ACFM - #ACFM Trip 7: Be Here Now

Episode Date: November 28, 2019

Nadia Idle, Jeremy Gilbert and Keir Milburn ask why now for acid corbynism? They discuss historical conjunctures,  farcical repetitions, and left melancholy. https://novaramedia.com/2019/10/27/acfm-trip-7-be-here-now/

Hello, you're listening to the podcast version of ACFM on Navarra Media. And on the podcast version of this show, you'll get the stimulating and mind-expanding discussion from our hosts, but you won't get the music. That's because of the way rights and licenses work in the digital age. So you're really only getting half the picture, but there is an easy way to fix that. If you head over to the Navaramedia.com website, you can stream the full show. It's easy enough just to follow the link in the description of this podcast. Otherwise, enjoy the standalone discussion in this episode of ACFM. Hello, welcome to ACFM, the home of the weird left. I'm Jeremy Gilbert and I'm joined as usual by my friend's Nadia Idol. Hi. And Keir Milburn.

Hello. And I'm going to take a moment to do what we keep fading to do on these shows and mention that the show is produced by Matt Full, is edited by Olivia Humphreys, Matt Huxley and We really couldn't be doing this without them. They are as much part of the ACFM ideas we are. So, Keir, what are we doing today? Okay, so today we're addressing the question of why now. What is it about the current conjuncture? What is it about the present state of things

that makes us think that the time is right for an acid communist, or actually, more specifically, an acid-corbinist politics, right? This is ACFM, so we also want to discuss this, not just through the point of view of political economy. We want to discuss it from how it feels to live in late neoliberalism, what contemporary experience feels like and what aspects of that experience make us think

that an acid-corbinist politics could be both attractive and potentially effective. And of course, we need to address the converse of that, right? What elements of that experience might lead us away from an AC politics or might make an acid-corbinist politics potentially less effective than we'd like. You know, it's not an easy question to answer. It's not an easy thing to do. It's not easy to be sure that your politics actually do address the present, right?

It's not easy to be sure that your politics aren't, in fact, informed by some sort of legacy politics from previous era. So we also want to discuss concepts such as left melancholy, which are designed to help us address that question. you know, the question of how difficult it is to address the present, how difficult it is to be here now, as the early psychedelic guru, Richard Alpert or Ram Dass, put it in 171. Well, firstly, what do we mean by this term conjuncture? It refers to the sort of the convergence of events and sort of relations of power shaping any particular moment and a particular time, and to some extent, in a particular place. and it is deliberately sort of ambivalent.

Like there's no fixed time scale for a conjuncture. So actually I only realized this a few weeks ago, but Stuart Hall, for example, in the same book at one point, in his book The Hardrow Road, to renewally, he uses the term conjuncture for historical moments that last several decades and also that just seem to last a few weeks. But I think, look, basically the question of conjuncture is always just the question of what is specific about the present,

like as compared to the past? and when does the present start, as we conceive it? So what is it the defined now, and when does now start? And if I ask you, like, Yanadi, like, how you think about that? I mean, like, how would you answer it? Like, what do you think of the sort of specific characteristics of our moment? And when do you think of that moment as sort of beginning, like, and some previous moment having given way to it?

Or do you not think about that at all? No, I do think about that. I mean, I think one of the things that makes today, or the times that we live in different. There's several things. One is the lack of acceptance of historicity, historicity as like being normal. So that thing of, like, it's normal that people don't know kind of like where they come from

or how things have come to be or, you know, what struggles happened beforehand or like how the history, what's the history of your class or how did the social and material conditions happen, that I would argue and I'd make a gamble to say that that is part of what living under neoliberalism is and part of the kind of excitement of the political project of people getting involved in politics is like discovering this whole like European and North American

but also like world history and past of like, oh my God, things haven't always been this way. So that's one thing. thing is the in terms of the interaction of mental health and time with activism and change, I think is really important in terms of how people experience time and how much space they have in their brains and why the kind of juxtaposition of communism with acid there is really important is that there has to be a mind-expanding consciousness inflation part to any political project, which effectively is about trying to keep you sane when things around you are changing at a pace,

not necessarily a far space, but the way fascism makes itself known is not the way that people imagine it to be made known. And in the same way, the kind of consciousness deflation. happens slowly and slowly and slowly. And so we're seeing both things at the same time. I think it's both a time really exciting time for politics and for people in their 20s. And it's also like there are forces of capital behind

which is kind of goose stepping forward. I mean, I think that's all really useful. The one thing I would say is about the eight historicity thing. This is a sort of paradoxical. But I think it's a really common misconception right now. And it's a misconception that Mark, really has did a lot to reproduce, to be honest, which is that somehow that a historicity is specific to the present.

