasis from ideology to cultural values: they are saying that what matters is not sharing the same principles, but sharing the same lifestyle and views on gay marriage. And whereas culture divides, money seemingly doesn’t: so a billionaire property tycoon can be seen to ‘represent’ blue-collar workers. The defining categories of Right and Left, rich and poor are still there, and still real – albeit refracted by complexities of identity. But they are obscured by these new confected divisions and alliances. Right-wing populism takes grains of truth – the neoliberalism of the EU, the corruption of parliamentary democracy, the strain on public services – and uses these to construct a through-the-looking-glass world where everything is turned on its head. Right-wing populism takes the healthy left-wing antibodies that should be fighting inequality and injustice, and it turns them against the body politic.

Populism is the primary symptom of our political crisis, therefore, but it manifests as the cure. It appears to reengage people with politicians, as finally they can vote for leaders who appear to have purchase. Populism does represent a genuine and urgent desire to rescue politics’ essence and vitality from the forces that are distorting and occluding it – corporate interests, bureaucracy, managerialism and institutional stasis. The point is, as I’ll go on to argue, that there are good institutional checks and balances as well as bad institutional ossification. In a vicious circle, populism unleashes a public attack on government, government then shrinks the state by outsourcing public services to unaccountable private companies, and the act of privatisation necessitates the introduction of unelected quangos to regulate the companies now running everything. People then react against the resulting de-democratisation and technocracy, which leads to ever-louder attacks on government, and more disillusionment with politics. The strategically useful critique of the neoliberal distortion of democracy is displaced by an assault on democracy itself.

* * *

Many commentators have struggled to interpret the emergence of populism on left and right. Its bipolar manifestation has been mistakenly interpreted as a sign of the decline of Left and Right as meaningful categories. The opposite is the case. Populism is a response to the denigration of right and left ideology in political discourse – it represents a kind of distorted yet powerful desire for ideological commitment and expression. Populists appear to say what they mean, and this comes as a great relief in an age in which media training suppresses any statement of ideological belief or intent, producing near-identical, bland slogans about economic security and hard-working families. One definition of charisma is saying in public what everyone is thinking in private. Under populism, saying the unsayable, the freedom to cause offence, becomes a stand-in for ideological commitment. We think we want authenticity, but we really want sincere ideology. People tend to assume there’s a world of difference between the press-office-controlled automaton and the flamboyant maverick who tells it like it is, and we regard the latter as figures of ‘the new politics’, sweeping in to paint everything in Technicolor and disrupt the old guard. But the reason why nothing ever really changes is that these archetypes are flip-sides of each other. Both pander to the people. Neither provides ideological leadership.

Populism is, therefore, deeply and inherently problematic. It exposes democracy’s institutional weaknesses, but it tends to underestimate its agonistic value. It appears to be conflictual but in fact drains politics of ideological difference and debate. As the political scientist Carlo Invernizzi-Accetti puts it:

Democratic politics depends on the confrontation between rival political agendas and ideological visions. But in the struggle between technocrats and populists all we are left with is the choice between preserving the system as it is or burning it all to the ground.⁶

While populism appears to be a reaction against technocracy, populism and technocracy are actually two sides of the same coin. As Invernizzi-Accetti and the politics professor Jan Werner-Muller note, technocracy claims there is only one rational policy decision; populism claims there is only one authentic popular will. So while the age of populism feels very dynamic and eventful, it is in fact a time of stasis and paralysis, because it lacks the ideological specificity and commitment to take things in a particular political direction.

Since populism imagines the people as a mythic totality, it downplays the reality that those people will hold differing political views. The ‘us and them’ conflict that populism stages is often not in fact about politics at all, but about a contested purity of morality and identity. Populism may be modern in its urge to shake up political traditions, therefore, but it’s atavistic in its nostalgia for a golden-age heartland. The opposition between ‘the people’ and the political ‘establishment’ comes to replace a necessary conflict between competing interests, and politics as a way of making difficult choices. These are unavoidable, but this fact is glossed over by populism, which stages an unrealistic contest between people and politicians. What if the people won – then what? There would still need to be a way of resolving internal tensions between different constituencies and demands.

Although populism is crucially different on the Left and on the Right, populism’s political multivalency is one of its flaws. Building on the work of the political theorists Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, left-wing populists deploy the notion of the ‘empty signifier’, a deliberately undefined and pragmatic coalition of interests that unite against the dominant political/economic power. But by regarding the people as a single bloc without ideological inflection, that amorphous concept can be leveraged by the Spanish left-wing party Podemos, but also by the right-wing Ciudadanos (Citizens); by Bernie Sanders but also by Trump. How can the Left’s critique of the ‘broken’ political establishment have any meaningful purchase, when it is perfectly replicated by someone who represents the interests of the rich and powerful? UKIP’s Douglas Carswell is as critical of the ‘smug and smarmy Westminster village’⁷ as Scotland’s Radical Independence Campaign. ‘The people’ is a powerful yet fundamentally empty concept: the ‘People’s Pledge’ was a politically orchestrated ‘grassroots’ campaign for an EU referendum; the ‘People’s Challenge’ a campaign to remain within the EU.

Populists purport to be supremely democratic, therefore, but they’re not: by claiming to represent ‘the people’, they posit all those who oppose their policies, and all other political contenders, as not just of a different view, but fundamentally illegitimate – or invisible. ‘What truly matters’, announced Donald Trump in his inaugural speech, ‘is not which party controls our government, but whether our government is controlled by the people’.⁸ As we saw with the EU referendum, populism dismisses the minority as not ‘the people’. The reason why populism is heralded as people-power but feels confusingly like the removal of that power is because, as George Letsas has remarked, the essence of populism is not emotional or rhetorical appeals to the public, but rather ‘the political strategy of invoking the will of the people as a way of avoiding having to justify a decision’. It is, he continues, ‘the deliberate attempt to bypass the normal channels of representative democracy, and the institutional checks and balances it imposes, by invoking as the sole justification for political action the nebulous concept of what the majority of the people want’.⁹

* * *

Since populism figures ‘the people’ as a totality with a single set of correct views, furthermore, that totality can be channelled by a single leader. So even left-wing populism invariably has its charismatic (nearly always male) leaders – Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, Bolivia’s Evo Morales, Podemos’ Pablo Iglesias and Syriza’s Alexis Tsipras. ‘Populist’ means representing the interests of the people, but some also use it to mean having popular appeal. Thus populism can either mean representing what people really want, or it can mean purporting to represent what people think they want: the deceptive lure of the demagogue. Populism is fascinatingly paradoxical. If you hate politics and politicians, you can love an insurgent who embodies the opposite of politics; you can worship an anti-leader. This in part helps to explain the apparent paradox of populist authoritarianism.

In an iconoclastic age, populism resonates with a broader cultural celebration of ordinary people; but that of course is a flattering illusion. We may pay lip service to equality by obsessively policing the statements of politicians in public, in private and on social media – especially left-wing politicians such as Gordon Brown, who was excoriated for muttering about ‘that bigoted woman’, and Islington MP Emily Thorn-berry, who resigned after her ‘Image from #Rochester’ tweet. We may, as a culture, perform window-dressing exercises: quoting ordinary voters on Prime Minister’s Questions; claiming that digital culture enables everyone to ‘have a voice’. Politicians and commentators are at pains to avoid offending working-class voters or even uttering the phrase ‘working class’. Yet that doesn’t affect the reality. Another pitfall of populism is that it can perform symbolic service for inequality, by publicising the illusion that ordinary people now have a voice.

While populists claim to speak and solicit the blunt truth, the issues they raise may often be euphemisms for underlying concerns that are more difficult to voice: anti-immigration sentiment, for example, as a sublimated complaint about the non-enforcement of the minimum wage. So should we take the stated complaints at face value? Liberal commentators tie themselves in knots over this: they don’t want it to be the case that working-class people are actually racist, and they think the problem is really all about economics anyway; but they don’t want to appear patronising by suggesting that those people are unwittingly targeting the symptom not the cause. Analysing populism raises tricky questions, therefore, about class, conscious self-determination and expertise. Why do working-class people vote for right-wing populists against their own economic best interests? Is there something crude and inchoate about populist demands? And that brings us right back to the very definition of politics as either the roar of the crowd or refined debates in Parliament. And can anyone be prime minister, or do we need political leaders to be trained in the art of administering increasingly complex societies?

* * *

Can there ever be a convincing case for left-wing populism? Many left commentators are citing it as a pragmatic, if not inherently desirable, tactic. Williams and Srnicek advocate a left populism in the conclusion of their manifesto, Inventing the Future. Leftists are following a tradition of political theory established by Antonio Gramsci, and Ernesto Laclau’s reading of Gramsci in his 2005 book On Populist Reason, via the formation of leftist governments in Latin America. Podemos in Spain was heavily inspired by populism, but after initial optimism, its prospects for electoral success have diminished. Syriza in Greece moved through a populist phase before adopting a more formally left position; they were ultimately hobbled by a misplaced belief in the Euro, which left them defenceless against the punitive economic illiteracy of the Troika.

Both right and left populisms pitch ‘the people’ against ‘the system’. When ‘the system’ is an economic elite, as in the case of Spain’s ‘La Casta’, left-wing populism is effectively a political intervention, even though this is not usually registered in explicitly political terms: Podemos positions itself as post Left and Right. But the danger here is that the Left echoes the anti-political dismantling of the system by the Right, and helps to remove the tools of mainstream politics which are necessary to exert organised influence. Populism represents an unhelpful conflation of ideological and structural critique. As Ernesto Laclau put it:

Once we move beyond a certain point, what were requests within institutions became claims addressed to institutions, and at some stage they became claims against the institutional order. When this process has overflown the institutional apparatuses beyond a certain limit, we start having the people of populism.¹⁰

Populism registers the problem of finance distorting the political system, but it’s a very blunt tool with which to anatomise and respond to this problem. It offers vital energy, but it is inchoate diagnostically. In addition to its oppositional stance towards national political systems, it elides international institutions such as the EU, the World Bank or the UN with global finance and multinational corporations. Those institutions are indeed entangled with the forces of capitalism – but it’s vital to distinguish between the two categories. Left-wing populism merges them strategically, in order to call attention to their corruption; right-wing populism merges them capriciously, in order to turn public anger away from finance power and onto political institutions.

Ultimately, therefore, while it can be a useful wakeup call reminding us that the system isn’t representing people properly, populism is fundamentally unsustainable, even as a movement. It can’t announce itself as a leftist project, and if populists do get into power, they themselves are soon considered part of the machine. While right-wing populism has triumphed around the world, left-wing populism has faltered – especially in Europe. This is perhaps because the major impact of populism is not in shaking up the system but in influencing the rhetoric of mainstream, mostly right-wing parties.

While right-wing populism denounces the political system, behind the scenes it has taken over the formal levers of institutional power. Right-wing populists are loudly insurgent and covertly establishment at the same time. The Left, meanwhile, takes the insurgent rhetoric at face value and neglects the dull but essential structural questions of institutions and formal power. Disastrously, left-wing politicians and the left-wing media are alike buying into the ‘anti-elite’ language, which means not only that the Left has stopped fighting on the really important grounds of economic inequality but also that we fail to prevent an attack on the very political system which provides the space for a democratic challenge to neoliberal power.

Unless the Left decides what we think about institutions – unless we decide what is valuable about them, we will have no defence against right-wing populism. With Brexit we see why direct democracy is not so great; that ‘the people’ alone are not enough. It forces us to confront the fact that we have no structural sense of what macro politics should look like.

Populism is properly political in its desire to cut through the paralysis, therefore, but it greets post-politics with anti-politics. It is a diverted desire for left-wing politics, and it works to destroy the very system in which such a force could operate. Politics has been reduced to a futile opposition between ‘ordinary people’ whose opinions cannot be questioned, and ‘out of touch’ politicians whose notable characteristics are not who their policies actually benefit but who they are as a person – what school did they go to, what is their personal wealth. We need to ensure that politicians are more diverse in every way, and we need to make democracy more truly representative. But we must not lose sight of the overwhelmingly important matter of ideological intention. By focusing on facts about politicians, we are destroying the primary means we have of improving our world. Instead of anti-elitism, we are ending up with anti-politics.

The task for the Left is to employ the good aspects of populism: to divert people’s energy from anti-politics to good politics; to channel impassioned, candid beliefs and oppositional anger into ideological struggle; to use the visceral presence of people in decision-making to revive democratic institutions; and to convert our clear attraction to leadership into a model of authority that is fit for an egalitarian society.

CHAPTER TWO

How Did We Get Here?

In the previous chapter, I argued that populism is simultaneously an anti-political movement and an expression of desire for the return of politics proper. Both tendencies are a response to post-politics and depoliticisation. Politics feels moribund, useless, pointless, dead; so we feel the desire to kill it off – which as I’ve been arguing is an understandable reaction, but also an illogical and counterproductive one. Post-politics leads to anti-politics, which in turn leads to more post-politics, and so on. So how did we get into this vicious circle – what factors have led to the turn against politics in practice and also politics in principle?

Since the unpopularity of politics has coincided with the rise of the Right, a key question is whether the latter has caused the former; whether antipathy towards politics is an epochal shift or a right-wing strategy. To explore this question we need to look back to 1989 and a seminal article by the political scientist Francis Fukuyama entitled ‘The End of History?’. Fukuyama argued that the long wars between competing ‘isms’ – those of Left and Right, East and West – were finally over. Western liberal democracy had decisively triumphed as the best possible ideology, so ideological debate was effectively redundant. Fukuyama’s thesis is often dismissed, particularly by those on the Left: it certainly doesn’t feel like history has ended, what with the financial crash of 2008, Occupy, the Arab Spring, terrorist attacks, and the political turmoil surrounding Brexit and Trump. The response to that is that the ‘end of history’ isn’t about history as in events – it’s about the evolution of ideals.

A more valid critique of Fukuyama’s thesis points out that Fukuyama was a Neocon when he wrote ‘The End of History?’, so although he uses the apparently bland and benign phrase ‘Western liberal democracy’, what he was really saying was that the Right had won, because right-wing ideology was best. Presenting its partisan position as neutral has become a primary tactic of the Right in recent years. It has allowed them to covertly promote right-wing ideology while presenting this as simply the advent of a post-ideological era. Fukuyama’s essay has been so picked over in part because of this fundamental ambiguity about what ‘liberal democracy’ means. It’s not clear if it’s an ideology at all, or rather a broad-spectrum system for accommodating different ideologies. Stuart Hall once said that history will not have ended while there are still energies out there in the populace that are not yet integrated into the system. But this depends on how the Right is framed: as a particular orientation or as common sense. The Left has been reinvigorated in recent years, confounding Fukuyama’s assessment, but angry energies have also emerged in the form of working-class support for UKIP and the Conservatives. Right-wing populism is the pessimistic response to Hall’s formulation, because it mendaciously incorporates the people and their complaint. Interestingly though, in the light of Fukuyama’s thesis, the Right has actually become largely dominant in terms of power rather than ideology; the Right is hegemonic because it has co-opted the ideology of the Left: they claim to be the party of the poor, on the side of ‘ordinary, working-class voters’. It’s the Left that seems to have won the battle of ideas.

Co-option hollows out politics and empties out words – they mean whatever the powerful wants them to mean. And it depletes the Left, because their message is now broadcast by the undermining Right. It’s no wonder the Left is wary of articulating its vision: why should we have to say what we really think, when the other side just lies and steals? So the narrow democratic bandwidth we have in contemporary politics is actually the result of two distinct factors: the shift to the right by the Third Way Left, and the co-option of left ideology by the Right.

As I’ll explore in a later chapter, the very concept of ideology has fallen out of favour – it’s only the other side who are motivated by ideology, politicians insist; we are just doing what works. There may be vehement opposition to right-wing governments, but who now says they are left-wing? It’s toxic, taboo – uttering it makes you seem like a naïve old dinosaur. The talk is only of ‘narrative’ and ‘framing’, as if the only issue is that of branding. There’s a maddening quality to this situation – as if we are trying to argue without being able to speak. We are trying to mount a political fight in the era of post-politics – when the language has become corrupted, and the formations and institutions are crumbling, are being disassembled before our eyes. And the Right, too, never now say they are right-wing. They are only ‘centre-right’; if they promote any ideology at all, it’s the purloined ideology of the Left. As I’ll argue, it is primarily the Right who have toxified ideology; if the Left don’t like to use the word ‘left’, it is because they are victims of this process.

Even if we accept that Fukuyama’s notion of liberal democracy is disingenuous, however, his article raises a huge and hugely important question that we are not yet able to answer: whether we have, particularly in the West, entered a post-ideological age, where grand narratives are inevitably a thing of the past, or whether this is simply a right-wing ruse, to remove the possibility of a left-wing challenge. Far from being triumphalist, the tone of Fukuyama’s essay is actually resonantly poignant. ‘The end of history will be a very sad time’, Fukuyama writes:

The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands.

