ACFM - #ACFM Trip 3: The Weird Left

Episode Date: June 14, 2019

Nadia Idle, Keir Milburn and Jeremy Gilbert discuss the weird left. FULL SHOW: http://novaramedia.com/2019/06/12/acfm-3-the-weird-left/

Okay. Shall I go? Yeah. All right. Welcome to ACFM. I'm Nadia Idol and I'm joined by Jeremy Gilbert. Hello. And Keir Milburn. Hello. And today we're talking about the weird left. Slips. Sounds good to me. Do one more. Do one more. It could have been weirder. Do it weirder. Hello. You're listening to the podcast version of ACFM on Navarra Media. because of the way copyright works with the internet, the version you're listening to only has the conversation and discussion from the show. The music and archive material is only available in the version you can stream online. So really, you're only getting half the picture or seeing through a glass darkly or on a really weak dose. Why not head over to the Navarra Media

website or our SoundCloud where you can stream the whole thing in its glorious fullness? The link is also in the description of this podcast version too. But if you just want the chat, keep on listening. Okay, so in the first episode, we sort of spontaneously decided just before we started recording that we'd call ACFM the home of the weird left. And that was a pretty unworked out phrase. It sounded quite worked out, to be fair. But it was an interesting discovery for me that we had just made it up, but great. No, but it sounded appropriate, didn't it? Yeah, it didn't. But we haven't really explored it.

So the start might be, why did it seem appropriate for ACFM where we're discussing things such as acid corbinism? Why did it seem appropriate to tag ourselves as the weird left? And if I thought about that question, you know, I'd say part of what we've been interested in is thinking about politics in areas which have become disassociated with left politics or not associated with the norm of left politics, such as thinking about transformation in terms of like political transformation but also cultural transformation, how they link together.

We've talked about acid communist moments before. When we look back at history of these moments where there's big social transformation, big cultural transformation, seems to be linked to sort of cultural innovation. And those things are linked to like a project of political change. any moment like that right if you're going to have cultural and social transformation you're going to have moments which look subcultural right moments where people are experimenting with different ways of living right which are going to look weird to people who are looking from the outside like a weird left need to defend the space for people to experiment with different kinds of ways of

living. So that would be my opening gambit of why I would think an acid corbinist project ACFM would seem to think it natural to take on the phrase the weird left. Yeah, I would agree with that. I think there's something about the weird which speaks to like the political methodologies which accepts like human subjects as as complex. And what I mean by that is this idea that the traditional left or the normie left, which I think is something we're going to come on to, the way it's actualized is people seem to feel like they need to perform a certain, to be a certain person to be on the left and appear to be a certain person. And through that performity, they are obscuring the complexity of what it is to be human

and therefore keeping the political in a very specific realm and not allowing for that, you know, cultural expression or different ways that it is to be and express culture and exist. And of course, that has a massive knock on effect onto the involvement and the juncture between art and politics. So I think putting that term the weird next to the left like forces you to explore different imageries with your head as well.

but I do I do hugely agree with you Kia that for this is this should not be thought about in the sense of well this is about trying to create a subculture ourselves so I think I think we would agree that we're not saying hey where the weird we're cooler than you or better than you or like we're going to remain within this subculture this is just a way to understand what would be a more transformative politics I think I was thinking about when you were just talking Nadi is actually my I mean my dad is is is not a kind of normie socialist. He's a lifelong anarchist, you know, self-described. But he's like he's 80 this year. So he comes from the generation that was already, or the cohort at least, that was already, you know,

already kind of working and having kids and stuff by the time the sort of counterculture of the late 60s happened. And he had been schooled in this political tradition where even if you're an anarchist, actually, you try not to make yourself look kind of, you know, really strikingly different from other people. So I remember in the 70s, like he had a suit. He was a social worker my dad when he worked and he had a suit and he only ever wore a suit for two