Because if you go back to the mid-19th century, like Marx is saying exactly the same thing then, he's saying, well, people don't know history, and that the function of ideology is to make sure people don't know history so that they don't realize that social relations are contingent and can be changed. That's interesting. And then most of the main theorists of ideology, like Gramsci and Al-Zer in the 20th century,

they both said, look, Al-Zet said very specifically, this is the historically invariant feature of all ideology. You go back to the early classical times and the function of ideology is to convince people that the Athenian city state is just like this universal form which has always been like that and couldn't be any different. But you're not wrong. I mean, at the sort of subjective and political level, of course,

historicising and sort of becoming aware of history is really crucial to any kind of radicalisation. But I would just say, well, it always was. Like it was a huge deal for the workers' movement, like all through the 19th and 20th century to teach people history and to get people to get a sense of their history and develop a kind of radical history.

So there's no question that is really important. But I think what is specific about neoliberal, the neoliberal moment is that neoliberal hegemony was so successful, it was very, very successful in kind of making people dehistoricised. But ideology is always trying to do that, I think. I think what I'm trying to say is, in people's lived experience, in their communities.

And I'm very careful when I use the term communities because people use that term a lot and for most people, people don't have a community. But there was a time, I believe, and I might be wrong, but there was a time where there was more community. So people grew up in certain places and knew more of the people around them

and that people were less uprooted in a sense. Again, I might be wrong. And that's where I mean the history, comes from is that there is a history of, you know, whether this community being particularly conservative or this is the way we do things around here, that also was a logic that existed for a lot of the left. Like, we are the left because culturally we are the left and we are belonging to this class. Now both the unrootedness of people in a very literal sense with the physical place of where they live in the, in, you know, many parts of the West and definitely

for people in the UK in cities has a specific interaction with the perceived dissolution of class. Yeah, well I think that's right. But I think, I mean, I've got to say, I think a particular image is haunting that account. And it's the sort of idealised image of the working class community in struggle. So if you're talking about minors in South Wales, then what you're saying is completely right. But they were never typical of like the broader working class. And they were certainly never typical of the broader population. But there was never a moment when like most people had a clear sense of their own history

and their class as a class or their class as a history. But I think what you're getting actually is important because it's very difficult to even give people that sense of historicity when there isn't even a community for them to learn the history of. Yeah. There's another thing that's missing though, isn't there? So the classic thing was always that the party was the memory of the working class basically. and so it was left institutions which would carry the memory of struggles,

you know what I mean, and then be able to help people position their own lives within history. So that might be a way in which you could sort of, we could resolve your point with Mark Fisher's point because that is what really does collapse is the continuity of the left. That's what collapses under neoliberalism. Well, it does, but that continuity had only existed for a couple of generations, I would say. Oh, God, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It was always the problem with Mark, and with people like Simon, you know, was very Clavity Reynolds, is they were always treating basically post-war culture or mid-20th century culture as if it was some sort of historical norm, you know, from which everything else was a catastrophic deviation. And it just, it wasn't true. It was more, it's more accurate to say, well, after decades, really a century of struggle, like for a couple of generations, we had these relatively stable working class communities in struggle. We had constantly innovating popular music, you know, we had social democratic progress. And it

is really important to get at that, because it's important to, and this comes back to the question of conjuncture that actually what we're living through now is more normal for the history of capitalism. What we're living through now is more like normal capitalism than what people had in the mid-20th century for a few decades

into the end of the 20th century. Let me just say that I think that Nadia's point about like mental health and a lack of historicity, they are related and I think it's sort of that's a good way of thinking about our project in the only way that

I can keep sane or keep from getting depressed is because I have I understand the present moment in terms of history do you know what I mean I see it as oh yeah okay so this is what's going on now you know I can see this you know

if I look back at the previous you know some of the previous big big crises I think we're in the middle of we're still in the middle this big, big crisis period provoked by the 2008 and the great financial crisis that came after it, you know. There was one of those in the 1970s. There was one of those in the 1930s. You know, if we look at the 1930s, you know, there's a big crisis. It starts in 1929. You know, if you look like 10 years on, you've got, you've got Hitler, Mussolini, you know, basically things are not looking nice around the world. You know what I mean? These things produce, you know, you're getting these epochal moments, abuse.

big, big periods of struggle, but it takes a long time before you see what the new iteration of capitalism perhaps is going to look like and what the new left, which is going to be adequate to that, is going to look like. And I see we're in the middle of that moment now, right, where there's new, you know, a new left is trying to emerge and we're trying to be, you know, we're trying to help that. We're trying to help that birthing process. And part of what we're doing by that is saying,

It's by saying, look at all of these things, like mindfulness, you know, microdosing so that you can be more creative, you know, all of this sort of like Silicon Valley sort of version of psychedelia, etc. All of these things, we're saying, look, these had a different history, a history which shows it could have a different path now, do you know what I mean? Part of that different history is that, you know, this could be turned into a left project as it was in moments, just in, you know, in potential.

in 1960s and 1970s. Yes, and so my understanding of the present conjuncture is really that, is that we're in the middle of this long extended period of crisis, you know, which we've seen in the past in the 1930s and the 1970s, they took about 25 years before you could see what the new world would look like

which was emerging out of those crises. You know, it took a long time for that to come around, perhaps not 25 years, 20 years, something like that. I mean, Kear, the point about, you know, knowing history to stay sane and not get depressed, I think is totally crucial. I don't think you can really stay sane in the present moment without understanding how totally fucked things have been at several points since the Industrial Revolution, really. Things are not as fucked now as they were even in the 30s, to be honest. They're really not. You know, we've still got a National Health Service, even though it's on its knees.