In the post-historical period, Fukuyama continues, ‘there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history. I can feel in myself, and see in others around me, a powerful nostalgia for the time when history existed.’¹¹ His observation echoed that of the sociologist Daniel Bell who had come to a similar conclusion in his 1960 essay collection The End of Ideology:

[O]ne finds, at the end of the fifties, a disconcerting caesura. In the West, among the intellectuals, the old passions are spent. The new generation, with no meaningful memory of these old debates, and no secure tradition to build upon, finds itself seeking new purposes within a framework of political society that has rejected, intellectually speaking, the old apocalyptic and chiliastic visions. In the search for a ‘cause’, there is a deep, desperate, almost pathetic anger. … [Young left-wing activists] cannot define the content of the ‘cause’ they seek, but the yearning is clear.¹²

Like Fukuyama, Bell had ties to Neocons, but denied an affiliation to any ideology. Yet his words, also like those of Fukuyama, ring disturbingly true. Globalisation and digital culture are, in curiously similar ways, dissolving all boundaries between geographical locations, historical periods and ideological movements. It feels as if we’ve lost the linear progression of time’s arrow, and entered a disorienting permanent present. History, culture and politics have all gone into the blender of postmodernism. As Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi in After the Future, Simon Reynolds in Retromania and Mark Fisher in Capitalist Realism have noted, we appear to be now in an era of post-progress.

There is indeed a curious lack of visionary ambition amongst today’s politicians – particularly those of the Right – who dismiss any kind of idealism as both antiquated and left-wing. Yet this turn against politics appears to be part of a more pervasive atmosphere of pessimism, which has also infected our culture: you can see it in depressing adverts for JustEat, promoting the ‘mini fist pump’ you get when someone suggests a takeaway. Is this the best we can now expect? The message seems to be: just work really hard, don’t even think about collective ambition or even the good life. Our post-progress atmosphere seems partly the result of climate change, partly of economic stagnation, and partly because our ideas about progress have been outsourced to technology. Instead of improving society, we have smartphone upgrades. But even here there is no progress: although, according to Moore’s law, computer processing power increases exponentially, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that technology has stopped evolving. Things aren’t really moving forwards; we’re just addicted to consumer gadgets with differently sized screens. After all, who needs a Wi-Fi-enabled washing machine?

Silicon Valley embodies, therefore, a similar combination of right-wing ideology and post-ideology to that of Fukuyama and Bell. As Adam Curtis describes in his film Hypernormalisation, Silicon Valley utopianism has always embodied a strange brand of idealism without the ideals: a utopian/dystopian belief in computer systems that are in fact self-regulating, which tend always towards the mean, towards algorithmic predictions based on past behaviour: If you like that, you’ll love this. The architects of cyberspace wanted a post-political world – that is what they dreamed about; even now the likes of Peter Thiel and Elon Musk explicitly long for an escape from politics and a removal of the need for politics. Yet they are also energetically enacting what the media theorists Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron have dubbed the ‘Californian Ideology’: an almost evangelical creed of capitalist libertarianism. And there is speculation that Mark Zuckerberg intends to run for president – perhaps in order to vitiate the role altogether.

The digital age very visibly appears to embody radical change, yet this serves to conceal the fact that it actually stymies political progress – particularly that of the Left. Activists tend to be vocal advocates of social media, tech companies deploy a rhetoric of peer-to-peer egalitarianism, and technology itself seems to embody progress because it provides a simulacrum of human evolution. But markets and machines are rapidly becoming allies. They are the twin forces driving our world and they place themselves above and beyond politics. Neoliberalism operates in a way that is both economic and cultural: global capitalism and the global internet alike open everything up to metrification and marketisation. Yet neoliberals claim that markets are apolitical, and technology and its advocates deny there are human and partisan forces shaping its development. As we head into a technocapitalist future, we need politics more than ever – politics is, after all, human agency expressed and enacted. But what technology does is consolidate the dominance of the Right, while seeming left-wing, and while also appearing to usher in an era in which all political struggle is obsolete.

So which came first: the internet, postmodern fragmentation or right-wing dominance? It’s not clear if mash-up culture is a consequence of the internet or if the two have simply arrived hand in hand; if digital culture is a successor to capitalism, its enemy, or its ally; and most importantly, it’s not clear whether mash-up culture is a consequence of neoliberalism: if all grand narratives are defunct, or just those of the Left. After all, the Right seems to be doing rather well in the era of post-politics.

Mark Fisher was one of the few theorists to address the relationship between postmodernism and capitalism, noting in Ghosts of My Life that Fredric Jameson ‘equates the postmodern “waning of historicity” with “the cultural logic of late capitalism”, but he says little about why the two are synonymous’.¹³ Fisher offers two possible answers: the first is that consumers, lacking social solidarity and job security under neoliberalism, find solace and refuge in nostalgia. The second is that artists, writers and musicians are now deprived of the leisure and resources necessary to produce new art and new ideas, and have to rely on recycling existing cultural products. These explanations are no doubt true, but it seems to me that the answer has to do with factors that are even more fundamental – and that Fisher addressed elsewhere in his work. Are we in a kind of end-times era when our culture begins to cannibalise itself? Does capitalism coincide with the end of the world – is it in fact causing it? If the latter scenario is the case, it is not labour that drives change, as in the Marxist conception of history, but capital – the hegemonic interests driving technological and cultural transformation.

If we can work out to what extent post-politics is a consequence of neoliberalism, then we can separate one from the other and begin to work out how politics itself can be decontaminated. Who drives change: the powerful Right, technological innovation, or simply historical development? If post-politics is the result of an epochal shift, the Left is up against existential forces of history; if it’s the result of neoliberalism, the Left is up against formidable political, ideological and economic forces – but at least the task is theoretically possible. It’s important to know which one of these challenges we face.

* * *

Let us now turn to other factors that have driven the advent of the apparently post-political era, beginning with the transition from capitalism to neoliberalism. There has been a shift away from a faith in the free market as an invisible hand, a neutral force that will automatically shape society for the best, to the recognition that markets need the centralised, directing influence of government to engineer the imperial expansion of the free market. The shift from capitalism to neoliberalism is complicated, in terms of what’s happening to politics, because neoliberalism reinstates a strong role for government as actor, even while it keeps political choice off the table by invoking the ‘neutral’ market as prime agent of organisation and change.

Despite an ostensible consensus among left-wing academics about the definition of neoliberalism (see for example Will Davies’ The Limits of Neoliberalism, and the special edition of the journal New Formations on neoliberalism), there is in fact a residual ambiguity surrounding its explicitness and coherence. How do neoliberals describe their ideology to each other, in private? How many of them use the word ‘neoliberal’? Do they believe that the function of government is to enforce the entrepreneurial free market or to remove obstacles in the way of elite monopoly interests? Do they think the market is bottom-up and competitive, or top-down, winner-takes-all? This ambiguity can be illustrated by Michael Gove’s education reforms. On the one hand, he advocated free schools, exempt from government influence. On the other hand, he subjected the remaining state schools to ever stricter forms of direct government control. As the philosopher Manuel de Landa has argued, the free-market aspect of neoliberalism has always been more a legitimating ideal than a reality; capitalism has always been about monopolies. There is a side-question to be asked here, about whether we are entering a new era of nationalistic authoritarian capitalism, as distinct from the global free-market variety, or if this is simply a more explicit continuation of business as usual.

So whereas before, we had free-market capitalism which claimed to not be an ideology at all, but rather a natural force, we now have neoliberalism which retains this belief in the non-ideology of the free market but combines it with an implicit recognition that the market needs the state. In other words, at the same time that hegemonic power has been intensified at the level of the state, there’s a double cloaking of real ideological intent. As the political scientist Colin Hay argues in Why We Hate Politics, neoliberalism deliberately set out to depoliticise itself as an ideology and conceal its statist controlling tendencies, first in the 1980s by loudly denouncing the efficacy of the state and the good intentions of politicians, and, from the 1990s onwards, by rationalising and naturalising neoliberalism itself. What we end up with is a massively centralised hegemonic governmental and state apparatus, which disavows its own agency, power and ideological inflection.

In other words, where capitalism denied it was a matter of political choice – an ‘ism’ – and thereby closed down the space of the political, neoliberalism increases the space of the political by bringing so much more under the control and purview of government – from how many minutes you read to your child at night to the opening hours of GP surgeries; yet neoliberalism is anti-political, anti-state and anti-big-government. Furthermore, it is such an abstruse and euphemistic term that as an ideology it is hidden from public view. Neoliberalism is intensely political but it evades any definition or public targeting as a dominant political force.

Politics in the form of ideological contestation has been replaced first by the Darwinian realism of ‘the markets’ – portrayed as alternately authoritative and capricious – and more recently by the fake strictures of austerity economics. And parliamentary democracy is controlled by globalised corporate and financial power. As Wendy Brown argues in Undoing the Demos, it’s easy to underestimate just how systemic the latter process has been – the economisation of everything – health, education, our innermost private lives on and offline. It’s not just that politics is dominated by money; we are seeing the economisation and financialisation of all public space – the subjection of every aspect of life and society to commodification, accountancy-driven audit, and ‘platform capitalism’. This process has happened rapidly but stealthily – like boiling a lobster. It’s also a remarkable effect of neoliberal hegemony that to critique this process just sounds hackneyed and juvenile. Leftists rarely now even utter the word ‘right-wing’. Yet it’s apter than ever. Chain stores homogenise every high street; steel and glass towers are going up everywhere as if nobody has ever seen a dystopian film. The public is aware of a lot of this, but the combination of knowledge and lack of agency just adds to their disengagement. It’s hardly surprising that protest itself is manifest as consumerism – as in the looting that accompanied the London riots of 2011. In keeping with the neoliberal, depoliticising turn, it was frowned upon to even describe the riots as political – as was the case with the anger following the Grenfell Tower fire of 2017.

In addition to the pressures of marketisation, politics itself is being redefined as economics: political decisions are reframed as fiscal decisions. Ideological choice is subservient to economic efficiency. Any election policy is put forward as a budgetary proposal – and is immediately challenged as such: ‘But how will you pay for it?’ is the standard follow-up question in any pre-election interview. This relies on the fundamentally flawed assumption that the economy is like a household budget.

As a reaction to the marketisation and monetisation of everything, there is a resurgent desire to articulate value in intrinsic, non-economic terms. This has emerged in positive ways – in the movement to promote stronger communities and quality of life – but has also found expression in right-wing populism. What could have been a rejection of neoliberalism becomes, in this distorted version, a move towards romantic nationalism. We don’t care if immigration produces a net economic gain, the argument goes – what’s more important is preserving local and national identity. This functions as a handy justification for why working-class communities sometimes vote against their economic interests – this is not just about money, in this formulation: it’s about values and ideals.

Another driver of post-politics is of course globalisation. Right-wing nationalism can be read as a perversion of the quite rational wish to bring back the nation state as the agreed forum for properly functioning political agency. Eurosceptic populists like to identify the EU as the prime authority eroding national sovereignty, but – with the exception of countries like Greece, which is constrained by the Troika – it’s really the global network of international banks, offshore funds and multinational corporations, whose power exceeds that of many national governments. Globalisation has a further impact on politics: it severely limits the power of individual governments and indeed political parties to enact or advocate policies, because only a narrow spectrum of ideas are deemed ‘realistic’ in a ‘global market’.

* * *

In the post-political era, there is a lack of democratic choice; in response, there’s been a proliferation of forms of pseudo-choice; most obviously consumerism, which is now extended to identical, colourless and mundane products such as water or car insurance. Likewise, as a kind of neurotic or ideological displacement of political choice, there’s a popular-science obsession with decision-making – for example in books such as Stephen J. Dubner and Steven Levitt’s Freakonomics and Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. Nudge politics, designed by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, prompts us to passively follow paths that are supposedly better for us: salad will be placed at eye level in the work canteen – but chips are still there if you care to reach. The paternalistic engineering of ‘choice architecture’ is combined with a lip-service retention of individual freedom to choose. And it may be governments or corporations who really benefit – as in the case of the UK’s ‘nudge unit’, which is linked to the ‘Public Health Responsibility Deal’ involving fastfood and soft-drinks giants such as McDonald’s and PepsiCo. Many canteens and restaurants outsource their entire catering service to monopolistic mass-produced food manufacturers like Brakes. Under capitalism, choice is an illusion; but now, that reality is concealed.

A key part of the story of how politics became hollowed out is of course technocracy, bureaucracy and managerialism: the Third Way generation were heavily influenced by management-speak, business guru-ism and accountancy-logic. As the late political scientist Peter Mair noted in his book Ruling the Void, politicians themselves disparaged politics by turning to ‘experts’, evidence-based policy and arms-length institutions such as quangos. Counterintuitively, this move often went – and still goes – hand in hand with the semblance of ‘people-power’: focus-grouping is simultaneously managerial and populist; and recourse to evidence-based politics is framed as what people want. And of course, as I’ve mentioned, marketisation and privatisation profess to be efficient and anti-bureaucratic, but actually promote the equal and opposite flowering of institutional bureaucracy in the form of regulation, which neuters politics still further.

Politics has been attacked from without, therefore, but it’s also been undermined from within: by notionally left-wing politicians who move their policies to the right in a desperate bid to occupy the mythical centre ground and who jettison their own powers in a quixotic bid to give ‘the people’ the sense that they are in charge; and by right-wing politicians who employ a disingenuous attack on politics and politicians in order to consolidate their power while removing the democratic mechanism for political challenge.

The final factor I’d like to mention here as contributing to post-politics is the culture wars. Politics has been transformed into a matter of identity and social and cultural values. The politics of identity and identity politics are not to be confused: the politics of identity is about right-wing nationalism and patriotism; identity politics is about the expansion of left-wing identity politics out from their institutional origins in academia. Both are depoliticising. Class identity was once mapped onto political affiliation and represented as competing interests in Parliament. But both Left and Right now claim that society is fragmented into a myriad array of identities. This is cited as the reason why the traditional political system no longer works. This depiction not only downplays the mass uniformity of life under platform capitalism, it also serves to conceal systemic inequality; and it works to close down political action based on economic injustice and the claims of subjugated groups. Parties such as Corbyn’s Labour, Tsipras’s Syriza and Bernie Sanders’ Democrats have been trying to remind people that ideological divisions are rooted in material circumstance – but with faltering success.

The other facet of the culture wars is the outsourcing of politics onto the arts, education and the media. There are frequent calls for these highly symbolic arenas to be ‘democratised’, to widen access and increase diversity of participation. This agenda has been adopted by the Left and by the institutions themselves – or at least reluctantly adopted in the knowledge that this is the only successful way to apply for funding. Standards and quality in education, research and cultural output are being diluted by the prioritisation of out-reach and social wellbeing. These strictures are another way to clobber educational and artistic institutions – whose products should be measured in intellectual and aesthetic rather than monetary terms, and which are themselves capable of producing critique and dissent, if only they had the space and freedom to do so. Above all, this outsourcing has become a fig leaf for economic inequality and the real, political, democratic deficit.

In all these different ways, therefore, the political sphere has been denigrated, undermined and weakened. Right-wing politicians have disavowed and denounced it; left-wing politicians have forsaken it; the public have become impatient with it and lost faith in it. Throughout this book I am asking a central question: everyone agrees that the political system is in a dire state; but is that a prompt to do away with it or repair it? In the next chapter I turn my attention to the response of the Left to our political predicament, and in particular, the response of new left-wing groups that have emerged in the last five to ten years. To what extent do they provide a solution to post-politics and anti-politics; and to what extent do they replicate and even compound the problem?

CHAPTER THREE

The Left’s Response

Let’s start with official party politics. The Left’s problems, electorally speaking, have stemmed from the widespread and false assumption that ‘credibility’ involves appealing to the ‘centre’. The centre is defined as politically neutral, so the Left has moved to the right and emptied itself of political content at the same time, thus betraying both its working-class and its middle-class constituencies, and removing any logical grounds for political allegiance. In the UK, this changed somewhat in the general election of 2017, when the popularity of Corbyn’s left-wing policies became unavoidably evident to his critics. At the time of writing it’s not clear how long either the popularity or the recognition will last.

The Right are famously good at putting ideological differences aside for the sake of party discipline; it’s perhaps open to question whether some right-wing-ers even have a coherent ideology at all, beyond the protection of assets and class interests. Either way, they are able most of the time to come together in a practical way to achieve hegemony. The Left, on the other hand, have tended until recently to be neither pragmatically coherent nor ideologically explicit – the worst of all worlds.

