TRASHFUTURE - UNLOCKED Riley's Commie Book Club: For a Left Populism

Episode Date: December 7, 2018

I'm going to unlock another Riley's Commie Book Club, because I'm going to do another book club episode later today. In this episode of my podcast-within-a-podcast, I'm talking about Chantal Mouffe's "For a Left Populism. Why are we constantly told that the status quo — i.e. neoliberal market economics  — is the natural order? What does it mean to be "political," versus "post-political"? And how should the left see itself?

Hey, it's that time again. It's me, Riley, right here by myself, recording a Kami Book Club episode for all you wonderful Patreon listeners out there and then also all you non-patreon listeners sometime in the future or from your perspective, the present, yeah, that's more or less how time works. That's very fun. Hello. It's me, Riley.

Like I said before, today I decide, well, A, I'm not going to be drinking while I record this, which is unusual because usually I am, however, I had a trademark big night out last night and I've decided not to do that. Instead, I'm going to get over my hangover by talking about a book that I liked. The book today is called For a Left Populism. It is published by Surprise Verso. Hey, other publishers want to send me free books. I'm more than happy to take a look at them.

And it's by Chantal Mouff, who is a French political theorist who primarily works in England. And she's at the University of Westminster. She's a big figure on the left. I'm a big fan of her work. She's written a lot of books. This is sort of just her most recent. She's written on the political hegemony and socialist strategy, agonisms, they're all

very good. I really recommend you read them if you like sort of theory, because that's what she's talking about. She's talking about a lot of theory stuff, and she writes like a philosopher. It feels quite a bit like, honestly, it'll feel like doing university reading, but at the same time, she's very, very clear. And if you want to put the effort in to kind of really understanding what she's saying, then it's very worthwhile reading.

For a left populism came out in 2018 this year, and it is essentially a sort of a prescription for how we can understand populist politics as sort of a left movement, I guess. And I wanted to do this book because many of my previous book clubs have always been about sort of accurately describing the problem, engaging with works rather, that I think accurately describe the problem of sort of in what ways are our lives made more stupid and pointless by the dominance of capital, and in what ways the screws of control tightened. And I've been told they get kind of depressing, and I'm not going to lie, I always bum myself out too whenever I do them, because they're basically just a monthly review of all the

sort of emplacable forces arrayed against us. And what Moof does is she talks, yeah, she talks about how this came about. In fact, I'm going to be focusing on the bits of her book that are less about sort of how we came to our current moment, and more about what she thinks we should do about it. So let's just jump in. So let's first with a quick summary. For a left populism is a book about thinking about a way to harness the crumbling of neoliberalism to bring about socialism in our time.

Neoliberalism is crumbling because, A, it's unsustainable economically, obviously we sort of talk about that almost every time, and B, there is still enough democracy left for people to effectively oppose it. The problem is, of course, a lot of that opposition, or at least a lot of the successful opposition to the crumbling of neoliberalism has basically been fascism, which is a yikes for me. So what are we really talking about here as still in, when I say still enough democracy left for people to effectively oppose it? Moof talks a lot about post politics, where basically the period from 1990 or 1980 or 1971,

if we want to talk about currency liberalization, to 2016 was post political, where there was a consensus in most of the developed world that the market was to be the dominant force in society, and all politics would be fundamentally reactive to the market. Now, this is a very heavily theoretical book, like I said. So I'm going to really start with the theory stuff and go through some of my problematic fave philosophers like Schmidt and Heidegger to talk about Karl Schmidt, rather, and Heidegger, and we'll talk about how it applies to modern politics, and how the post political through this lens is such a stupid way to exist.

