Adulting - #77 Politics, Polarisation & Communism with Ash Sarkar

Episode Date: September 20, 2020

Hey Podulters, welcome back for season 8! In this episode I speak to Ash Sarkar about why politics is so polarised, if we could ever have a unified left, and what a world without capitalism might look like! I hope you enjoy and as always please do rate, review, subscribe & share!!Ash's Top Three Books:The Wretched of The Earth, Frantz FanonThe Lonely Londoners, Sam SelvonRiding for Deliveroo: Resistance in the New Economy, Callum Cant Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Fandu Casino Daily Jackpots. Guaranteed to hit by 11 p.m. with your chance at the number one feeling, winning. Which beats even the 27th best feeling, saying I do. Who wants this last parachute? I do. Daily Jackpots. A chance to win with every spin and a guaranteed winner by 11 p.m. every day. 19 plus and physically located in Ontario.

Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600. Or visit connectsontario.ca. Select games only. Guarantee void if platform or game outages occur. Guarantee requires play by at least one customer until jackpot is awarded. Or 11 p.m. Eastern. Restrictions apply. See full terms at canada.casino. season eight of Adulting. I took a bit of a long break, but I'm excited for you to hear all the conversations I've been having, the things I've been learning and the people that I have been speaking to. So to start off, I speak to Ash Sarkar. She is a British journalist, left-wing political activist, and also the senior editor at Navarra Media, as well as teaching and lecturing

at universities. So she is very academic, very intellectual, and certainly made me feel like, God, I have no idea what I'm talking about when it comes to these issues. But she is really generous with me in this conversation. And I certainly learned a lot from her. We spoke about the difficulty in creating a unified left in VertiCommunist. We also spoke about communism, the way that social media plays a part in the polarization of politics. And at the end of every episode this season, I'm asking my guests for their three favourite books. So if you're interested in those as well, I'm going to put them in the show notes. I love speaking to Ash.

And again, she really blew me away because it really showed how out of depth I am in some of these conversations. But I hope that you learn just as much as I do and enjoy the conversation just as much as I did. Happy listening. Bye. Hello, and welcome to Adulting. Today, I'm joined by Ash Sarkar.

Hey. How are you doing? Can't complain. I'm a bit sleepy, but I'm sure you'll wake me up. Okay, good. I hope I'm going to wake you up. For people who don't know who you are and what you do, could you give us an introduction to you and your work? Oh, okay. So my name's Ash. I'm five foot two in Aries from North London. I'm a communist. I'm a contributing editor at left-wing media outlet Navara Media. I'm a lecturer at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam and I also do a bit of freelance writing. I've done some ghost writing and I'm now starting to work on my own book. Oh my god that is so exciting. Congratulations. When did you start working on that?

Well we're still in the like super early stages of putting it together but it felt quite urgent after the general election result and there's a lot to make sense of and I thought that the thing that I want to do is explain what's going on with the culture wars, how they've become so important and what effect do they have on our political landscape. Oh I think that's absolutely fascinating that's absolutely fascinating. That's kind of like the crux, that kind of stuff is what I'm completely fascinated by, which is why I love everything that you do.

And I know that this is such an annoying thing to say because I'm, well, I'm younger than you and I've watched so many people in interviews with you being like, using your age as a means to be like, you don't know what you're talking about, but you are young to have so many strings to your bow and to have so many different parts to your career. How did you get into being this and being this person with like a myriad things?

Well, you know, Fred Hampton was in his early 20s when he was assassinated, you know, when he was killed by the FBI. So I don't think that like age is any barrier to political awareness or activity. For me, the single biggest influence of my politics was my mum, seeing how she had been shaped by the economic conditions that we live in as a single mum, a woman of colour, but also how she resisted it. She's always been politically active. She was active in the movement against apartheid.

She was active in the black and Asian caucuses of the trade union movement. And there was always just this environment of politics is something you get stuck into, that you talk about all the time. And you certainly don't trust politicians either no i completely agree that's i love the idea that it's been like in your bones and i think that's something we need to talk about more in terms of especially right now i think that has happened and i think that especially since the last election obviously with jeremy corbyn that did ignite a lot of political ambition and lots of young people who suddenly felt like actually

i'm quite invested and interested in what's going on and this sounds like something that I can I can get behind how does it feel now being in the space where you are I mean you've got tons and tons of followers on Twitter you do face a lot of adversity and people coming for you we did you feel can you ever be prepared for that and were you ever expecting to reach a level of like don't know if notoriety is the right word but you are very well known in these circles was that something that you ever wanted or expected to happen no absolutely not um what what I like about Navarro Media and that's how my platform got built in the first place is that it took the kinds of conversations that we were having in political spaces.