In terms of the non-party Left, there is a split between more moderate organisations – for example think tanks such as the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) and Demos – who have retained a belief in social democracy and the importance of institutions; and activist, iconoclastic, tech-friendly neo-anarchists, who reject the existing political, public, civic and institutional fabric. The dynamic energy is with this latter faction, who believe in spontaneous action, emergent behaviour and self-organising systems. Then there is a third group, associated with Slavoj Žižek and Jodi Dean, particularly her book Crowds and Party, which still recognises the importance of macro structures and ideologies. Yet this third line of thinking is oddly marginal on the Left – a sign of the popularity of digital activism and also of the general lack of strategic coherence, such that even those calling for strategy and purpose are just one strand amongst many.

In their book Inventing the Future, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams put forward a much-needed and highly articulate critique of what they call ‘folk politics’ – the deliberately structureless politics so widespread now on the activist Left. The arguments I make in this book resonate in many ways with theirs. Yet towards the end of that book, the solutions they put forward begin to resemble the folk politics they so rightly critique. They recommend Left populism (albeit for pragmatic reasons), and also digital technology, which, in its structure and rationale, is itself intimately bound up with folk politics. Self-organising digital networks are aligned, on the activist Left, with spontaneous social and political networks. The reality, of course, is that a handful of search and walled-garden social-media companies are taking ownership of cyberspace, and the Right are employing controversial data firms like Cambridge Analytica and AggregateIQ, backed by tech billionaires such as Robert Mercer, to covertly manipulate elections.

There is a huge amount of outrage and political will on the Left, but much of it is dissipated and squandered because of the mistaken belief in peer-to-peer network theory, bottom-up action and structurelessness, and the notion that the problem with politics is the structures themselves rather than their current corruption and takeover. Populism is infecting the Left, reducing the broader political project to a drama about the authority of political leaders. The general election of 2017 was a comparative success for the Left in Britain, but it revealed the Left’s confusion about mainstream politics – was it really so bad after all?

Techno-futurists and ‘fully automated luxury communists’ are correct to argue that society is changing dramatically with post-work, robots and AI. In a sense it’s difficult to posit the politics we need until we know how the revolution in the world of work is going to play out. But so far the direction politics has taken has been hyper-capitalist, fake egalitarian and also surprisingly retro – it’s ironic, as Paul Mason and others have pointed out, that automatic car washes are giving way, in an era of cheap labour, to ‘five guys with rags’. The post-humanism of Nick Bostrom and Julian Savulescu consistently downplays the grubbily political and economic reality of the technology they hail as inherently revolutionary.

The radical Left is prone, in other words, to a form of cyber-utopianism which talks up the potential of digital culture and social media to facilitate new forms of direct democracy, public debate and mass resistance. This tendency is hard to distinguish from the fake-radical, fake-egalitarian ‘Californian ideology’ propagated by the barons of Silicon Valley. The internet has some communicative and organisational uses, but it is not proving effective as a platform for organising joined-up, sustained change. In fact, as Jodi Dean reminds us in her critique of what she calls ‘communicative capitalism’, along with Nicholas Carr, Jaron Lanier and Adam Greenfield, it’s a force for atomisation and alienation, and it tends to keep campaigners in their silos of pre-existing acquaintance, and social-media users in their echo chambers. A symptom of its impotent structure is the Twitter hashtag: these are supposed to bring topical debates together into a single conversation, but there are usually several hashtags operating at once.

The contemporary Left is incoherent and relatively ineffective, I argue, because it pays little regard to coherent strategy, to building horizontal connections and connective tissue, to ideology and to institutions. It should be devoting more energy to colonising and strengthening the existing political system, and thinking about how to influence public opinion. There is far too much emphasis on alternative systems and formations – alternative democratic spaces, alternative journalistic sources and so on. And this has just played into the techno-capitalistic dismantling of institutions – whether political, civic or media. The Right is anti-political yet highly politically successful, while the Left appears to find itself fighting the Right in a post-political field. The Right wants the Left to pursue alternative systems, so that it can retain control of mainstream politics itself.

Occupy, the Radical Independence Campaign in Scotland, the Focus E15 campaign – these eruptions of resistance keep appearing at a local level, and feel hopeful and significant at the time; but their impact soon fades. A new generation of leftist activists measure their significance synchronically by social-media virality, but the diachronic dimension is missing. With this privileging of the immediate present and the grassroots, it’s hard to scale these movements up or make them last. The Right’s hegemonic grip on mainstream politics has weakened following the 2017 UK election, but how long this situation will continue remains to be seen.

Time and again, the Left reproduces the very post-political tendencies neoliberalism has encouraged in the first place. It has little defence against right-wing populism because it has itself rejected ideological affiliation in favour of a generic defence of ‘the people’; and it has failed to come up with a positive defence of political authority and political institutions. But as with many of the phenomena I’m discussing in this book, it’s difficult to know whether the Left is mirroring the Right, or obeying a tendency that is inherently characteristic of our age. As the Left splinters into a thousand grassroots initiatives, is this because the Right has created a field of action that is all about the local and the non-state, or is it part of an epochal post-ideological, post-grand-narrative fragmentation? Furthermore, the Right’s assault on ideology, government, the public sphere and the state has merged, on the activist Left, with the 1960s New Left critique of the paternalistic and bureaucratic state. This has prompted the Left to focus their attention on initiating local, small-scale projects, which are inspiring, but are at the same time a reflection of neoliberalism’s dispersed hegemony.

Here again it’s not clear whether the Right are obeying this tendency themselves, or simply announcing it as the modern imperative and in fact doing something entirely different – in this case, centralising everything. As the geographer Kean Birch has argued in his book We Have Never Been Neoliberal, the Right employs the rhetoric of decentralised autonomy while actually pursuing a strategy of executive control. The Right’s advocacy of the grassroots is itself a co-option of progressive values and techniques. But the Left takes this rhetoric at face value, abandoning any attempt at concerted organisation.

* * *

An important aspect of the Left’s predicament is a confusion about the relationship between politics and economics. The Right encourages the public to divert a legitimate critique of financial and corporate power onto MPs and the ‘Westminster bubble’. The anti-Westminster anti-politics we are surrounded by feels left-wing, because the Right happens to have dominated Westminster for the past four decades. But in reality, the space of the political is politically neutral – it’s the arena of democracy, like the public space of the state. So an attack on that space actually serves the Right, because it’s an attack on the possibility of a left-wing democratic option, as well as an attack on the state as the provision of welfare and public services. Thus a problem of privatisation becomes a problem of the public; a potential critique of corporate capture becomes a critique of politics and the state as public institutions.

Since politics was taken over by economics, the Left has responded in two contradictory and counterproductive ways. First, many of the organisations and initiatives on the Left – while both invaluable and inspiring in the work they do – are primarily economic in their focus: there’s the New Economics Foundation, Positive Money, UK Uncut, the Real Economy Lab, the New Economy Coalition and Post-Crash Economics. Of course we need to transform and repair our economic system, but the emphasis in the campaigning landscape unwittingly perpetuates the terms of the takeover. Second, in a contrary tendency, many other groups – particularly those concerned with inventing new democratic platforms – are using a political hammer to crack an economic nut. They are creating political platforms that sidestep rather than tackle the systemic takeover of politics by corporations and capital. It’s true that sidestepping may in some cases be a neat and necessary manoeuvre, and people do need to have more of an active role and a say in politics. But by focusing on structural reforms of the political system itself, rather than the broader injustices of society, the Left ironically forfeits the political field in favour of a kind of vanity of process.

It may be that right-wing hegemony is by now simply insurmountable; that their capacious resources have enabled them to mount a vertically integrated ideological and organisational campaign of domination. But it may also be that the Left’s weakness is also a product of its own shortcomings. In order to think our way out of our predicament, we need to understand what’s contingent to our political system and what’s inherent; and to ask if the Right has placed certain political options beyond use that we need to revisit.

* * *

Commentators including the theorist Alain Badiou and the journalist Seamus Milne have suggested that we are witnessing the ‘passing of the unipolar moment’, that the revival of the Left post-2008 shows that history is on the march once again. It’s true that Occupy, Syriza, Podemos and opposition to Trump appear to challenge Fukuyama’s thesis. But the recent manifestations of the Left have been post-ideological – Occupy refused to make explicit demands, and Podemos and the Left in general will not even identify themselves as left-wing. While the Right is capitalising on the turn against politics, therefore, post-political strains within the Left are deeply compromising, because the stance and the critique lack terminology.

By choosing to avoid making demands or statements of ideological intent, therefore, the Left implicitly accepts the neoliberal myth that we are now in a post-ideological age, and fails to articulate a platform of ideas that people could rally around. And by rejecting formal leadership and organisation, the Left renders itself incapable of building structures, strategies and capacity that might credibly challenge neoliberal hegemony. This is a coordinated crisis, and it calls for a coordinated response.

Finally, the Left offers little resistance to the Right’s deployment of culture and identity as a distraction from socio-economic injustice, because it has enthusiastically focussed on these itself. In some ways, this is an understandable response to the marginalisation of women and minorities – within Left groups and within wider society. Politics does need to be diversified and feminised; it does need to adopt strategies from the feminist movement including a political consciousness-raising movement. But in its emphasis on symbolism, validation, inclusion and essentialism, identity politics neglects the significance of economic interests, macro injustice and structural solutions.

I argue that it’s essential to anatomise these weaknesses of the contemporary Left if we are to understand why we are not making more headway, and to analyse prospects for the Left’s – and politics’ – future. Because of the historical toxicity of factional debates within the Left and the understandable perception that they have held back the bigger cause, it’s become difficult to have these debates out in the open. It’s true that neoliberals’ ability to pragmatically ignore internal disagreements has contributed to their success. But I believe that the Left’s coyness about hammering out these issues head-on is holding us back. In any case, I don’t want a revolution that is inchoate and anti-intellectual.

I believe in analysing the structure of the Left as a movement, and also in theorising and planning the society we want. So much about the Left today is anti-political – its fetishising of spontaneous, bottom-up action, digital platforms and social movements, and its rejection of ideology, the state, institutions and a coherent public sphere. That needs to change if we want a better politics and if we want to use that politics to create a better society.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Case for Good Authority

The crisis of post-politics and anti-politics is bound up with the crisis of authority. Authority has become the least fashionable virtue there is. Nobody now makes a case for it. Deference, we are told, is dead. Pedestals everywhere are crumbling, and we are repeatedly informed that this is a positive development. According to the ubiquitous mantra, the old hierarchies are obsolete, unfair and ripe for replacement. ‘Over the last few decades’, reads the blurb of one business bible entitled Never Mind the Bosses: Hastening the Death of Deference for Business Success, ‘power, information and resources have moved from being concentrated in the hands of a few, to being disbursed across many’.¹⁴ David Cameron announced in 2010 that ‘We are the radicals now, breaking apart the old system with a massive transfer of power from the state to citizens, politicians to people’.¹⁵ Peter Mandelson pronounced in 1998: ‘We entered the twentieth century with a society of elites … But that age has passed. … People have no time for a style of government that talks down to them’.¹⁶ Douglas Carswell has claimed that ‘deferential democracy is dead’.¹⁷ And it was Mark Zuckerberg, the archetypal fake-egalitarian tech baron, who said that ‘When you give everyone a voice and give people power, the system usually ends up in a really good place. So, what we view our role as, is giving people that power’.¹⁸

This is yet another narrative that has the ring of media cliché about it, therefore, but if examined properly is highly ambiguous. Is it a description or a prescription? If the old authorities have ‘had their day’, is this a call to unseat them, or an acknowledgment that they are already toppled? As I will argue in this chapter, this narrative is also both false and counterproductive. Promoted by the Right and Left alike, it is largely responsible for the mess we are in.

For a start, despite all the iconoclastic rhetoric, the embarrassing reality is that we are more in thrall to authority than ever. Contestants on Masterchef and The Apprentice hang on the judges’ every word. Yes Chef, No Chef, they say. Thank You, Lord Sugar. Despite their funky, informal brand image, Apple and Google are run by a highly controlling and secretive management. Bond markets and ratings agencies have become gods: an economist at BNP Paribas bank said in 2010 that ‘if the austerity measures had not been delivered the markets would have gone mad’. Populist parties on right and left are led by charismatic leaders. The Queen is greeted with fulsome tabloid praise. People have for the last seven years voted in governments that pose as responsible parents with a strict and prudent control over the economy. This has only been reinforced by the supposedly revolutionary chaos of Brexit. As one Tory MP is said to have murmured after the EU referendum, ‘It’s time for Mummy’.¹⁹ Why is nobody commenting on the mismatch between the supposed death of deference and the advent of authoritarianism? Authoritarian populism has become a cliché in journalistic commentary without any understanding or analysis of how this paradox fits together.

In its quasi-Maoist sweeping away of all previous orders and traditions, I claim, this facile anti-deference has failed to distinguish aspects of hierarchy that are positive from those that are negative. It has failed to distinguish between expertise and democratic institutions, and arbitrary power, wealth and inequality. So when right-wing populism burst onto the scene, we had no way of responding apart from gazing at it in horror and then attempting to emulate it.

* * *

As I’ve been arguing here, the Right have systematically turned the beam of public scrutiny away from financial and corporate power and onto professional and educational authority: onto knowledge and responsibility and care and expertise. Instead of targeting inequality and the outrageous liberties taken by oligarchs, banks and multinationals, we the public are encouraged to take aim at political leaders, social workers, food inspectors and hospital doctors. It is they, we are told, who are committing the worst offence, in presuming to know what’s best for ‘ordinary people’.

Those who provide political representation and social security are thus maligned as overweening nanny-staters and patronising do-gooders. The fabric of the government and state is being dismantled, with people realising too late that the institutions and bodies they were led to despise are actually the checks and balances that protect people from arbitrary power. In the worst of all worlds, now, hegemonic authoritarianism is combined with making it up as you go along. Nobody knows what’s going to happen, including the ruling class.

As with authority, therefore, so with the concept of the ‘elite’. The Right’s aim is to confound the two meanings of elite as privilege and office; to convert the Left’s complaint against inequality into an attack on political representation. This is the impact of figures like Eric Pickles and William Hague, and Steve Hilton, whose political crowdsourcing platform Crowdpac aims to ‘give politics back to people’. The 2009 expenses crisis seemed anti-elitist, but it actually functioned as a counterproductive safety valve, diverting public anger about the role of bankers in the financial crisis onto expense claims for bath plugs costing 88p. Politicians have ceded their power to finance and corporations, but we punish them by eroding their power still further. We forget that politics is, after all, a means for designing ways to improve peoples’ lives. Public outrage about the capture of the system is turned on the system itself. The Right can therefore present themselves as championing autonomy and ‘people-power’, while behind the scenes promoting the real elites and maintaining the status quo.

It’s true that the majority of MPs are drawn from a narrow social and educational class. They are career politicians, which means their interest is in maintaining their position. Their interest in the concerns of ‘ordinary people’ is thus instrumental to this end, and it shows. But it’s important to distinguish between the contingent characteristics of today’s political leaders and the merits of political office per se. There’s an unhelpful muddle about whether it’s leadership itself that’s the problem, or the people who are currently occupying the positions of authority. It’s often the case that in practice, status maps onto privilege; but this is not necessarily so.

We have today a paradoxical situation: highly authoritarian politicians who have nonetheless lost all confidence in their own office. The elites have withdrawn, because that’s what they think we want, but this only makes things worse. It is politicians themselves, as Peter Mair observes in Ruling the Void, who have undermined their own position in a bid to become less unpopular with the public. Not understanding the distinction between office and the abuse of office, masochistic yet self-interested politicians render themselves less authoritative, less ideological, less political – in a desperate attempt to be more ‘relevant’ to voters. And in the process, they become ever less relevant. They dig themselves into an ever-deeper hole. I think they would be more popular if they just stood up and owned their position as advocates. All the post-fascist, remarkably neutral and even positive talk of ‘strong leaders’ can be read as a transposed desire for the authority that politicians so damagingly eschew.

Our era is in some ways post-political, yet we have constant elections, testament to a constant need to obtain validation from the electorate. So this paradox is in part an apparent one: politicians’ authoritarianism is shrill because their grip is weak. We have the worst of all worlds: right-wing governments enjoy an absence of meaningful or powerful opposition, yet we have to all intents and purposes succeeded in knocking politicians off their pedestals, resulting in a situation in which we don’t even have the critical or satirical space to lambast them, because they no longer have any proper status. Satirists themselves like Private Eye’s Ian Hislop and Spitting Image’s John O’Farrell actually would like politicians to be held in higher esteem, because they understand that once we have no political authority, we are in a totalitarian space.²⁰ In our reckless iconoclasm we have got what we wished for, and in doing so we have unleashed the demon of despotism.