purposes. One was to go with his clients to court and one was to go and demos. And he always used to quote me, some guy, some figure I don't know, an American black radical figure who gave a talk that really influenced him. They said, the effective revolutionary is comparatively inconspicuous. so there's a whole kind of it's interesting to reflect there's a whole tradition like within even very very sort of radical sort of strands of politics of thinking well there's sort of a problem if you take a subcultural strategy if you adopt a subcultural strategy of just you know of explicitly differentiating yourself from everybody else in order to assert your radicalism rather than trying to sort of engage with that broader culture on the other hand you know i'm not i'm not saying i'm not sort of defending that position i've never worn a suit on a demo that that itself would now be really weird in fact but I think I think um and it does speak again to the question of all that we're all I think we're sort of persistently concerned with on this podcast isn't it which is what you know what is our relationship to that kind of moment when some to the fact in some ways we're still in this historical moment that begins in

the second half of the 60s when a whole kind of ecological and political ecology changes Can I am, I want to go, I want to go back to your dad's, um, normie, normie political instincts. Norma anarchism. Normaism, actually, yeah, because I've lived through, I've lived through a normie term in, turn in anarchism myself, which was, you know, this whole, this whole thing from punk through to, punk, which is all about pissing off your parents, and through to the sort of a narco punk. And so, you know, when I was very young, I was sort of like quite influenced by a narco punk.

And then there's this turn around, you know, the late 80s, early 90s from like, you know, your way you dress being based around, you know, transgressing norms and like, you know, trying to piss off your people who look like your parents to then getting involved in like political struggles and you think, hang on a minute, actually I need to, if I'm going to bring about any sort of change, I need to get people who look a little bit like my parents on board with this project. Do you know what I mean? And so, you know, there was a big turn. turned towards class struggle anarchism. And that was definitely a turn towards looking normal, basically. A turn away from the countercultural. But isn't there a difference between sort of opting out of a so-called weird style as a tactic and between that being actual like developed or organically developed culture? I don't know if it's tactics, though, because it just brings out something which is a tension in, you know, radically transformative politics between, you know, the experimental moment where you want to break with the norms of society and then the moments where you want to massify and find, you know, what's common beyond, you know, the sort of subculture that you've created. I mean, the way through that or the way, yeah, the way through that tension is probably what you were saying earlier, Nadia, which is, you know, human life is complex and, like, basically, the normal is like an empty set, do you know?

Yes, exactly. No one is normal. Everybody is weird, do you know? Most people are weird in one way or the other, and more than that, you know, most people recognize that most people are weird. That doesn't mean that the normal doesn't exist. The normal is. well it's like norms it's a regulatory norm you know it's like a place a judgment basically it's a place of judgment and not somewhere where you where people really exist exist and that that to me is the really interesting point is that what what is happening when people say that is not normal is that's a reflection onto themselves is saying I can't be like that or I am like that and I will not recognize that I am like that too, because there is something in that space that's

about a threat to the normal. And I'm really interested in that politically. So when people cast other people aside in the realm of left-wing politics and say, that's normal, that's not normal, what's actually going on there? And what does that say for the ability for us as individuals, also as groups on the left, to transform? The version of psychedelic music that we had, say, in the first, well, we'll have had in the first two episodes. It's a very specific idea of psychedelia and it's one that, you know, people like myself were sort of championed, but it does rather leave out like what a lot of people would immediately think of when they think of the psychedelic, which is kind of really weird kind of avant-garde sounds like sort of deliberately strange and

disturbing music. If you're thinking about psychedelic culture and its legacy, a whole component of it, you know, is this tradition going back, going back again to the late 60s, really, of borrowing to some extent borrowing from the kind of mid-century European avant-garde, promoting a kind of avant-garde experiment, sort of experimental aesthetic of dissociation, etc. I mean, probably the most celebrated, the most ideal typical example is probably the work of Captain Beefheart, unlike, say, the Grateful Dead that we've played before, like it was never going to have a sort of mass following because it is so. weird. It's just so weird. And it is a sort of, but its value, but its value is this sort of,

you know, this sort of, you know, quite uncompromising sort of celebration of its own, like, extraordinary sort of complexity and imminent weirdness. I mean, I think it's worth saying, like, what is the weird left? What is the idea of the weird left or what is it kind of reacting to? And one of the things we, we've been interested in is just a couple of articles or blog post interviews from the states where people have tried to differentiate what you might call a weird left, a transgressive left, from, you know, what they're calling normy socialism, which is this idea that, well, in order for it to be popular, in order for it to be politically successful, then socialism necessarily has to appeal to absolutely, you know, just to a certain