We all met through the student movement, you know, in 2010, 2011. And we just created a media platform which could publish those conversations, stage those conversations and involve other people in our own political thinking. So it felt in a way that I was learning to do media in a completely different way than I thought media should be done from having consumed, you know, legacy broadcasting content from the BBC or Channel 4 or what have you. And that in turn something really supportive and in some ways cocooning when shit just hit the fan when it came to the far right and the abuse and all that you feel so ensconced by a movement and a political shared collectivity that you feel quite protected and you feel that even though things are going completely nuts that you're on the right track and you're doing the

right thing because those are also the people that you trust to pull you up when you do fuck up or you do make a bad judgment um and so I think that's one of the reasons why you know yeah sometimes things can be upsetting um and you just have to like wade through you know a complete like cesspit of crap um but when you've got that kind of friendship group around you and it's a politicized friendship group um you never feel alone in it do you think that like since the inception of Novara Media have you felt like politics is becoming more and more polarized it's something I talk about not a lot and I'm not anyway as much clued up as you are um but I feel like even in my personal life I feel like it used to be very heightened online

and that's kind of the nature of social media but it's kind of trickling into my everyday life that these really heightened discussions in a way that it never used to be. Do you think that that is like kind of happening universally? And do you know what the catalyst is for that? Or is it kind of social media? It's kind of a chicken and the egg situation? I think that that politics has become more polarised. And I think that there are lots of different things that have driven that polarization so one is social media right because social media is basically a partial democratization of the public sphere it used to be that political media was a one-way conversation broadcasters broadcast consumers consume whereas now that dynamics change its audiences are talking back and are shaping uh political collectivities outside of the traditional means so yes that is

one aspect of it but another is that we live in a hugely polarized society because of socio-economic inequalities like to me it seems completely batshit that over 65s as an age group doubled their wealth in the decade following the financial crisis so you've got this huge intergenerational inequality in wealth, home ownership amongst my age group, right? So late 20s, early 30s. 25 years ago, that was at around 65%. Now it's collapsed to less than a quarter. So what this tells you is a story of the social contracts between generations having broken down. And you've got a young generation which is completely locked out of having a stake in the ongoing running of the status quo as it is. What's the point of preserving the status quo if you don't have a stake in it and so then you then have you know as a kind of backlash to that because that would usually be the ideal uh environment for nurturing left-wing populism a kind of you know revenge of the home

owning you know retiree baby boomer. And that is the sort of culture wars stuff. That is the kind of Brexit stuff, which is about taking these marginal issues and turning them into very potent symbols of the nation under threat. And the right know how to do this. They've done this since 2016,

is taking these, you know, no one gives a shit about the eu uh in the early 2000s you know euro skepticism tiny marginal issue no one cared um but then turning it into a referendum on sovereignty about britain's place in the world slapping it down in the center of the the public conversation, creating a division and securing a majority on that division. The left is very bad at that. So polarisation is happening. It's happening economically, it's happening because of technology, and it's also happening as a political strategy. And the left need to work out how to secure a majority coalition in that environment. What I find so

confusing about the whole the inviting the left that everyone goes on about is like I can never work out if maybe it's kind of like part of the nature of especially people who feel very liberal and have certain ideologies about things as you're saying earlier like your friends are going to call you up it is a position of feeling like you want to be accountable for what you're doing and what you're saying and so like I always wonder is it kind of just part of the nature of some of the ideology on the left that we will never be able to have some of the camaraderie that the right can get when they can bandy together better than we can does that make sense or do you think that's a bit too generalized I hear you but I think we need to then like drill down into it a bit more are we talking about the left or are we talking about

liberals are we talking about liberals who think there are leftists or are we talking about leftists who think that they're liberals um because I think that that can tell you just what the nature of the conflict within progressive circles is on the one hand if you take an entity like the labour party it's because there was a split between people who wanted to see um a return to genuine social democracy in the uk and thought the way to do that was by advancing socialist policies right that's your jeremy corbyn's your john mcdonald, your Diane Abbott's. But the party up until that point had been led by people who thought we're all middle class now. Right. John Prescott very famously said that in 1997. The Labour right thought that the role of the party was to basically be the electoral wing of corporate social responsibility. And they'd lost two elections on that basis, Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband. So that's one kind of conflict. And then you've got the other kind of conflict, which is, I guess, kind of performed on social media, call out culture

and this, that and the other. And it comes from sometimes a good place and sometimes a bad place. The good place is to recognize that um just because we identify as being on the left it doesn't mean that we don't reproduce homophobia sexism racism ableism transphobia in our spaces and it's and it's good to want to um provide spaces which which are better and more welcoming than what society has to offer and then the bad thing is that sometimes I think it becomes very obsessive and granular because you're never going to end up with a perfect activist space that's not going to happen and so if you make having a perfect activist space a condition of doing anything then you fucked it you're no longer

on the terrain of mass politics you're out you know it's you and four friends screaming at each other you're done so um so i think that's a very different kind of conflict and the reason why these things are so much more potent on the left than on the right it's because we're not aligned with the forces of capital right we're not going to have the city you know know, out there hoping that we win, right? We're going to have all of that money put into financing our political opponents. We're not going to have a broadcast media environment which is hospitable to our messaging. It's when 61% of broadcast media stories have their origins in right-wing newspapers.