You know, it's a cliche I know, but my grandmother went to school in bare feet, you know. things are not as fucked and they're definitely not as fucked as they were i mean people in the late 18th the sort of 19th century living in cities we're just living in abject squalor working 18 hours a day kids were going down you know kids were working in factories and coal mines and and there was an and as far as we can tell from the historical evidence almost nobody was saying i mean people were just fucking nuts you know people were just it was just a horrible brutal way to live so it is really important to keep that in mind and it's really important not just to focus on what's been lost. When I was doing a talk in Cardiff about

acicobinism, I got a question from the floor, you know, from a young woman about how I thought acid corbinism related to or what its connection could be with the kind of recent revival of interest in jazz, especially both of young people and to young musicians. And I was a bit diffident and I said, you know, well, in my experience, it's a jazz revival every 10 years or so. I'm not yet to see how far this is going to go. I always want there to be because I sort of love jazz. And I sort of do, I think it's a really obvious reasons why, in some ways, it's the sort of definitive, radical, modern radical music, because it's always an exploration of sort of collective, you know, agency

and, you know, creativity and freedom at the same time. But I think that has, it's pretty undeniable now. So in London, in Britain and in the States, there's been a really, just in the past sort of three or four years, a kind of explosion of really innovative jazz, you know, a way for sort of young women performers, really for the first time. People kind of, you know, producers and musicians evoking the kind of radicals or psychedelic jazz of the early 70s

in a really convincing way for the first time since that moment, I think. Probably the kind of the sort of darlings of the kind of current young London jazz scene of this group, Sons of Chemit, and there's this track, which is partially spoken word track, Your Queen is a Reptile, slightly surreal, very obviously kind of anti-establishment, anti-authoritarians, or anti-colonial. in its tone in my generation

in my generation left book I sort of take up Marx in the 18th Brumeer where he talks about you know he's got the famous thing about you know history happens first as tragedy second time as fast But then he goes on to make this analysis when he's saying, you know, whenever the, whenever people sort of like have this chance to revolutionize everything, whenever they try to make something really new, they tend to be anxious and adopt the clothing and the demands and the sort of political frame of previous generations, of the dead generations, he says.

And that weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And you mean here Marx as in Karl, rather than Marcus and Fisher? because they sound the same on this recording. Yes, we must say Mark Fisher. We must say Carl Marx. Yeah. Yeah, Karl Marx, the 18th Brumeau of Louis Napoleon of Louis Bonaparte.

He was writing about 1848, this whole cycle of revolutions, and he was thinking, you know, when these revolutions break out across Europe, they, in 1848, they think, they pick up all the slogans and all of the framings from 1789, which is a French revolution. Do you know what I mean?

and like you can understand that in various ways but the way I understand it is that just tends to be what happens you know that you tend to create something which is new by repeating what's gone before but in a way which opens up to the new so the key is like let's not make it a farcical repetition a farcical repetition is where you just pick it up

and you repeat it even though you repeat all the bits that don't actually fit with how life is we've lived now it doesn't fit with the present conjunction in fact you need a non-fasical repetition where you can pick up those things and then see how they relate to the present moment.

And I think that's what the AC project is. We've got to make the AC project a non-pharsical repetition of the 1960s and 1970s, basically. And I think that's what we're trying to do. It is. Okay, so who will be the subjects who would be more amenable

to an acid communist analysis and who would be to totally reject them, right? I think that's something we could move on to discuss. Who will take it up? Like who's the constituency? Well, the core constituency is, you know, what the sociologist's guy standing calls the precariet. It's a young, mostly young, although increasingly not that young, sort of mostly sort of graduates, you know, sort of disenfranchised by the contractions of the labour market. But also absolutely so immersed in kind of post-1960s and neoliberal, kind of libertarian culture.

they're not going to embrace a sort of socially conservative reaction against neoliberalism which, you know, a lot of commentators over the past few years, and we've mentioned this before on the show, a lot of commentators have thought that the natural reaction against the failures from neoliberalism

will be some sort of restoration, so going to return to certain kind of social conservatism. And certainly in some in many communities around the world, that's happened. I mean, that's been the basis for the rise of certain kinds of religious fundamentalism, for example. But I think, we're saying that the sort of, you know, A.C. sort of, I think, expresses almost the natural politics of sort of generations or a generation in the kind of macro sense that you kind of hint at or explaining the book here, whereby a generation isn't just 20 odd years.