kind of resonance with mainstream culture, with the kind of imagined, with an imagined and assumed cultural conservatism of the broader working class or the broader class correlations which it has to have in its base. Yeah, so there was an article, actually an interview with a US activist called Kate Doyle Griffiths and it was titled Normie Socialism or Communist Transgression. Transgression. She's quite good on this idea that the normal is actually tied to basically a sort of aspirational bourgeois ideal of what what life should be like, what a person should be like,

right? Or perhaps what an adult should be like. We've got an idea of adulthood and yet we can't access it and that ideal of adulthood is tied to the attributes of private property to some degree. So we've got this moment where being a normal adult is a, you know, this aspirational bourgeois ideal, which nobody actually lives in, but even the aspiration doesn't make much sense anymore because it's just not available. It's not available. So that's one reason why we might want to talk about why this tension between the weird and the normal is coming out.

But it is also about the level of change that we're envisaging. You know, are we talking about a very mild social democracy in which everybody has access to the normal? Or are we talking about, you know, perhaps a very mild social democracy and setting the basis for a much larger and more. a wide-scale transformation. I'd say that the times call for the latter, basically, just because of the scale of change that we, which climate change for one thing, puts on the table. I think, well, that's right. And I also, I think, you know, it's not rocket science. The

weird is always about a kind of break with normality. It's about a sense that there is something beyond normality, something not quite fitting about normality. And also something potentially novel happening at a given moment that, you know, that the world is not necessarily, as it presented itself before the weird thing occurred. So weirdness, and weirdness I think carries this resonance in our culture, you know, with the idea of the weirdo, the idea of the freak, the idea that, you know, that it's always bound up with the idea of the strangeness of the novel, the new.

And that comes back to the sense that, well, you know, one thing the weird left wants to assert, if he wants to assert anything, is indeed, as Keir keeps saying, the possibility of things being very different from how they are now. I mean, one of the ideas that I always come back to you when trying to think through this question is the idea of the experimental, the idea that, you know, you can make it,

I think you can make it a pretty reasonable, you know, reformists or political demand to say, well, what we want. We want government, we want institutions, to actually facilitate and encourage various kind of experimentation, whether it's experimentations in the kind of household you can live in, experimentations in education,

experimentation in the organisation of healthcare delivery, you know, whatever it is. And I think that is, on the one hand, I think that is completely consistent with the most sort of radical wing of social democracy, say in the mid-20th century, which was, you know, that's what it meant to be progressive in a way. And it is very different to, for example, sort of third way neoliberalism, which doesn't want experiment, which wants to shut down experimentation in all of those sites. and he wants to shut it down, indeed, by imposing that bourgeois aspirational model on the idea of what kind of a household you can want to belong to. It wants to shut it down in education by using league tagables and standardised testing to shut down experimentation within the schools to say that the only thing education is for is for producing, a very narrowly defined kind of worker, wants to shut it down. Indeed, it even wants to shut it down in healthcare by making sure, by really orienting, subtly, reorienting the delivery of healthcare back, you know, to the accumulation of capital by

pharmaceutical companies and private deliverers. So if you think about just trying to sell this as an idea as a principle to people, to quote unquote, ordinary people in the electorate, I think it's interesting to think, imagine you're on the doorstep trying to explain this to someone. And on the one hand, I think, and the one hand it's something, I can imagine it being very easy to sell, as long as there's a certain kind of optimism in the mood shared by you and the person you're talking to, a certain kind of belief in the possibility that, yeah, you know, if we try, you know, trying new things is good, you know, it's what we want. That's what everybody, you know, we want to allow teachers, you know, to be creative in the classroom. And then you imagine