And the complexion of the newspaper industry is far more right-wing than it was in the days of, you know, Harold Wilson winning elections and the Daily Mirror was the country's most read newspaper. So it's always going to be an uphill struggle for us. We're not going to be able to win by playing by other people's rules because those rules were created precisely so that we don't win that's it you've put that so perfectly and I feel like I'm such a guilty party of trying to be the person I'm very idealist and I am one of those people that's like we can't say this and you can't do that and I had this really big long conversation with someone a few weeks ago and I suddenly realized that which is why I kind of wanted to talk to you about no platforming because I was as you're saying like hammering that so hard like trying to be so perfectionist in the

way that I was being inclusive that actually it was like just shutting down conversations and that's and that is an argument that's leveled often towards people like me liberals or whatever you want to say and I know that people say it to you too so how do you like toe that line because you do speak up on things very well and you do things call things out how do you like toe that line because you do speak up on things very well and you do things call things out how do you straddle the ability to engage in conversations with people that whose views are so abhorrent whilst maintaining your own ability to like still talk about things in the way that you want to well it depends what the nature of the conversation is nationalisms, right? He said, we're not going to defeat capitalism with black capitalism. We'll defeat it with socialism. We're

not going to defeat, you know, white nationalism with black nationalism. We're going to defeat it with black liberation. And so he understood that it wasn't enough to talk about race and nothing else in it was a critique of american imperialism of course fred hampton was an activist during the vietnam war so that became a particularly potent issue and also a criticism of capitalism because i think once you get onto that terrain of thinking about the material organization of our lives it's not then about drilling down to to immutable difference right along the lines of race or gender or what have you it's about actually shared experiences of how how how we we engage with the economy right and so that's that's how i think you do that thing

but then the other thing is conflict right you can't build a coalition with someone who is implacably opposed to your goals and wishes to destroy you and that's what the conflict bit is important so sometimes you know your enemy will say that he's your friend and you've got to say no so i think what's so interesting i hadn't really thought about it but i'm thinking about more and more is i do talk about identity politics all the time and i think you like kind of what you're saying is that sort of a symptom of our wider capitalist patriarchy that we live in you know capitalism is kind of inherently racist in because of institutionalized racism and knowing that you know the idea that you can as long as

you work hard enough you'll get what we want we know that systemically these things like aren't true and so i guess what you're trying to say is that you've got to look at really zoom out at the broader wider things that we live under rather than like pointing out the minutiae that are true and really tragic but also I guess we can't solve anything by zooming in on those is that what you're saying well yes and no I think that identity is something you've got to work through because identity is the interface between our individual subjectivities and the society that we live in so it's no use asking people to transcend their own identity it's inherently political but it's saying that political conflict isn't only played

out along the lines of identity. And I think one of the reasons why identitarian ways of framing conflict have become so potent, it's because over the last 40 years, the institutions which produce class consciousness, the trade union movement, heavy industry, council housing, have all been smashed to bits. So now we don't have these institutions which remake class consciousness. It means that we've now got class as a set of floating signifiers. So accent uh educational status political views where you live in the country uh in a way which is weirdly decoupled from income and from wealth so you end up in an absurd situation where you know you've got property developers claiming to be working class meanwhile someone who's working uh in a call center in

london is deemed more middle class because they know what an avocado is like it's insane so i kind of think that there's been an identitarian tilt in how we understand class politics um because of those institutions being smashed to bits. So it's no good saying transcend identities. It's actually about materially ground our understanding of identities. It's really interesting, because I think since ever since I've been alive, I've always seen, I used to associate class like poshness with wealth and everything. And then as I've got older, just as you said, I've started to the economic boundary of that has blurred. And it is about, you know, where someone's from or what their parents did and you kind of have you can transcend

the class that your parents were but you can't ever really change where you came from it's kind of like an attitude that I've been like kind of subscribed to sort of like if you're born working class then you are working class forever so it's interesting I mean from an academic point of view would you say that we shouldn't really be so flippant with class and it does have need to be more neatly tied into like your socioeconomic status than it is currently well I think we need to understand that class composition has changed a lot in the last 40 years and that's because the single most important figure in UK politics of the last 50 years, undoubtedly, is Margaret Thatcher. She absolutely is. Very famously, she said, economics is the method.

The object is to change the soul. And she did that. So she created a new middle class out of property owners who were reliant on asset inflation for their wealth right right to buy sell off the council housing make owners out of former council tenants and then restrict the new construction of council housing um smash to bits the trade union movement So also when you've got the demise of heavy industry, you also have just the heart being ripped out of these communities. You've got the creation of, you know, a white collar precariat. It was a complete transformation in British class composition.

And so I think that we've got to think about, well, how does class work differently today you know you can have a graduate who's heavily in debt never going to never going to own a property in their lives um are they more or less middle class than you know a self-employed contractor or plumber who owns their own business owns their own house and can retire quite comfortably i think especially like when we're talking about the problem with the left i'm doing inverted commas but you can't see me and a lot of the time we we do people from those areas that were really impacted by thatcher those mining towns

and those places that have never really had those things put back into place so that those areas outside of london can have like the economic prosperity that we have luckily in London that those communities are often the people that are voicing the fact that this new wave of liberalism isn't what they're subscribing to I feel like you can put this better than me but you know what I'm trying to get at in terms of if we're looking at voting behavior it's also really interesting to look at how uh the voting behavior in those seats has changed who's switching and who's sticking so the switches tend to be relatively affluent within those areas so tend to be homeowners tend to be pensioners tend to be older uh the majority of