* * *

Paralysed by accusations of condescension, the Left is failing utterly to make any kind of positive case for authority. MPs such as Stella Creasy and Jon Cruddas advocate the ‘co-production’ of services and the devolvement of power to local communities. In some ways, co-production is empowering; it’s a response to the one-size-fits-all, top-down administering of services. But autonomy, resilience and self-care can also mirror bootstrap Thatcherism; it’s the injunction to not rely on the state; to look after yourself.

In an age of anti-authoritarian and non-affiliated politics, the belief in grassroots people-power on the Left is often indistinguishable from the pro-individual-autonomy agenda of the Right. The ‘sharing economy’ is advocated by some progressive believers in the new economics and the rentier moguls of Uber and Airbnb alike. Even if we know the sharing economy is a sham, the Left is hampered in its critique because it too has been advocating the paradigms of peer-to-peer and bottom-up. The anti-establishment Left and the Right’s little platoons are united in an antipathy to the big state.

Social movements and the more radical activist left, for their part, have responded to the neoliberal corruption of political authority, as well as the historical dominance of privileged white men, by opening up a space outside of existing hierarchical structures: they have attempted to create horizontalist formations where nobody is in charge. These groups espouse digital technology, self-organising systems, and the network theory of Manuel Castells, in particular his 1996 book The Rise of the Network Society. In my own experience, left-wing groups that have no formal or explicit hierarchy always have soft, informal hierarchies operating unacknowledged – which are harder to challenge. The American feminist scholar Jo Freeman called attention to this tendency in the context of the Women’s Movement in her seminal 1970 essay ‘The Tyranny of Structurelessness’, but its lessons are not generally heeded on the radical Left, which prefers to pay a kind of endlessly essentialising lip service to ‘power and privilege’ without altering or acknowledging its actual power structures.

It’s true that, as Hilary Wainwright and others have noted, modelling non-hierarchical society in micro form, prefigurative politics, and ‘being the change you want to see’ can spark broader political change. We need a dual approach: to articulate what good authority looks like in mainstream politics, and to fuel the political imagination through radical experiments in agency and control. But we also need to be wary of pitfalls. For a start, network theory and systems theory is strikingly similar to the neoliberal Californian Ideology. This is in part the result, again, of co-option. But it’s also symptomatic of a post-political tendency on the Left.

According to this way of thinking, people do not only use social networks to express themselves and organise campaigns; they also behave like computer networks. The hive, the swarm, the crowd is a way of conceiving of humans as machines. Centralised strategy and top-down leadership are to be replaced by the autonomous power of grassroots networks to propagate links, build movements and realise emergent political will.

As Adam Curtis has shown in his documentary series All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, systems theory originated in Silicon Valley, a fusion between Sixties hippy culture and the Californian Ideology. Its advocates believe that computers, the internet and, latterly, big data are best placed to manage society – and politics. We have gone from being governed by markets, therefore, to being governed by markets and machines; but the political valence has changed. Systems theory has been enthusiastically embraced by Left as well as Right, and it is often impossible to distinguish between right-wing proponents of the Californian Ideology and the left-wing activists wedded to social media and networked forms of organisation.

Networks are not inherently egalitarian: the ‘Google effect’ strengthens monopolies and mirrors real-world power dynamics. Horizontalism has not proved capable of challenging broader power imbalances. As Yotam Marom of Occupy puts it, the movement was ultimately doomed by its ‘mantra of leaderlessness’, which

foreclosed on the possibility of holding emerging leaders accountable, created a situation in which real leaders (whether worthy or not) went to the shadows instead of the square, and made it impossible to really develop one another (how, really, could we train new leaders if there weren’t supposed to be any in the first place?).²¹

The fact that anti-authority rhetoric is manifest on Right and Left alike, therefore, should in itself make the Left think again. On the Right, it’s essentially a co-option of left-wing localism and autonomy, masking a natural tendency towards elite monopoly; on the Left it is both imperfectly applied and strategically compromising.

* * *

So what should the Left do? We need to separate out distinct issues that are often conflated: authority in the structure of political movements, authority in political institutions, authority in the state and authority in the wider society. Left movements’ internal eschewal of hierarchy, the transferal of attention away from social inequality and onto organisational forms themselves, removes their ability both to critique the predicament we are in as a society and strategically to organise to do anything about it. I argue that we need to stop being organisational narcissists and start to assess what it is about those traditional qualities of structure and hierarchy – both in the movement, and in politics and society – that is valuable and that we’d like to retain.

We need to separate authority from privilege, and work out ways to ensure that authority is constituted by experience, knowledge and expertise, and underpinned by democratic validation. If iconoclasm can’t be put back in its bottle, what new forms of organisation can realistically take shape? The task is to find different models of democratic leadership and structure that recognise the need to value everyone equally, while also recognising that people differ in their skills and levels of experience and also their time and inclination to lead.

I want leaders who actually lead, rather than follow; who proudly declare their beliefs and principles, rather than reading out questions from Lorna of Luton. We need leaders who are capable of strategic planning and mass mobilisation and who connect with social movements. It’s not that politicians have too much power; it’s that they don’t have enough, and are relentlessly and indiscriminately trashed by the public. The abuse, trolling, violence and threats of violence that politicians suffer is talked about only in terms of its personal effects, or as if it just goes with the job: it’s not generally connected up with anti-politics, or denounced as such. We need a version of government that is capable of representing its citizens and affording them safety and support. It is not sufficient to just talk small, talk local, talk ‘people first’ – because that is simply to repeat what the Right is arguing for too. The Left needs to think structural, and think big.

Without leadership it’s impossible to produce coherent, scaled-up, lasting change. The new Left organisations that are effective have a clear and rigorous structure, strategy and leadership. As Sigmund Freud, Max Weber and Hannah Arendt have noted, we humans have a profound need for authority because it gives our lives shape, potential and meaningful limits. We need leaders to stand up for the buried demands of the Left, to take responsibility and to represent grassroots interests when not everyone can turn up for meetings. As we will see in the next chapter, we need a state that exemplifies what the cognitive linguist George Lakoff calls the ‘nurturant parent’ model – one that can provide unconditional care for us in the different stages of our lives – through schools, healthcare and social care. We need good authority in our movements, in our politics and in our society.

CHAPTER FIVE

What Should the State Do?

If politics has recently fallen out of favour, so too has the state: it’s disparaged as an anachronistic, topdown relic of the twentieth century. The field of the state is not the same as the field of politics, but the antipathy to the state on both Right and Left is an aspect of post-politics, because the state is public in the same way that politics is public – an officially common forum. The aim of this chapter is not to offer a fully worked-out vision of what the twenty-first-century state should look like, but rather to call attention to the troubling similarities between Right and Left attitudes towards the state, and the strange absence of thinking about the state on the Left.

There was once a clear split between Left and Right about the optimal size and role of the state. The Left was in favour of a big, or big-enough state; for publicly owned resources and centrally distributed services. The Right argued for individuals and communities to be more self-sufficient. That has now changed. The ‘condescending’ state, taking upon itself the power to determine what’s good for ordinary people, is one of the targets of the Right in their assault on authority. Yet a critique of the mid-twentieth-century state is also common to both the soft and radical Left. One of the few recent exceptions to this trend is Polly Toynbee and David Walker in their 2017 book Dismembered: How the Attack on the State Harms Us All. Prominent voices on both the mainstream and activist Left now advocate localism and autonomy. We must ‘think differently about the state’, argues a recent report by Blairite Labour MPs Liz Kendall and Steve Reed entitled ‘Let It Go: Power to the People in Public Services’: services are inappropriately predicated, they claim, on a kind of parent–child relationship.²² The state is almost absent from discussion in the most cutting-edge Left groups. The motivation might be different on Right and Left – the devolvement of risk and responsibility rather than the genuine distribution of power – but the effect can be hard to distinguish: very few now seem to be making a case for the state.

While it’s good to be forward-looking and think outside the box, the repudiation of the state has a number of problematic consequences. First, it means that people are not being looked after. The Left denounces cuts to the NHS and to schools, but fails to make the structural case for the state as an organisational entity. In the wake of the Grenfell Tower fire, an under-discussed response by many of the residents was a complaint at the absence of central co-ordination, top-down administration of support and help by those in authority. Grenfell revealed that jurisdictional authority in the UK is a mess. Nobody knows who is supposed to take responsibility for anything – for disaster relief, for safety inspections, for paying for renovations. It benefits the Right that everyone is attacking the state, because they can hand even more power to Serco and Capita. And furthermore, it means that the Left is not doing the kind of thinking we need to reinvent the state so that it is both functional and palatable for the contemporary world. Red Pepper’s Hilary Wainwright has been doing this kind of thinking, for example in her 2003 book Reclaim the State, and Compass published Finding Our Voice: Making the 21st Century State in 2015, but there is precious little of this around. The equation on the Left of newness with the notion that the state needs to be radically revised or replaced means that some of the most energetic and imaginative progressive voices are unwittingly replicating the rhetoric of neoliberalism.

This process of rethinking has started, in a way, with discussions about the future of work – between Peter Fleming, Carl Cederstrom, Anna Coote and others. But these must connect with the idea of the state as a structural entity. Many new initiatives currently being proposed on the Left around the future of work, such as a universal basic income or a publicly funded media, rely on a huge role for the state; but this is rarely acknowledged explicitly. To think in theoretical, structural terms is out of fashion in activist, neo-anarchist circles; and staging this kind of philosophical, architectural debate prompts a certain wariness given the history of left-wing infighting. All this means that it’s difficult for the Left to think in a concerted way about central versus local ownership of resources, the future of work in an age of automation, the funding of public services in a post-taxation future, and the provision of services in a post-deferential culture.

* * *

So what is the state? What is its function? It’s the public interest and the public sphere – what people strive to contribute to and what gives people an overriding sense of civic identity. And it’s the body that takes care of people; that administers services such as schools and hospitals and provides a safety net for people when they are in need. A proper discussion about what the state should do has to start with an examination of post-war social democracy. 1945 is a foundational moment in this discussion. We on the Left don’t spend enough time looking back to that moment, seeing it for what it really was, and working out how that informs our thinking now. We don’t tend to sit down and distinguish between its intrinsic weaknesses and the external factors that may have made it unworkable. It’s rare on the Left to hear any kind of debate about what the mid-century state was like, its advantages and disadvantages. It’s either eulogised or it’s dismissed. We either look back to it in a kind of unthinking nostalgia, or we simply follow the Sixties critique of 1945 for what it didn’t do and who it left out. On the one hand, we have Ken Loach’s paean The Spirit of ’45; on the other, the Radical Left General Assembly declaring that the election of 2015 ‘proved that social democracy is dead’.

The anti-state position is currently dominant. Unwittingly deploying the same anti-authoritarian rhetoric as the Right, the soft and radical Left dismiss the post-’45 settlement for being paternalistic; but how true was this, really, and what made it so? It’s hard to know what we are capable of, since we are used to relying on the state; but at the same time, do we not need to acknowledge our vulnerability, our need for top-down support? Who really wants to co-produce their care – don’t we actually just want to leave it to experts with the specialist knowledge to make sure we get what we need? I’m not sure people really want social services, work, education and so on to be ‘democratised’; I think they just want it to be organised and distributed reasonably and equitably. Autonomy and empowerment are positive qualities, but they are being used to justify public spending cuts.

Many also claim that the post-war state was bureaucratic, but David Graeber has challenged the association between the public sector and bureaucracy in his essay for Strike! magazine entitled ‘On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs’, arguing that it’s actually corporations that behave like the bureaucracies of the old Soviet Union. The local provision of services is always portrayed as better, but how do you avoid the massive inefficiencies of duplication? There is a great and largely unacknowledged divide on the Left between those who believe in nationalising energy companies and those who believe in setting up ultra-local energy cooperatives. I personally don’t want control over my energy provision; I just want it to be provided in the most efficient, equitable and profit-free way. It shouldn’t be a trade-off between getting ripped off and doing it myself. Bureaucracies are faceless and impersonal, compared to provision of services by communal organisations, but how valuable is personalisation? Aren’t some provisions, like social security and health treatment, just generic? This is not to say that the state should not be relational, in a way that is elegantly outlined by social entrepreneur Hilary Cottam and the sociologist Michael Rustin. But the state and the entire fabric of communal institutions used to provide those relationships in the course of their workings; for me the structure comes first, the relationships follow.

We should not forget that in monetary terms we live in peak welfare state now; never before has more money (relatively and absolutely) been spent on welfare. This is partly because of factors like our ageing population, but it’s also because more and more of the state’s functions have been taken out of local and democratic control and handed over to inefficient quangos, businesses and unelected bodies. The problem with top-down state provision is not that it’s authoritarian or faceless, but that it’s privatised, dysfunctional and corrupt. It is not operating in the interests of people.

When people declare that we can’t go back to the post-’45 settlement, it’s not clear if they mean it was an incongruous blip, a luxury we can no longer afford, with our ageing population; or something we wouldn’t go back to even if we had the resources. Rather like the political system, we seem unable to distinguish between the state’s inherent flaws and its recent corruption. It is to some extent true that the post-war state functioned as a counterpart to capitalism; its primary role was to boost productivity and maintain and reproduce a healthy workforce. But this is what we need to be talking about – not just dismissing the whole entity because it’s ‘old’. Discussions about the state are particularly vulnerable to the neoliberal modernising imperative: it feels like we have no option but to regard the twentieth-century state as a dinosaur that needs replacing or ‘reforming’. It’s as if, as Owen Hatherley argues in The Ministry of Nostalgia, our intense desire for the era of the welfare state has to be manifested aesthetically, not politically.

The public square is being enclosed and privatised, turned into surveilled parks or patches of astroturf on which to consume a solitary salad from Pret or Itsu. Institutionalised and formalised civic and communal life is disappearing. There is no longer a stable body of public opinion that can be shaped in the usual ways, except that the dying gasps of print journalism have left us with a vestigial monoculture of venomous tabloid pseudo-iconoclasm. Digital culture is balkanising what used to be shared political and media space into walled gardens, echo chambers, micro-markets and solipsistic bubbles of personalised advertising. Neither ultra-local politics nor cyberspace is an adequate substitute for the state as a site for the public interest, organised accountability and the provision of welfare.

* * *

Asking what the state should do gives us the building blocks for reimagining the state for modern times. We must design and advocate for a vision of the state that contains elements of old and new – the question is what form it should now take. Where is the public sphere of the future and what does it look like? Since the ‘big state’ is toxic in the public eye, what words can we use to articulate it? One way forward is to distinguish between the original ideals of the state and their (imperfect) realisation; to renew the humane and equitable principles of belonging, collective identity, public spirit, support for the vulnerable, increased equality and the regulation of business. Reviving these ideals is not going backwards, if they were never implemented properly.

As well as the caring function of the welfare state, we need to revive the state’s enabling infrastructure. I want a state that embodies Slavoj Žižek’s notion of efficient impersonality: that provides services at scale. There’s currently a lot of enthusiasm on the Left for a universal basic income, and while I’m broadly in favour of this in a world of increased automation and exploitative labour, it does not address the problem of inequality: it’s rather like a benign version of the flat tax. As soon as you begin to address the flaws of the UBI, like introducing elements of means testing, the more you begin to just start reinventing the wheel of the welfare state. The UBI is promoted by the Right as well, which is cause for suspicion. And it doesn’t address the need people have for status and validation through work.

It’s possible to incorporate elements of the 1960s Left critique of the post-war state by recognising people’s differing circumstances, the importance of social relationships and the necessity of regarding the origins of people’s needs in political terms; in other words it’s possible to personalise the state, and politicise the personal. We do not have to invent a new world of co-production, individual budgets and the like. But welfare needs to be built around people’s lived experience and real socio-economic context. This approach – applied to childcare, schooling, housing, unemployment, mental health, drugs policy and so on – has the benefit of connecting the micro with the macro, of consciousness-raising at the ground level, and enhancing democratic engagement.

The absence of a collective identification with the nation state, the lack of a sense of public citizenship and a pact of duty with a protective entity – this is what has caused nationalist fervour, right-wing populism, Brexit, anti-immigration sentiment and a widespread confusion about the level at which accountability and sovereignty should be exercised. The primacy of ‘the market’ and ‘the global race’, the notion that people are simply units of productivity that must contribute to growth – these are no substitute for the state as the manifestation of the common good.

If the state is to be revitalised for a suspicious public however, we need to respond to the new desire for visceral control by combining the structural big solutions with the state at the local level, thinking about the most appropriate level at which decisions should be made to maximise people’s sense of agency over their environment and their lives. This principle of subsidiarity – that decisions should be taken at the lowest level possible – once found expression in local government and municipal bodies such as the GLC. Despite their rhetoric of localism, successive governments have starved local government of money and control. We need to formulate and fund new forms of local administration, and incorporate these with national state administration – there is no inherent conflict between the two. The priority is to have the big conversation about how this might work, and not assume that ultra-local is always by definition best.