Now, Moof describes liberal democracy as a balance between liberal forces, so privatized services to make them more efficient, whether or not that works, and democratic forces, nationalized services at the expense of capital to make them work for everyone, if not more efficiently, even though they are more efficient when they're done that way, blah, blah, blah, ideology. The transformation of labor from Benism to Blairism was essentially the triumph of the liberal part of liberal democracy over the democratic part of liberal democracy. So liberal democracy exists in this tension, where we have popular control of politics

and we have like unpopular control of nearly every other part of everyone's life. And so we know, and we've talked about this before, from the 70s to now has been the sort of retrenchment of democracy in favor of liberal economics. So think about how politicians often voice opposition to genuinely popular socialist policies for fear of inducing something like capital flight, which if you don't know is when all the investors in a given country just sort of pick up and leave because they don't want to pay taxes. So I remember there's this concept actually called the Laffer Curve, and I'm sure any

economists sort of listening to this or rolling their eyes because they know what this is. But the Laffer Curve basically suggests that there is actually a certain percent of tax where you get diminishing marginal returns on rising tax rates. So basically, if you put a 97% wealth tax, for example, then you're actually going to get less tax than if you put in a 10% tax revenue than if you put in a 10% flat tax because the wealthy will find ways to avoid it. Now the Laffer Curve is sort of a complete bunk economics, and I'm sure one of the economists in the broader trash future world can sort of go into a little bit more of why that

is, but much like the Reinhardt-Rogoff paper, which I've discussed before, which is that positing that if you have debt as a certain percentage of your GDP, you are going to stave off growth, both of these disproven, as complete nonsense, they just made up the numbers in order to get to that point, but these concepts were sort of deployed to sort of play down democracy in favor of liberalism, like, well, we'd love to do democracy, but we can't. We sort of can't because of these laws of economics that they've really just made up. So ideas like this or really powers like this sort of hide behind these ideas to allow the market to set the terms of rule, to sort of define what society is, who it's for, how

it works, how we distribute the benefits and burdens of cooperation, and the demos, the people, takes a sort of much more passive role. Now so this is what move sees as the fundamental crisis of liberal democracy is, is that it has come out of balance. And a big part of this is the growth of liberal politics as sort of forgetting how to do politics. So politics for move is based on in and out, a distinction between friend and enemy, and the point of politics is you and your friends are working in an adversarial relationship against another, an outsider, and that's where the line is drawn.

And the most interesting thing here is that she relies on Karl Schmidt, who is, if you don't familiar with him, was a legal philosopher in Germany in the 1920s and 30s. Yes, folks, a Nazi legal philosopher, the Nazi jurist. And what Schmidt says is that, look, the concept of the political is based on the distinction between friend and enemy, which is sort of what makes, what makes sort of Nazi politics almost work. And so what makes fascism work is that, is that the fascists draw a line and say, you, the sort of racially pure Germans or the white Americans or whatever, you're being threatened

by the Jews or you're being threatened by the black people or what have you. And that's where right wing fascist populism draws the line. Left wing populism draws the line between we, the people, and them, the elites. And left wing populism is supposed to build a solidarity across country lines, across race lines, and within a certain class, let's say. And I think, I want to think a little bit about Carl Schmidt and what he's saying here. So what he's saying here is saying that politics is sort of exciting, daring, and dangerous. And that kind of reminds me of Walter Benjamin.

You know, Walter Benjamin, I've talked about quite a bit as everyone on this who's listened to these knows I really love the Frankfurt School. And what we really remember is that he, one of his best sort of, I think snippets, was that fascism is the introduction of the aesthetic to politics, that feeling of sort of daring danger, that sort of reinvigoration of life into the polity. It's just that fascism is the sort of shot of adrenaline to the heart of a zombie politic. It is protecting the sort of decayed and degenerate relationships of dominance that sort of, that keeps society stupider and more evil, I guess.

And when we say the aesthetic to politics, in the one sense, yes, we are talking about the sort of the thrill of the sharply cut uniforms and lines of soldiers marching in formation. But we also mean the introduction of a feeling of teleology and destiny to politics. And that looking at politics as libidinal is not in itself bad. It's that we must harness that libido for the ends of solidarity. We must harness that libido for the ends of sort of extending human dignity, that socialism must be exciting.

And the other thing that I think of, and this sort of brings me back to Karl Schmidt, is the other Nazi philosopher, Heidegger. So Martin Heidegger was, again, a sort of German, because you could say ontologist, phenomenologist. And he was thinking about political ontology. What is the political, how do we define it? And what I think is that is sort of the concept of the political for Heidegger was a way that people would reckon with spiritual emptiness. And there is nothing quite so spiritually emptying as living in late capitalism.

