ACFM - ACFM Trip 48: Political Commitment

Episode Date: December 8, 2024

Which side are you on? Keir, Nadia and Jem consider the ebb and flow of political commitment with ideas and music from Jodi Dean, Gramsci, John Coltrane and the Raincoats. Is cultural production the same as political action? What’s the difference between an ally and a comrade? And why do some communists end up as […]

Hello and welcome to ACFM, the home of the weird left. I'm Jeremy Gilbert. I'm here as always, with my good friend Nadia Idol. Hello. And my other good friend, Keir Milburn. Hello. Today we are going to be talking about the topic of political commitment. Now, Keir, this is one you've been wanting us to talk about for quite a while. So why don't you tell us why? Yeah, it has been in the back of my mind for a while.

Partly just I think it's an interesting, another angle onto some debates that we've just gone over and over from different angles here, such as political commitment understood as some sort of political view of the world, that you maintain through ebbs and flows, that sort of thing. Relevant at the moment, because many people might be going through an ebb in their political commitment, not least because we saw the U.S. presidential elections President Trump got elected. Reaction in the U.S. doesn't seem as the first time the sort of shock

and then, oh, let's all do the resistance and go on marches and stuff. There's an element of resignation in there, perhaps, a little bit. And so it might be useful to think about this political commitment through the ebbs and flows, in that sort of sense. There's also a sort of debate going on in the UK about whether the left should form a political party or join the Greens or something like that. And so discussing the idea of political commitment

or what it means might also feed in might be useful for those sorts of discussions. So that's sort of why I want to think about political commitment. So what about you, Nadia? Any initial thoughts on this topic? Yeah, I think two things really. I think is political commitment a viewpoint is it like a lens or is it a kind of practice? Is this something that you do? Like, is it something that you are in a sense or is it a vantage point or is it something that you do? Is it in fact in the practice? And to what extent that's that's a self-conscious position or like a labeling of self? Like how does this interact with identity? Like those sorts of overarching questions, I think. The second thing I think is in terms of global events for some of us,

for many of us in the world, the US election was, you know, secondary or, you know, not that important compared to the ongoing onslaunt or attacks in Palestine and Lebanon and other places. And the interesting thing that I've observed is that the political commitment on Palestine by activists in the UK, like old and new, has been relentless in a good way. And there has been like multifaceted expressions of that, which has been kind of encouraging, for the future of activism, but also like the commitment to the values that underpin that. And they're sort of looking at that in terms of like where we are in history is kind of, it's going to be interesting things to analyze. And what about you, Jeremy?

Well, it's obviously an important topic because it's the question of what it means to be politically committed, like culturally, artistically, academically, as I guess has really shaped a lot of my thinking about. or different aspects of my life over many decades. So it's a very important issue for us to get into. That's what I'll say for now. But before we get into that in any more detail, I think we should mention that. If you enjoy the show, if you like what we're doing, then you can get even weirder and even leftier

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That is one way in which you, as a listener and a supporter, can express your political commitment. The classic song of expressing the problem of partisanship and the issue of partisanship is which side are you one. So the American Union song that was first written by Florence Reese in 1931. And she was part of a family who were involved in the Harlan County strikes in at that time in Kentucky. And of course it's been covered by lots of people, been covered by Pete Seeker, be covered by Billy Bragg. But let's hear a more recent version of it. Annie DeFranco, I know Andy DeFranco recorded this in the 2010,

so we can hear her singing, which side are you on? Come on, all good workers, this year is our time. Now there's folks in Washington, I don't care what's on our minds. Come on, come on, vote us, let's all vote next time. Showing which side are you on now? Which side are you on? Which side are you on now? Which side are you on?

We should probably open up by thinking about what is meant by political commitment. And like Nadia started with that, I think, when she said, you know, is it a point of view? I think I'm a politically committed person. In fact, it's very, very important to me. It really structures how I view my life as a politically committed individual, I think. Well, what am I committed to? That's a question. That's a really good question. I think it is committed to not one political view, but a set of political views. It's definitely something which is oriented to the future, something that, like I said before, that goes over the

ebbs and flows and the changes in the wider context or conjuncture that occurs. You know, I just see the world in a political way, I think, but I just start tripping myself up then, because it is an interesting one. What exactly am I politically committed to? I'm not sure. Could you help me out? Well, well, I do think, I do think it's interesting then to think about like what, in that vein of like, what isn't political commitment? So when I was thinking about this, and the reason why I brought up this question about is it a practice, is that if you were to respond to the question, no, I'm not politically committed. And here, this is why thinking about it as something you do might be also useful.

which, you know, kind of underpins a combination of maybe a vantage point and a practice, maybe we'll come to the conclusion that it's both of those things, is that, you know, I've had conversations with people who have said, or, you know, there are points where I've wanted to say, you know, I've left politics. If people say, I've left politics, or I no longer do this anymore, or I'm not involved in activism, does that mean that they are not politically committed? And I came up against this question, you know, like in a discussion I was having with somebody who I had just met who said to me, oh, but surely you are taking a break, you know, and I said, I'm not really involved in activism that much anymore. You know,

I do ACFM and, you know, I do consciousness raising, but I'm not, I'm not that involved. And this person's reaction to me was, oh, but surely you're going to go back. And I was quite taken aback, you know, this person said, well, you should go back. And I was like, I don't like being told, like what I should or should not do. You know, I was quite taken aback. But They said to me, but I know people like you and people like you who are politically committed, like you can't leave. This is something that is part of you. And that was kind of an interesting discussion because it did catch me on the back foot.

Like I was, it did get me thinking about this podcast. Like it's a coincidence that these things came up, but at the same, a similar time. But like, is it the way that I view the world? Because the way I view the world, like here, like that's not going to change. I'll be very surprised. if that changed, you know, there's everything from like, you know, values to, to analysis, to kind of theory to your ideology in there. But I do feel like it also is partly a commitment to some kind of practice or at least some kind of conversation to be able to label myself as

I'm politically committed. Yeah, that's very interesting. Yeah. I mean, there's a whole set of different themes here, I think. Like, on the one hand, there's the question of what is even meant by commitment? What does commitment mean? And that's, it can be, commitment to another person, to a set of people, to a concept, to a cause. And then there's the question of political. What does it exactly, you know, what does it, what does it mean to be committed or to be anything so politically? I mean, for me, the question of, like, what makes a thing political is a really central question. It's been a really central question in my academic work since I was a PhD student, actually, partly because, you know, I come out of

the tradition of cultural studies. And cultural studies has always, you know, has always, you know, been defined by a very strong commitment to the idea of itself as somehow, not just an academic or critical discipline, but a kind of political practice. But then the question of, well, what exactly does that mean, actually? It starts to get much more complicated when people start to try to dig into it. I think the question of political commitment is interesting, partly because they're obviously very different degrees to which people think of political commitment as being something you can demonstrate or display or have. And Nadia, you were talking about being an activist. That is referring to an idea of political commitment as necessarily involving,

like committing quite a lot of time and emotional energy and attention on an ongoing and perhaps open-ended basis to some quite specifically identifiable sets of political causes or maybe campaigns, maybe organisations, actual projects of some kind. And on the other hand, I think one can have a much more diffuse notion of political commitment. One can contrast that notion with an idea according to which political commitment more has to do with the question of, are you always thinking about the world in a political way? In conversations with people, are you going to put forward a political analysis of situations? Could you be relied upon at least a vote in accordance with a particular set of political

principles, analyses, et cetera. So I think there are certainly people who I can think of, and I might often, yeah, many times in my life I might count as one of these people who are not, who are really not, they're not activists in the kind of sense of committing loads of time week in, week out, to formal political activity. But a lot of what they do and a lot of how they live and a lot of what they say to people, importantly, is framed through a political lend. I mean, I suppose one of the questions here actually has to do with, given that a lot of what we're talking about has to do with how people spend their time and how people commit their time. A lot of this has to do with the sort of job you do, because I know a lot of people who's, for example, working the public sector, they're not trade union activists, they're not political party activists, they're not big campaigners, but they would see their job, just they're out there all day, every working day job, as politically motivated and involved. like having to think politically, like nearly all the time.

And so for those people, political commitment is something which sort of shapes a set of attitudes and a set of practices, you know, more than actually circumscribing a particular set of activities, which you would isolate as political activity. So you're doing that. So that's another way of thinking about what's meant by political commitment, isn't it? Kear, you suggested when we were preparing the notes for this, that the idea of commitment and partly has to be related to the idea of partisanship, just sort of being on someone's side.

And in a book I wrote, I think, in 2008, I think, I was playing around this idea of partisanship and saying, well, one of the things that mass radical politics really needs is it needs loads of people who are not full-time activists, but who have a sort of sense in their mind of what it means to be on the side of a particular political project. And I was sort of trying to think about how could you define political, that kind of political commitment in a way which isn't the same as saying that it's a really kind of defining part of somebody's identity, but that it does kind of orient the way they think about the world. And I sort of think this is important.