CHAPTER SIX

Democracy and the Fetish of Participation

There is no doubt that the democratic system we have in Britain is broken, hollow and unfit for purpose. Corporate lobbyists and finance power have unlimited influence, while civil society groups are gagged in the run-up to elections. The real power resides not in the institutions of democracy but in the governmental executive, in corporate and private interests, and in unelected technocratic bodies. Our system of party funding is corrupt. There’s the notorious revolving door between ministerial office and the private sector. MPs are professionalised and media-trained to become impermeable robots, and all-powerful whips enforce uniformity and message discipline. As The Thick of It illustrated to the point of cliché, politics has become a cynical game of spin, marketing and PR. Most of the British media is owned by a handful of right-wing billionaires. The debating chamber of the House of Commons hosts a mechanical performance. More recently, elections have been skewed by dark money, the manipulation of data and the use and abuse of algorithms. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to hold politicians to account over time: the resignable offence – you said that then, you say this now – feels like a thing of the past. Politics exists in the moment, which can be shaped by powerful forces and media management: the past – which includes manifesto commitments – is erased; irrelevant. The loss of the temporal dimension is an understated aspect of so-called post-truth politics.

Above all, however, democracy is dominated by right-wing parties. It’s true that there are structural problems with the electoral system that militate against the success of Left parties. Electoral reform is long overdue. But in order to properly diagnose the problem, we need to begin with a question that is a theme running through this book but is rarely asked elsewhere: Is the problem the system itself, or its capture by the Right?

We are living in a post-democratic era, but the reaction to this is complicated by the fact that MPs on Right and Left, left-wing NGOs, think tanks and activists are all saying that representative democracy is dead. Their legitimate critique of democracy in terms of its corruption by the Right merges confusingly with a critique of the system of representation itself. Belief in the principle of representation has been replaced by a quixotic faith in referendums. In the aftermath of Brexit, MPs voted shamefully to deny themselves a meaningful vote on the form the final deal would take. The emasculation of parliamentary sovereignty in Britain epitomises the way in which democracy is now being eroded – in the name of democracy.

Right-wing populists like Douglas Carswell criticise the parliamentary system, but are still thoroughly invested in institutional power. The Left are equally populist – even Jeremy Corbyn describes the Westmin-

ster system as ‘broken’²³ – but instead of taking power, a lot of left-wing energy is channelled into setting up a myriad of alternative initiatives. There is Unlock Democracy, Involve, Assemblies for Democracy, Flatpack Democracy and Occupy Democracy to name just a few. There are sites like 38 Degrees which have some effect but are prone to the pitfalls of ‘clicktivism’. And there are groups using innovative face-to-face methods of participation and engagement such as Podemos and Take Back the City. These are all great. But reinventing or reviving democracy is nothing if not structural, and few of these groups address the question of how their work fits with the existing system. It’s as if we are building lots of little wooden sheds in the grounds of an old, crumbling mansion.

It’s logical to want to create bottom-up initiatives to reinvigorate democracy, but how do these relate to the mainstream political arena? How do alternative democratic platforms tackle what the Right has done to parliamentary democracy? Unless we are really pessimistic and there is no hope of broader change, advocates of these initiatives need to keep in mind the connection between what they are doing and the big picture. The election of Corbyn as Labour leader, and his subsequent relative success in the 2017 general election, created confusion among many proponents of alternative democratic spaces, because it placed radical political action back in the mainstream democratic arena. But this new reality has not been adequately integrated into a systemic working-through of these questions about the relationship between activism and the status quo. Politics is after all about organising the whole system.

Of course, the best democratic initiatives see no conflict between established and innovative; one complements the other. But we must at least think through the relationship between old and new. One group, therules.org, comments that it is ‘working for change from the ground up’, but how does that fit with the top down? Therules.org claims that ‘we simply cannot rely on the electoral political system to save us, because it is designed to prevent the fundamental change we need’. But what if the right people were in charge – would we need to reinvent the system then?

For the last five years, the leftists with energy on their side have been busily rejecting representative democracy in favour of direct, deliberative and participative forms – government by the people, not just for the people. They claim that people are no longer content to simply vote every five years and then ‘go back to sleep’. But then Brexit happened, and it was abruptly clear that direct democracy is not necessarily better at all; that majoritarianism has inherent problems that we didn’t really anticipate, because – as with the vast majority of commentators blindsided by right-wing populism – everyone was assuming that we just needed to give people more power, and everything would be okay. It’s not necessarily a more progressive situation if more people vote and they are mostly right-wing and ‘the will of the people’ equates to enabling exploitation and disempowerment.

* * *

Simply calling for a replacement for our current system, therefore, obscures key questions about what’s happened to democracy, who dominates it and why, and what the word even means. Because it’s such a moveable feast, ‘democracy’ can simply indicate a direction of travel, or the impression of a direction of travel: it can signal an intention for the people to have a more powerful role, or it can also be simply a PR term: signalling but not instituting people-power.

There are such diverse definitions of democracy that it’s difficult to know what people mean when they say they want things to be ‘more democratic’. For example, the proponents of a project called ‘Redesigning Democracy’ say they are ‘pro real democracy’; they want to build ‘a truly democratic society, where everyone will be given an equal chance to prosper’.²⁴ Such initiatives surely mean well, but they are emblematic of the ambiguity that surrounds the term. The people behind Redesigning Democracy want to give up on politicians, and look for change from ‘the British people’. But they also want to rescue the NHS and HMRC. Do they want top-down at all, or just bottom-up? It’s not clear. At its worst, this ambiguity is not only intellectually unclear and strategically undermining – it can also lead to co-option: for example, ‘Direct Democracy’ is the title of a pamphlet written by right-wing ideologues intent on dismantling the NHS.

The question of whether or not representation is a good thing is complicated by the fact that, as the political theorist Hanna Fenichel Pitkin noted in her 1967 book The Concept of Representation, there are multiple, competing forms. We need to ask if representation is unfair in principle, or if there are just contingent reasons why people aren’t being properly represented now.

Before the modern period, democracy had nothing to do with elections – it was all about citizen juries and other participatory processes. Athenian democracy was direct in the sense that officials were selected by lot from the general public rather than through elections. Thus to its oligarchic opponents, democracy was a pejorative term: it meant mob rule. The founding fathers of the US constitution never talked about democracy; they preferred the word ‘republican’. The word ‘democratic’ only started being applied to election-based systems in the twentieth century, ironically when financial and corporate power was really starting to dominate. Anxieties about ‘the mob’ were no longer being voiced in public, therefore, but the people were being ‘managed’: the concept of democracy was becoming a PR term.

Advocates of a ‘new democracy’ implicitly portray the UK’s democratic system as an obsolete one that hasn’t changed in decades. A typical statement is that of the Green co-leader Caroline Lucas, who has described our political system as both archaic and broken. Lucas is an exemplary politician, but it’s important to be clear whether it’s a system that’s rotten at its heart, or whether the rot set in at a particular point in history. What if the system’s problems are relatively recent? As Ferdinand Mount points out, the UK was once much more decentralised and participatory than it is now, with strong local government and a network of community organisations that have been all but stripped away. What neoliberalism has done is to centralise so many decisions – from the school curriculum to local planning decisions on matters like fracking – but confusingly, it does so while speaking the language of small government, small state and local autonomy.

We should ask what is inherently wrong with the principle of representation before dismissing a set of institutions that are bad at representing people in practice, for reasons that are partly structural, partly historical and partly political. Is representative democracy really ‘dead’, or has the whole game just moved to the right? Are we in danger of throwing out the baby of representative democracy with the bathwater of neoliberalism? This muddle is not helped by the ubiquity of broadsheet comment pieces that ask: Is liberal democracy dead? Or talk about the waning of the era of social-democratic parties in Europe and the rest of the world. These announcements that such models have ‘failed’ creates a tautological sense that they are faulty by design – when it may be that there is nothing wrong with them, but people have lost faith because we are persuaded to go along with that consensus. The question ‘is social democracy dead’ conflates an ‘is’ with an ‘ought’, but it has become an op-ed truism before it can be properly analysed or understood.

There’s also a danger of reinventing the wheel: deliberative democracy is arguably already present in the form of select committees, and localism in – well, local government, and constituency surgeries. It’s true that ordinary people don’t have enough say in decisions that are taken about their lives. But the state, the government, our elected representatives also don’t have sovereignty. Their hands are tied by globalisation, by corporate and financial power, by bureaucracy and complexity and general ossification. They need to have more power, not less.

It’s tempting to try to re-animate the Athenian model of citizens’ juries, consensus-formation and other forms of active taking part. Commentators I admire such as Hilary Wainwright, Stuart White and Jeremy Gilbert are great proponents of participative and deliberative democracy. Experiments in participative democracy are powerful, they argue, because they provide an exhilarating experience of agency that can lead to broader mobilisation: the Indignados movement in Spain influenced both Podemos and the Radical Independence Campaign in Scotland, for example.

While experiential exemplification can be radical in its immediacy of enactment, we need to be clear and explicit about whether what we are doing is symbolic or substantive. The Flatpack Democracy project in Frome is an inspiring model of direct democratic control: a group of independent councillors have taken over the parish council, and are using the localism bill to exercise both political and economic power in the public interest. Such projects are transformative, but difficult to scale up. They are invariably spearheaded by a charismatic individual. The internet certainly won’t do it spontaneously, as many have claimed.

As Wendy Brown, Srnicek and Williams, and Greg Sharzer (author of No Local: Why Small-Scale Alternatives Won’t Change the World) argue, such models only work – like Athenian democracy did – on a small scale. With a larger population the question immediately arises of how to fairly incorporate everyone’s wishes. The excitement surrounding consensus politics obscures the fact that, invariably, those with the loudest voices tend to dominate. Division of labour is efficient, and it ensures that not everyone has to be involved in every decision. There are many situations in which experts are valuable. Since not everyone can rule or have a say, all of the time, there has always got to be some way of mediating or aggregating people’s views and desires. Representative democracy contains an acknowledgement of this: as such it is indeed the least-worst option. Existing institutions have guarded against corruption and abuses by building in checks and balances, airlocks of necessary delay and reasoned consideration, that small local systems don’t have. Most people have neither the time nor the inclination to go to meetings about the provision of energy in their community or the logistics of refuse collection; they just want it to function properly, as it did before privatisation. As Yotam Marom of Occupy says: ‘At the very heart of your process is the notion that all views will go into the consensus, but now you’re sick of the meeting, you’re hungry, you’re tired of arguing, and you want to go home’.²⁵

There is also the problem of what Jeremy Gilbert calls ‘disaffected consent’: people have become passive and cynical and simply providing new mechanisms is not the answer. Not being listened to can make you angry and engaged, but it can also prompt you to disengage. In my own experience it is really difficult to get people involved in local activities – apart from a number of very well-publicised exceptions. People are burned-out and put-upon; they have request fatigue. Even if we designed the ideal system, it’s not clear that it would actually be taken up. A case in point here are the admirable attempts at a constitutional convention – it’s a good idea to expand people’s participation in the very question of how best to represent people, but in practice it’s hard to ensure that it’s not just the usual suspects turning up. Moreover, the liveliness of this kind of initiative can – when the meetings stretch out – very quickly turn into the procedural dullness that everyone hated in the first place.

As Jodi Dean has argued, this is where the party comes in – the body that can pick up and carry forward these political orientations and desires. ‘We are losing’, she writes in Crowds and Party, ‘and we are perversely praising the conditions and causes of our loss, trying desperately to form them into a politics. This is the politics of the beautiful moment’. The real task of politics, she continues, ‘is to organise the beautiful moment, to give the crowd an orientation, to direct it. The Party names the organization of the crowd into a revolutionary politics that can institute a new social order’.²⁶ This is the role of the party: to concentrate and direct the energies of the people. Ultimately, we need both. The excitement, the feeling of losing yourself, that collective euphoria of the festival can’t last, but it can lead to something else. My point is that not enough people are talking about the structural dimension: community projects and social movements are so often idealised on the Left as if they are the authentic primary origin of all political action. It would help if these different positions were aired and debated in the open, but this is hard to do amid the rousing calls to ‘rip it up and start again’.

* * *

We often hear that people feel distanced from politics because they are not involved in decisions that affect their lives. But there are two issues here that are often conflated: participation in decision-making, and the exercise of meaningful choice in electing a government which would produce a more equitable society. There is a confusion, in other words, about whether democratisation is about giving people the ability to participate, or about electing a party that can change the macro balance of power between finance and humans.

Democracy is not just about taking part. As Chantal Mouffe and Peter Mair note, democracy is about the representation of competing interests, the play of political choices. Our problem is not just one of process, it’s the lack of agonism; it’s the narrow bandwidth in the political spectrum. In its emphasis on problem-solving and consensus-formation, deliberative democracy is unwittingly technocratic. It is anti-ideological, and therefore anti-political. We place too much emphasis on decision-making itself and not enough on the formation of public opinion that shapes the content of those decisions. As a culture we have stopped being interested in the genesis of ideas, just as we have stopped talking about ideology. We tend to think that political views are authentic and organic. But if they are swayed by misinformation, as happened with Brexit, then does that really constitute meaningful democracy?

Our democracy is not working, in other words, not only because it does not represent ordinary people, but also because it does not adequately represent left-wing people – a distinction that is not often made. Is the aim of new democratic experiments to increase the bandwidth of the political spectrum, or is the aim to create a platform of political participation that feels left-wing? It’s not clear to me that systems that are more democratic are necessarily more progressive. Surely a functional democracy contains the Right as a legitimate option.

These are tricky questions. Neoliberalism is indeed anti-political, and works to undermine a functional democracy in which the Left can exist as an option. Better democratic representation offers more opportunity for ordinary people’s voices to be taken into account, which is inherently progressive. But it’s crucial to distinguish between political process and political ideas. When people say ‘we need a new kind of politics’, it’s impossible to know if they mean they want a new system, or new – i.e. left-wing – political ideas. When they say ‘there’s no point in voting, they’re all the same’, they can mean politics is professionalised, robotic and captured, or they can mean the parties are all now clustered to the right of the political spectrum.

At an event convened in 2016 by Jon Trickett MP entitled ‘Designing Democracy’, participants found themselves split between those who wanted to achieve a better society, and those who wanted to simply create a platform which people could use for whatever purpose they chose. If we simply call for a new decision-making system – Democracy 2.0, Democracy OS – then we are neglecting to make the essential case for progressive values, for the kind of society we want. We need purpose as well as process.

We need to think harder about these conundrums if we’re to make meaningful headway. The takeover of the political system by financial power is both an anti-political move and a neoliberal one. We need to be clear about whether reinstating the primacy of politics over economics is a matter of political process or political orientation. And we need to ask how reinstating the primacy of the political over the economic helps with the issue of power – systemic economic power which has come to dominate politics. Are the new democratic formations an end in themselves or a means to an end? Is the problem to do with politics itself or the effect of economics on politics; and is the solution a political or an economic fix, or both – and how will the solution address the relationship between the two?

* * *

Buried within the visceral desire for agency and control so vividly yet incoherently illustrated by debates about the EU is a question about scale; the level at which democratic jurisdiction should operate. Do we want local autonomy, national sovereignty, a European or a global system of governance? Everyone is calling for devolvement of power – but to not set a limit on that downward push to the grassroots is to evade something fundamental. Politics is not just about speaking but about being heard, not just about taking part but about being part of something that matters above the level of you as an individual. There are admirable moves to ‘democratise’ everything on a micro scale – the workplace, education and so on. But what we also really need is civic space, a central forum for democratic exchange, representation and contestation. For people to feel recognised, they need to be acknowledged by the public gaze. If that gaze is fragmented, that need will remain unanswered. This ambiguity is reflected in the word sovereignty. Sovereignty means autonomous control and self-government – sovereignty over the self. But sovereignty also looks up to a representative – as in the sovereign as a figure invested with royal authority – who symbolises this at a higher level. So sovereignty represents the paradox that we only really have autonomy that counts by looking up to a leader.

I believe the nation state as a unit of jurisdiction still has value, because it embodies the idea of the public. It is the level at which representation and accountability are meaningful. The Left needs to have a mature conversation about national democracy and not maintain a sole focus on grassroots community that is politically reductive, tactically ineffective, and mirrors the Right’s emphasis on individual, bootstrap autonomy. But democracy can operate on different levels at once: the desire for control can be met at the sweet spot between individuals and national government. There used to be a name for this: local government. What should it be now? And we also need a system of really macro, international governance to address global inequality, manage migration and limit carbon emissions.