a scene in which people are feeling very defeated, feeling very miserable, people have just had, you know, decades of, you know, education, you know, being narrowed or being underfunded, and people say, no, I don't care about that. And falling back on this Blairite slogan, or what matters is what works. Like, I don't care. I just want, you know, basic, services delivered like now. I think that's important. I mean, that's important because it links to some of our other themes like in earlier episodes about things like collective joy. The fact that what we want in part is a politics, which is perfectly feasible, but it's feasible as long as people feel that the world is a world rich

with possibilities. And that, you know, everyday life to some extent is a field of rich possibilities. But the more that people feel just narrowed down and defeated by their experiences, the more they're going to retreat from any idea of experimentation, the more they're going to retreat, and the more it's going to become the case that, you know, as the normie socialist will tell us, you just, you can't go on the doorstep telling people you want like democratic schools or just think you're mad. I actually, it's very hard for me not to think about this with my kind of strategic political organizer hat on and think that that the problem here is one in terms of like being able to sell things that let's say you know to keep on

theme are weird to the electorate on the doorstep is a question of the difficulty in doing that is is a lack of um ambition um on the part of the people who are doing that sort of work and because they're not making big enough asks i think if you say to someone if you say to people as part of your political strategy we are going to win something big and change something big and we want you to do something big with us, they're more likely to believe you than if you keep on scaling back in that kind of capitalist realism kind of incremental, like smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller demands. I think there's a point at which you break through and you you stay with a project and you say, actually, what we want is this and we're not backing down

from it. And there's something in the sincerity of making that demand of what you actually believe the future should look like that is really powerful and I and as you were speaking Jeremy it got me thinking about you know our weird or you know the acid acid weird in a sense which seems to have a quality of like effervescence or or not it's it's in contrast in a sense to meet to the heaviness of like normie left leftism or leftiness or whatever to me there's something about the weird in the way that we see as a positive political trajectory or possibility that kind of almost rises up and has a potential to break through capitalist realism or like political realism in a sense and you can't quite pin it down and you can't quite

fit it on that grid like you say but because it speaks to part of what is the human spirit and the weirdness and the kind of the possibilities of the human mind once multiplied into like a collective experience so so for me that that's what's excited about it's exciting about talking about the weird in in that sense it hasn't got this kind of heaviness and these these these rules and this kind of lack of ambition about about what is possible it's it's it's a much lighter than that psychic tv and throbbing gristle a kind of linked a pair of bands led by genesis p orage and they came out they came out of the performance art scene they got into weird stuff you know they were kind of into some of them

were into sadomasochism they were into ritual magic they were sort of into the occult and again they were part of that strands of counterculture which because it wanted to pursue weirdness you know high weirdness as eric davis would put it to a certain extreme that they got into kind of occult practice and kind of magic and their music is again you know it's not an easy listen at all, but the point it's designed to try to, you know, in some sense, it is supposed to be sort of trance inducing actually, but by pushing the listener to a certain extreme limit. With throbbing Gristle, like I think there's a really good example, because they sort of invent industrial music, and they probably got the best claim to have invented industrial music,

which leads to bands such as like 9-inch nails and Marilyn Manson, you know, and Marilynne Manson, you know, and Marilyn Manson, in my head, isn't it, a real example. of, you know, where the weird becomes reduced to a fixed set of stylistic conventions, do you know what I mean? Which basically makes him pretty boring as far as I'm concerned. But, you know, he performs the weird for, in the 1990s, he performs the weird for, you know, Middle America. This book by Ken Goffman and Dan Joy is called Counterculture Through the Ages.

And they use this phrase, the freak left. And the freak left, they're used to refer to, is the specific left groups. in the late 60s, who are, they are the epitome of acid communism. I mean, they're literal, they're not acid communism in the broad sense. The Mark uses the term. They're literally Maoists who are really into taking acid, like even while they're doing, they're like, you know, sort of weird kind of terrorist exercises, kind of blowing up banks or whatever.