I think it is important that there are ways in which people can have a sense of what it means like to be on the left in Britain, for example, that doesn't demand that in all. to think of yourself as being on the left, you have to look a particular kind of way or think about yourself, a particular kind of way, outside some fairly specific parameters and doesn't demand that you really do anything particularly. That's super interesting, though, because that gets me to think, OK, well, if that's the case, then are we saying that there is a political commitment which doesn't necessarily need to be mobilised? Because I would have thought that, you know, in that example of like, you know, the underpinning of like, you know, the Corbyn project or whatever, there was all of these people who were not necessarily activists, but they could be mobilized at some point, even if, you know, the action is like a click. But it also gets me thinking about the thing, you know, that ACFM or this podcast is trying to address, which is like cultural production. You know, if it's about identifying as a left-wing person, well, then what are the other avenues in which that political commitment can be expressed, even if it's not mobilized? And if that is cultural production, then that's one thing that is massively lacking in the UK today. Like, there seems to be very little of it.

identify that's coming out of a left-wing perspective basically. I think it's a really interesting idea that political commitment has different levels or something like that. There are people who have a general sort of political, it's not political interest. I think people can be interested in politics without being politically committed. Yeah, I agree. So it's something else. I think partisanship does sort of get to that. But then again, that's quite difficult as well because people would, used to say that, you know, there were partisans of the working class or something like that. And a lot of these debates around political commitment, in some ways, like they relate to the era when there were mass communist parties, particularly in Europe, etc. And so the word for somebody

who was like not a member of that, but still a sort of partisan of that was like fellow travelers, fellow travelers of the movement, etc. And of course, in any sort of politics, there's a core of people who are very active and then there are wider circles of people who are less active and then there's a wider sort of constituency who might be tempted into leveling up in their political commitment to take some sort of action. Lots of like political strategies about how you how you get people to sort of like shift to level up. For me though when I think about me what I would think of as political commitment it's an orientation to action or at least it's sort of like

approaching the world from the question of like what has to be done basically what should happen now that's the thing that survives the ebbs and the flows basically that's the thing that helps me my political commitment maintain

across the ebbs and the flows it's like ah okay so what's changed what should what should be done what should happen now that sometimes mean I get very politically active in actual activities sometimes it's just you know you're writing and talking

either publicly or privately about what needs to happen, etc. You know, that's quite a minority pursuit, I should imagine. You know what I mean? I'm really not sure whether my political project is to make everybody like that. I think that's probably a dangerous way to go. Anyway, I just wanted to say that there is some orientation to some form of action, even if that action is just to vote in a certain way or to click or something like that.

Do we think it's a minority pursuit, or is this just a function of late neoliberalism in the UK, or is it just a function of us being in an era of defeat for us? I think there are plenty of places in the world where having a political discussion is about the state of the nation, for lack of a better phrase or whatever, is like what a lot of people are doing all of the time. I don't think globally it's necessarily a minority person.

pursued at all. I think, though, that people who are really, really invested in politics and what is to be done and are sort of activists, that's always some sort of, some level of minority pursuit. I think it's probably even true in, like, big revolutionary periods, like the Russian revolution or something like that, you know what I mean? Most people were sort of like being swayed one way or the other, but were not necessarily active. I mean, I take that, but I think, it's also about what the stakes are. I think if you're in, you know, if you're in Lebanon or in Palestine and you're, you're being bombed or whatever, it's a very, very different. Yeah. Like you're, everyone, everyone is like highly politically active because it's about survival.

It's not like a, it's not like a conceptual, like you, you know, you, you, you, you, you, you can't afford to sit and have a discussion about it. So I think it's about, like, what the stakes are and what, like, the liveliness of the issue is. I think that is right. I mean, This is partly the self-fulfilling prophecy of post-democracy or anti-democracies. The conditions are created, which mean that it's more difficult for people to affect political change collectively. And therefore, people become disinvested from political processes because they rightly judge that their chances of influencing outcomes are not that high anyway. So, and sometimes, you know, sometimes circumstances change in,

in ways that nobody can really plan for, that increase the chances of people having an impact on outcomes for various reasons. But sometimes you just have to, you know, you have to build up, build up cohorts who are forcing the possibility of change onto the agenda. So you can then attract more people by that possibility of change. I mean, this is something we've talked about on the show before and something I've written about that there's always a sort of chicken and egg problem for the left.

in a situation like Britain, which is more historically normal for a left-wing movement to be in than a sort of highly charged or a wartime or a pre-revolutionary type situation. But that chicken and egg problem is, in order to get enough people involved in and committed to a project for change to make it viable, you have to convince a load of people who weren't already convinced that that change for that project for change might be viable, like as well as desirable. My answer to that is always to say you have to accept that is just a paradox and a difficult situation which progressive forces always find themselves in and what you must avoid is the law of kind of magical thinking which tries to offer some some magic solution to that

problem. I think a lot of millinarian, a lot of fantastical and sort of quite politically useless like thinking on the left tends to proceed from people just not being able to see a way out of that paradox and not being able to accept that it is just a paradox we have to live with and constantly accept and trying to find some magical way of resolving it. But that is the paradox, if paradox is even the right word, really. That is the, it's the aporia, if you like, in philosophical terms that we're always sort of stuck in that until the moment when you have enough people to make the change happen, then the change probably isn't going to happen because you don't have enough people. And you can only get enough people because, you know,

wanting that people start to feel like it looks like it might be possible. That's partly why it's always really important to be kind of analyzing what is going on in a given historical conjuncture. I've started to hate that word because I hear so many people use it and use it badly. But yeah, I come from Gramsian Cultural Studies, so I'm allowed to use it and I use it correctly. So in any sort of given historical conjuncture, meaning, you know, a particularly historical moment be analyzed in terms of the question of what is changing and what is staying the same. and what the balances of forces are and how they might be changing, they might be changeable.

At any moment, the importance of attending to the conjuncture is partly because you are always having to look out for what might be those surfaces of emergence, what might be those sources of new energy and new agitation and new mobilisation, which might get some people kind of excited and animated around possibilities of change in a way that then inspires and animates a few other people that eventually leads to having the sort of necessary critical mass to make things happen. But of course the question of commitment comes up to the extent that

on the one hand, you need to have some people around who are kind of very, very committed to just doggedly carrying on with the work of radical politics. You sort of need them there and you need them to be able to doggily carry on and be committed, even

when you're living through a historical moment when the chances of anything much happening are pretty low. But you absolutely must not not communicate to the wider set of people whom you're hoping eventually to inspire or mobilise or just get committed. You must not communicate to them that in order to become in any way involved, they must demonstrate that same level of commitment because that is fatal. And I mean, I would say that was the absolutely fatal disease, certainly of the British left and include

kind of anarchist and green kind of radical movements in that category all through my youth, to be honest. The fatal disease was this kind of activist culture within which people place such a high premium on the idea of their own commitment and their own committedness and kind of very, very clearly advertising this to themselves and to others that they just put off like more people than they ever attracted. In fact, the very idea of attracting people to a movement came to seem sort of distasteful to a lot of people because in order to attract people, you'd have to make some sort of compromise, you would have to apparently water down your commitment. And it was completely fatal. That's, and, you know, that was one of, that was a symptom of the weakness of the left during

that period, but it was also a self-exacabating symptom. It was a cause of the weakness of the left during that period. And it's one reason why we lived through really decades prior to 2015 when the left was just off the political map in Britain. And so I think it is, it's really important to hold both those sorts at the same time. Like, we do need, like, the dog. And, committed activist, you know, we need those people who are willing to, like, I mean, we probably even need, and this isn't really our politics, any of us, but, you know, I've sort of really come to admire the people in, like, the Communist Party of Britain, like, producing the Morning Star, like, every week, like, for decades, and, like, committed to a very kind of old-fashioned

vision of Marxist-Leninist politics, but I sort of think, if you don't have those people, kind of willing to demonstrate that level of commitment, you know, yes, you. year in, year out, like in the face of terrible defeat, then once you get moments of historical opportunity, then apart from anything else, you don't have any infrastructure with which to try to capitalize on them. So it is really, it is really important to, I think even those of us who are not in one of those sort of very traditional, sort of highly, highly committed partisan traditions, like we sort of respect them and respect the necessary work they're doing to keeping alive the best, bones of a sort of radical ecology, which I think we know from the experience of Corbinism,

like does turn out to be really important, when an opportunity for larger scale mobilisation becomes possible. We want dogged political commitment without the dogmatism. Yes. What you're doing there, Jamie, is thinking that we need all this sort of activity now because the situation may change and things may open up. And it's definitely, like political commitment is definitely action and thinking in the present, which is really dependent on an orientation to the future,

future in which change happens, and like an openness, probably, an openness to the idea that what we're experiencing now, this closing down will eventually open up again. And so one of the functions of the political party historically and classically has been to be the memory of the class or whatever or of the movement. One of the things it carries is this idea

that there are ebbs and flows basically and that idea that there are Eberton flows and that there will be flows in the future, openings up in the future, is incredibly important to maintaining political commitment through the harder sort of times. I wanted to sort of mention one resource we could go to in that, which is the Marx's classic comment about the old mold revolution,

burrowing away under the surface and then popping up into visibility, perhaps in a place you didn't expect, it, you know, Paris in the French Revolution, and then in Paris again, 1848, and then Paris again in 1870. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to say that. What I meant was, you know, it pops up in perhaps this whole revolution burrowing away, pops up in ways which we were quite expecting before, and in places we weren't quite expecting before. Marx talks about the old Moor Revolution in the eighth room air of Louis Bonapal, is really classic text on that, on this problem of like, There are repetitions in history, but there's also sort of novelty.