When we talk of, I was an article on Eater, actually, recently, that said that sort of like the commodity sort of is sucked of all life, a sandwich that you purchased in Tesco versus one that is made for you from your mother, or from your father, or you made it for you. The sandwich that's purchased from Tesco is necessarily going to be sort of dry and empty. There is no personal thing to it. It is a relationship of exploitation where sort of that sandwich is the method by which

Tesco is able to extract excess value that the worker produces and then extract what little wage you have left over. You feel kind of cheated when you have that particular sandwich. And I think it's no sort of, it's no wonder that a lot of the modern fascist groups, they reckon with the sort of, the feeling of sort of disenchantment, they answer the question of is that all life is with actually no, you have a destiny, it's just they construe that destiny along nationalist and racial lines. And as I say, the job of socialism is to understand that that is a natural, that desire for a

teleology and a destiny is, it's natural for people, it's a natural result of living the way we do and we have to sort of harness that energy, but we have to harness it for good. And we have to admit that we are in a time where this aesthetic is the feeling of destiny is ripe for political readmission because remember so much of what I've discussed on previous book clubs is about how our autonomy is more and more circumscribed as the ways we constitute who we are becoming more defined by consumption rather than labor, self-directed production and so forth. And there's that great emptiness and Heidegger points that out and he thought it was going

to be filled by racial destiny, national destiny and the socialists say, no, we see the emptiness too, but we will not fill it fraudulently. One of the phrases, I think just to explain this a bit more, I sort of frequently use on comedy book clubs is the idea that our lives are sort of being constructed for us in such a way that they could really be lived by more or less anybody. You know, so this is the classic, you go from school to university to a job to sort of moving up in that job to realizing you've been in institutions for your entire life and you have always been a sort of passive participant in society that most of the way that you sort

of construe yourself individually is through consumption choices and those choices leave you feeling sort of profoundly empty because it's a fake kind of freedom. It is a way where you say, well, I'm a nerd so I buy a lot of Warhammer so I'm buying Warhammer so I'm a nerd and I know who I am because of what I buy not because of necessarily what I do or what I make and so you sort of always have that nagging feeling in the back of your head that your life really sort of has no point, you're sort of, it's a paint by numbers at best and how can you possibly say that something like a paint by numbers is really art and so this is kind of the feeling that I think that we can think about when we think

of Heidegger we can just understand him as you know going the wrong way with it. Back to back to Moof, so left populism tells the story about how this emptiness that you're living is basically created because the elites have excluded you from the democratic process and have taken advantage of you by reducing your economic autonomy because ultimately it is by self-directed labor from which you benefit that you own that you decide how it works and blah blah that's a lot of how you end up feeling as though you are doing something that your life is your own and couldn't be being lived by anybody and so I'm going to move on to another sort of concept that Moof talks about and this is going to help me transition I think into talking about why liberal

politics is sort of so I don't know uninspiring why the people's vote movement will never get anything done and why it's just sort of annoying that politics for Moof that division between friend and enemy and again the division we want to emphasize is between the people and the economic elites namely you know the Bezos's for example the people who are you know becoming billionaires because they're exploiting you the politics requires radical negativity which is the acceptance that some differences in interest are irreducible to compromise that is to say there is no problem solved there's no problem solving there's no tweak there is no regulatory sort of nudge that is going to actually reconcile the interests of labor and capital these are opposed interests now

the other one of the other sort of key differences I think between sort of left populism and say right populism is that left left populism as Moof describes it looks at this process agonistically as opposed to antagonistically agonism is defined as a kind of a contestation or opposition between parties that are adversarial but are not seeing each other as an enemy there's a difference between an enemy and an adversary an enemy you sort of destroy by any means necessary and an adversary you recognize the right to exist but you also want to beat them you genuinely beat them you don't want to listen to them you don't want to take their concerns on board you want to genuinely marginalize their voice but you don't want to then kill them about it and so again fascism

sees this dividing line and this radical negativity is taking place antagonistically socialist I think or at least democratic socialist as Moof discusses sees this taking place agonistically but that's why liberals say socialists and fascists are the same because both both parties sort of harness the psychological power of politics as a grand narrative as something sort of mannequian that rather than sort of simple boring managerialism and problem solving but I think this is actually where one of the one of the first most sort of problems of the book comes up though which is that well the fascists are antagonistic and we are merely agonistic where we say if our goal is an egalitarian politics our goal is the