I mean, generation left in Britain is now pretty much everyone under 52. It's according to the opinion polls, you know, it's now 52 is the cutoff age below which, you know, if you look at people's ideas about the way the way that. works and their policy preferences, they're basically libertarian socialists. I think in sort of sociological terms, one thing that's sort of interesting to observe, and it comes back to some of Kears points, is it was actually John Tricket, like senior Labour MP, first said to me a few years ago, one of the things we've got to think about is the changing composition of the middle class. And he said, I think in the long term, conservatism has a real problem because the traditional

base of conservatism for 150 years was the petty bourgeoisie, the kind of the, the intermediary layers between the capitalist class and the working class, and they were historically very, very conservative. And one of the things lots of sociologists have picked up on from the 60s is one of the things that happens out of the 60s, and indeed with the kind of neoliberal reaction to the 60s, is quite broad sections of the so-called middle classes, that even kind of small business owners, people working in tech, people working media, as well as the kind of public sector professional classes that we all sort of belong to, is it. It's do they become really libertarian?

That traditional conservatism completely stops being part of their composition. And I still think it's the case today, you know, what the group I sometimes call the new petty bulls was, you know, the sort of people working in or even running like small businesses, people in media, people in tech.

They're sort of politically up for grabs, I think. They were sort of the core constituency for the third way. But that's partly because Blair and Clinton were the first people ever to try to really, you know, appeal to them. and I think they are sort of they're sort of open a lot of them

to a politics which is socialistic providing it's also sort of hedonistic and libertarian providing it isn't they don't think it's going to make them have to wear hair shirts and you know join a Maoist kind of work commune or something so so part of it is that I think and part of it I think part of our sort of the strategy our sort of

the strategy for our strand at the left more broadly actually is to sort of talk to those people and say, look, actually, look, you're never going to be Martin Zuckerberg, you know, so you really better off throwing in your lot with, you know, you know, manual workers and precarious workers, et cetera, to the extent that you're all going to get, you know, shorter working weeks, you know, universal basic income, you know, and a green planet to live on. I worry that all of those people are Lib Dems. Yeah, well, they might.

They can. Well, we've seen that the whole point of the past two years is they can be Lib Dems, they can vote for Corbyn. That's the whole point. They did. They did vote for Corbyn. Right now they're all saying they're going to vote Lib Dem or Green, a lot of them. They've gone to the Greens. That's the whole point. The whole reason why actually acid Corbinism, not just acid communism, is an important political idea in the current conjuncture is precisely, one of the things we've learned

over the past two years is people like, you know, me and I don't think any of us would have disagreed, have been saying for the past three years is the constituency labor was most, seem to be most bothered about losing, like leave voting, you know, former minors over 60 in Yorkshire was not the only constituency they had to worry about keeping on side. They also need to worry about keeping on side, you know, libertarian, hedonistic, you know, computer programmers who do go and do I-Husker.

Because those, because there are more of them than there are former miners now. And they will vote for Corbyn or, and they will desert Corbyn for, you know, the Greens and the Lib Dems, yeah, if you don't appeal to them. So in that sense, yeah, I see Corbynism, on that level it is pretty serious, I think. One of the other aspects of like this new generational left, generation left politics is, I think, a level of pragmatism and openness to sort of like the idea that you need to strategise for how you actually change the world, which is not present from a lot of my, the people I've done politics with in the 90s, etc. we didn't have to think about strategy at that point because we also, we were also caught in this, even though I was involved in radical politics in the 90s and early 2000s,

we were still caught in this general picture that like radical change is not possible. So you don't have to think about strategy, etc. I mean, and all of this is a link away through to sort of thinking about this problem of left melancholy, which we said we'd discussed. Yeah. I mean, so left melancholy, I mean,

Keir can talk about it more than I can really, but it's this melancholy, it refers to Sigmund Freud's classic description of melancholy as like the opposite of in some sense of mourning. The morning is when you realise that the thing you loved is gone and you sort of deal with it. And melancholy is when you can't deal with it. You somehow can't quite let go. You can't quite move on beyond this state of kind of depression because the thing is gone. And I remember sort of sort of trying to theorise Brit Pop, for example, in terms of that, this sense that Britpop was all about this endless nostalgia for 1966, which is a perfectly rational moment to be nostalgic for it.