people who are uh you know in deprivation you know in you know they hit all those indexes of deprivation well they're non-voters right right they're just they don't come out and vote and the bulk of working age people so you know 18 you know up to 40s and blah blah they're voting labor so it's much more i think to do with i think generational changes in wealth and economic security um as well as these things that you indicate and you point to i know those things are sharpened, I think, through other political issues, such as immigration, such as Brexit, perceived weakness on national security, and all that kind of thing. But another explanation for why these seats become more unstable

is because you look at the demographics, there's an exodus of the young. These places are aging. They're getting older. And it's because young people are having to move to the cities in order to find work. So in order to, I guess, categorize people now, it's not, I think this is where I get to as well. It has become, I guess, these labels that we used to use in terms of class and whatever else it might be. They're actually becoming slightly redundant because they don't mean the same things. Do you think there needs to be a new means of creating dialogue? Because I also feel like, and maybe this is just heightened because of the conversations

that I get into and the people that I follow on Twitter and the way that I engage with things, but it does feel like this class war, but as you say, between two people that could actually be from very similar backgrounds and have very similar incomes, but maybe that someone's from the North and someone's from the South. These things are all seemingly getting heightened and there seems to be so much miscommunication and everyone can't engage. And I'm not just talking about like on Good Morning Britain, but conversations are getting really stunted and becoming so aggravated so quickly. Are you finding that that's happening more and more or are you finding there is any space for nuance when it comes to actually trying to get to the root of what is causing this feeling

of not even just disenfranchisement but like people just feeling so angry towards any kind of ability to make a change I don't know I don't know if I'm honest and so at the moment I've been trying to work through my own feelings of nihilism, if I'm honest. I find it hard to feel hopeful. And I feel hard to feel hopeful as a person of colour. I look at what's going on in the States, the violence of white nationalism. I look at the way in which those culture wars have been imported here, the way they're playing out. to feel that a spirit of solidarity and mutual aid and kindness can overcome a thirst for violence for cruelty uh for domination you know like I don't know how you get there um my partner's actually much more hopeful than me and he's actually from you know like I don't I don't know how you get there um my partner's actually much

more hopeful than me and he's actually from you know a red wall seat that flipped blues from Penniston uh you know at the heart ripped out of it by Thatcher and he actually feels more hopeful than me so I'm just sort of outsourcing my hope to him uh and seeing if it can carry me through the next couple of years and what do you think do you think that part of the issue is this we're becoming more individualized and more i don't know if neoliberalist is the right term in this situation but i guess like especially well maybe in terms of like some streams of feminism that are coming in and the way that everyone's and it's a very capitalist ideal that we've got to make the most and do the most do you think that the part of the breaking down of kind of like community and not necessarily

religion but that is that was part of the community do you think that that's feeding into this wider narrative of this individual's want rather than this ability as you say to create unity and to break down these really awful phobias that people have around people of different intersections? I mean, I think this is also a question of organizing, right? And so I think that one of the problems is, is that the anti-racist movement has become balkanized and it lacks institutional strength, particularly in this country. That's something which is changing in the United States and it has changed with Black Lives Matter. Black Lives Matter, don't forget, has had two iterations. The first was its explosion onto the scene after the acquittal of George Zimmerman for the killing of Trayvon

Martin. It became particularly salient in ferguson uh after the killing of mike brown and then there was this period where you didn't hear so much about black lives matter but they were busy doing the work of of making institutions right that could be ready for when the next moment came along and those institutions were ready uh and i think that that speaks to uh the the the foresight in their political strategy it was a really really good thing to do in the uk we haven't quite got there yet we really haven't got there yet and i hope that's going to change i think instead we have i think a very kind of a balkanized and fragmented anti-racist movement which tends to treat different communities as very very separate we don't yet have a discourse or an organizational

framework that can hold all these things together and I think that that's a result of the particular history of anti-racism in the UK um political blackness obviously is deeply flawed as an identity. However, it was a useful organising tool at one time in history because it was a reflection of how the British racial landscape had been affected by the composition of its empire. And so it was, I think, a much more anti-imperialist in lots of ways than, you know, its parallel movements in the United States. And that's because of the impact of empire. What you had after, you know, the riots of the 80s, so Tuxta, Brixton, Broadwater Farm, Handsworth, is a partial institutionalisation of some bits of the anti-racist movement. So they became NGO-ified. They kind of became incorporated into some aspects of the state under new labour. And they became uh detached from communities of color it became

its own world of equalities and human rights and blah blah blah which operated at this very lofty level had zero impact on people's lives um and we've never really recovered from that we've never really recovered from that detachment and we've got to work out a way to do it and i think work out a way to do it very quickly because the kind of white nationalist uh explosion that's currently gripping the united states it is going to come here you know they say when america sneezes the world catches a cold um these things will have an impact on us they're already coming here in some kind of way and so i think we've got to work out a way of of recreating these liberation movements in a way which has like institutional resilience without falling back on neoliberal identity politics yeah it's so interesting and you're right it's terrifying and it definitely is coming over and just even with the whole

Lawrence Fox situation and then the amount of kind of like news coverage he then got in talking about this and it felt like a really weird time to be living through where things that even when I was growing up I felt like you couldn't be so overtly racist and suddenly that's kind of slipping back into the world and and I can't even imagine how terrifying that must be as a woman of color like I'm a really privileged white woman so I can't really speak on it to any level of depth. I mean, the thing is, what I find funny about Lawrence Fox is that he looks like Sid from Ice Age. He so does.