extension of democracy out of the sort of formal political sphere into the economic sphere and their goal is absolute rule from luxurious space stations over a patchwork of ethnic Bantu stands from which they you know occasionally take blood then aren't we still compromising them by allowing them any space or power at all that is at what point does Bezos give up a his wealth and influence voluntarily we say voluntarily I don't mean giving it to charity or whatever I mean deciding to obey a law requiring him to do so and B at what point does his refusal to do so cause regrettable antagonism and moreover at what point do we admit that the conditions of the amazon warehouses are genuinely antagonistic to to us as a class when we see the Tories sort of killing 120,000 people

through well notories lib dems and the labor right killing 120,000 people through austerity at what point do we see that as antagonism and by sort of mere and with mere agonism I say mere agonism are we sort of shooting ourselves in the foot but you know I again I can't pretend I know the answer to this question but it is something that sort of was in the back of my mind while reading this whole thing because this is the problem and the fundamental contradiction of democratic socialism at some way at some point sort of electorally driven democratic socialism requires the consent of the elites not to merely be diminished in their wealth and influence but to stop being elites entirely and I question whether or not this is possible and therefore

we will be stuck in a rotation of improve and worsen as the elites sort of loosen and tighten their grip as we get sort of new deals and then welfare reform as we get sort of like a glass deagle and then Dodd Frank and sort of rolls rolls back of protections and rather than having their sort of metaphorical hands removed not literal I mean with liberal political ontology the in ontology if again if you don't know is the field that's concerned of understanding the nature of what things are fails to understand this sort of this fact that politics is is about irreducible interest at this it is conflict it is adversarial so I'm moving back from my criticism move back to sort of what she's saying that it's not a process of problem solving but one of

contestation which is why I also frequently point out that the liberal dream is to have a 100% vote share because they would have solved all the problems with all of the right facts right and I'm sort of going to I'm going to go a little bit out of the book for a second though I'm going to go into something that's happened recently which is sort of the people's march the people's vote march now for the puzzling segment of our listenership that's American as we all know brexit the brexit vote occurred and we now live in the world of brexit and trump if liberal op-ed writers are to be believed and the response to brexit has been sort of manifold at one of the responses has been sort of what we've taken to calling continuity remain continuity

remain is the sort of the political project of the liberal democrats the labor right the conservative party sort of various sort of cosmopolitan liberal elites and so on and so on who have got together and have said no we don't we think that the brexit vote was a bad idea I mean incidentally I also do think it was a bad idea but not in the same way they do and so they're saying okay so what we need is a people's vote we need another referendum now this has been construed in sort of many different ways some have said well look the people didn't have all the information when they voted so we should actually do a second referendum to make sure we still care about it I mean incidentally less opinion polls have swung I think in favor of remain but there's

no guarantee remain would win it's hilarious they just assumed they would which I'll get into actually and the other the other thing they want is a referendum on the terms of the deal it's like okay well we just said leave we didn't say how we'd leave so the idea is well let's get a vote that is going to say on the ballot paper yes we we leave with no deal or we take this deal or we stay in entirely so you know it's I mean the whole thing is a completely fraught idea but there we go there's sort of march for it sort of more or less all the time but let's think about this this is the liberal wing of both parties they're trying to go backwards in time essentially to the point when they were relevant that is where the cleavage in politics because

every political group has a cleavage whether they acknowledge it or not it's always based on an us them division and for them the division was between politicians so politicians like chakramana and anisubri who are basically liberals who have sort of minor aesthetic disagreements over sort of how to be liberal of how to manage capitalism and so on and so on and the brutes who are sort of ruled and it's for their sake that we rule but it's also for their sake that we don't let them close to the handles of power because they don't read the economist and they're going to fuck it up somehow so this is this is their cleavage but that's also why liberals love to blame evil geniuses like steve ban in russia cambridge dark mark tambridge