And then Matt Full are kind of riffing on that, kind of had this phrase you used sometimes about the weird left, which, imagining, you know, what kind of left we would be part of. way we'd resonate with some of that legacy, but we'd also resonate with the broad, much broader nation of massive communism, the mark put forward to designate the whole kind of sort of spirit in politics of the counterculture and the whole countercultural kind of zeitgeist, even in working class culture in there. So, you know, great moment of 60s and 70s. Having been interested in that, we came across this stuff that Keir's referred to, these articles about the weird, you know, the weird left. And I think somebody uses the phrase

in one of those articles, or maybe we just used it, Keep Socialism Weird, which is a deliberate evocation of this slogan that was popularised. I think it was first popularised in Austin, Texas, then it was taken up by Portland, people in Portland, keep Austin weird, keep Portland weird. And the idea is you have a town which has developed a reputation for a certain kind of bohemian sort of countercultural quality,

and it's in the process of being gentrified, and being sort of somehow normalised, and you don't want that to happen. and you want to somehow protect or even extend its weirdness. And so that leads us into thinking, well, you know, how do we relate to that notion of weirdness and the weird and keeping things weird and why would we want to and do we really care? Well, I mean, before getting into a genealogy of the weird as a concept,

I think we feel that this debate around what they're calling normy socialist versus an imagined weird socialism or weird left, it really resonates with some key debates, a lot of us have been interested in on the British left and in British politics over the past 10 years. So, for example, I mean, when Mark Fisher and I were writing stuff together a few years ago, one of the main things we were exercised by at the time was the popularity of the so-called Blue Labour project.

And the Blue Labour idea is this idea that what Labour needed to do to win popular support was to completely reject Blairite third-way neoliberalism, but to reject every aspect of it, including its embrace of cosmopolitan culture, you know, immigration, globalization, social liberalism, gay rights, to reject all of that and to embrace social conservatism and say to people, yeah, your right to be socially conservative, but what's causing all the social disruption you don't like is neoliberal capitalism. And that's why you should join us in opposing neoliberal capitalism, because that's what will defend your heart, you know, your beloved values of faith, flag and family. And so my Mark and I had a specific critique of that said, no, he said it was completely wrong. Blue Labor was just totally misreading a certain element of a broader public mood which rejected neoliberalism and was nostalgic for something before it. Because Blue Labor thought that what people were

nostalgic for was some imagined universe in which everybody, you know, of the 1950s. And we said, no, that's not what people are nostalgic for. What people are nostalgic for is the sense of hope and optimism of the 60s. That's what more people are nostalgic for. And then it's nostalgic for the very idea that they had to kind of open and free future ahead of them. And that's what the left had to sort of give them back. And I think to some extent, I mean, Blue Labor went nowhere as a political project. It was never even really popular in the Labour Party. It didn't get, you know, it didn't really develop any kind of a popular base. And Corbinism is the thing that kind of, you know, erupted in some ways at the moment when it was clear that Blue Labor had totally failed.

So, and I think that's part, and that's partly why we have felt since the beginning of Corbinism, People like us making this show, who in some ways come from a much more radical kind of intellectual and political heritage, feel that there is something in Corbinism, which in the dip Corbinism does partly involve that very rejection of blue labour that resonates with this whole alternative current, which indeed says, no, the working class are not inherently conservative, they're not inherently necessarily conformist, they're not, you know, and that it is possible to have a kind of creative, optimistic, experimental politics, which can also be popular. Now, in terms of really current immediate debates, one of the things we've been talking about in leading up to this discussion is Joe Kennedy's book, Authentocrats, which is a critique of both Blue Labour and other sorts of recent discourses, mostly in British political culture, but you could see the same thing happening in the States, very much so, where people claim to be speaking for an imagined authentic working class experience by asserting the kind of immutable

value of certain kinds of social conservatism by saying, look, ultimately you'll never kind connect with the real working class unless you embrace, you know, subtle racism, nationalism, social conservatism, family values. And Kennedy does a really forensic unpicking of this to saying, well, it's just not true. It's demonstrably not true in the people who claim to speak for that position are largely self-serving. But I think it does, there is still, even within kind of Corbynism, within the mainstream of the Labour Party, there is a kind of anxiety around the question of, well, you know,