And how do you keep those in mind, basically? And like, Marx talks about the old mold revolution, and he's referring to, like, Hegel uses that phrase. And like, for Hegel, it's like, you know, it's not the old mold revolution. It's like, you know, it's like the subterranean progress of reason or something like that that keeps bursting, the spirit of world history, he'd probably put it like that one,

bursting into visibility every now and then, but basically on a sort of like a dialectical, but almost inevitable journey or passage towards the full realisation of reasons and like that. So that it carries that sort of thing to it. Hegel actually gets it from Shakespeare because it's in Hamlet. Hamlet says, well said old mole,

well said old mo, because he's referring to his father basically, the ghost of his father who came up was visible to him and now he's back under the earth, but he's still talking to him, basically. And I think that's what Hegel's on about. You can still hear a reason chentering away, even if you

can't see it. Yeah, yeah. That sort of thing. And like that carries through into Marx's conception of the old mole revolution well-grabbed old mole every time it pops up again in a new sort of form. We should play Here's to You, which is the music's by Ennio Morricone, who is best known for the soundtracks, the Spaghetti Western films in particular,

a real genius, actually. And Joan Baill is another genius, it sings the song. Here's to You is from the soundtrack of a film Sacco Ivansetti, which was released in 1971. I know it because it's played at the end of the documentary film, Germany and autumn, which is about the Red Army fraction, et cetera. But the lyrics, there's only a small amount of lyrics that Joan Baez sings are these.

Here's to you, Nicola and Bart. Rest forever here in our hearts. The last and final moment is yours. That agony is your triumph. So the film is about Nicola Sarko and Bartholomeo Van Zetti. Sacco and Vansetti were really two famous anarchists who were fitted up for a robbery and a murder they didn't commit and then executed in the 1970s.

U.S. or a big core celebrity in the U.S. And the lyrics to the song, the lyrics about that, that agony is your triumph, et cetera, drawn from a statement that Vansetti gave to a reporter just before he was killed. And it's probably worth reading them out because it's a nice passage. Van Setti says, if it had not been for these things, I might have lived out my life, talking at street corners to scorning men. I might have died, unmarked, unknown a failure. Now are you not a failure?

our career and our triumph. Never in our full life could we have hoped to do such work for tolerance, for justice, for man's understanding of man, as we do now by accident. Our words, our lives, our pains, nothing. The taking of our lives, lives of a good shoemaker and a poor fish peddler, all that moment, that last moment belongs to us. That agony is our triumph. forever here in our hearts the last and final moment is yours that agony is your triumph here's to you

Nicola and Bart rest forever here in our hearts the last and final moment is yours that agony is your triumph So one of the issues that's coming up here is the issue of just organisation and the idea of the party. And we've talked about partisanship. We talked about these debates going on on the British left and whether there should be a new left party, as if there aren't already loads of left parties. I mean, you know, maybe there should be another one.

But I think it's a bit mad the way I keep hearing people talk about the question. Should there be a party to the left of Labour as if there are not like literally dozens of very small political parties to the, the left of Labour. The question is, should there be one which is like big enough to actually achieve anything? It's really what people are asking. They are, yeah. And everyone that exists wants to be that. Yeah. Are they asking that? I think just to complexify that a little bit, I think what also is going on there when people are saying that are the thing, is there a place for me? Yeah. Is there a place for my political commitment? I think that's also what's going on.

It's looking around. I think sometimes it's with knowledge of all these other parties and rightly or wrongly going, I don't want to do the hard work of going into those parties and reforming them so that I could have a home because that's not my theory of change. I want to make a party which suits me, which is, you know, I think there's like, you know, two sides, two ways of looking at that. But that's also what's happening there. There's also like several debates going on. One of them is there's obviously electoral political, looks like there's electoral political space to the left of Labour. So some people are talking about much more primarily a, an election A new electoral left party.

Other people are talking much more about a much more classical sort of all-encompassing party for which electoral policies would be slightly to the, you know, would not be the main focus. It could be a focus. I think that's part of what's going on. There's been all sorts of discussions, but there was a series of discussions at Pelican House in London, the social centre in London, about this called Party Time. I spoke at one of them. I didn't really know what to say.

I'm not sure what the answer to that question about parties is. But the impression I had really did fit what you were saying, Nadia. It was like packed, the meeting was packed, really enthusiastic. And people wanted somewhere, they wanted somewhere where their commitment, political commitment could be channeled, basically. There was absolutely no doubt in my head about that. You know, it was almost that way around, rather than the, what does the objective situation require at this moment?

It's almost like political, their need for political commitment and the withdrawal of political commitment they experienced perhaps post-Corbinism. There are actually lots of young people who were too young to be really involved in Corbinism. But, you know, that removal of political commitment or the expression of your political commitment and the channeling of your political commitment

that took place during the Corbyn, high Corbyn moment, we put it that way. I found it really interesting that. That was a really strong impression that I got. That does speak to one of the issues which is at stake in the whole question. of political commitment and the question of partisanship and the function of party. And that is the question of the relationship between the organisation or the party or the political

orientation and its mode of expression as strategic vehicles or as agents of strategy on the one hand. And on the other hand, the role that all those things can play as, I want to use the phrase agents of belonging. I don't know if that really expresses what I'm saying, but basically potential sort of homes for people and points of identification for people. And there is a sort of paradoxical tension between those two roles that to the extent that something becomes recognizable as a place where a very particular kinds of people, whatever kinds you may be talking about, but feel at home politically because there are other people like them there, to exactly that extent any such project or institution risks alienating people who don't see themselves in that

group of people and don't feel themselves to sort of share that identity. I mean, you know, my impression is, you know, what's going on at those Pelican House events in Bethnal Green in East London is essentially a particular cohort of people who your political sociologist around the world would recognize as basically disaffected graduates as a particular sort of social cohort who have over the past 20 years, like moved drastically to the left. There's a long history of disaffected graduates being on the left. They were central to most revolutionary movements all through the 19th century, for one thing. Those are people who were highly attracted to Corbinism and to the more kind of policy and intellectually ambitious elements of Corbinism, and they

now feel completely alienated from the Labour Party. They're not very attracted to the Green Party for fairly contingent reasons, largely because the Green Party is. Largely because the Green Party itself has various kinds of baggage that they don't feel attracted to. And so they're looking for a place to go. They're looking for a thing that they can be part of. And they're partly looking at the example of other parties in small new left parties in parts of Europe who have relatively similar constituencies and bases. And of course, all of that is completely legitimate. All of that is completely fine. And the question is really whether there are enough people who share that sort of a social identity

and I would be attracted enough by the idea of a political vehicle which is largely grounded in that political identity for that to become a viable sort of electoral project. And I'm not saying yes or no to that. I just think that is, you know, that is a good example of the kind of sort of dilemma that gets faced.

This is a problem face, even in a much more proportional and much more democratic system. You've always, you've got a problem that if you're, if you're, a political party can't just be a vehicle for a particular social cohort unless that social cohort is clearly large enough or strategically important enough or well-placed enough that it itself can become a kind of source of political leverage. Otherwise, a successful political party has to be able to attract other groups of people

to its agenda. And then you get into the whole paradoxical question. Well, to what extent can you attract other people to your agenda without watering down that agenda and ceasing to function as a kind of home for people and ceasing to function as something, therefore, that certain kinds of people will feel very committed to. I'm not saying I have an answer to that. That's just a perpetual paradox. I think this is really, this is really useful actually, because what it's making me think about is like whether there's a contrast between political belonging as, or like political commitment as belonging, I mean, and therefore

belonging being about a home and being about, you know, a cohort. And this is what your use of the term cohort here kind of spark this in me, Jeremy. Like, are we talking about, like, to identity, like identifying with something and this idea of belonging and home being, I don't want to say static, but being like about, you know, a place and people rather than it being the other word that you use, you know, a vehicle or, you know, a process or like an action. And I think that's interesting to kind of like juxtapose and think, like, can these, both of these things exists, you know, together, are they both part of the same thing when we're talking about political commitment? Or are we in a place where, you know, if we look at where we are in

history in terms of like in the UK at this moment, you know, 2024, late neoliberalism, late capitalism, etc. Like, is there a fact that people are looking for belonging rather than action, for example? Like, is this to do with, like, to do with defeat? Or, like, basically, to trace that story or if we were to like, you know, take an anthropological, do an anthropological study of like what brought people to that, you know, Pelican House meeting or, you know, if we're trying not to be London, trying not to be London centric, which I like us to try and not be, you know, in other other events, you know, like whether it's the, the event that, you know, like I went to in, when you went to like Sheffield transformed, et cetera, like what still pulls people to

want to be in that space? Is it because it's the energy that comes out of it, where you think, yes, there's a real, you know, now I know why I'm politically committed. Like, I'm politically committed and therefore, like, events like this give me the energy to continue to be politically committed, or is it to make you feel better about your political commitment? You know, I think these are, these are not the same thing. But that's kind of what this discussion has kind of led me to at this moment.