analytica dark macky of ellie or whatever for their ideology crumbling because that's all their whole ideology is based on getting 100 of the electorate of being problem solvers of working together to solve the problems of capitalism of denying that there is such a thing as radical negativity that there are irreducible differences and rather see the political divide as something to be overcome rather than this zone of contestation and this is why i think i like about sort of what move sees politics as she doesn't see it as an activity she doesn't see it as something you do necessarily she sees politics as an ontological space where these divides occur and where you can sort of organize yourself into understanding well who am i who am i what are my interests who else

shares my interest and we create these identities that are political and that are based on on on an on an us them relationship um and and and they see politics as essentially a branch of economics they see politics as a sort of kind of problem solving now marxists of course also kind of see politics as a branch of economics but at least we acknowledge that there is um uh that it's it's contains within it uh irreducible differences differences that are irreducible to compromise um right but they see themselves yeah as as technicians more or less technocrats so they need evil geniuses who are against good who want this i don't want good things for us as a uh let's say society for example or just wrongness as their enemy they've created their political

divide and on it is everyone sensible and on the other side are either wrong people or evil people who lie or the fake news for example russia uh and on this is why they're so fascinated with steve bannon i mean he's a guy who's in the white house for three months before getting turf back to being you know a racist blogger um but he serves as this other side he is their political enemy because he reminds them he is he is proof that sort of that they are the managers of facts he is the purveyor of fiction and then everyone else is apolitical they don't have a politics theirs is just to be ruled um so you need that person on the other side whose viewpoints are illiberal and who is either mistaken or evil so he's he's he's he's lying or fucked up this is

why they always try to debate racism like oh we have to platform racist so we show them that their ideas are wrong right it's like that's we're saying racism is stupid well no it's that racism is a way to draw the dividing line of politics between yourself and a racialized other you know that racism is not a mistake um but when you see racism as the dividing line between friend and enemy white and black us and them it doesn't matter that it's baseless and wrong and evil and horrible it feels right to them because ultimately politics is libidinal it's something we feel and it's something about what makes us who we are this is why fact checking doesn't work because that only works on a single register the sort of reason register and it shies away from any

kind of affective message it's a sort of homo economicist assumption that aims to sort of avoid political excitement because excitement isn't in the model it's not it's not controllable through sort of through regulation it's not easily capitalizable you can add up the effects but you can add up the facts but you can't add up the effects so think about how continuity remain could be doing better if they spoke to people's feelings about being a european and having a post-national identity think if they if instead of sort of you know sort of trotting out statistic after statistic after statistic and sort of fact checking leaves sort of endlessly saying oh they wrote down a lie on the side of a bus um and what they could have done was they could have

actually harness something that people felt and that we wanted to go after they could have said don't don't don't you think of the life you could be losing can't you not just the life you could be losing but imagine this what this project could be the idea that we could actually get past states get past wars and we could sort of come together in solidarity now also obviously the european union isn't that it's a you know a giant regulatory capitalist club that you know to keep countries from returning to socialist uh but let's forget that for now the leaf campaign did speak to people's emotions because it didn't matter that 350 million a week wasn't going to the nhs the idea was you they were at that was a way for them to say you're getting screwed and

we're going to screw them back for you we never did that and we never do because ultimately liberals the liberals like libidinal drive is for west wing fact checkery now this is why our moof discusses grand chi and freud here and i think this is what works really really well is sort of talking about these dual systems sort of yes there is economics but there's also culture and things don't merely proceed along these sort of simple reductionist lines where people sort of line up all the facts in their heads and then sort of based on where the facts are sort of define themselves accordingly um so culture think law and order does much more to create our political identity by imagining what the police do than facts because it creates it creates the facts

that we act on when we act politically and the facts themselves are immaterial because that the facts are only the facts in as much as they are understood to be true and in as much as they are acted upon i'm sorry michael walker i'm i'm being a post-modernist again rather than a scientific socialist but i think that's in terms of say electoralism anyway that matters it really matters that when people think of the police they think of law and order they don't think about the effects of the carceral state on you know them and their friends and people who could be their friends and you know they're the other and everyone in society they don't they they feel even a persistent sort of little bit of like a quickening heartbeat when they see a police officer

across the street even if they're doing nothing wrong because they know they know somewhere that they're scared of the carceral state and that's what it represents to them but what this but but with the law and order vision this sort of again creating this hegemonic idea of what the of what police are you know then we're able to sit then and arguments for say curtailing police power or in the states for sort of disarming police get sort of beaten down because the first thing people think of is you know the the the svu sting and the people protecting them from you know the rapists and murderers and so on and so forth so political knowledge has this effective dimension because