is it, you know, do we have to pretend that Jeremy Corbyn, you know, who's a vegetarian, who has an allotment, who's been on the fringes, left fringe of British politics since the 70s, who first got nominated as a Labour MP by a bunch of left communists, You know, do we have to pretend that actually he's just a, he's a, he's a, he's a, he's a, he's a, he's a, he's a, he's a non-threatening character to the sort of, the sort of constituency that gets imagined into existence by, you know, by new labour that Kear was already talked about. Or can we go out and say, look, in fact, you know, it is the case that that, that dream world that the new labour created for you, where everybody gets to be, you know, everybody gets a semi-detached house, a mortgage and, you know, two point two kids and a car, you know, is just a dream world. it's never going to be available to everyone and we shouldn't even want it anyway

and in fact we can offer it we have a much more pluralistic vision of what the future could be and a much more inclusive vision of what the future could be for everyone in Britain precisely by embracing the fact that weirdness is fine and everyone is weird like Corby's a good example of

weirdness is normal right because in some ways he's a really archetypal British character you know a lot of month growing collects what does he collect is it pictures of of manhole covers

or something like that that is deeply weird and absolutely British and normal but Jeremy Hardy said you know this thing about look he's so British if you cut him he'd bleed tea you know what I think

he's very very he's a British archetype he is an archetype of the of the of somebody who is authentic because he's weird Do you know what I mean? Some of his weirdness is left weirdness. Some of his weirdness is just that classic British weirdness.

And what you'd oppose to that, right, is... So the paradigmatic example that Joe Kennedy uses in his Authentocrats book is Owen Smith, who was in a leadership election against Jeremy Corbyn in 2016. And he gets interviewed in a cafe in PontiPrieve. And he gets served a cappuccino. and he pretends to not know what it is. And so this is an Italian, this is an Italian cafe in PontiPri.

There's a big tradition, I come from South Wales, there's a big tradition that goes back right to the 1930s of Italian families, running cafes and serving Italian coffes, way before we have any of this Seattle rubbish.

He knows what cappuccino is. And he says, oh, this is the first time I've ever been served a frothy coffee, he says it's called. It's the first time I've ever been called a frothy coffee. They don't normally serve it to me

in this fancy cup with these small, I normally get a mug and it's like this, this totally artificial, this is not what Britain is, that's not what South Wales is. It's just this, you know, this weird. It's like a fantasy version of normal, basically. You know, so I think that Owen Smith versus Corbyn is an interesting thing about actually people are weird and when you pretend not to be weird, you get yourself tied up in this ridiculous performance. You know what I mean? Okay, so the fall, uh, uh, uh, uh, an ever-changing line-up led by Markey Smith come out of Manchester, a real northern working class sensibility but added to that,

you know, a real fascination with the weird. They're an example of the weird in the normal or perhaps the normalisation of the weird, right? So, you know, there was songs about football and that led to this really odd moment in which Marky Smith, the lead singer of the four, gets to read out the football scores on the BBC in the early 90s.

It's because the BBC were using this theme from Sparta FC as their theme tune, so they got him to read it out. Markey Smith is a very ambivalent figure politically. Like, you know, he's supposed to have been on the far left at one stage and supposed to have kind of become disillusioned with that. And he took some quite reactionary positions occasionally in sort of interviews and things. And there is this sense in which, you know, there is this sense sometimes in which, like, the last thing Marky Smith wants is like for everyone to be listening to the fall

and for the fall actually to influence other bands and like he hated, he was really resentful by any other band that had obviously been influenced by the fall. And there is this sense in that in wanting to defend his own weirdness, like there was this really self-limiting, you know, nature to the project that it just could only go so far in sort of changing the culture and changing the music. And that is, of course, that is the danger of the weird.

The danger of the weird is you end up in an aesthetic and political cul-de-sac where in order to defend your weirdness, you refrain from the possibility of resonating with the weirdness that is already imminent in the every day. How is steering onto a meanable territory for the right to fight us? You know, when neoliberalism first emerged

in the late 1970s, early 1980s, it wasn't putting forward its own proposal, it was saying, we're going to end this chaos. You know, we're going to end this disruption. And today, you know, the right want to draw us into a war about culture because they don't want to have a war about economics, you know. That's my worry about this. Yeah, well, I think, well, your rights are ways that.