The defective House of Commons has been replaced in the Left imaginary by ‘the commons’: the idea that resources are not only commonly owned and produced, but also administered directly by the people – a different way, in other words, of conceptualising democratic space. In the digital age this space is mapped onto the internet and social media. It’s colonised by groups such as 38 Degrees, Sum of Us and therules.com. This alternative space is not an adequate substitute. Online democratic systems such as delegative democracy, Crowdpac and similar initiatives get a lot of publicity in certain quarters, but it’s very hard for them to catch on and be sustained; you need them to be absolutely universal monopolies to function properly, rather like the route-planner app Waze – which relies on everyone using the same platform. Real-world commons initiatives can be inspirational, but they need to have a rigorous set of rules if they are to work. As soon as you start to replace democracy with another system, you tend to work your way back to the system we already have.

* * *

At the same time, however, I am not against assessing the merits of our democratic system from the ground up. Since that system has been poisoned in the public mind, the renewal of traditional representative democracy will indeed need to be strengthened with participative, deliberative and local forms. These will not be a substitute for representative democracy, but rather can be coherently stitched into it, for example via the institutions of everyday life – work, education and healthcare – so that representative democracy is extended and enriched and people have the experience of engaging with the decisions that affect them.

We should ensure that the renewal of democracy rests on as broad a foundation of engagement and consent as possible, by staging public conversations about our political system. This can happen in the form of a constitutional convention comprising randomly chosen groups of citizens, otherwise known as sortition. Such a group could make structural recommendations – for example, that elements of sortition should be included in the political system itself. This kind of conversation won’t happen organically – it takes organisation and coordination. Progressive alliances between parties opposed to the dominant neoliberal hegemony could be the formal advocates for a better electoral system.

In terms of practical options, many leftists favour a form of proportional representation known as the single transferable vote; although there’s nothing stopping PR benefitting small right-wing parties. We can have a process for recalling MPs, but if we make MPs’ jobs ever more difficult, this ensures that only party insiders and special advisers will ever put themselves up for election. We need to find ways to strengthen big politics so that people-power can be aggregated to counterbalance the power of business and finance – but in a way that takes account of new times, and that gives people more democratic agency.

Once again, we need to pursue a dual strategy: to both model the possible and rework the actual. What of the old democratic system do we want to retain, and what do we need to reinvent? As I’ve argued, the Left is failing to face and get to grips with this structural question. Even if we say ‘the existing structures are inadequate, let’s just start again from scratch’, we still have to say what structures we are going to put in place, otherwise we just replicate the destructive, fragmenting logic of neoliberalism. But to do this work of sifting, analysis and design, we need to tackle the fact that political energy right now is populist; it’s anti-system. And this prevents us from realising our political goals – the subject of the next chapter. What kind of world do we want these structures, institutions and processes to help us achieve, anyway?

CHAPTER SEVEN

Bring Back Ideology – In a New Language

I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, when it was still acceptable – desirable even – to subscribe to an ideology. Politicians set out their beliefs and principles explicitly and passionately in speeches and manifestoes; people grew up with an ideology that arose out of family or community allegiance; they could also change that allegiance as the result of persuasion and debate. The important thing was that people had a political identity, a political language and a political home, even if they didn’t class themselves as ‘political’ animals at all.

But ‘ideology’ has, like ‘politics’, been rejected as a concept. The old ‘isms’ – communism, socialism, even liberalism – are now regarded, paradoxically, as both defunct and dangerous. Politicians on all sides insist that it’s only the opposition that’s motivated by ideology; ‘we’ are simply doing ‘what works’. Those who follow an ideology are either – again paradoxically – naïve dreamers; or they subscribe to a pernicious agenda that wilfully disregards ‘the evidence’. Tony Blair famously declared that New Labour was ‘beyond ideology’. As he was elected president, Barack Obama pledged ‘a new declaration of independence ... from ideology and small thinking’. Obama has claimed that President Trump is ‘non-ideological.’ Trump certainly denounces ideology. In reality, of course, politicians are all still ideological; it’s just that now their motivations are hidden.

The toxification of ideology is one of the great puzzles of our era; yet it’s rarely remarked upon. The OED reminds us that ideology is ‘a system of ideas and ideals, especially one which forms the basis of economic or political theory and policy’. It’s hard to see why that is so terrible. So how has ideology been transformed from a neutral, descriptive category to one that is negatively inflected? And if we were to revive ideology, how could it be cleansed or reinvented?

The turn against ideology originated in the 1990s with Blair, Clinton and Third Way politics. Instead of setting out a platform of beliefs for voters to choose between, politicians began to canvass their voters to find out what they cared about and then attempted to appeal to those concerns. Although it seemed as if politicians were now listening to voters more, in fact they were turning the whole operation into a marketing exercise. ‘Third Way’ politicians posited a static ‘centre ground’ which they then attempted to win over, ensuring that politics became more and more bland; that the clear blue water between parties became ever narrower. If you just target swing voters based on their intrinsic identity, making it all about who they in essence are, you fail to see ideology as capable of swinging those voters in a different direction.

Ideological allegiance used to be shaped communally and from the ground up by group circumstance and social context. We often hear from the media that class categories are much more complex than they used to be, but as I’ve been arguing, they are still present – if disavowed. What has changed is that the institutional, social, communal and cultural platforms for enacting this identity are falling away. Tabloid newspapers still exert a strong pull on working-class communities, but this force-field is increasingly rigid and shrill, perhaps capitalising on the fact that the communal fabric of their readership is wearing thin. The political theorist Alan Finlayson has described how ideological affiliations used to be marshalled and defined by the rhetorical bond between politicians and their supporters – either in public meetings or through the medium of newspapers, radio or TV. But as the public sphere and the media landscape fragments, those relationships of identification are breaking down – or at least we have a general fragmentation combined with the occasional intervention by a demagogic leader such as Trump. Our media culture – online echo chambers combined with the residually powerful tabloids – has produced a kind of monopolistic monoculture that mimics in its blanket rhetoric the mass media of the 1930s while also differing from it in important respects. While ideology was once propounded through rhetoric, we have declared rhetoric, like ideology, dead – despite the dominance of what was once ‘spin’ and is now ‘post-truth’.

Rhetoric, like ideology, never died – what we have now is a rhetoric of no rhetoric. Donald Trump exemplifies this combination of extreme rhetoric and anti-rhetoric: he is a ‘blowhard’, yet an ‘ordinary guy’. Our political culture is all about authenticity and hard hats and hard work and early mornings and productivity. Politicians avoid setting out a platform of ideals and policies in favour of ‘consulting’ the electorate at every opportunity – formerly in focus groups, now ‘on the doorstep’. We have the worst of all worlds: we are constantly asked for our opinions, yet we neither have any power nor are properly taken care of, because those in charge are only interested in pursuing their own careers while at the same time relinquishing ideological leadership.

I’ve argued in this book that anti-politics and post-politics are part of a vicious circle whereby the aspects of the political system that are identified as solutions are actually part of the problem. Ideology – and the state – are the obverse: they are aspects that are regarded as problems but are actually part of the solution. The post-ideological turn is self-perpetuating: the more ideology is dismissed as inflexible tribalism; the less politics becomes anything that people could really care about. It is mutually reinforced by politicians, the media and the public. In fact, it’s at the heart of a widespread misunderstanding about the cause of our political malaise. While ideology is regarded pejoratively as the harbouring of a vested interest, practical empiricism is viewed positively as ‘getting the job done’. So we may think we’re against technocracy, but we are all technocrats now. The ‘problem with politics’ is identified as its confrontational style – outmoded in an age in which the old polarities supposedly no longer pertain. ‘My toddler behaves better than MPs at PMQs’ is a familiar complaint. But while the performance may be confrontational, this masks the fact that the ideas are not. As Chantal Mouffe notes, we need politicians to have genuine disagreements based on fundamental ideological differences – that’s what agonistic democracy is all about.

The public’s distaste for ideology is presented by politicians and the media as an issue of demand – that people are inherently apathetic and uninterested in political difference. But as Peter Mair, and the 2006 Power Inquiry’s report into Britain’s democracy – ‘Power to the People’ – have noted, apathy is something of a myth. It’s actually a problem of supply: parties do not set out clear alternatives, so why should the public be enthusiastic about choosing between them? This is why polarised politicians such as Trump and Sanders become so popular – because they appear to offer ideological distinctiveness. The difference between them is that Trump is just noisy and outspoken, whereas Sanders says what he believes. It’s something that worthy Electoral Commission reports don’t get. They don’t associate apathy with post-ideology; they just keep trying to ensure that politics is about ‘issues that are relevant to people’. Without conviction and idealism, it’s no wonder that voters regard politicians with cynicism, as just in it for their own gain.

* * *

There’s another, bigger question here, however, which I first raised in the introduction – a question which is central, in fact, to our understanding of contemporary politics and culture in general, and which must govern our response to post-politics. Is the turn against ideology part of a broader postmodern rejection of grand narratives, or is it the result of a specific neoliberal strategy designed to foreclose the possibility of a left alternative?

As I noted earlier on, Francis Fukuyama was a Neocon when he wrote ‘The End of History?’, but he rather accurately diagnosed our present condition: political debate is indeed moribund – at least on the level of explicit articulation. Today’s young activists may still sit around campfires, but lofty debates about principles and ideals have given way to exchanging predictions about concentrations of CO². Of course there are always politics in everything – there are winners and losers in climate change, and international climate summits illustrate the power dynamics between developing and developed countries. But climate change is an existential challenge. It’s a post-political problem, but if it’s to be curbed in time it demands political action.

So has the triumph of neoliberalism caused the death of ideology? It’s probably too early to tell. What is clear is that they go hand in hand: as Colin Hay argues in Why We Hate Politics, the last three decades have seen the rise of the depoliticising assumption that politicians and the public alike are ‘self-interested rational utility maximisers’ – that all political decision-making is driven by economistic expediency. Neoliberal ideology has managed to disguise itself as ordinary common sense and market naturalism. Any reference to creating a better world is greeted with eye-rolling; austerity, low taxes and market ‘reforms’ are successfully presented as the only game in town. This is fake-realist politics, framed rigidly by the ‘Overton window’. David Cameron launched his austerity budget with the declaration that ‘We are not driven by some theory or some ideology. We are doing this … because we have to’.²⁷ This disavowal of ideology is the most ideological utterance of all. It’s designed to stop people thinking, questioning and challenging received opinion. Left and Right are still meaningful categories, therefore, but by demonising ideology and deploying the apolitical vocabulary of the household budget, today’s neoliberal elite conceals and promotes its partisan agenda. The Left is vulnerable to the fact that ideology is most strongly associated with pie-inthe-sky socialism. In fact, as I’m arguing in this book, politics is itself identified as left-wing. The Right, meanwhile, can present themselves, misleadingly, as non-ideological.

When the Right do make overtly ideological statements now, they employ the language of the Left. It’s significant and not often noted that the co-option only goes in one direction: the Left has moved to the right, but only the Right co-opt the language of the Left, not the other way around. This begs some interesting questions: is it only the Left that is good, that is ethical? Is it only the Right who lie, who say one thing in public and another in private? What exactly do the Right say in private about what they are doing – do they sincerely believe they are following their own route to creating a better world, or are they simply finding ways to publicly legitimate the defence of wealth and privilege? The problem for the Left is that their ideas only appear credible when articulated by the Right; and that when they do express their own ideas, they find themselves just repeating the messages of their opponents.

Left-wing parties are told repeatedly by politicians and the media that they need to move to the right in order to win the support of working-class voters and get elected; then they duly move to the right, and they lose anyway to a more right-wing party. Many disaffected voters are aware that right-wing politicians will forsake them, but the hegemonic power of the Right is now so strong that those voters exercise the only power they have left, which is to forsake the Left for moving to the right. The Right is popular because the Left sold out and moved to the right. So the solution is for the Left to keep left.

While ideological polarity seems to have returned over the last few years, and particularly with the rise of Jeremy Corbyn, the shift towards the culture wars is still dominant: we see bitter divisions based on social ‘values’, identity and place. The return of history we have witnessed most dramatically has been the up-surge not of leftist resistance but of right-wing populism. The resistance has been ‘the people’ against the political establishment, not Left against Right. Fukuyama famously claimed that liberal democracy had triumphed, but the ‘return of history’ has been a reaction against liberals and social democrats. Ironically, liberals are now figured as left-wing. The return of history has been to a large extent in the service of the Right.

* * *

It’s deeply problematic, therefore, that the Left has accepted the post-ideology development seemingly without questioning it.²⁸ Grassroots localism is a facet of this tendency, as is the embrace of single-issue campaigns and action over words. A typical comment is that by one representative of an otherwise admirable campaign group on the New Economy Organisers’ Network (NEON) email list, during a discussion about the term ‘alt-left’: ‘If something still comes with the labels of left or right attached, it’s hardly an “alternative”. Any attempt at a genuinely unifying politics has got to leave those binary categories behind, otherwise you’re only ever speaking to your own. It’s inherently oppositional’. For me, opposition is not aggressive or negative; it’s properly democratic.

Commentators have replaced what they label the ‘old’ left-right binary with other, more modish categories: Jon Cruddas claims that the new political division is between those who believe in central control and those who believe in distributed autonomy – as if anyone would say they believe in central control. David Goodhart’s much-discussed distinction is between the ‘Anywheres’ and the ‘Somewheres’ – a formulation which in my view is both inaccurate and also simply reproduces the existing stereotypical tabloid categories. To me, Right and Left still have purchase.

The Left’s attempt to move beyond ideology is not surprising, since the ability to self-articulate has been so comprehensively tainted. But although the refusal to make demands can open up a space for radical imagination, it is also deeply compromising in terms of strategy and purpose. It leaves the field clear for the Right to claim to be post-ideological and decentralised while privately operating an integrated hegemonic infrastructure of think tanks, media commentators and the central party machine.

Without necessarily putting their finger on the problem, many left commentators are now attempting to fill the ideology-shaped hole. There is much talk of ‘framing’ and ‘narratives’; but these strategies are derived from a cognitive-essentialist political-science tradition, and are beset by confusion as to whether they are about branding or deep principles. The appeal to ‘moral’ values neglects the political dimension: it fails to appreciate the clash of competing views, and the fact that the Right has principles too. Without any historical sense or understanding of the meaning and life of ideology and its recent rejection, the Left is unable to correctly identify the loss and how it might be remedied. We need to talk explicitly about what has happened to ideology and why we need to bring it back or replace it.

There are signs that things may be changing. On the Left right now there is a profound desire to ‘envision real utopias’ to borrow the title of a book by the sociologist Erik Olin Wright; to articulate a vision and purpose. We want to be able to opt out of marketisation and financialisation, low tax, low wages and a small state, but how do we define what progressive principles are? There’s a recognition that without a clear expression of what we are for, it will be impossible to scale up all the myriad campaigns and initiatives into a concerted, enduring alternative. Attempts to define what this might look like are emerging, albeit in isolation. There’s the Kilburn Manifesto in Soundings, NEON’s Framing the Economy project, the work of the Public Interest Research Centre, George Monbiot’s vision in his 2017 book Out of the Wreckage, Adbusters’ ‘Blueprints for a New World’, NEF’s paper ‘From the Ashes of the Crash’, Common Weal’s ‘All of Us First’ and many others. We need to share and combine and conserve these manifestos and blueprints: we need to assemble the building blocks of a new left ideology.

* * *

In our postmodern, pre-linguistic predicament, we need new words. It’s not enough – as the populist Left inspired by Ernesto Laclau believe – to simply recolonise the territory of ‘common sense’. This movement regards common sense as a linguistic moveable feast: Laclau took from Saussurian linguistics the idea that words mean nothing in themselves; they only acquire meaning in relation to other words that they are not. But politics is about interests and demands that arise out of a particular lived experience and socio-economic position. It is true, however, that any new ideology will need to connect with people’s sense of the real and the credible. The challenge for the Left is to find a new way to express this – and through the channels of communication that now influence public opinion. Can we brush off and re-use the word ‘left’? Or must we, like Podemos, conclude that its currency is irredeemably tarnished?

Ideological articulation does emerge at key moments of stress and opposition – in confrontation with an immediate and specific threat, like forced eviction or the Grenfell fire. At those moments, people are reminded of the value of collective definition and affiliation. But if this is not consolidated and generalised, such moments are both fleeting and politically slippery – such as the ‘broom brigade’ as a response to the London riots of 2011.

Ideologies are both emotional and cerebral, about both reactive anger and idealistic hope. They provide identity of purpose and build communities of solidarity and resistance. Ideologies acquire shape – crucially – through conflict, by taking sides: as the political theorist Kate Dommett notes, we know who we are, and who we are with, by what we oppose. This is why ‘values’ aren’t a substitute – ideologies are about what we are against as well as what we are for. ‘Divisiveness’ is only toxic when ideology is replaced by identity. In some ways consensus is benign, but in others it’s total-itarian. The reason why the much-hailed ‘new politics’ doesn’t stick is that – like marketing – its watchword is ‘engagement’. The Third Way was a politics without an enemy. And that was why we opposed it.