knowledge doesn't necessarily have to be true you just have to believe it to be true but socialist strategy must capitalize on this like why do you think we do a comedy show is because ultimately that's what people like it makes it sort of fun and it talks to people's you know feelings it makes people identify with what we're talking about rather than just sort of understand it as more statistics and facts in a world of statistics and facts that don't excite you that best just kind of make you feel sort of tired and guilty and so really the implicit political divide that makes liberals a political unit is this conceptual one that their enemy is errors of fact lies and effective politics so in liberal austerity measures claim 120 000 lives it's not murder

because it was inevitable to call it murder to engage with this fact antagonistically or even just agonistically is incoherent to the liberal mind because it draws a dividing line between opposed groups of individuals and liberals believe division between people undermines the quest for facts so every gotcha continuity remain picks up about the brexit vote the overspend the rough manipulation whatever is implicitly based on imagining the division between truth and fiction to be a political one rather than a factual one that has a contested political meaning and this is also why liberals love to say judge us on our record meaning stop articulating political demands based on your interest and instead do politics as a calculus

of facts fascists don't talk down to the electorate because ultimately fascists represent or at least they don't talk down to the right electorate the white electorate the national electorate because fascists represent a real political tendency liberals talk down to the electorate because the electorate has forsaken facts that's why sort of the every day on sort of on online or even in person in the press whatever you'll hear endlessly the ah well the voters were wrong they didn't have all the facts they were tricked they were lied to there was fake news russians created you know facebook groups about how you know hillary clinton was actually a lizard or all this stuff right well that's people believe that because it's true to them and

then liberals say well it's not actually true and their response is just well of course you'd say that because you're one of the lizard people why would you say what's true i get my my my news i know the truth david vance told me um and and and and you're sort of part of the part of the problem and the sort of the endless apple polishing nerdery the just dorkishness is like actually i think you'll find if you look at the facts uh that uh hillary clinton is not a lizard in fact we even got a dna test to prove hillary clinton is not a lizard it's like well what's that matter like honestly what's how is that going to be ah i was wrong i thought hillary clinton was a lizard turns out she wasn't crazy so this is what socialists sort of have to understand i think

what we increasingly do understand so when we think about say the this the style of jeremy corbin um what he talks about is is you he sort of identifies that there are elites they are fucking you over and you have power he is empowering to you know listen to because simply because he says you know rise like lions he is saying you should get swept away should get swept away in this sort of mission for justice um and i think and i think that's sort of very effective he's not saying well no you voted wrong he's understanding that you have interests and that those interests are opposed to someone else and that we have to get the voters on side and we can't get them on side well sort of you know just bombarding them with a bunch of facts from homework class

so i i think that's it's very it's hopeful to see i guess i i just hope it's enough to you know turn back the tide of fascism before you know global warming kills us all you know what in two months before christmas so anyway what does moof say we have to do to fix our predicament i mean from that sort of little theoretical theoretical and sort of liberal politics digression i think we can see that i can we already have some of what moof says which is that politics has to sort of re harness the libidinal and has to sort of exist as real politics not as sort of post politics where there is no division between friend and enemy and politics is merely managerialism of capitalism we throw up our hands and say well the market's just going

to handle it and you know we're going to basically be glorified ribbon cutters it's like well no we have to go be political again and be actually political because the fascists have been political for a while i mean i think that's actually one of the one of the sort of strong points of her sort of quoting um schmitt and directly or indirectly alluding to someone like heidegger because you're saying well look we know that they are effective they're tapping into something and and they're tapping into something powerful and we can tap into that same thing but harness it basically for good so to fix our predicament moof says we have to radicalize democracy that is to say we must reclaim liberal democracy from its conflation with the capitalist mode of production it is

within this framework she writes of the constitutive principles of the liberal state the division of power universal suffrage multi-party systems and civil rights that it is possible to advance the full range of present-day democratic demands to struggle against post democracy does not consist in discarding these principles but in defending and radicalizing them so we radicalize democracy we move these concepts out of a merely formal dimension and aim to extend more of them into more of society the capitalist order creates a boss class than almost feudal relationships of the worker which means that sort of the principles of equality before the law for example the the the principles of civil rights of you know being able to say what you want for example