He does all this sort of, like, gurning and pantomiming. You know what, he's very good at what he does because you can see how he's identified the space that he wants to operate in. And he's made that for himself. So he's done it very, very cleverly. You know, it doesn't mean that what he's identified the space that he wants to operate in and he's he's made that for himself so he's done it very very cleverly um you know it doesn't mean that what he's saying is any less idiotic it's you know he's feeding the like paranoid delusions of you know white british baby boomers who've got a real persecution complex but he's done it very very smartly

you know he couldn't make it as a musician you You know, he was kind of mid-range actor. But now, look, you know, he's, you know, in our top five talk radio reactionary pundits, you know. FanDuel Casino Daily Jackpots. Guaranteed to hit by 11 p.m. with your chance at the number one feeling, winning. Which beats even the 27th best feeling, saying I do. Who wants this last parachute? I do. Daily Jackpots, a chance to win with every spin

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Restrictions apply. See full terms at canada.casino.fandu.com. Please play responsibly. It's ridiculous to look on the internet, but it is awful how these people gamify these tactics, which literally could end someone's life because of the way that they're spreading this rhetoric. And it's terrifying. I've seen so many people level at you that because you talk about race or because you bring up race and talk about how it intersects with things going on that you're creating this race war and i feel like when you have that that level of miscommunication where people don't like you you're

literally talking on completely different levels do you do you find that very frustrating like how do we bridge that gap of understanding you know I mean so I think I've been answering this in a non-political way for a second so you know I come from a family that's mixed by marriage uh my my stepdad is white British I've got two uh white British stepbrothers um and my boyfriend is from Yorkshire, which he thinks is distinct from white British, but I have to correct him. So I exist in a mixed environment all the time. And one of the things that was interesting to talk about with my stepdad, actually, was how when he married my mum, one of the things that he had to learn how to do was parent to

children of colour, right, me and my sister. And it was a challenge for him who had kind of, you know, entertained these like very progressive views, to then work out how to socialise me and my sister into the world, when he will never understand how it feels to be us and I think through shared experience through muddling through it's possible to foster a much deeper understanding and a really loving understanding even though you can't understand how it feels to be me, you can get to know me very well. And that's a way of, I think, opening things up and starting to exist in a shared social reality. So what I try and remind myself is that those voices on Twitter who are calling me a race baiter, saying that I must hate all white people and blah, blah,

is that maybe they reflect the worst 20% of white people out there. And 20% is still a lot, right? That's still a problem that can still shape politics but actually through coalition building through interpersonal interactions through a shared social existence it's possible to take white people along with you and for them to become invested in the changes that need to happen for society to become fairer so I think that experience of a mixed family of mixed relationships makes me feel that a greater understanding can be reached but it's got to be done from the position of equals if you go looking for white people's validation you'll never get it but if you come out from a position of

power and of confidence it's possible to fashion that something new together yeah and I feel like within although this is massively generalizing but like within our our age group and within people that probably have like similar views to us, the conversations around race are really nuanced, really complicated. And people are really like starting to get a grip on a deeper understanding of race beyond the overt stuff, but like the real institutionalized racism that happens. And it's on, you're right that in real life, and like, as you say, you've clearly got like a lovely family where, you know, those things are really worked through and understood. And as like, there's a massive level of empathy there but I guess it's

like what especially when you're online and as you say you're engaging that in that 20% it does it does throw into relief all these people that maybe we wouldn't well I wouldn't have that experience but wouldn't engage with in real life and I wonder if like the thing is is that I want to I want to talk to these people I'm fascinated by them I'm fascinated by who they are I want to know like what's your relationship with your parents like what what food do you eat what do you watch on telly what is your life like that you managed to make time in your day to call me a low IQ Bengali or to say that I must have been railed by x many white men at university or to call me a paki or whatever I want to know who you are except any time when I go hey do you want to actually like just talk do you want to like talk on skype or whatever then they're nowhere to be seen it's

really annoying I will never satiate my own curiosity it's it's it is frustrating though because like even hearing you say that I think like this is one of the things I kind of wanted to come on to talk to you about was in terms of like saying that the liberal leftists like never want to talk to people they want to de-platform everyone they want to no platform like what are your what are your understandings and opinions of no platforming from because from what you just said like actually engaging in a conversation to you even if it was someone that's like fucking awful is productive and could prove to have like a really good result so what's your opinion of no platforming and this idea that you know that's all that we do on the left I mean no platform is a

specific tool intended to deal with fascists because throughout throughout history fascists have utilized the institutions of liberal democracy in order to gain power and then destroy those institutions that's what they've done um and so no platform is a tool to deal with that to nip it in the bud to not wait until it's too you know transphobic ideology or white nationalism stopping short of fascism or anything else and going this is an appropriate tool to use in those cases as well and i think that sometimes you know when all you have is a hammer everything starts to look like a nail i think that the problem is is that no platform became seen as the only tool to use and i think there are lots of tools that can be