I really like the way you put that, Nadia, because you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, asked is, are people looking for a home or a vehicle? And basically, can you have, can an organisation be the same, be both, basically? So I think you're arguing for the camper van theory of a political organisation. Yes, mate. This is what we want to get to. This is the ACFM solution. The VW camper van of political organisations is what we shall build. The trouble is a camper van is not that great as a vehicle and it's not that great as a place to sleep. It's a compromise between those two functions. It's useful under contingent circumstances. Yeah, well, it's also, I really like being in my camp and I've got a VW and I really like

being in it because it's so compact. You have to put everything away and really take, you know, everything has its place. It can't be not in its place. Exactly the opposite of. No baggy politics. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Draw the political analogies of that that you want people. But I think it's also like that, one of the other things you could put for that is like, well, what are people looking for then, right? Well, you did exactly say that, Nadia, but like, what is it about political commitment and having a vehicle or a political association in which you can put that political commitment? What do you gain out of that, basically?

We should probably say, like, what do you lose out of that as well? Do you know what I mean? Because in some ways, what you're gaining is gaining other people like, do you know what I mean? That's part of the thing, isn't that? You're gaining other people, and you can think of political commitment, a political partisanship as an almost like political friendship. Do you know what I mean?

What you're entering into is a relationship in which you will help each other on this journey and you will be able to have debates and be able to help you think through the questions of the time. Do you know what I mean? So you're not just reliant on yourself and your phone and some influencer or on TikTok or something like that. and what you give up? Well, I mean, part of what you give up with, like, partisanship, perhaps,

is that perhaps, well, one of the dangers, put it this way, is you get drawn into an over-partisan view of the world, and your partisanship is not to, you know, the ongoing movement, it's not an allegiance or commitment to the old mould grubbing away, but it becomes a commitment to a particular organisation and its particular views, you know, that the fall of an organisation, organisation into a sort of sectarian sect. That's probably just a redundant word, isn't it?

But anyway, into a sect, basically, who find it impossible to open up to what's new about the situation, basically. Forcing the world to try to fit into the political ideology that holds a political organisation together and to which people are politically partisan, you know, it's forcing the world to conform to that rather than adjusting their theory to to fit the world of course that's just a problem that a general problem of politics and theory but like it seems to be exacerbated in political organisations particularly in times of like political defeats basically when that's when the sort of more sectarian things take over then when you see

moments of opening up such as like high carbonism people did sort of put things to one side to a large degree or in fact the more part the more sectarian and inward looking people seem to get bypassed some sort of way, they got overflown by the big flood of like new political enthusiasm or something like that. I mean, that question of what is a party and what is a party is for, I think that is interesting because, of course, originally the word party just meant a political faction. It didn't mean this really highly organised thing that we have now. And that's where the idea of partisanship also sort of comes from. It's just based on a general idea that you recognize that within the broad space of political contestation. There are going to be different groups with different agendas and that

you have to sometimes pick aside. You have to pick which group you belong to. Of course, it's important to think about that party because one of the persistent myths of liberal culture is this idea that, well, actually, it's possible to somehow transcend political differences and just come up with clever, competent technical solutions which everybody can agree to. You know, this is the fantasy embodied in that god-awful, like podcasts. The rest is policy. for example. I was thinking about when I was talking about, like, people can be interested in politics without being politically committed.

I was thinking of that. There was a picture going around of a really big live event that the rest is politics with Rory Stewart and who else is in it? It's Alistair Campbell. For fuck, say, Elsa Campbell. It's the wrongest people in politics. But this is, people love listening to it. Like, it's so weird.

But also, fair enough, fair enough. Listeners, if you also listen to the rest of politics, like, fine, you know. Like, I'm not judging you, but also I don't get it. Could I just say, I am judging you and we shall be, once you've joined my politically committed organisation, you should be subject to Maoist's self-criticism sessions. Yeah. Until you give up your beastly habits.

I mean, I know for a fact we do have listeners who listen to both, actually. And I think the reasons why they do is sort of interesting from the point of you of most of our listeners. I know we do have listeners and Navarra has more generally has listeners who I would, you know, their demographic is like they're, the people I can think of are all men. So they're all, they're like guys our age and they are, they are people whose general politics is actually like a very left wing. But they're also quite conscious of living in a world in which and their own social milieu is one in which that's not the norm, which is like different from me. Okay, so they sort of said they don't want to completely cut themselves.

off from, the more sort of mainstream social milieu, in which they have to do their jobs, like, apart from anything else. Yeah, and absolutely, because people also, let's just say, like, we, like, listen to things. We talked about this in the disruption episode a bit, like, you know, like, there's different views on, like, you know, like, censorship and, like, why people do things and, like, whether you want to, like, control the discourse. And I don't. And I'm quite happy to have listeners that, like, listen to all sorts of different things,

even if I think they're totally terrible. Obviously, this is the best podcast. because mostly because we enjoy ourselves so much. That's the reason. Also, I mean, it is important for people to understand that the rest of politics is evil. It is an evil institution. I'm not judging anyone for listening to it, but if you're listening to it just thinking they're jolly good chaps

who just want to make the world a better place, they're not. They're completely evil people who have deep connections to the security state or anything else. So, this is just not Jem's usual theory about everybody having care of this. This is just very well documented. to. I'm not going to get behind. I'm not going to get behind the use of the word evil there personally, but yes, I will say that they are not our people. So, you know, I would not want to be joining in a politically committed project with them. I was just about to roll back my explain that I was making a joke then about the Maoist self-criticism sessions. But Jem's categorization of evil

has put me back into a Maoist frame of mine. No, I've got friends who listen to the rest of politics and they listen to a variety of things. You know what I mean? That's a fine thing to do if you've got the time to do that, I suppose. I probably couldn't, basically. I've only got two eyes. I'd poke the one eye out, the first time I'd listen, the second eye out, the second time I'll listen, and then what would I do? I have no idea. I got an obvious song to play would be the partisan, which is an anti-fascist song about the French resistance in World War II. It's a song composed in World War II in 1943 by

Annamali, that music is composed by Anamali and then the lyrics come from this French resistance leader. Emmanuel de Astaire de Villiers I'm pretty sure I got that spot on. It's like it tells a story, basically, of these resistance fighters, losing their comrades, their family getting killed, but they persist in their resistance of the Nazis, etc.

The reason the song is known, I think, in English world is because Leonard Cohen did a cover version of it in 1969 and we should probably play the cover version. The lyrics to the version that Leonard Cohen sings are, oh, the wind, the wind is blowing, through the graves the wind is blowing. Freedom soon will come, then we'll come from the shadows,

which is very nice, but like the literal translation from the French is even more haunting, I think, because it goes like this. The wind is blowing on the graves, freedom will come back, everyone will forget us we will return to the shadows when they poured across the border i was caution to surrender this i could not do i took my gun and banished I have changed my name so often I've lost my wife and children

but I have many friends and some of them are with me Can you have a politically committed centrism? You obviously can, but the whole idea of centrism is sort of a suspicion of political commitment in some sort of way. Do you know what I mean? And a self-understanding that you're not politically committed, you're just doing sensible politics.

Well, I would say, you know, the Labour right, you know, have exhibited all the features of a politically committed centriism. And the story they tell themselves about why it's okay to, for example, quite openly just lie to people about the views and politics of somebody like Corbyn, is that it's necessary. To them it is a sign of their commitment. that they're willing to do anything. I mean, it is this weird, like, Cold War thinking they've got.

Maybe it's not weird, because that Cold War thinking is just a legacy of both liberal and conservative thinking going back to the 17th century. Yeah, but if you want partisanship, I mean, that's it, isn't it? Basically, the Cold War, they sort of, like, absolute partisan, you know, that if you're either a friend or an enemy, basically, that clear divide. Well, that is their self-conception. The self-conception of the hard labour right

I've said this before loads of times, but it's a useful shorthand for anybody who wants to try to understand their twisted logic. Their self-conception is based on them thinking they are in a permanent caricature version of 1948. And so America is led by, you know, by FDR and is doing the New Deal. The Soviet Union is led by Stalin and is about to bring, you know, tyranny to Eastern Europe. And so, you know, you can be somehow on the side of America against the Soviet Union and yet also on the side of social democracy. against a sort of fantasy version of pre-war capitalism,

which is the thing they always think they're against, as well as being against Stalinism, which they think is a permanent threat to civilisation, like even to this day. So that is the way they think of it, and it is a totally partisan view of the world. I mean, it's a very weird one, which just doesn't map onto any objectively identifiable or correlable sort of reality.

It expresses itself in the kind of loving with NATO, doesn't it? this stuff. Yeah, yeah, no, they really, I mean it. They really think NATO has defended human civilization. It's defended it from the dark shadow of tyranny. And we saw how Kirstama reacted when some people were like, uh, maybe, you know, we should like have a nuanced view of NATO and he was like, no, if you don't defend NATO is the most important thing ever, you're out of the Labour Party and out they went. I don't think anyone can plausibly or credibly look at the career of Kistama and not think somebody from the security services has had a word with him at some point and told him what would happen if he didn't, if he ever just blinked

one, one eye the wrong way when asked about NATO. So I don't think Starma believes anything, but those guys really believe this stuff. Some of them, they really do believe it. They really do have this sort of view of the world, which, which of course is, I mean, in terms of their own psychology is based on the fact that they're all, you know, they're all not very well-developed people psychologically who haven't grown out of first-year undergraduate politics in which, you know, it was all about them versus the SWP, basically. And they still think everyone they're against to their left is basically like the SWP.