It was literally, you know, it was this, the high point of the post-war settlement before unemployment starts to skyrocket again and before de-industrialisation starts to kick in. But it was all the, it was a completely crap way of processing that. It was just this crap, apolitical evocation of the sort of music and culture of 1966 without any sort of political critique of what, you know, what had made it go away. here you talk about left men and kinney well Wendy Brown takes up this

idea of from Freud's of the distinction between melancholy and mourning and she sort of takes it from Walt Benjamin as well who's obviously writing in a dark time for the left right he's writing in the 1930s and in fact he commits suicide on the border between France and Spain

because he thinks he can't get into Spain and away from the Nazi forces which are invading France so that's a political of, you know, of melancholia and the defeat of hope. And so that gets picked up by Wendy Brown and she's writing in 1999. She starts to talk about left melancholia

and she's sort of talking about how they're left at that point, it can't accept the big defeats that it had... It can't mourn the big defeats it had undergone in the late 1980s and the early 1990s. It couldn't mourn that and then move on. it was trapped in an attachment to politics from another age, right? It couldn't, if it could mourn those defeats and mourn that, it could adjust itself towards the new conjuncture, right?

The new conjuncture that was at the time, and instead it couldn't do that. And so the left got attached to, all these parts of the left got attached to the impossibility of change, got attached to, you know, attached to the impossibility of a left politics, more than, and detached from the potential of a left politics. You mean only being in opposition, right? So can we be a little bit more explicit about what we're doing?

Well, it's not just only being in opposition. It's sort of like the repetition of forms of thinking and the forms of acting, you know, social movement forms, the forms of politics, which no longer had any ability to affect the world. But you just keep repeating them over and over because that's what they did in the good, Because that's what they did in the good days, you mean? Well, partly, but that's what melancholy is. It's like you cannot let this a lost object go.

And so you just do the things that will, which will make it. That we've always done. Yeah, you do the things that'll always done because, you know, you can't let it go. It's an attachment. She calls it a structure of desire. You know, our desires keep makers compulsively repeat these things to make the mere semblance that that, that world hasn't gone, you know, even though it has. So I always, I've got to admit, I've net, I was.

never clear like who which left she was talking about. I think she's talking about the radical left basically. I think she's talking about the radical left in the 1990s. I sort of recognise it. Now when I look back, you know, I even see the radical because 1990, 1999, sorry, you know, there's a big demonstration in Seattle against the World Trade Organisation and that sparked off a sort of big wave of protests and social forums and it was like the reemergence of the left after a very, very bleak period in the 1990s, right? But when we look back now, we see it was totally, totally, it was still totally, and it was like we could say

that 1999 and that whole anti-globalization movement was the first attempts where people were really trying to break with a pass and create a left which was adequate to the times, which started to address the times. But it was soaked in left melancholia. You'd definitely have to say that when you look back now because strategy wasn't really seriously discussed. You know, the key slogan of that globalisation movement was,

another world is possible. There was very little discussion of how you move from now and make that possible world actual. There was very little of that. So that's part of the melancholy, the fact that it wasn't strategic. Is that what you mean? I'm getting completely confused. Yeah, that's one of the symptoms, yeah.

Because you're not looking at the world and saying, how do I change, you're not looking at the conjuncture and saying, this is the conjuncture, these are the possibilities, how do we act to move those possibilities in, a socialist direction, you know, instead you're doing, you're compulsively repeating your habitual patterns of behaviour in order to maintain the illusion that the world that you mourn has not, you know, is still there. Well, this is, there's been an interesting little lineage here. So, you know, I mean,

I wrote a book on anti-capitalism and culture in 2008, which is really a sort of response partly to being involved in things like the sort of post-Sietal anti-globalization. But, you know, my, my key bit in that, was what I called the critique of the activist imaginary, which was precisely defined by the refusal of what I call a strategic orientation. So it was this complete inability, and it was absolutely typical that I thought of that moment. And also, like, groups that Keir was in, actually,

people like Turbulence had sort of were trying, this little sort of affinity groups, were trying to also make some critique of the fact that it really did become the case. If you were around that kind of anti-globalization, anti-capitalist scene, the things coming out of reclaim the street, in London, in the late 90s, early 2000, it really did get to a point where if you literally you weren't allowed to use the word strategy. People have the attitude that if you said the

word strategy, you were a Stalinist, that the only way to be a good kind of libertarian, horizontal activist was literally just not to think about it. And so Keir's developed this argument quite recently, which I think he's really persuasive that that's also a symptom in some ways of the same thing as like the trots, even though it's more obvious with the trots, just basically trying to exactly mimic the behaviour of Russian revolutionaries in 1910. That refusal of strategy was also about the fact that if you couldn't imagine, you just really just couldn't imagine actually winning. You couldn't imagine actually making any progress.

So you just refuse the very demand to do so. But isn't that also about the two things there, about both culture and opportunism? And culture, when I say culture, I mean like, it's about identity. It's like we are anti-globalization. We are anti-globalization activists because this is the tradition that we come from

and therefore these are the tactics which we use which I guess is our critique of why people who are like, oh, Corbinism is all electioneering I can't believe that you radicals are like going into like party politics. It's that same thing. It's like basically saying your culture should tell you,

how you should behave, how you should speak, whether you're selling papers or whether you're blockading police lines. That's what determines it rather than... Rather than culture, though, I think perhaps tradition is a more classical way of saying, this is my left tradition and my left tradition does things this way.