Ideology, like politics, is about real choice, about human agency. It’s about opening the Overton window, perceiving that the constraints upon us are planetary, not economic. In an age of unprecedented freedom and resources we have succumbed to the daily grind and the mean straightjacket of austerity and various forms of determinism – Darwinian, cognitive, technological, market. False inevitability and false expedience is placing the Left outside the realm of legitimate possibility. What kind of society deems it unthinkable to requisition empty private apartments for the homeless residents of a burned-out tower block? What has happened to our capacity to decide, collectively, what kind of world we want to live in? We don’t have to be miserable and work hard all the time. We have the wherewithal to look after our citizens and treat them generously. We can reclaim humanity and the good life from markets and machines. It doesn’t have to be this way.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Back to the Political Future

In this age of change and uncertainty, everyone is looking for answers. But nobody really knows what’s going to happen. In these interregnum times, nobody has a definitive or credible sense of how to proceed, or how things will all shake down. It’s actually impossible to know the kind of politics we need until we know what kind of era we’re heading into – if we are facing environmental collapse, then we’ll need a kind of existential, practical, survivalist politics – it would be appropriate in that scenario to go and live in Transition Towns and concentrate on building our resilience.

In this final section, therefore, I do not lay out a new blueprint or programme or explore possible scenarios comprehensively, but I attempt to map out the kinds of considerations we need to be making when thinking about the political future. Time and again commentators have been caught out by events, and actually the one thing we can reasonably conclude from this is that we need to spend more time trying to analyse our anti-political predicament and the Left’s seeming inability to make sustained headway.

There’s an odd way in which the radical solutions that preoccupy the commentariat – Universal Basic Income, robots, space-travel – seem to evade the political doldrums we are in, or presuppose what seems to me an unlikely rupture between these times of head-down long-hours work culture and Conservative dominance, and a post-work future. As I’ll argue, these imagined solutions are also often highly technological in a way that is both unattractively post-human and ecologically non-viable.

We need politics more than ever to solve the persistent and worsening problems of our world – climate change, poverty, inequality, financialisation, loneliness, community breakdown; the list is long. Yet the Left is thoroughly split on the question of whether to act on a macro or a local scale; from the top down or the bottom up; using old solutions or new; and enacting them through evolution or revolution. And so often, as I’ve argued, it’s the local, the bottom-up, the new and the revolutionary that are the privileged approaches.

* * *

I understand that the big-picture solutions seem daunting. I also understand the reluctance to engage with old institutions; in John Harris’s memorable phrase, to put jump leads on dinosaurs. I can appreciate the desire to work on an ultra-local level, to invent entirely new structures on the ground: to follow Colin Ward rather than Herbert Morrison. In Spain and Portugal right now, embracing community autonomy is for many the only way to live with any hope. In Italy, a movement called Genuino Clandestino has given up on mainstream politics and is returning to small-scale living off the land as a response to capitalist hegemony. To a considerable extent, it is possible to create your own phenomenological reality: to be surrounded in your everyday life by shared allotments and organic cafes and start-ups and co-ops and people who share your outlook. Such small-scale solutions are radical, empowering and create an experience of life that can feel transformative.

It is also true, as Jodi Dean puts it, that Goldman Sachs doesn’t care if you keep chickens. Bottom-up projects don’t address macro power imbalances, and are hard to replicate on a large scale, particularly without inspirational leaders like Frome’s Peter Macfadyen or Barcelona’s Ada Colau. Time and again, leftist accounts of brilliant initiatives play down the importance of these individuals who actually make things happen.

Local initiatives can be linked to large-scale solutions: it’s valuable to build up the connective tissue between the horizontal and the vertical, grassroots and leaders, social movements and political parties, local and national. As I’ve noted, local formations can function as prefigurations of the macro. Community projects that shape our reality in the here and now are ways of having a good life while we redesign the big solutions and build up left hegemony. The priority is understanding the relationship between those immersive experiments and the bigger interventions – and not giving up on those bigger interventions, not giving up on the structural questions.

Climate change is a case in point: it illustrates more than anything that we still need politics to take concerted action to save the future, but the debate on climate change mirrors the debate in politics: should change come from the bottom, from individual behaviour, or should it come from the top, from national or international governments imposing limits on carbon use and investing in damage-limitation technologies? Ultimately, it’s not an either/or: we really need both. But the difference between the two needs to be clearly articulated on the Left so that we can strategise coherently on these multiple fronts.

Blue Labourites such as Maurice Glasman are right that we need to revive the infrastructure of local and community organisations that mediate between people and big politics. They are also right to say that politics needs to address ordinary life; what Marc Stears calls a socialism of the everyday. The world around us used to be shaped by our needs and wants. Farm tools would evolve according to how they were used: they would be honed and tweaked and perfected on a human scale. Now the world is designed around other needs and wants – corporate, operational, managerial. Work phones require a byzantine login procedure to make a call; office workers no longer have bins under their desks; train doors lock forty seconds before the scheduled departure time. The problem with politics – as with so many aspects of ‘modern’ life – is that it is no longer ergonomic. It’s true that politics will work again only when it’s designed around the heuristic reality of relationships and home and work and emotion and culture. For it to catch light, politics will need to be about what kind of life we want to lead and what we value. This is why the debate about the future of work is central to the future of politics. If politics is to be rebuilt, these will be the bricks.

Yet this perceived need to scrap politics and start again with the concerns of down-to-earth everyday life is not the whole answer. Our spark is lit not only by having a direct say in refuse collection, but by being lifted out of everyday life and into a collective concern, a broader project, an overriding principle. Given the current emphasis on local autonomy, it’s the big picture that needs emphasising; otherwise we give up on challenging neoliberal hegemony and politics threatens to dissolve into myopic lifestyle improvement. And it’s not an overstatement to say that if we give up on the big picture, we give up on human civilisation as a collective project.

As I’ve argued in this book, politics is about a generality of jurisdiction, a social desire to collectively organise how things work – to have a single, agreed way of doing things. You notice this especially when you go to a foreign country, and don’t know for example where to buy bus tickets. Our current political crisis is in a sense a confusion about scales of jurisdiction – over what area politics will be exercised. Nobody likes to talk about the question of scale and jurisdiction – it’s too abstract, too dry – yet it is a knot at the heart of the public’s inchoate frustration. Control is not just about the ability to pull your own personal lever; it’s about ensuring that the big levers work for the ninety-nine percent.

Beneath the level of the sovereign authority there do need to be sub-groupings of political organisation and identity based on shared experience – not just about where you’re from or whether you’re gay or straight, but about common aims and needs and wants. As I’ve argued throughout, however, these formations must be stitched into the big picture. Because while it’s fine to have local jurisdiction, what happens if you then bump up against another jurisdiction, or people from another area, and you all have different rules?

Many people are positing technology as a kind of proxy for general, top-down jurisdiction; but unless there is universal imposition of that technology, how does it ever catch on in a holistic, joined-up way? The commercial forces driving technological change militate against compatibility – as well as the common good. There is no structure for co-ordination. Silicon Valley – like Donald Trump – is explicitly against the ‘administrative state’. An illustrative example is Wired magazine collecting data on the resilience of Italian schools to earthquakes, supposedly an example of ‘Smart Cities’ making use of the ‘big data revolution’ – but the government simply ignored the data and year after year schools keep collapsing. There’s no point having the data if governments ignore it; you can’t just have islands of technology that aren’t put to organised use. Top-down is so out of fashion now; but without it how do you ever get anything done?

New technology is equally difficult to aggregate for bottom-up action and organisation. It’s telling, for example, that there are numerous collective consumer bargaining initiatives online, splitting their mass galvanising potential. Why is there not just one? Cyber-utopianism is not a solution for our political malaise, and it’s the only solution that’s currently being offered on the Left. Some commentators, such as Paul Mason in PostCapitalism, have outlined solutions that are both radical and large-scale – but all are predicated on new technology being transformed from its current role as vehicle for corporate dystopia into a platform for common ownership of the means of production. It’s true that automation will inevitably and radically alter the nature of work and the structure of society. But so far the prospects for an effective progressive digital politics or society seem to me both unlikely and unappealing. As David Graeber and Nick Srnicek have noted, automation will only happen if there are strong workers’ rights. The ‘internet of things’, the zero-marginal-cost society, the singularity, robot carers – these prospects are unrealistic and inhuman. We need to take a sober look at new technology and distinguish the desirable from the inevitable. What political possibilities are really afforded by digital culture, and to what extent is it part of post-politics?

The advent of new technology and its dominance in our lives has in fact itself contributed to the death of politics. Young activists feel technology is left-wing, with its scope to ‘hack the system’ and its apparently iconoclastic youthful constituency. But it is post-political in that it is politically neutral: technology is a platform, not a force for a particular political persuasion. It is post-political in that it drains and neuters human attention, human energy and human will. It is also quite distinctly a force for elite interests, as increasingly the promise of an egalitarian digital commons is revealed as a chimera, replaced by the reality of Google, Facebook and a handful of other tax-avoiding global monopolies. The place of technology in new political and social movements is frequently overstated. Old-fashioned TV was key to Podemos’ rise. Bernie Sanders’ campaign relied on face-to-face ‘barnstorm’ meetings.

There is a way in which new technology can be marshalled to reinvent the big solutions in a coordinated way, in the form of what some call ‘cyber-Stalinism’: the use of Bitcoin’s encryption technology to deliver the functions of the state. The key to this is the block chain: a secure system that allows identities to be verified. In any transaction – whether it’s a financial transaction or the distribution of benefits – the key is knowing whether the recipient is who they say they are. This is all about replacing the ultra-local forms of verification that existed prior to modern credit – people lived in small communities with local currencies and they knew each other face to face, or by close reputation. The block chain is oddly both post- and pre-modern – it comes after the modern state and also harks back to old, decentralised, small-community methods of knowing who you were dealing with. It provides a standardised way of decentralising this process of verification. This peer-to-peer method of carrying out transactions could be radical in the sense that it could bypass finance power. But this is precisely what finance power is trying to avoid with its supposedly empowering ‘cashless society’ – an attempt to control all transactions. The centralised state is all about transparency; the decentralised one is all about encryption: they are in a sense two competing models of bureaucracy. The problem with the decentralised model is that it is both highly technical and Kafka-esque; buying into the block chain means being locked into a highly laborious, arcane and exacting numerical system. Many utopian political claims are made for the block chain, but really it’s just a verification tool – you can’t use it for collective decision-making.

It is only the determined, organised, large-scale solutions that are capable of tackling financial and corporate power, inequality and climate change – the most pressing issues of our age. For this to happen, we need to reinvent left ideology, and to actively promote left movement building, left leadership, and left parties in order to revitalise democracy and the state. We need to reach back through history and repurpose these arrangements and institutions for new times, sifting through the old ideas to see what was valuable and then reframing the ideas and structures in the context of what has really changed. And we need to shift public opinion through a concerted effort to reinvent progressive language, and disseminate progressive messages through political education and the media.

* * *

The big unanswered question about the future of politics – one that I’ve tried to call attention to in this book – is whether the change required is one of amelioration or alternatives. It’s true that the idea of mending rather than replacing our political system feels like putting on a wet bathing suit. If we just limp on with the current combination of complexity and disillusionment, with a few direct-democratic sops and patches, then discontent will continue to fester. We will always feel the need for something new. On the other hand, overhauling the entire system feels impossibly difficult. This is what neoliberal post-politics does: it makes it seem as if change entails building a whole new politics from scratch.

This dilemma is related to another theme running through this book: the issue of temporality. MPs and commentators are constantly calling for a ‘new politics’. Such calls are symptomatic – they function as a kind of political turbo-consumerism or ‘non-stop inertia’ to borrow the title of a book by Ivor Southwood. It’s as if we’re all repeatedly hitting the ‘refresh’ buttons on our browser windows, willing something to happen. This actually prevents us from analysing our predicament and prospects – a relentless case of ‘Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss’. Rejecting the past keeps us stuck, lacking the tools, language and resources with which to build the future, and condemned to repeating the same mistakes. So rather than calling for a new politics, I want to dig down into this facile neophilia, identifying it as a key aspect of neo-liberal post-politics.

Like other forms of right-wing depoliticisation, the rejection of history is a partisan ploy presented as a universal imperative. The result is that everyone now – on both Right and Left – dismisses the past as necessarily bad. But to only ‘face forwards’ is to assume – along with neo-Darwinians and the prophets of digital destiny – that things automatically get better all the time. This insidious logic implies that the winners are the best – when in fact in politics it just means they’re the most powerful; another reason why Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ thesis is problematic.

As Owen Hatherley has noted, one of the many pernicious effects of austerity nostalgia is the way in which it casts socialism as a thing of the past, and how through its ironic pose it subtly reduces any positive harking back to the welfare state as not realistic or reasonable. And neoliberalism thus becomes not only a seemingly neutral development, but also a self-perpetuating one: the past was more left-wing and we can’t return to it. Calls for ‘the new’ thus reproduce the neoliberal erasure of the progressive past. They confound an ‘is’ with an ‘ought’: because in a literal sense we can’t turn the clock back, the Right persuades us that it’s undesirable to look to the past. The cry ‘We can’t go back to 1945’ – which I hear on both Right and Left – blends a kind of austerity realism with a seemingly common-sense dismissal of time travel.

This is particularly ironic since the Right in the UK is called ‘Conservative’ – yet they talk only of the need to ‘reform’ everything. At the same time, they merrily invoke other policies from the 1950s – most strikingly, grammar schools. It’s maddening that the political past becomes out of bounds just as our culture is thoroughly saturated with retro style, historical drama and a 1950s work ethic. The Left – for its part – is completely at sea on the whole question of conservation and progressiveness. Since the corruption of politics is a recent phenomenon, figures like Corbyn, Sanders or David Harvey represent the ‘new politics’, but they are also a throwback, because they haven’t changed since the ’70s, when in some ways politics was more real, more committed, more straightforwardly ideological. After nearly four decades of neoliberal dominance and ‘New Labour’, the old, unreconstructed Left feels fresh; but the Left doesn’t know how to draw conclusions from this fact, and integrate them into its thinking and strategy. Young leftists don’t pause to consider what it is about that earlier era that continues to throw up so many heroes.

Despite the neophilia that liberates the Right and constrains the Left, in reality our political culture is thoroughly mixed: it combines elements of old and new. That’s a necessary and a good thing. We need to ‘make do and mend’, to combine the new political energy with traditional institutions and structures. Our task is to sort through the political past and decide what we want to save, and what requires reinvention. The response to post-politics is to renew history in order to create a better future.

If going back to old ideas seems like a cop-out, it’s not. In the realm of culture, critics such as Mark Fisher and Slavoj Žižek have responded to the atemporal paralysis of postmodernism by calling for a return to a historic modernism. This is crucially distinct from right-wing modernisation, which renders the past unavailable. Modernisation is devoid of idealism, because nothing from the past is available for use. Hand in hand with the shutting down of agonism, therefore, is a closing down of the past that could provide foundations for the future – historical precedents that could provide evidence of different ways of organising society.

I recognise that the public needs a sense of the new. We have to appreciate that people get really fired up by conversations about new formations, and there’s no putting the genie of new democratic structures back in the bottle. Neoliberalism has succeeded in activating public antibodies against the system we have. What I’ve argued in this book, though, is that our inability to discern whether the flaws are inherent or evolved is hampering our response. And ultimately, I don’t think people really want to raze Parliament to the ground. After all, the populism we are seeing now is deeply atavistic – it’s all about homeland; taking things back to how they used to be; old industry and traditional jobs; Farage’s beer and cricket. The approach I’m proposing would speak to this profound need for security and stability and belonging, while also reviving the big-picture, modernist, forward-looking visions of how we want our world to be.

Modernism is attractive to me because it represents a break from political Conservatism, an intellectual jolt, in the realms of both politics and culture, away from stultifying complacency and the unjust status quo. Yet I am also a conservative with a small c. I share with old-fashioned Tories a desire to preserve the traditions and aesthetic treasures of civilisation and the natural world. I want to forge an alliance between red and green, between left radicals and the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England. Those old traditional Conservatives – like Roger Scruton – who share this position are increasingly marginalised by a party that wants to tarmac the Green Belt for the sake of economic growth and ‘winning the global race’. I want to advocate for a kind of aesthetic socialism or a socialism of quality of life and quality of place. It’s time for progressives to make the case for intrinsic value – as Fiona Reynolds has done in her book The Fight for Beauty. This conservative leftism would be a reaction to markets, machines and the technocapitalist world that Silicon Valley and radical right-wing politics has designed for us.