The trots, as it is. Yeah, the trots, as they call them. So that is a form of partisanship. Jim, can I just stop you there before you make a serious point? I just want to show my appreciation for conspiracy Gilbert. It's my second favorite Gilbert persona after Tanky Gilbert. The Tanky Gilw is getting a good outing today. I can tell you.

I was going to, you know, name check him earlier, but, you know. Thank you Gilbert. Thank you Gilbert is surveying the state of the world and wondering exactly what argument he has to make against the views of his friend in the Communist Party of Britain. He's completely taken over from Mr. Stapst. Tankie Gilbert is, Tanky Gilbert is there as a sort of persona for like overseeing us

and asking us just what, you know, what is it, what is the argument we have to make against the view that against the view that the Gorbichos revisionism was a disaster for human civilization I don't believe that but I don't know

what the argument is against it anymore yes the harsh super ego of the acid communist partisan exactly

I don't but I mean speaking of that speaking of communist rigour when thinking about the question of partisanship the text

I keep meaning to bring up here, and we keep getting sideline from me doing so, is Jodie Dean's book, Crowd and Party. Jody Dean's book, Crowd and Party, I think, is very interesting on these issues. I say that despite the fact that I think Jody wrote that book very much against what she saw is the decadent views of people like us, that maybe you don't need a classic vanguardist revolutionary party to do radical politics. And, you know, maybe you can, maybe the traditional functions of the party could be carried out by a more diffuse sort of organisation.

I mean, I think she was writing against a sort of a particular view, which I've always also been critical of, like the sort of pure horizontalism, which, you know, Rodrigo Nunes, for example, criticises in his book that we interviewed him about on the show. I think there are definitely differences of emphasises being like Jodie, on the one hand, like Rodrigo and us on the other hand.

But she does make, I still would really recommend it as a really useful, like quite short study and discussion of some of those. debates when her sort of starting point is the observation that some notion of party is when you can't really get away from if you're trying to do any sort of effective politics. And it's partly to do with the way in which it involves certain kinds of commitment. In fact, I would say that Jody's book, Crowd and Party, and then my favourite book of hers, by far actually, her book Comrade, where she explores the concept of the comrade and why the term comrade becomes important

in radical discourse. They are between them, like a couple of really interesting, or between them they add up to one complex and extended interesting meditation on notions of commitment, as well as organisation and strategy. Comrade is a great book. I love that book. And she writes it in response to, initially, I think just her irritation at the popularity of the idea of allyship, which is something that always has always rubbed me up the wrong way. And she says, we don't want to be an ally I want to be a comrade and my my reading of that in line of with my own sort theoretical ideas is that well the difference is an ally is someone who just sees themselves as not being not having a stake in the struggle that's being referred to but just wanting to sort of support it

like giving it a you know giving it a monthly direct debit and then forgetting about it whereas a comrade is someone who recognizes that they have a stake in the same struggles you know women you know men can be comrades with women in the struggle for women's liberation to the extent that men recognize themselves as also having something to gain from it, not just recognizing that it's a nice thing to do. I think there's another thing there that I think is really important, which is that Comrade speaks to the politics of solidarity, which at its essence, I always say this is like the definition that I go for, is your ability to see yourself in other people. So it's not just about, you know, at the level of like the intellectual level of, or, you know,

like the organizational level of I will get something out of this. It's being to understand. that you can see yourself in other people who are in a different position to you, which allyship is completely not about. An allyship is to me... It's about reifying the difference, isn't it? It's about reifying the difference. Yes, exactly, exactly. So it forces kind of like an essentialist, you know,

identity-based understanding of like how you basically move in the world and how you relate to other people, which I think is like highly individualist and problematic. The book Comrade as well has got, it reproduces some really moving testimony of different, you know, people's experience of comradeship, in particular, black militants from the American South who were members of the Communist Party because they did lots of anti-racist organizing, etc. If you want to know what's in it, what's in it for political commitment, you can sort of read those sorts of texts. There's sort of like huge expansion of agency and like understanding themselves as the agents of their own life and these sorts of things. It's euphoric. It's effervescent. Like when we get like, it's going to make us start talking about pride and it's going to make me want to cry, you know, like that, that idea, that conceptions of solidarity, you know. And I think that does say something that does speak to our question about political commitment, right?

Because those kinds of vignettes that we could read in a book like comrades are like, they tell us something about like the possibility of like what once you recognize a certain kind of worldview or like an understanding of how change happens, which brings me back to this. idea that, you know, perhaps the initial question that was posited right at the beginning by UK here about like a vantage point is also important because it allows for, you know, those kind of like relationships to occur. Gemma's talking about Comraz and it reminded me of this film I watched recently called The War is Over by directed by Alan René. It's from like the 60s sometime. And it's about Spanish, I think the Communist Party members, but basically it's like after the Spanish Civil war once the defeat has happened in like the 1950s or something like that there's an organization

of exile communist party members i think who are trying to keep the keep the struggle going and they're infiltrating and trying to build up a network a subterranean network of activists and organization etc in spain and they happen to go in and out and you know it's it's about this militant who's been he's not quite disillusioned but he's getting there he's just getting tired basically and he's in danger a lot, you know, if you get arrested in Spain, you could easily be killed and that sort of. And I picked out a couple of really nice lines from the film. One of them is this, at some point, the protagonist says, you again find this comradeship irreplaceable, but eaten away by a lack of reality. And that's just like the Communist Party is calling these strikes and they're just from France, from Paris, and it has no, there's no relationship.

but also there's also really have a really nice line that he says to somebody who's falling in love with him, this woman who's falling in love with him, he says, falling in love isn't on the agenda for a professional revolutionary. What is she asked? Patience, above all, patience. And it's like a great mediation on like political commitment and like the costs and the necessity of sometimes what you're doing is waiting. Do you know what I mean? Political commitment involves that waiting for things to change. You know what I mean, for the situation to change in some way.

Maintaining that without losing touch with reality is incredibly difficult. I feel like we're raising more questions than we're able to solve today to a certain extent. I feel like I'm just saying over and over again that it's sort of important just to be able to understand that, you know, there are a set of kind of paradoxes and problems which have been faced by every radical, you know, in the history of modernity and post-modernity that we're not going to get away from. And it's probably better just to accept that they're things we have to learn to live with. And I think this question of commitment is a really good one. You know, on the what is a good example of you do have to have certain kinds of commitments in order to be able to do any sorts of politics.

Like you have to believe that what you're doing is worth doing. You have to believe you have to have some sort of organisation. You can do it through. You have to be relatively committed to certain forms of organisation, whether they're local or national or international, whether you're just, going to, you know, just to be able to get anything done at all, but the real risk that we see like a time and again in the history of radical politics is that the necessity of making the kind of emotional investment that you have to make in those things in order to function at all as a political person, like very, can very easily shade into the kind of overinvestment

that leads to dogmatism, the kind of overinvestment that leads to sectarianism, or all that leads to burnout, actually. You know, you might not really be doing anything. apart from listening to Navarra, you know, that might be just the thing you're doing that's political at the moment. It's still sort of valuable and it doesn't have to define you as a person and it doesn't have to define you as not capable of undertaking other kinds of action when opportunities arise. Yeah, you might feel that you're someone who really wants to do something that's much more like committed in the sense of requiring more time and that having more definite purposes. It's trying to shift the political terrain in a way that would make other people

feel able to act. And that's also, I mean, that's also, good. It's also, I think sometimes I'm conscious that my own sort of anti-activism rhetoric can get my, sometimes I worry maybe it's going to make people feel bad, you know, for like wanting to still be involved in local campaigns or still be involved

in party building or still going to branch meetings. And I think that that's partly why I think it is really important to stress that, you know, from my point of view, it's really important that some people do all that stuff at any one time, like someone has to do it. And, you know, it is really, really

important. Because as you said, as that line in the film says, you know, patience. Patience is really central to a lot of this stuff. Patience have all patience. Yeah, the idea of patience as a virtue is very, very important within sort of politics and political radicalism. And I would say sort of impatience. Impatience has probably undermined like more radical projects and radical opportunities than anything else I can think of in some way. That speaks to that question which we raised earlier about, you know, that mentality of people feeling like they are an Uber activist and like what they do matters the most and like a kind of like really egotistical, central, like self-centering vantage point in terms of political commitment. And like I think that's

contrasted with like the importance of like understanding your place in history and that this is like a long struggle and like you're doing a thing but like you're not at the most important moment in history ever, forever, and what you're doing, you know, can be done by someone else and, like, making peace with that. Although to argue against what the point I made just moments ago, I mean, personally, I do feel a huge sense of responsibility, partly that is, because of the urgency of the situation. Do you know what I mean? You have patience because you cannot solve everything at any one time, but like, like the urgency of climate change militates against that.