Right, yeah, right. And also it became an identity. I mean, I think if you're talking about the early 2000s anti-capitalist movement, there wasn't much of a tradition to it. I mean, if there was, it was coming out of things like Earth First in the 80s, it was more that it was an identity. I mean, my critique of it of what I called the activist imaginary

was just a kind of theoretical elaboration of this quite famous essay that was published in this weird little Marxist paper out of Brighton at the end of the 90s called Alf Haben. And it was an essay called Give Up Activism. And it was really, and it was really sort of powerful for me. And it said, look, the whole, you know, because it was all about this, it was a critique of the fetishization of the activist as an identity.

And the thing is now it has, I mean, Kier's, right, it's completely gone. I keep saying this to people at the moment. I keep finding myself saying to people, look, if you think the left is in any, it's got any kind of problems now in terms of its internal culture, it's just that it's light years of head of where it was then, because it was just ridiculous.

I mean, most people who were in any way active had this totally fetishized centred themselves as an activist, and it was more important to kind of prove to yourself and your friends that you were a good activist than it was to win any new recruits to the cause, to actually persuade anybody of anything. And it was

totally fucked, you know, it was, and it just got no way. I'm using that word far too often today. But what I was going to say, my, my second point on opportunism is that, you know, there's often a political moment that you can't see coming with all of these things. I don't think you mean opportunity,

don't you? Sorry, sorry, opportunity. Sorry, sorry, I mean opportunity. You're right. In the sense of, like with Tahirir, you know, when the Egyptian revolution happened, like it toppled a dictator or any government for the first time in 7,000 years. And then there was a huge vacuum and everyone was like, what the fuck? Because people didn't think it was going to happen

but they pushed forward with it anyway and that's not, that was not a movement that came from a specific tradition or culture in that sense. It's just sometimes there's an opportunity and it will be followed by a vacuum and then it will create another set of conditions.

Well, I think that's exactly right and that's one of the, that is one of the kind of hard truths about which conjunctural analysis can need you to, which is often very hard to take, that often the scope for political action is limited. Often there isn't that much you can do, like it's not really clear that from that whole period, from the mid-80s up to about 2008, there was really much anybody could do, apart from sort of kick off, you know, stop traffic, you know, make-office. I mean, to some extent, I mean, the way I, I mean, my understanding

of, you know, what any kind of useful left activity was doing for most of that period was it was just keeping stuff going until another opportunity arose. I mean, right now it's an interesting moment because we don't really know what the scope of our kind of opportunities are. We don't, but clearly after 2008, and clearly what's happened with Corbyn becoming Labour leader and then the 2017 election result was it's quite clear now that although we don't know exactly how much we can get done in this moment,

we can clearly get something, we can demonstrably get some things done that were totally impossible for like 30 years. So if we're talking about, you know, melancholy in, you know, recent sort of music, then probably the greatest exponent of a pretty explicitly melancholic musical project was burial. So coming out of the dubstep scene, but also the music is just explicitly riddles with this nostalgic evocation of sort of rave culture of the early 90s,

even though it's made in the kind of mid-2000s by someone who, you know, would have been a small child if he was around at all in the early 90s. So for me, it was always really, it was kind of weird because I, you know, I was sort of hanging out on the sort of hardcore rave scene which this music sort of evokes

as now this sort of paradisiical lost moment of London's dance culture. part of the reason it's hard to know how much can be done is, you know, how much of, like, left monocally are we carrying around with us? Do you know what I mean? I'm carrying absolutely zero. Can I just say?

I think we're going to win. I think we're going to win. I've, I think we're going to win. I completely believe in the Martin Luther Quick King quote of like the arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice. Like, I think we're going to win. I thought we're going to win since I started when I became a left-wing person. And that is basically, yeah, that is what I believe.

I think it's really fucking difficult, but I think we're going to win. And that is central to how I do my politics, whereas I completely see that there's all of these different left groups out there who they don't think they're going to win. Just don't believe it. I believe it. One interesting thing at the moment is if you're going to look around and look for that form of political melancholy now, you would say centrist melancholy is like right. life, do you know? Like, you know, that it's exactly the same path of behaviour. Complete inability to recognise that 2008 is happening.