There are three important caveats here. The first is that precedents for political renewal can be drawn from geography as well as history: from Bolivia, Greece and Barcelona. The second is that people will no longer accept old ideas as they are, because they are regarded as corrupt and tainted. So they need to be rearticulated and reframed for a tired and wary era. And the third is that some of the old ideas and institutions need to be thoroughly updated for new times, not just given a rebrand and a makeover. This needs to happen in the context of a realistic audit of what has changed and what has not. Some things are undoubtedly different: the nature and organisation of work, technology, globalisation and climate change. But many aspects of our ‘new times’ are overstated. For example, we live in a post-Fordist era, but a lot of work is still dreary and standardised – sometimes in novel ways. The reality of new technology so far is a bureaucratised deadening; a stupid rigidity; commercial and state surveillance; and above all highly uneven implementation.

In Mr Smith Goes to Washington, that most prescient of films about stale democracy, the eponymous outsider speaks the soaring rhetoric of the American constitution back to the jaded and corrupt incumbents of Congress, exposing their hypocrisy and making those words mean something once again. Yes, it’s true that the politics of Frank Capra’s films are questionable. And yes, it’s true that some political institutions – the Houses of Parliament among them – are founded on colonial exploitation. But the answer is to display frankly those realities of Empire as vestiges woven in amongst other valuable elements. We should take these ideas strategically at face value whether or not they were implemented in reality, and put them to their stated use. If they’ve been mouthed as a fiction, let’s take them as fact, pulling the rug from under the cynics and manipulators. The infrastructure is there. The thinking has been done. The town halls, the Commons – the institutions are in place. What is needed now is to breathe life into them. We need to plant something new in the ground of the old.

* * *

So much for what we are aiming for, but how do we get there? What can we do, right now? What can be our next steps? We need to plan using my principle of the What, the Who and the How – what are we fighting for, who is involved and how will we do it: which strategies will be effective? To even start to find answers to the many questions I have raised here, we need to develop less atomised ways of having conversations, connecting up social democrats and those on the radical or ‘soft’ Left. And we need to collect, collate and conserve resources and results, combining face-to-face discussions with the creation of toolkits and a repository of ideas in print and online. For understandable historical reasons, the Left is wary of debate. But intolerance of disagreement only pushes it underground, where it becomes passive aggression. The Right is comfortable with competing views and pragmatic alliances, because they recognise their practical inevitability, and the need for leaders to set out a way forward. The Left should not assume that there is just one morally correct position. These debates are necessary. The Left is at a crossroads, and we need to get our bearings before we can choose a path.

The first task is to come up with a coherent set of demands. My big-picture proposals can be designed on a small scale. We’ve been so paralysed by the chicken-and-egg dilemma of message formation versus movement building that we haven’t even brought together the existing manifestos on the Left today. We could integrate these and feed them into a collaborative ‘wikifesto’ project. As I’ve argued, central to this ideological work would be a concerted look back through history to find the best precedents to update and use now. And we need a central place to share and preserve the results. Magazines like Marxism Today once acted as an intellectual home for the Left, and we need to find a new reliable archive and definitive civic square. We need to analyse head-on, and in a joined-up way, the nature of post-politics, anti-politics and political resurgence.

What we must not do is to coyly shrink from coming up with a programme and simply ‘listen’ to ‘ordinary’ people. If we go down this route and don’t take the initiative, we will wait around self-defeated for decades. The Left of the ’70s and ’80s recognised that people are influenced top-down; now, middle-class leftists defer to the organic ‘authenticity’ of the working-class voter, terrified of appearing patronising. Post Brexit this mantra has become ever more widespread on the Left and in liberal media commentary. For example, a 2017 National Theatre production entitled My Country: A Work in Progress set out to listen to voices around the UK – but significantly not in London and the South-East – as a way of addressing the divisions that have emerged since the Referendum. Like many such initiatives it did not explore the origin and formation of these views, but just accepted them as a given.

‘Listening’ is posited time and time again as the solution to our broken politics, but it’s actually part of the problem. If you listen to people, what you hear is lines from the Daily Mail. In fact, the injunction to ‘get out there and listen’ has emerged as a key right-wing strategy to undermine the Left. Since working-class voters are coded as Conservative, ‘listening’ implicitly equates to moving to the Right. Politicians routinely claim that they are not motivated by ideology, but by what ‘really matters’ to ‘ordinary people’. But, as I’ve argued, this simply drives ideological motivation underground and narrows the bandwidth of clear political choices that people actually crave. Yes, ideology is created in a two-way street between politicians setting out their position and constituents feeding up their concerns. But right now the tabloids are making policy by falsely purporting to represent the views of the people, and then politicians are simply following this rather than setting out what they believe. Opinions are both formed and open to challenge. We need to listen but we also need to talk.

Then we need to work on smarter movement building. As with the political system and the state, so with organising: the big question lurking mostly undiscussed in left circles is whether movements should be run top-down or bottom-up. This muddle means that – with a few notable exceptions – the Left is terrible at meetings, and it is terrible at organisation. Nobody wants to take charge, nobody wants to take the lead and tell people what to do. The misplaced faith in consensus, in grassroots, digital, spontaneous action, means that nothing ever gets done, initiatives fizzle out and energy drains into the ground. We need to accept that campaign leaders will take charge, and that this is necessary. As documented in Becky Bond and Zack Exley’s Rules for Revolutionaries and Jonathan Smucker’s Hegemony How To, the Sanders campaign mobilised huge numbers of people using live barnstorm meetings and co-ordinated door-stepping. We need better chairing and facilitation, and clear lines of authority. Witness the breath-taking speed with which, post Brexit, Tory challengers fell on their swords to make way for a viable leader, compared with the protracted negotiations around the Labour leadership. Decades have been lost misapplying the principle of social equality to political organisation. Just think what could be accomplished if movements and parties accepted the need for accountable authority.

The other element lacking in left organising is horizontal links between groups. There is NEON, an impressive umbrella group linking NGOs and campaigners, but this kind of formation is relatively rare. The most telling example is that in the run-up to the 2017 general election, there were several independent progressive-alliance initiatives – which also couldn’t combine their efforts because of the gagging law. Everyone is thinking the same thing, independently coming up with the same ideas and projects. It’s not enough to email round a toolkit or put it on Facebook. Where is the primary archive of resources, the generally agreed-upon central forum of interchange? We need to map the existing left organisations, and build alliances and connective tissue between them so they don’t duplicate their work or work alone.

So much for political campaign groups – we also need these to feed into mainstream formations that can take these strategies forward, and also crucially function as political homes where the non-campaigning public can join up in political membership and solidarity. Clearly we need both parties and social movements, but the party is currently undervalued on the Left, with rare exceptions such as Jodi Dean. But parties must articulate their message in new and common-sense terms; they must find a way to speak to blue-collar voters currently being co-opted by the astroturf Right. Whether it’s Labour or a progressive alliance, a viable coalition needs to build real connections to social movements and to a broader mass of people who are enthusiastic and vehement, but not necessarily affiliated. This means plugging into a network of intermediary, civil-society organisations – which themselves need strengthening. There’s no need for organised civil society to be anathema to party politics; in one interesting suggestion by the Guardian’s Aditya Chakrabortty, they could be combined: parties could recognise their founding history in social institutions and could themselves function as these institutions: providing welfare advice, legal support and protection from corporate predation.

I do not accept that society has become too varied and complex for the party system to work. In some ways, society and culture today is actually notable for its uniformity. Everyone has an iPhone and is obsessed with the release of Pokémon Go and Beyonce’s Lemonade. Elections are not debated in a diverse ecosystem of public opinion; they are fought out on monopolistic social media platforms or in a homogenous, commercialised media. It’s clear now that the rhetoric about the internet being radically open and exposing us to diverse voices from around the world was grossly misleading. Instead – with notable exceptions such as Novara – online media simply echoes the residual mass media. And social media is ironically creating a policed hygiene of acceptability that enforces uniformity still further, combined with the occasional burst of cathartic relief provided by right-wing populists saying outrageous things.

Since the Labour party has been to some extent compromised by losing touch with its voter base, the Left needs to address the gulf that has emerged between middle-class, cosmopolitan left intellectuals and the working classes. It’s true that this gulf is both often overstated and also the result of historical, structural shifts. But gains can be made by deliberately staging conversations between politicos and community leaders. We need to then publicise and disseminate the results of these encounters and incorporate them into the new set of ideological demands. This is how message formation can be combined with message dissemination; how top-down can be combined with the grassroots.

The Left’s programmatic vision for a better society must, therefore, be informed by and make sense to people whatever their background – we need to talk not about ‘sustainability’ and ‘living standards’ but about money, housing, nature, care and how, in an ideal world, we would spend our time. The political ideas and programme we develop must be both intellectually confident and also have the capacity to influence public opinion. We need a clear counter-hegemonic strategy, aimed at shifting and ultimately replacing neoliberal common sense.

These, then, are the urgent tasks of the pro-political Left: analysing, designing, historicising and reframing; movement building, organising dialogue, campaigning and mass education. Progressive alliances need to be built everywhere: on the ground at the level of the cross-class Left, and at the level of party politics, to maximise our chances of building a broad coalition to counter right-wing power. Our objective should be clear: the rejuvenation of the ideological, public, state and democratic realm by a hegemonic Left. This is the path that will take us beyond anti-politics and post-politics, towards a politics that is the best it has been and the best it can be.

Selected Bibliography

Badiou, Alain, The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings (Verso, 2012)

Berardi, Franco, Gary Genosko and Nicholas Thoburn, eds, After the Future (AK Press, 2011)

Birch, Kean, We Have Never Been Neoliberal (Zer0, 2015)

Bond, Becky and Zack Exley, Rules for Revolutionaries: How Big Organizing Can Change Everything (Chelsea Green, 2016)

Brown, Wendy, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (MIT Press, 2015)

Campagna, Federico, What We Are Fighting For: A Radical Collective Manifesto (Pluto, 2012)

Canetti, Elias, Crowds and Power (Seabury, 1982)

Crick, Bernard, In Defence of Politics, new ed. (Continuum, 2005)

Davies, William, The Limits of Neoliberalism: Authority, Sovereignty, and the Logic of Competition (Sage, 2016)

Dean, Jodi, Crowds and Party (Verso, 2016)

— — —, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics (Duke University Press, 2009)

Douzinas, Costas, Philosophy and Resistance in the Crisis: Greece and the Future of Europe (Polity, 2013)

Finlayson, Lorna, The Political Is Political (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2015)

Fisher, Mark, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Zer0, 2009)

— — —, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (Zer0, 2014)

Flinders, Matthew, Defending Politics: Why Democracy Matters in the 21st Century (Oxford University Press, 2012)

Frank, Thomas, Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right (Metropolitan Books, 2012)

— — —, What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (Henry Holt and Co, 2004)

Fukuyama, Francis, The End of History and the Last Man, new ed. (Penguin, 2012)

Gilbert, Jeremy, Common Ground: Democracy and Collectivity in an Age of Individualism (Pluto, 2013)

Glaser, Eliane, Get Real: How to See Through the Hype, Spin and Lies in Modern Life (Fourth Estate, 2013)

Graeber, David, The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement (Penguin, 2014)

Hay, Colin, Why We Hate Politics (Polity, 2007)

Judt, Tony, Ill Fares the Land: A Treatise on Our Present Discontents (Penguin, 2011)

Kunkel, Benjamin, Utopia or Bust: A Guide to the Present Crisis (Verso, 2014)

Laclau, Ernesto, On Populist Reason, new ed. (Verso, 2007)

Lakoff, George, Don’t Think of an Elephant!, new ed. (Chelsea Green, 2014)

Mair, Peter, Ruling the Void: The Hollowing of Western Democracy (Verso, 2013)

Mason, Paul, PostCapitalism: A Guide to Our Future (Penguin, 2016)

Monbiot, George, Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics in an Age of Crisis (Verso, 2017)

Müller, Jan-Werner, What is Populism? (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016)

Reynolds, Simon, Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to its Own Past (Faber, 2012)

Sharzer, Greg, No Local: Why Small-Scale Alternatives Won’t Change the World (Zer0, 2012)

Smucker, Jonathan, Hegemony How-To: A Roadmap for Radicals (AK Press, 2017)

Swyngedouw, Erik, The Post Political and its Discontents: Spaces of Depoliticisation, Spectres of Radical Politics, new ed. (Edinburgh University Press, 2015)

Toynbee, Polly and David Walker, Dismembered: How the Conservative Attack on the State Harms Us All (Guardian Faber, 2017)

Virno, Paolo, Déjà Vu and the End of History (Verso, 2015)

Wainwright, Hilary, Reclaim the State: Experiments in Popular Democracy, new ed. (Seagull Books, 2009)

Williams, Alex and Nick Srnicek, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (Verso, 2016)

Williams, Zoe, Get It Together: Why We Deserve Better Politics (Hutchinson, 2015)

Wright, Erik Olin, Envisioning Real Utopias (Verso, 2010)

Žižek, Slavoj, Living in the End Times, new ed. (Verso, 2011)

— — —, Trouble in Paradise: From the End of History to the End of Capitalism (Penguin, 2015)

Notes

1    Charles Falconer, Speech to the Institute for Public Policy Research, 2003.

2    Roberto Unger, interview for Social Science Bites website, 9 January 2014.

3    This is the title of a paper given by Nina Power at a conference I organised in 2015 on ‘Postpolitics and Neoliberalism’.

4    In an article for the Institute of Public Policy Research’s journal Juncture, predicting trends for the year ahead in January 2015, and in a programme I presented for a 2015 edition of Analysis for BBC Radio 4, I was one of the early commentators to call attention to the rise of populism.

5    Trump, Inauguration speech, 20 January 2017.

6    Carlo Invernizzi Accetti, ‘America’s choice this November is between a populist and a technocrat’, Guardian, 5 October 2016.

7    Douglas Carswell, interview on the TaxPayers’ Alliance Website, 13 November 2007.

8    20 January 2017.

9    Letsas, London Review of Books, Vol. 39, No 6, 16 March 2017.

10  Laclau, ‘ Why constructing the people is the main task of Radical Politucs’ Critical Inquiry, Vol 32, No 4, 2006, 654-655

11  Fukuyama, ‘The End of History?’, The National Interest 16 (1989), 3–18.

12  Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (The Free Press, 1960), 374.

13  Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life (Zero, 2014), 14.

14  Robyn Ride (Wiley, 2012).

15  Speech to the Conservative party conference.

16  Keynote speech at a seminar held at the British Embassy in Bonn in March 1998, quoted in the Guardian, 16 March 1998.

17  Carswell, ‘Let’s have iMembers in our parties and really change politics’, The Spectator, 9 July 2013.

18  Interview on ABC’s ‘World News’, 21 July 2010.

19  As tweeted by Giles Dilnot on 5 July 2016.

20  Zoe Williams, ‘Is Satire Dead?’, Guardian, 18 October 2016.

21  Marom, ‘What really caused the implosion of the Occupy movement? An insider’s view’, Alternet, 23 December 2015.

22  www.progressonline.com, February 2015.

23  Corbyn, speech to launch the general election campaign, 9 May 2017.

24  www.redesigningdemocracy.co.uk.

25  Marom, ibid.

26  Dean, Crowds and Party (Verso, 2016), 125.

27  Cameron, speech in Milton Keynes on 7 June 2010.

28  See my paper for the New Economics Foundation entitled ‘If ideology is dead, how can the new politics find its voice?’ (NEF, 2014).

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Compass, the New Economics Foundation, the New Economy Organisers’ Network, Soundings and the Institute for Public Policy Research for enabling me to attend and contribute to events at which I developed many of the ideas in this book. I have benefitted from stimulating conversations with many thinkers and doers on the Left including Neal Lawson, Zoe Williams, George Monbiot, Nick Pearce, Jeremy Gilbert, Hilary Wainwright, Kate Raworth, Robin McAlpine, Clare Birchall, Alex Williams, Clifford Singer, Adam Curtis, Stuart White, Marc Mulholland, David Graeber and Mark Fisher. This book also grew out of two conferences I organised at Birkbeck, University of London and Canterbury Christ Church University, on ‘Ideology Now’ and ‘Postpolitics and Neoliberalism’ to which a number of influential scholars generously contributed papers, including Chantal Mouffe, Costas Douzinas, Owen Hatherley, Erik Swyngedouw and Nina Power. I’d like to thank Tariq Goddard for his enthusiastic commissioning, and Emma Jacobs and Josh Turner for their perceptive editing. Gratitude is due, as ever, to Adam Smyth.

Published by Repeater Books
An imprint of Watkins Media Ltd

19-21 Cecil Court
London
WC2N 4EZ
UK
www.repeaterbooks.com
A Repeater Books paperback original 2018
1

Distributed in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York.

Copyright © Eliane Glaser 2017

Eliane Glaser asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

Cover design: Johnny Bull
Typography and typesett ing: Stuart Davies
Typefaces: Palatino

ISBN: 9781912248117
Ebook ISBN: 9781912248124

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitt ed, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.