Once again, this is probably one of these dilemmas that are tensions which are not solvable, certainly not solvable for eternity. You know, it's basically you're trying to make judgments about, you know, what is possible, what's not, what your responsibility you feel to try to do something, etc, etc. We should play list of demands, brackets, reparations,

by Saul Williams. It's from 2004. Saul Williams is this really interesting rapper. writer and poet. But it was covered by the kills in 2018. This song was suggested by my friend Jess, actually. And so list of demands was included on this album of Saul Williams from 2008, which has the absolutely fantastic name, The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggi Tardis, a reference as Likistartist, etc. The chorus goes like this. I got a list of demands written on the palm of my hands. I bore my fist and you're going to know where I stand. A fantastic lyric. And Saul

Williams said this about the song. I'm tired of the bullshit. I'm tired of the hustle and the make-believe hustle. I'm tired of buying into ideas that divorced me from my potential. I'm tired of having my potential explained in terms of money. Amen to that soul. mouth, you want to be somebody, see somebody trying to free somebody, got a list of the fence, ridden on the palm of my hands, I'm on my busy, you're going to rise, dead. We live in hand the mouth, in the mouth. The idea of what it means to be committed to something, it is something that's been a preoccupation of certain strands of philosophical thought.

I would say at least going back to Kierkega, Saur and Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher and theologian, was writing in the early 19th century. And Kierkegaat is the origin of the phrase, the leap of faith. The idea of the leap of faith. And really where that idea comes from is the idea that will basically, by the early 19th century, most of the attempts to construct a rational argument for belief in God as described within Christianity and the Christian scriptures and tradition have pretty much run out of road. You know, it's very, very difficult. It's very difficult to justify a belief based in any kind of reason and rationality, which is something that wouldn't have bothered people that

much in like the 11th century, but like from sort of the 15th through to the 18th century, it really bothers people because people keep thinking that they've come up with fully, fully logical bases for Christian faith and then how do people keep knocking them down because they really don't stand up to any sort of systematic inquiry. And Kierkegaard, he's absolutely not the first person, never to say, well, you could only really have faith to the extent that you don't have a really rational argument for believing in God. But he's one of the people who's kind of working in that sort of tradition. And he's, and his argument is that there's, a sort of, I don't know if it's an accurate

translation, but it's translated as a moment of madness, the moment of the madness, which is also the moment of decision, when you just decide you're going to do a thing, or you decide you are going to commit yourself, you decide that you are going to accept the idea that there's a God and there's Jesus, and

you're going to accept salvation or what have you. And that gets taken up, for example, like in much more recent times by Jacques Derrida. and Derrida is partly interested in Kierkegaard to the extent that he seems to provide a sort of model for something like ethical or political commitment

and the idea that, well, the sheer problem of uncertainty, the problem that you can just never really be sure how things are going to work out in the future. It can never be sure whether you're on the right side of history or what have you means that sometimes you just have to jump. sometimes you just have to make the best judgment you can or you just have to make a decision. And you can never fully know that you've made the right decision whenever you make a decision. You can never 100% know what the alternative outcomes might have been.

Had you made a different decision. For me, this is quite close, I think, to the sort of existentialist idea, although at the moment when Derrida was writing about this, it was the moment when people like Sartre and Camus, existentialist heroes of the 50s who were completely out of fashion. So there's no kind of engagement with that stuff at all in people like Derrida. But for people like Sartre in his kind of existentialist phase, there's this idea that because we live in a world without a gods who offers any sort of moral certainty to us about the validity or otherwise of our actions, then we become the

authors of our own destiny. We are condemned to be free and we must make ourselves and what it means to make ourselves is to make decisions, to take responsibility for our own decisions. So there's this whole strand of thinking which tries to deal with the fact that just epistemologically, you can never totally know you're making the right decision. And unless you're working in some kind of platonic or theistical tradition, which basically says, well, if you're one of the people who's got privileged access to the mind of God, then you're always going to know you're making the right decision. If you're not working in one of those traditions, then you've always got a problem. Like, well, how do you know? How do you know you're doing the right thing? How do you

know? And I think this is really relevant to thinking about the condition of like being a political radical in the 21st century because, I mean, I always say, I mean, people really do actually hate me saying this. I'm afraid. A lot of people hate me saying this. But if you're a clear eye, political radical, then you've got to know most of the time you're usually, you're probably going to lose. You're probably going to lose. You might do that with a consciousness that over the course of the past 200 years. It's the isolated moments of victory for progressive forces which have produced a situation which has made life sort of livable for people like us today. But you're probably going to lose. I remember saying this a lot to people, like younger people, during those early years of the sort

of Corby movement. And even before that, actually, I was saying there's quite a lot of people in the earlier 2000s. And people really hated me saying it. And a lot of people replied to me, no, I don't agree with you. Like, I'm only doing this. I'm only doing this radical environmental action. I'm only supporting Jeremy Corby. I'm only doing this because I think we're probably going to win. And I told them, I thought that was a mistake. That was not a useful attitude to have. But I think that sort of kick a guardian existentiallyist or deridean tradition, like it has a certain value for us to the extent that it emphasizes the idea that, well, you don't commit yourself because you've made a fully rational calculation

that doing this is the thing that's going to put you on the winning side. You might make a fully rational calculation that for various reasons you just can't live with yourself as a human being if you sell yourself out to the other side and that ultimately you have a conception of your own interests such that the only way that those interests

could be fully realised is in a society that you manage to reduce some of the inequality, some of the destruction, some of the pain for everybody. This is my own view of my own political commitments actually. But the last and most dramatic of those thinkers in some ways is the French philosopher

Alan Badu. And Alan Badu, who is a Maoist philosopher, was one of the very last. He's still alive, isn't he, Badu? Yeah, yeah. He's one of the very last of that Parisian generation of radical philosophers. It's very old now. Completely uninfluential, they're not really read

in the English-speaking world for decades and decades. And then I enjoyed a period of fashionability about 10, 15 years ago. Badi has this very sort of this very, very extreme version of that kind of a perspective which sort of tries to elevate it into a whole theory of history. And his whole model of historical change

and of politics is that basically political events occur and they occur in a way which can't really be anticipated or predicted. You can't sort of sociologically analyze situations to know when they're going to happen. And what really defines you as a political radical or just as a political being at all

at any given moment in history is the nature of your own sort of existential relationship to the events which still define the moment that you see yourself as being in. So he has this very famous model according to which this is a kind of logic that can be applied not just to political commitment, but to the idea of commitment or the idea even of truth of what he sometimes just calls fidelity to truth in the fields of, I can't remember what they all now now. The one I always remember is love. Love, yeah.

Yeah, so he talks about the idea that art, I think, I can't quite remember. Yeah, art as well. Politics as well. Yeah, politics and love and art. And basically, in all of these fields, how it works is something happens, like an event occurs, an unpredictable, almost miraculous event occurs. And then what defines you as an ethical person as a good person, basically, or not. I mean, he would say, oh, no, of course I'm not saying anything as simplistic as being good or bad, but he clearly is, sorry. But he's talking about ethical, about ethics. He's talking about ethics. He says, what makes you a kind of ethical person is your fidelity to the event, your loyalty to the nature of that event. And so in love, then the event is just the event of falling in love, which is kind of unpredictable and irrational and can't be kind of, you know, can't be rational.

into existence or out of existence. He says that about love, but then he basically wants to say the same thing about politics. He says there was these events, like the event of 1968, the event of the Russian Revolution, which are basically as unpredictable and non-rationalizable as the event of falling in love. And what makes you an ethical person is you do or don't exhibit commitment to, you know, commitment and loyalty to the truth of that event. And the same is in art. They're like events in art.

invention of cubism or something and then you do or don't demonstrate your fidelity to that event my own line on this is it's a pretty good it's an okay description of what happens in love although it's potentially quite dangerous you know it's because it's sort of i think it valorizes a sort of you know romantic it valorizes an idea of romanticism which places a very high value on sort of instantaneous infatuation in a way which i would say is quite that can be quite problematic for people it works brilliantly for art that it absolutely does sum up some intuition that we all have to the extent that well you know there are ideas which emerge in the field of the creative arts and some people want to carry those ideas to their logical conclusion like without compromising with

the marketplace or with received ideas and there's something admirable about that whether we really like what comes out of it or not that sort of it's and for politics it's like totally fucking disastrous it's like it's a mad it's a completely mad idea of like what defines, you know, political orientation. What Baddeu is trying to do is to develop a Maoist politics without a political party, where political commitment is not, the political commitment is not to a specific political organisation, but to fidelity to the event.

And one way you could think about that in relation to love, is that, you know, the fidelity that he sees in love is not to a specific individual person. It's the fidelity to the event of the collision of those two people. Do you know what I mean? Fidelity to the sort of transformation that took place during the full flush of love, basically. You know, you can sort of see that he's trying to do no fidelity to the organisation or to the individual but to the event, the transformation. As you could do a generous reading where you put that next to the old mole,

that well-grubbing mold, the old mole revolution is that like what, you know, those events recurred for, through history and what you're trying to, what the fidelity is, is to keep an openness to the possibility of change, basically, the truth that was created in the transformation in that political event. Of course, he's got a very specific political event in mind. He's a 68 philosopher. You know, and it's fidelity to the truth of 68 is what he's trying to think through. And so in order to sort of like understand that, you should, you probably need to think about France in the 1970s and into the early 1980s, where you have, in fact, it's quite often it's like Maoists, ex-Mawis are becoming political turncodes and moving, shifting to the

political right, renouncing what their past, etc. And the majority of the people who are doing that are in a specific Maoist organisation, the biggest Maoist organisation in France at that time, which was actually quite influential. And in fact, Sartre became aligned with when he moved from existentialism to a political commitment. Foucault is acting with Ghosh proletarian, this Maoist group, when he does his work around prisoners, etc. And what happens is, at least this is Badger's version of it. Ghosh proletarian is this really millinarian organization

who basically think that the revolution is happening next week and that, you know, if they join Goche proletarian, and a lot of the militants as a route to power in some sort of way. Do you know what I mean? And when that millinerian hopes had then dashed, they renounce all of this. So the most famous one is like perhaps André Gluckman was one of the most famous members of Gush Proletarian.