But I would also point out that the alt, I mean, we all know that the alt-right has been an important part of the ecology, of the rise of, you know, both sort of Brexitism and Trump. And the alt, I mean, what is the alt-right? but it's the weird right. And the reason why the alt-right has seemed to be so scary and so potent in some quarters is because it has allowed itself to embrace a certain weirdness.

And I think a big part of our argument from day one on this podcast is, well, we won't, the reared white is part of what we have to fight. And we won't fight the reared white without finding and embracing our own weirdness, you know, a better weirdness. And it doesn't, because that weirdness is what gives them a certain libidinal energy. you know, which makes them sort of attractive to people and makes them seem kind of, you know, and it makes that, you know, I mean, it's just really interesting kind of, you know,

discourse going around a year or two ago about how it was the meme magic of the alt-right that made Trump possible, that kind of wield them into existence. And I think, uh, some of that, some of that is kind of problematic, but also some of it is clearly just true. Some of it clearly is sort of true. And I think, uh, we have to face that. I'm really meaningful to the idea that, like, the problem with the alt-right is that they're not weird enough. I, you know, it's that's thing of like just transgressing, transgressing what, you know, liberal sensibilities, you know,

triggering the libs is the whole point of that whole culture. But like, how do they do that? They do that by falling back on the most tired, you know, tropes of, of naturalizations, well, race science, for instance. You know, all of this, you know, the idea that there are races and all this sort of stuff or traditional gender roles, you know. This is not weird enough. But I think a lot of the energy that you were speaking about, Jeremy, that the alt-right

get is also because of that lightness. So what they've got in terms of a similar definition to the one I just spoke about previously, about the effervescent possibility or like effervescent character of the weird is that by the kind of almost just winging it with some of the text. techniques, not in terms of like the grounding of like the right wing politics behind it. But I think, you know, there was a lot of winging it and the trial of all of these memes and like different sloganeering and stuff. And I think it stuck for the alt-right because because they were trying something new. And it was much lighter.

And there was a, and there is a strong sense of like mobilization and action rather than like sitting and planning and, you know, boardrooms in the way that that politics. manifests itself. And I think that's attractive. And I would argue that it's the way that that politics performs itself that makes it just as attractive as the content of it. And I'm very much a form over content with these things. I'm really interested in how the performativity of a set of politics. And it's very, very different to, you know, previous, how previous right-wing politics looked in terms of its communication. I think it's exactly right. I think that I think that formulation of lightness is really useful because it really makes me think about where, if we survey the contemporary left and the kind of labour left, where do we find

that lightness and where don't we? And where we find it is in the world transform and in the sort of, you know, the kind of local events that have been inspired by the world transform that have been happening over the past year. I mean, that is really one of, you know, you go to one of these events and you have this sense of a kind of energy, but also there's a sense of easiness. There's a sense that, you know, you could sort of do or say or produce kind of all kinds of things in this space that just wouldn't be possible elsewhere without anybody getting too

uptight about it. And I think, and that is, I mean, that's where kind of the acid-cobinism idea came from, like out of that matrix. And it's so different from the complete, there's been a complete failure. Maybe it's just impossible. Maybe it's an inability to make that lightness felt like within the structures of the Labour Party. I mean, it's not the experience people get going to branch meetings.

No, because of the light, because the lightness is also related to control. And that also takes us back to this concept of the weird. Like there's a lack of control over like the direction of things. And you're right, I think about, you know, the world transformed experientially in the sense of that you don't feel like you have to fall in line. You don't feel like you will be punished, you know, if you're a certain event and you have a discussion around something or if something doesn't actually work in exactly the right way that the organizers predicted it to or even like the output in terms of the content. And I think, you know, that's a really interesting point because if you use that frame to look at exactly that difference between what's it like to go to a branch meeting and that kind of heaviness and the kind of, and to me, that's within, that's within the kind of heaviness and slowing down and kind of difficulty of life as experienced underneath capitalist realism. Whereas, you know, part of the whole acid thing and, you know, the terminology around taking drugs about like getting high, you know, and letting go and relaxing has to be also part of the culture, sorry, of how we do politics. And that doesn't mean that there aren't really strong left-wing principles which undermine this sort of stuff.