used when dealing with the reproduction of uh bigotry exclusionary discourses uh through the through media i think that there are lots of different tools that can be used and we don't necessarily always use them um so yeah that's my take on on no platform which is developed to do a specific thing in a specific time things have become more complicated so if we're talking about trying to like unify this very disparate left of labor supporters who maybe have left labor or when we're talking about trying to create some kind of bridge across this chasm that has been created through these divides do you think that because of echo chambers and social media and no platforming and

the way that media propaganda works and all of these things do you think that actually in some ways um having no platforming or relying on it too heavily is actually causing more of a divide like do you think that that's one of the the things that's actually perhaps exacerbating the dismantling of like a unified left well i know i think the problem of a unified left i think is much more fundamental and it's a recognition that the moderate centrist policies of the 1990s through the 2000s led us to where we are today right in terms of brexit authoritarian right-wing populism economic catastrophe a decade of lost wage growth that those are the policies that got us here and yet in the face of that very same authoritarian right-wing populism there has to be some kind of coalition between centrists liberals technocrats and the radical left

in order to protect democratic institutions uh from right-wing authoritarians. And we haven't worked out how to do that. We simply haven't worked out how to do that. We haven't worked out how to do that in America. We haven't worked out how to do that in the UK. And so I think that the stuff about echo chambers and no platform, that's not a cause of that disunity. It's a pretext for it. and so I think we've got to get good at identifying how things are used as excuses for a better better better politics not happening and what's actually causing it and so I think the cause is different right okay that's a really interesting take on it because it's something I kind of I'm not at any way near as well versus

you are so I'm sorry if it feels like I'm jumping around at the time you're probably like what is she talking about the next thing I want to talk to you about um because I find it fascinating is communism um because I know you're literally a communist favorite favorite little clip but talk to me a bit more about that because I find myself as well I'm quite an idealist and I've listened to you speak a lot and I think that I some of the things that I say I often get people laugh at me at parties because I do have this massive utopian ideal of the world that's probably never going to happen but talk to me about where your ideas towards leaning towards communism came from and what how could you define communism for people because I think some people hear that and just think well you're ridiculous so and obviously come forward with well look at

what happened in Russia and etc so talk to me about your communism and your views on it so I mean I would define myself as a humanist communism I believe in uh everything for everyone omnia sunt communia but I also believe in individual human flourishing which is not what happened in the Soviet Union or under Mao. Why I'm a communist is very easy, because you look around and we are poisoning the planet we live on in order to generate more wealth for people who already have more money than they could ever spend in a thousand lifetimes. And that, for me, is the sickness of capitalism. It is the cancer at the heart of capitalism. And I'm also a communist because I believe that capitalism is a constraint on that human flourishing. How many poets, how many writers, how many painters, how many sculptors, how many dancers have we lost because they can no longer afford to live because they have to sell their labor to work mining coal tan in the Congo because they've

got to sell their labor to work two maybe three cleaning jobs in the city of London I feel that what we have now isn't freedom of choice it's the illusion of choice, where the choices between be exploited or be excluded from the means of survival. That's not much of a choice at all. Now, as for the Soviet Union, which I said, that is not a humanist form of communism. It was an authoritarian dictatorial regime. It needed this huge bloating of the military apparatus, like all dictatorships do. It also operated within huge geopolitical constraints. The Soviet Union, you know, after the Russian Revolution was, you know, invaded by 14 countries, and it still managed to take Russians in the space of a single lifetime from serfdom to space so it was

a hugely rapid period of industrialization but that's certainly not my idea of communism for me communism is about the shared ownership and stewardship of all the things that we need to live food food, air, land, water, energy, where everyone gets what they need and isn't able to hoard, to restrict other people's access to these things that they need to survive in order to profit. That's, it's so interesting you put it like that because I was trying to talk about it with my boyfriend earlier and I was like, well, he was like well the only thing I don't get is that you know people would kind of stop not creating like uh art and things but maybe he was like we wouldn't

advance and then economically we would have nothing to offer and then all of this stuff and I was trying to explain to him exactly kind of what you said but way better than I did I was like well I guess right now we feel like we've got the freedom um to which is the choice you're talking about so we've got the freedom to you know if we can if you've got the privilege work up and make something whatever whereas I guess communism would be freedom from poverty or the possibility that you know you couldn't even enjoy life in any way shape or form would you say that's a really simplified way of and freedom too what freedoms do you have when you no longer worry about losing your home what freedoms do you have when you have electricity when you have wi-fi when you have food

on your table those are freedoms too as well um and we don't think about those privations as a restriction of freedom and you and and you and you really we really should I mean I remember growing up this before my mom married me said that um you know we were broke broke like we were up all night mom worrying at the kitchen table broke we were precariously house broke for a bit and what freedom did she have what choice did she have what opportunity for human flourishing did she have it was miserable it was terrible um and so I kind of think you know we don't exist as these abstract free units of choice in capitalist society our choices are hugely constrained and we've I mean we've seen it with COVID the the people in in power think that everyone has a