And he moved to the right, became pro-American, supported Sarkozy, etc. And then together with the utterly despicable Bernard Henri Levy formed this movement called the New Philosophers who were like this anti-communist, anti-socialist sort of philosophers. I'm doing inverted commas around that. So it's this like anti-communist, anti-socialist reaction to 1968, basically. So he's trying to understand, why did those Maoists go that way?

And he and his comrades didn't, basically. They had fidelity to the truth. They didn't renounce the truth of 68. The possibilities of politics that opened up. They kept with it. And that does make me think that, like, if we talk about political commitment, which you'd probably talk about, like,

the political turncoat for not. That phenomenon were very familiar with of like ex-leftists moving to the right and then far right in the UK, like the most bizarre, but probably actually prominent example of that is the revolutionary Communist Party led by Frank Faradie, who were like utterly obnoxious sectarian political party who were like, you know, always took a position which was provocative or controversial against the prevailing left. position right for the 80s and into the early 90s and then became the spiked online network that we all know far right conspiratorial very close in fact in the government some of their members in government of Boris Johnson very close to Boris Johnson etc really phenomenal fucking turnaround I remember like the RCP having a conference in 1980s saying let's prepare for power I mean the RCP was going to say similar minelarianism. Basically, they had that similar sort of millinarianism to ghost proletarian, I think.

And like what happens with, I think, with them and perhaps some of these other actors is, like the fidelity that like the Revolution and Cominies Party showed to politics was fidelity, like to the sectarian form of politics, not their content. They maintained their networks and maintained that like entryism, the sort of denunci, all of that sort of stuff. But basically to just swapped out the political. content. I think it's probably useful to explaining this Badu position is to contrast it with what I take to be, it's complete opposite, which is actually the sort of the Grammcian position, which we have sort of put forward sometimes, you know, that knowing your place in history,

being infinitely patient. I'm always reminded of a conference once where Ernesto LeClo was asked what he thought about Badu. And if you've got to understand, Badu doesn't write books saying, right, I'm a Maoist me, and I'm going to explain what it means to be a Maoist in contemporary philosophy. He does sometimes mention Mao, and he sometimes mentions his own political practice, but for the most part, what he tries to do, and I'm not joking here, listeners, is he tries to demonstrate the incontestable truth of Maoist politics based on mathematical set theory. I'm saying nothing more about it. Look, there are some people who find Badu really useful. I actually think Badu on Art,

we'll come back to this, we talk about it. I think it's kind of interesting. But anyway, Ernesto LeClo is asked about his views on this guy who's starting to become really fashionable, this French philosopher, who tries to derive a whole theory of politics and history from advanced set theory. And Ernesto's response was, the real difference between me and Badu is Badu is a Maoist and I'm a Gramscian, and everyone sort of laughed. But it was true. And Gramsie himself has quite a lot to say, actually, about ideas of political commitment or political what it means to be a political person. He was a totally political person whose life was totally committed to struggle, and he was very interested in the way in which politics goes on across multiple fronts. It goes on in culture. It goes on in the media. It goes on in philosophy, not just in the workplace or the party conference hall. I think they are really sort of diametrically opposed. Actually, I was going to say they're diametrically opposed views of nature of history and the nature of commitment.

But maybe they're not, actually. I mean, maybe they're not. I don't know of anywhere where Gramsci actually asked the question, well, why do I even become committed in the first place, other than a general belief in the improvement of society and believing in the Marxist analysis of capitalism and it's incompatibility with human well-being. So maybe on a sort of purely ethical level, maybe there isn't really a difference. But it definitely is true that Gramscian ideas and Baduian ideas are tied to totally different notions of what an effective mode of political organisation might look like. Because as, as Keir says. Badu's philosophy is tied to his own political practice. I mean, his own political practice is that he just belongs to this tiny little revolutionary organisation. I mean, the joke used to be they could all fit in one car. I don't know if that's true. They've moved up. They've expanded. They're now in a camper van, I think. But, I mean, their own kind of political, their political activism, as far as I'm aware of it, like in Paris a few years ago, was fine. It was general refugees,

solidarity stuff, basically, and they were involved in refugee and immigrant solidarity work. They helped to try to promote the anti-racist, anti- xenophobic slogan. Everyone here is from here. Good sort of good slogan, for example. And it's fine. But in terms of they have any sort of theory of political change or theory of organisational form, it is absolutely rooted in the most extreme variance of the sort of post-Leninist theory of party, which we associate with Maoism, according to which the only way you're going to get a revolution

and is by having a highly trained, completely committed, basically full-time cadre, a professional activists, and that is the absolutely necessary sine qua non to any sort of real political radicalism. So it is all predicated on this idea that somehow the fact of being a revolutionary, as I literally, from their point to you, is an ontological fact, is the thing that defines you or not based on your relationship to, whatever revolutionary event, be that of 1917 or the cultural revolution or the 1968 events in France, you are defining yourself in relation to. And the Gramscian view is completely different. The Gramscian view is basically that history is an ongoing process. There are no sudden moments of rupture, even what looks like a sudden moment

of change like 1968 or 1917, has to be understood as actually just a tipping point in an ongoing process which has involved all kinds of different levels of work and activity and a whole ecology of behaviours at different times and that you know what it means to be politically committed is to understand might be to understand your role in that process but it might also be to understand in as generous a way as possible that lots of other people will occupy different roles in that general ecology of activism and I realize I'm saying this is Gramshian but if anybody goes looking for any of this language in Gramsci, you're not going to find it. I'm saying, I'm claiming Gramsci as an authority, but I'm really talking about myself and Rodrigo Nunes, actually. It's our view of

politics. I don't, you're not going to really, you're not going to find it set out in these terms in many other places. But, you know, we probably, I would certainly want to claim Gramsy as kind of a key inspiration for all that. But my sort of line on Badu is that, well, actually, his, his, his argument sort of, it makes a kind of intuitive sense when it's applied to art. I mean, part of my whole critique of Badu is that it's an aestheticisation of politics. This is a famous line from Walter Benjamin that, you know, fascists want to aestheticise politics, and whereas socialists should want to politicise aesthetics. And I think it is a sort of aestheticisation of politics. Badier's idea of the artist as someone who's sort of fully committed to an aesthetic practice, the purity and

rigor of which seems to take on a kind of ethical, quasi-political status in its own right. I guess for me, no artist who ever lived is more emblematic of that idea than John Coltrane. John Coltrane, somebody whose music has been heard as sort of anticipating the very obviously politically committed free jazz of the later 60s when musicians like Albert Eiler would see themselves as engaged in a project that was explicitly. committed to the black power struggle. I mean, there's no question Cole Train was a sort of partisan of that, but he was also very much a sort of spiritual musician and someone who's a huge model as such has inspired people to the point where he's even treated as a literal saint

by some sort of black church denominations in the United States. I think we should just hear a bit of one of his most famous recordings, 1964, A Love Supreme. I don't know I'm going to be I'm going to I'm going to I'm going to I'm

a bit of the I'm and the I'm I'm What is the nature of political commitment? When we talk about culture, when we talk about things other than straightforward politics, what does it mean to be politically committed?

What does it mean to do that from a position which is self-consciously affiliated to actual political projects? in the world. It is a really interesting question. Like, it's a really interesting question. What does it mean? One way into this is to think about like previous moments where political commitment or politically committed art was much more common. And that's times when there is a really big and active left and political possibilities open up. And in fact, we can just think back to, to Beyonce, etc. Beyonce is not a politically committed artist, right?