So basically it's this complete blindness to anything that's going on. Could you can't recognise 2008 has happened and fundamentally change things and destroyed the economic base of this electoral coalition and the electoral politics or the politics that a lot of these people, the centrist dads, the 90s comedians. Exactly. Exactly. That's right. And so, you know, and that's why a lot of their politics looks like acting out, you know,

because it's not about what's the, what's the situation in the world, how do we change things, how do we move things towards our politics, it's just acting out. It's like a temper tantrum. Yeah, I mean, I'm old enough to remember when there were plenty of Labour Party branches still being run by the militant tendency, even after they'd been, you know, roundly defeated in the party. And as, you know, history was hurtling towards 1989. And the behaviour of like the right, the kind of Blairite, right, right, who still run my local Labour Party

really reminds me of them more than anything else. You know, it's really similar. But they just, they can't believe it. And it's also, even if they did believe it, they don't know what else to do, apart from just keep attacking the left and trying to hold on

because I think you're right. I think centrist melancholy is, and centrist melancholy is a massive problem for us because they won't accept that they've been defeated. They won't move on and like figure out what to do. They try and figure out how to act strategically. I mean, my, I would

say my own, I would also say I have no left melancholy because I am no question that I am in fucking mourning for the defeats of the working class. Like I'm not, I have been since 1985, so I don't make any secret of it. And, you know, honestly I do like, you know, I probably

think about the minor strike and literally shed a little tear, you know, every couple of weeks, you know, and I have done all my life. I probably always will. So, but that is better. I would say that is better just dealing with, except the left. It's really important, I think, for Left Strategy today to accept we suffered a catastrophic defeat in the mid-80s.

It was so catastrophic that it was always going to have taken 50 years to recover from it. And I think we are that far into the recovery. I think for me, the absolute low point was the point we've been talking about, the early 2000s, actually. The moment when the, you know, the moment of the Gulf War, I think Occupy did start, you know, for example, represented at, a slow step on the path to recovery just because the culture around Occupy was actually a lot more open than that kind of activist culture

of the early 2000. I think 2011, as Kira said, was really important. You know, Corbinism is really important. I'm not massively optimistic. I mean, I'm not massively optimistic about the short term, just for the same reason. To me, it feels like we're still

sort of 10 years away from the government we really want, but... But that is the problem is that, like, we have this other climate crisis, pressing down on us, do you know what I mean? Which severely limits the time scale in which we can sort of think about politics. Yeah, it does, yeah.

Another person I thought we could talk about would be Janelle Monet. It's sort of like, I suppose you'd call it sort of sci-fi soul or sci-fi psychedelic soul or something like that. She's an artist who's got a stick. She's got an alter ego, basically, which is sort of like this android called Cindy Mayweather, is that right?

So it's definitely in the sort of like Afrofuturist sort of trend or theme or history, I think. Well, it's explicitly said. I can't think of any recent example of someone who is really a mainstream pop musician, like Janelle Meney, who has this very explicitly kind of intellectual project about the work. And she's very political, she's great on Twitter, you know, her politics are really sound. I mean, it is. I mean, we are living, we are seeing, we're seeing the final displacement of capitalist, realist, hip-hop as the central theme of kind of both African, you know, African-American and British sort of black music and black culture. And that is, I've said before and I'll say,

again, that is a precondition for any kind of sort of revolutionary culture to re-emerge. Do we want to talk about aspects of the conjuncture which are not conducive to an AC project? And we've talked about some of them but some of the things we could talk about would be, you know, there's been polls recently that show that young people are having less sex, they're drinking less, they're taking less drugs.

You know, we have to account for that. Which is of great concern to this radio show. But if we're going to sort of come up, you know, characterize the political character of generation left, we'd have to account for that, you know. Some of it, obviously, right, is to do with, you know, the diminished material circumstances of young people. You know, they're living with their parents.

They're living in their parents' house for longer, you know, cuts down the opportunities sometimes for sex and drugs and perhaps for drinking as well. They've also got less money, of course. But I don't think that accounts for all of it. There's something else going on, you know, something else to do with that. People on their phones, man.

Go on, make a serious point, Jeremy. Well, no, you're right about the phones as well. But it's also, I mean, I think it is, I mean, most of the journalistic commentary on that has linked it to people's anxiety about work about the fact that you just can't, you have to keep yourself primed and employable, like at all times.

So you just say, and this comes about to what we talked about in the last recording we made that sort of leisure regimes, including sort of, you know, or ideas about leisure and including ideas about intoxication are always tied to sort of regimes at work. And there's no question that people do experience the contemporary regime of work as deeply oppressive and intrusive in ways which the kind of, again, the sort of post-war settlement, the post-war settlement, I mean, it really varies between different social groups and different countries where the people are actually working more.

than they were, like, in the 60s, but the intrusion of work into every aspect of life is something that's really sort of ubiquitous, and that is something we have to kind of fight against. I think it goes further, though, as well, and I think it is to do with that thing we were talking about earlier about, you know, neoliberal institutions train you to be a certain form of entrepreneurial subject,

you know, the entrepreneur of yourself. Yeah, yeah. And so, like, that spreads from work to all sorts of life where you're supposed to be working on yourself. supposed to be improving yourself to some degree, you know, going to the gym, et cetera. Now that sort of, that creeps into people's lives, you know, even if that the response to that is some sort of collapsed, you know, of like I'm not doing anything, you know, I can't do anything. I think that must play into it, you know, and it does, it's an interesting thing about the point

we raised earlier about, you know, it's a libertarian aspect of the contemporary left. How much is that influenced by the sort of entrepreneurial, the entrepreneurialism of young people? And is that entrepreneurialism necessarily a bad thing, right? Can it be, can it be sort of, you know, can that sort of a level of like personal initiative, perhaps something like that could be linked to a collective project? You know, I think it probably can.