garden and that everyone has this freedom so that oh you can't exercise but don't worry just go in your garden I'm like I live on the sixth floor in like a shoebox flat in an old office building I don't have a garden like it's just it's it's interesting that the people at the top like that I think that was such a good signifier of showing what they think like the baseline of people living in this country like what's the norm and it just really throws into relief like how how much as you say like earlier about um then like the government being like oh we're all middle class now and it's like no that just isn't how it works and that's that's certainly not how like most of my generation are living and I think that it seems it's funny because it doesn't seem radical to me a lot of the things that you say but I know that maybe that is do you think that

that is a generational thing that we all have we just see this capitalist monster as like a kind of machination of private school boys wet dreams rather than something that's like great to work towards I mean I think it goes back to this question of having been locked out of the economy if you don't have an asset which can appreciate and value you're fucked and that's what that's that's the story of our generation we're saddled with debt we've got no way out of it because of that you know, decade of lost wage growth. It was the lowest wage growth the UK has ever seen since 1815. What is there? What is there? And meanwhile, because of that asset inflation, which sees the

wealth of older generations just, you know, skyrocketing, that keeps our participation on that level of the economy out of our hands. So we're in an impossible bind. Capitalism isn't working for us. But it's also the case that we're looking at the future of this planet. We're living ecological catastrophe, and yet the power stations keep burning. We're guzzling petrol as if nothing's up.

It's a sickness. Do you think, because I mean, widely people would say that China is a communist country, but is it not kind of capitalism dressed up as communism? I mean, China is a very interesting one. I would say that the greater challenge posed by China isn't really about capitalism versus communism. It's about Anglo-American capitalism versus state capitalism, which is what China can do. If you look at their state investment funds and the relationship of Chinese corporations back to the government is actually very, very interesting. And I think that China has two things. One is huge amounts of internal investment so that its own internal

market can be something which drives economic growth. And that has been what's happening. But even as that levels off by hook or by crook china wants to transform its role in the global economy and no longer wants to simply produce low value goods right the nuts and the bolts which are then sold off by american corporations is that they want in on technology information and and data. It's very high value economic activity. And they've got the state clout to back it up. Whereas, you know, after 40 years of neoliberalism, what's happened in, you know, Britain and America is that we've hollowed out our own state capacity to do anything.

You know, we can't even get a fucking contact tracing app up and running in this country we really uh have just hollowed out our capacity to do stuff public money has gone into these you know completely useless corporations like g4s and like circo which have but become adept at hoovering up government contracts, not necessarily delivering the services. And so public money just goes into these, you know, really inefficient bits of the private sector. So we've hollowed out that state capacity, which is going to be, you know, a problem in coming decades, already is when you think about the rise of China.

So I think understanding China as a communist country still has elements of communism, elements of public ownership, elements of authoritarianism and sexual planning. But I would think it would be more honest to call it state capitalism. And are there parts of that which would, if you had to create your ideal model, would it be like neat communism or would you have threads and strands of anything from capitalism intertwined in there?

Well, in terms of my ideal society, I've always been drawn to the sort of libertarian, humanist communism of, you know, Franco, Berardi and Bifo. The kind of idealism of the Italian, you know, operasmo movements, because I think that there was an emphasis there on play and experimentation and fun, forms of collective joy, which for me are just right at the heart of what I would see as a communist society.

Another thing that I would see, and this would be very different from the kind of industrialization of the soviet union and of mao's china as well is that the development of green energy solar wind hydro changes things entirely um you know very famously socialism was defined uh by fred hampton i think it was he just keeps coming up for me today uh as power anywhere where there's people that literally becomes true when you think about solar power it's literally where you are and so then what that means in terms of not necessarily having to have huge amounts of central planning and the consolidation of state power, you have a distribution this before, but like in some senses, whilst that could be catastrophic and kind of like, I guess, a rehashing in a weird way of Thatcher kind of stripping away those jobs, could it also mean that we would or could

have more freedom to lean into those creative things and actually enjoy the fruits of life rather than spending all day working nine till five? Or do you think that there would have to be such a big shift away from capitalism in order for that to be like facilitated? Could technology in a funny way help get to that utopian ideal? 10 points for you. You just invented Marx's fragment on the machine.

Oh, sorry, I've never read it. You've got there. Rolling in his grave like, I spent years on this theory and she got there but I probably have heard you talking about it that's probably why I feel so bad it's so embarrassing at all it's actually a really funny thing when that happens and I think that kind of goes I don't know I think maybe that indicates that that there's something intuitive about some of these really counterintuitive theories so um in in the grind which is just kind of the collection of like bits and pieces of marx's work which doesn't quite make it into capital you've got the very famous fragment on the machine and mark spells out just this is

that here is the contradiction which is the automation of labor makes the worker more precarious because you're having to fight a machine for your job and the machine's not going to go on strike the machine doesn't need eight hours of sleep the machine doesn't need to be fed uh the machine is probably more more, so it weakens the collective bargaining power of the worker in relation to capital. However, it also opens up the potential of something different, which is a world without work. And that's the instability there. And so then in my colleague Aaron Bassani's book, Fully Automated Luxury Communism, he takes as his starting point the fragment on the machine and he looks at areas of innovation,