But like she did formation and she did the whole thing at the Super Bowl with black power symbols and all that sort of stuff because like that was because Black Lives Matter was going on etc and you know

American football the NFL became a site in which that struggle was taking place calling Kaepernick taking the knee etc which you saw

spread around the world all that sort of stuff so if we roll back to sort of like times when the question of are you politically committed artist or not

was something quite important basically I mean you know we could think of like the 1980s etc. We had things such as like

Rock Against Racism, a really big series of festivals, a sort of movement, festivals, gigs, etc. Partly to do with trying to ensure that the sort of fascist sort of symbolism that was around early punk rock

meant that punk would go in a right-wing direction rather than a left-wing direction, basically. Rocking against racism played a really big role in that. Do you know what I mean? We can also think about like the music, culture around black liberation, particularly in the early 1970s, et cetera, that great documentary, the summer of Seoul is a good example of that. There's all sorts of other times

when cultural actors get drawn into political commitment. And you'd also have to sort of put the sort of like period after the Russian Revolution, etc. when, you know, artists like Picasso were like politically committed, or at least members of the Communist Party at one point. some of the dilemmas around politically committed is always whether you should be formally experimental as well as having a certain content, et cetera, or whether you should try to reach the greatest masses possible by not being formally experimental, perhaps. It's interesting to think what people mean by sort of political commitment in those context, though, isn't it? Because, I mean, one of the questions is, to have politically

committed culture, does there have to be something out there already to which you can be politically committed, because it's a really, really popular idea, including amongst, like, very radicals of cultural critics and historians, there's somehow, like, artistic and cultural practice, it must always somehow be in advance of, like, politics and political practice. It must be anticipating later political developments. The job of culture, the job of art, is to be prophetic, it's to explore new territories, new modes of affect, to be a probe-haired in to the future, Deleuze would say. And so there's this idea that somehow actually culture or artistic practice are always going to be the sort of leading edge. So the tedious, boring

business of politics is always trudging behind in its golden footsteps. And I'm saying this from the point of view of someone who has studied the question of the relationship between politics and culture, culture in both the narrow and broad senses, probably as closely as anyone alive today has tried to study those things. And I don't think that is true. I actually don't think that is an assumption that stands up to historical scrutiny. I think it's a legacy of a kind of romanticist ideology from the early 19th century, actually. I just don't think it actually stands up. I think, for example, the example you gave Keir, the effervescence of so communist modernism in the wake of the Russian Revolution in the 20s is one of the great

historical examples of a kind of committed art emerging in a radical context. And indeed, of course, on some level, you could say that artistic practice was trying to anticipate in some ways a genuinely democratic socialist society of the kind which tragically the Soviet Union would never get the chance to evolve into. But that stuff, it's not like those guys, but all hanging around in Moscow, like doing their constructivism, and their kind of radicalism in like 1905 or something that before the revolution. I mean, okay, you can definitely trace antecedents to what they're doing aesthetically. Maybe it's just a banal question.

But broadly speaking, in very crude terms, that massive effluent essence of modernist practice happens after the revolution and not before it. And I think, you know, similarly, you know, it's something that a lot of critics and historians, a lot of us have had to sort of think about and become aware of in the past few decades, is the extent to which, you know, what might have looked like this kind of spontaneous expression of cultural radicalism and popular cultural radicalism in the 60s and 70s and 80s is obviously, in retrospect, historically, totally dependent upon, and arguably is a sort of effect of the kind of social democratic reforms of the post-war period.

It's the social democrats who build the kind of the universities and the art schools and the comprehensive schools in the 60s, who create the world, who create the context, which makes, like, post-punk experimentalism possible in the 80s? Like, and the post-post, what are the post-punks anticipating? If they're anticipating anything, what is it? Well, what comes after that? It's like, thatcherism, so. So I've become a sort of political determinist on these issues to a certain extent.

And partly what all this speaks to is, you can't expect culture to be radical if there isn't a kind of thing out there happening in politics for it to be committed to. I mean, I think this is probably the most importantly relevant when thinking about things like the politics of hip-hop, you know, I would say, like, from a certain point of view, like, one of the great sort of cultural political disasters in the English-speaking world of the past 30 years was hip-hop being sort of captured by this basically neoliberal kind of reactionary sort of anti-political, pessimistic ideology in the mid-90s. If you're just looking at the history of like, you know, popular music in America, for example, that looks like a real sort

of disaster. It looks like it has terribly, very deleterious consequences. But on the other hand, And you have to say that itself is a direct response to the defeat of black political radicalism over several decades and sort of culminating in, you know, the defeat of the Jesse Jackson campaign and the massively reactionary racist authoritarian turn taken by the Clinton administration in the mid-90s. And, you know, the problem for, you know, black cultural actors and producers in the mid-90s in America is, well, there isn't, you know, there isn't a sort of radical movement really out there that's viable for them to orient themselves towards in any meaningful sense. So they're going to, they're going to produce culture,

which is about other things, which is, you know, maybe it is just about an experience of resignation to that condition, but that's what there is. So I think it is quite important that there has to be radical politics going on in order for cultural producers and artists to commit themselves to it. And it's not really fair to expect artists to commit themselves to a thing that's purely hypothetical. Ultimately, it's the job of politics. And it's a job of all of us as political actors, even if we're only acting at the very low level of chipping in our one pound a month for Navarra, it's the job of all of us of political actors to sort of create political movements to which cultural and artistic practices can

become committed rather than sort of expecting them to be already committed or hypothetically committed to projects which don't even really exist. Okay, so one of the things we're talking about on this episode is Anabadieu's idea of a kind of artistic fidelity to a radical event and the idea that this somehow defines a kind of

quasi-political ethics which can inform musical practice. Today I'm playing a couple of musical examples which to me exemplify this. One great example of how that idea might play out in practice is an idea I often put forward the idea of punk as an event.

The idea of punk as an event, rather than as a genre or a movement, the punk is an event, a thing that happens in culture, sometime in the mid-70s, after which all kinds of possibilities emerge, all of which might be characterised by a certain kind of fidelity to the radicalism of that event of punk.

This is why punk rock, as classically understood, you know, the clash, the Ramones, the pistols, is kind of formally boring a lot of the time, whereas post-punk, all the things that come after the event of punk while maintaining fidelity to it, is often so formally exciting. And at the same time, a lot of post-punk music was informed by

and characterized by very explicit political commitments, both at the level of the form and at the level of the lyrics. And no musical project exemplified that more than I think probably my favorite actual band of all time at the Raincoats. Raincoats' feminist post-punk band from London, who I think went further than any other artists I can think of in trying to develop a specifically and explicitly feminist vocabulary, a musical vocabulary for music using conventional rock instrumentation.

So maybe we can hear a track that I think really sort of exemplifies that. We could hear shouting out loud from their second album, the great classic album, Odie Shape, that was released in 1981. This is Shouting Out Loud by the Raincoats. The path is when, come to me, God's no stone The sky's up and I make mistakes Take me home

What will you do When I lie down And look around One of Derrida's schicks, in his book Specters of Marx, for example, which is also where he coins that punning term, hontology, is this idea of openness to the future. The thing that is demanded of the radical, the communist, the Democrat, is the orientation to the possibility of what he calls democracy to come,

a sort of openness to the possibility of the future. I mean, a lot of Derrida's work, and especially that book, it's one of those bodies of work that I've spent years sort of working with and studying, and I often find myself thinking, well, it's just banal. It's just stating the bleeding obvious. Just like, oh, well, just keep it open mind, hope something, you never know what's going to turn up. Like, it just sounds sort of banal. But in practice, in the practice of actually doing political organizing, political activism, talking about politics, it's actually a set of concepts. I end up finding incredible. useful because I feel like a lot of the time when people are making what seem to me to be important strategic mistakes or just mistakes in terms of how they're managing their own disposition to the world in a way which is potentially damaging to them is because they're not somehow you're not they're not doing that they're not maintaining openness to the possibility of democracy to come they're either committing themselves to one very narrow vision of the future which if they don't get it they're going to be miserable and if anyone is trying to get an even slightly different

and they're not going to worry with them. Or they're so defeated, you know, by a particular moment of disappointment or defeat, that they're becoming depressed, they're sort of withdrawing, again, they're not keeping open the sort of possibility that something might turn up, frankly. And I think in some ways, as Derrida would say, that is the only commitment which is demanded of the radical, is the only commitment that is demanded of the revolutionary, is that open us to the possibility of a better future. That is quite tied, actually, I think, to the idea which I'm always quoting, everyone's always quoting, that Gramsci gets from, you know,

another earlier thinker, actually, the idea of pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will. And mine and Alex's interpretation of that in our book, Germany now is, you know, you have to accept the reality of the fact that you're fighting from a position of weakness, which by definition means you're probably going to lose but that is changeable that could be changeable that situation and so you're always thinking what would it take from here from this moment

to slightly increase the odds in our favour so that we would increase the possibility of winning what Derrida kind of adds to that in a way with that notion of openness to the future is the idea that well you'd probably do have to accept that there's a certain I would say irrationality

but I'd say non-rationality a certain non-calculability to the nature of the commitment. Derrida gets this notion from Emmanuel Levinas, a very interesting kind of ethical philosopher of the 20th century, this idea of our infinite responsibility, our infinite responsibility to the other and to others, the idea that the nature of what we owe ethically to others and what others owe us simply can't be calculated, it can't be enumerated. And you can just allow yourself to be weighed down by that thought.

you can allow yourself just to just dismiss that kind of thought as just bourgeois morality. But, you know, what people who find that kind of thinking useful, including myself, do with it, I think, is to find it actually quite emancipating. It's quite emancipating to think, well, yeah, we are all kind of infinitely connected to each other to the extent that we do all sorts of owe each other, sort of kindness and care and hope. And we sort of do, and you can't enumerate it. You can't ever do enough, really. you can't ever do enough for your political cause or for the cause of the future. So instead, what you have to do is accept that you're never going to be able to do enough and accept that enough can never be done and therefore accept your own limitations where they impose yourself themselves and your willingness, your ability to act in the world

without letting that become a complete source of, you know, the ending of all hope. And I think that is important and useful. What I really like there is talking about, this within the frame of openness to the future and within this idea of curiosity and like understanding how that relates to consciousness inflation. And that political commitment is more than just, you know, a commitment to the political education of others. But really it's about the acceptance of the current conditions and being able to like pull back from that and have that viewpoint and then think, you know, as we were saying in the beginning, like what next and what can

I do for other people now.