That's really interesting. I'm like fascinated, part horrified by the potential answer coming out of that. Well, we need a different word than entrepreneurialism, I think. I mean, I've heard people saying similar things recently, but I just think you need a different word. I mean, Hart and Negri tried to reclaim the entrepreneurial, but I think it's probably dead. But isn't it about capacity?

Is that what we're saying? Is it about the capacity or is about the imagination? Is it about saying we're not pro job for life where you're just, you know, another cog in the machine and you don't need to think? Are we saying that there's a good aspect to like, you know, taking control of the direction of one's life, which is the other extreme, which sounds really like capitalists and horrible and makes me like cringe at what I've just said. No, no, that's really good. It's a really good way putting it.

And like, I mean, the cog in the machine that doesn't have to think, I'm always going on about this because it's really interesting. Yeah, Gramshee said that actually it was good from a socialist perspective, that early to mid-20th century industrial capital is. and made the worker just a cog in the machine who didn't have to think because it meant they didn't have to invest any of their emotion and intellect in their work so they could just think about you know revolution and reform

but a lot of that still exists on the left there are a lot of people there are a lot of people I mean it may be not a lot but I come across a lot of people who think well I do want to just have a job where you know I'm working at a reception or whatever because it means that I free I like I've got more time for activism and it's really something I've thought about

like basically my whole adult life because I've only had jobs on the left, which obviously is really rare. And I can't imagine it any other way, which is really bizarre situation for me to be in. I mean, we know what we want. I mean, it's neither. We're not, our whole, our thing would be that we're not satisfied just with people

having to just have jobs where they don't have to think, because if they did have to think, they'd just be being even more exploited. You know, that's the, I mean, that's the thing. I mean, the thing for granted is you're going to be exploited. So you don't, so it's better you, at least you don't have to think about it. because then your brain isn't being exploited. And on the other hand, we don't want a situation

which is the only opportunity people get to use their brains and feel creatively fulfilled. It's like doing marketing for breakfast cereals, which is still a really big thing. You know, that is still a really big thing with lots of, you know, young people today.

They think, you know, that is, they want to go working in marketing or something because it's the only way they can imagine actually being creatively fulfilled. And being paid and being able to survive, yeah, because you can't. And we just don't want, we don't want. either. I mean, that's why we do, I would say, we do support, you know, sort of fully automated

luxury communism. We do want to, you know, the demand for full automation as a socialist demand to the point that it liberates people from drudgery, but we also want the politics, which makes sure that that doesn't just become an opportunity for capitalist exploitation. And I think part of the libertarian thing as well is, is accepting, and I don't think this is something we talk about much, is, you know, that regardless of which way you come at this with people are different in that sense. There will just be some people who want to have the same job

which they don't have to think about and there are other people who they want their job to be the most creative space possible. And we want to facilitate that but mostly have the space for everything in between. And you're right actually. Well that does come to one of the potential problems actually that we're supposed to be talking about with AC. It does

potentially belong to a certain kind of bohemian, artistic kind of left tradition which sort of wants to, it assumes everyone wants to be an artist, you know. And I think you're right. It's a good point that, yeah, we don't want to just reproduce that discourse. Although I would say coming, we sort of said this in the past before. I don't think that the AC project is for everyone. I think the project is for everyone maybe, oh, maybe it is to the extent that we can accept that. We can accept that if you shouldn't have to be, you shouldn't have to be kind of dynamic

and creative, like if you don't want to be. You should, you should have the opportunity. everybody should have the opportunity. And our assumption is, and the good evidence is that those and those of people who want to be don't have the opportunity. But we also, we don't, we don't want to impose it as a norm. Absolutely. And I don't think, I think, I think we would never would though. I think that's, that's actually what I want to come back to, which marries, like, my point with, with the one that you just made, Jeremy, which is that there's, there's clearly, like, not enough space for creativity. Like, that's the deficit. And so we want, we want to create a situation where people can have more space for, like, living a more creative

life. And that won't be everyone. But we're not going to force it upon people in some kind of, you know, totalitarian thing. Like, you must be able to... Maui's still hot camp. Yeah, like, you must be able to do pottery, like forced pottery and like glass blowing. to you by Navarra Media. You can find more podcasts as well as video interviews and articles at our website, Navaramedia.com. And you can subscribe to our podcast feed wherever you get your podcasts. Just search Navarra Media. We're not funded by advertisers or wealthy backers, but rely on our subscribers. We ask for just one hour of your wage a month to keep us going. You can sign up at

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