so data, food production, gene editing, energy, and says, well, look, the marginal cost of all these forms of technology is rapidly approaching zero. You know, we've got the ingredients of this utopia. So then what you then need to do is develop a political vehicle which can bring it into being. Now, that's the bit where all of us get stuck. What is this political vehicle? And Aaron, bless him, in the final chapter of his book is kind of like, OK, so how do we get to the asteroid mining? Step one, the Preston model. Step uh question mark question mark question mark step three asteroid

mining um you know it kind of stalls there but i'm excited to see how he pushes that idea further but it's precisely that thing that you're talking about i guess so i'm just thinking as we were talking in a funny way though this is already happening and that we have like washing machines and dishwashers and cars and so like there have been lots of things that technically could have relieved us of i guess those things relieved us of like manual and physical labor or women especially like in the home but then that's just been replaced with work and this is also like the feminist critique of of aaron's book which is actually have had waves of automation of domestic labor and you haven't had gender emancipation um and that that then goes back to the political the political question i think he would say

um which is that you know we're not technological determinists um you know you need to build movements which can change out thinking it's not just about waiting for the robots and then things will be fine yeah and i guess also just like i ideologically and as a culture we are obsessed with productivity and work and um i really align with this idea and actually sometimes people find that awful that like I I'm in a creative industry and I love working but I fucking love resting and I think everyone should not have to work like however many hours a week and actually that's there's a real pushback that on that on that because like culturally we are obsessed with proving that we're productive and I think this gets like even more exacerbated especially on social media just like

on a cultural level it's such a weird phenomenon when it's like that would be such a big mindset shift as well you know we also have a very low productivity economy we've got you know some of the lowest lowest productivity of the g7 nations um so Britain's already fucking up there um and so I think I think we also have like fetishized we don't live in the ideal model of capitalism. Yeah. You know, like some of the inbuilt assumptions of capitalism are falling apart around our very eyes and we're just unable to see it. You know, it's the problems of demographic aging, low growth, low productivity. What's going on?

And so I think that, you you know also emphasizing the importance of leisure play rest um you know i think these things are hugely hugely important um you know thinking about what family life could be like um without the economic pressures of uh working under capitalism i can't even picture it i know it's weird isn't it but is that why you find it so useful to use communism as a vehicle to like show because I used to think that I was like but what happens like take away the capsules I can't see anything I don't understand what would it be like so is that kind of why it's such a useful tool to have your communist utopia as a means of like kind of showing the differences?

I think so. I think so. You know, Frederick Jameson very famously wrote, it's become easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. You know, this is, that's capitalist realism. It dictates the boundaries of our imagined reality and what communism i think can do i think as well as actually being a very sensible way of organizing resources uh on a finite planet um is to create room for that imaginative other um i think we need we have utopian instincts and we need political models that can speak to them oh I love I've absolutely loved speaking to you thank you so much for spending your time with me no it's been really enjoyable thank you so much and thanks for letting me wrap a lot about

communism oh I love that I find it so fascinating is there anything else you wish I'd asked you or something we've missed not really I just want you to tell your boyfriend that he should be a communist oh I know we're getting there don't worry so the last question which is a new question because it's a new series that I want to ask everyone because I love reading sorry I should have told you I was going to ask this before but do you have a favorite book or you can say three favorite books if you want to say more oh three favorite books okay i think when it comes to politics one i would recommend that people read franz fanon wretched of the earth because what fanon does is that he takes marxism and he stretches it to encompass uh decolonization right and colonialism so he sees the process of decolonization as a

fundamentally uh anti-capitalist uh initiative when it's done right so i think it's a beautiful work beautiful text uh definitely read it um second book uh if you want to read some fiction, and some fiction that I found very, very formative, Sam Selvin's The Lonely Londoners, which is kind of about the Windrush generation coming to this country, experiences of alienation, the creation of community in a very cold and unwelcoming country. Beautifully written as well

just just stunning and the third book um ah so this is a book that that that radicalized my mum recently um okay friend of mine's book uh called riding for Deliveroo by Callum Kant. It's an exploration of work and trade union organising in the gig economy. And my mum, I'd left it at her house and she rang me up and she was like, do you know what bastards Deliveroo are? So, yeah, that's really, I really got her goat. And it's a really, really good book. Oh, that was so good. Quick off the the mark I think I would have actually quite struggled I'm going to put those on the show notes so people can find them as well um if people want to find you uh if they're not

already following you you are what are all your handles uh my handles on Instagram and Twitter are AOCesar which is a nickname from uni and so those are my handles and then I'm stuck with it um so it's A-Y-O-C-A-E-S-A-R perfect thank you so much joining me and everyone do go check out you've got loads of amazing videos on um Navarra media which are great um and I would recommend checking out if you want to hear more from ash but yeah thank you so much for joining me if i spelt my own handles right sorry give me one second i suddenly got paranoid yeah i did spell it right thank you um you know you get this intrusive thought of like you just spelt it wrong and it's your own oh yeah completely oh yeah oh what amazing thank you so much and um thank you everyone for listening I'll see you next week bye We'll be right back. I do.