But it's recognizing that that heaviness is, is that, that norm and normality, that grid has a heavy. heaviness with it, which is lacking in any potential of transforming, you know, the kind of world we want to have. Okay, Laraji is really, he is an absolute embodiment of what I call Afro Psychedelia. He's coming out of the kind of musical traditions of the American, of Afro-American culture, but he's absolutely engaged with psychedelic music, like to get at the culture, and he's producing music, which is supposed to put you in a sort of trance state. It's music to trip to, music to meditate to you know in a way it's music which is trying to make that experience like not at all weird which is trying to make it it's trying to sort of domesticate it but it's also

music which is trying to explore you know the kind of imminent you know the potential of moments of absolute illumination and bliss in just of everyday life you know so meditating in your living room and in that it does have this kind of imminent utopianism about it which does speak to the idea of the weird as not just the rebarbative, like the horrible, you know, the extreme, the dark, but the weird as also the beautiful, even the sublime. I'm trying to think about what do we want,

what do we actually want to happen? I mean, there's a real danger at the moment, I think, that we're heading to a situation where the kind of energy that's come from the world transform, that's come from the grassroots, that's come from the membership, that's come through things like Grind for Corbyn, is going to increasingly find itself in an antagonistic, rather than a sort of complementary relationship.

with the sort of normie corbinism of unite. And I think we really have to be, you know, try and avoid that. Because if that's what happens, if we end up back in a situation, I mean, really a bit like the late 80s, which is basically like anarchists, you know, and sort of youth against the Labour leadership, you know, while the Tories just continue on indefinitely, then we're really going to be in trouble.

And I think there is, you know, there is a good precedent for this. And sorry to keep going back to the 60s and 70s, but like Tony Ben, you know, Tony Ben was, like in some ways the ultimate example. I mean, a bit like we said about Corbyn, of the kind of normal, you know, the normal English guy, you know, Tweed jacket, aristocrat,

pipe in his mouth. And he himself, like his own cultural tastes were always quite conservative, quite normal. But his attitude to, like the counterculture, his attitude when he went to, say, the dialectics of the Liberation conference in the late 60s was, look, we have to recognise these people are basically on our side.

Now, these people, even if we don't all really want to participate, even if the average MP or the average Labour Party branch officer wouldn't feel that comfortable going to a rave or whatever then it's important to recognise that broadly speaking they're all part of the same sort of family and on the same side and that was a fairly normal attitude amongst certain you know sections of the leadership of the Labour Party and the Labour movement until the 70s and then from the 70s onwards the Labour Party just embraced you know took the view that really it was just death for the

Labour Party ever to be seen publicly, to be anything but totally hostile to say rave culture. And I think we're at, we're still at a junction now where it's not clear, it's not totally clear whether Corbinism is ultimately just going to go that way, is going to go the way of saying, well, in order to keep on side the socially conservative, over 55, leave voting, working class voters, we're going to have to really be seen to publicly reject the kind of bohemian culture of our millennial, metropolitan activists, or is it going to say, look, we have to develop a kind of institutional ecology which can allow all of those things to resonate with each other in positive ways.

And it's not clear yet which way it's going to go, but it is a really live political question, I don't, just my little intervention on that, I don't believe, and maybe that's because I have a kind of positive outlook of like the potential of human behavior and existence and thinking. I don't believe that the 55-year-old small-town leave voter doesn't like a really good party. And I think if you took a really good part, you're right. That's a lack of imagination. I think there's so many people around the country who's like housing, their estates, their high streets have been like decimated.

And if we were to take your sound system, Jeremy, which is obviously the best sound system in Europe, to like on a tour around the country and through like free street parties I think like you know then we'd see quite a different then we wouldn't have that fear or people in labour wouldn't have that fear in my view

if we could combine these raves with like exhibitions of manhole covers I think we'll have all bases this show is brought to you by Navarra Media to find articles, videos and more audio content like this head to Navaramedia.com If you particularly enjoyed this podcast and would encourage others to listen to it, why not head to iTunes?

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