um it or it may be enjoyed outside of work but what about in work and what about as the boss gets more of sight of you outside of work um we do not enjoy those same rights and so radicalizing democracy means asking how we can extend those rights say of free speech to mean that yes the government won't punish you for what you say um not necessarily I mean obviously hate speech etc etc but let's say expressing a left political opinion that gets a lot of people fired we're aiming to organize a union that gets a lot of people fired so radicalizing democracy means understanding that sort of free speech must be more than formally guaranteed it must be like guaranteed into the workplace and that means curtailing the rights of the boss sort of quite

significantly because that's what political rights did political rights curtailed the sort of the privileges enjoyed by the sort of the nobles of um of of sort of of the 18th and 19th centuries and medieval times and etc etc etc blah blah hagellianism um and and if we can extend we understand that the next logical step with these rights isn't that they're done you know it's post politics says that those rights are extended and we have them good we're done let's um let's you know let let's let's tweet about our favorite harry potter books so that the so that bay prime minister justin trudeau will notice us no no no we have to push those rights into more and more of our of our of our of our of our lives um and that makes sense to me because those rights already

exist people already have a basis with them they already identify them with them and so if we make the case say this is what if we make the case for socialism not as a oh well it's more efficient actually uh and not by sort of quoting marks endlessly and if we make the case for curtailing the boss's power um because we're trying to actually give you more freedom we're trying to like extend the freedom you enjoy in the political sphere into the economic sphere god damn that's a powerful message why do you like remember like that's why remember like um jeremy corbin's made a video last year when he said you know the um the bankers at jp morgan have said we are a threat they're right we are a threat to them that is what because what he's saying is we are a threat to them

for you that the bankers at jp morgan they're sort of the reason that you can't pay your rent it's their interests that are sort of cutting that are sort of cutting benefits and creating universal credit it's so we can create the kind of economy where they thrive at your expense well we are a threat to them for you because we are instant we we are interested in liberty and we're interested in extending democracy um and so let's think about the difference between a left populist group and a liberal group people's vote looks at politics as something that happens sporadically among elites to solve problems but those elites the best thing we can do is petition them to sort of solve the problem in a way we want which is why people like brian cox and jolly and mom and whatever

are sort of so aghast that sort of brexit hasn't just been canceled yet why do you know whenever jeremy corbin goes to take a shit they're like uh taking a shit jeremy but why aren't you talking about brexit that's the problem that's the one we want you to solve whereas momentum a left populist group now look i know i sort of said i i i talk up sort of corbin and momentum sort of quite a bit on these and i think genuinely currently they are right now are probably our best chance to get sort of anything resembling socialism in our times sort of their imperfections notwithstanding i'm thinking of them more sort of stylistically so i know there are criticisms of both but momentum is a left populist group and it's looking at ways of building consensus and sort of building power

outside elite circles where pressing for a left populist hegemony in parliament through electoral means is merely one of many strategies so at the world transformed there are sort of panels on voting and and organizing people to sort of you know campaign there are also panels say on reforming the structure of the media and sort of changing the content of the media making our own content to sort of push out those Gramsci and hegemonic truths so you for example of it is sort of a hegemonic truth is um the is the sort of the sensibility of austerity then momentum makes a video about how um uh oh actually what happens the government cuts way cuts the budget and then the school budget is cuts the teachers can't be paid more so they can't go to the restaurants

so the restaurants can't hire builders and then everyone pays less in tax and then the budget has to be cut more and then it's just a spiral of cuts they have reef but that stuff like that as opposed to just sort of statistics but and almost entertainment media is what is going to sort of create these new beliefs among people uh right and so left populism sees politics as something more or less all of us do more or less all of the time and that's why people's vote on the other hand the liberal group can never think of doing anything except marching you know even their their attempt to try to make a momentum style of video like this that sort of grabs people's imaginations and sort of changes their ideas of well what society is and what it's for was basically

one where they were sort of doing the metaphor of brexit as a something bad happening to you that you have to speak up and speak out against they don't say why it's bad they don't they just they're talking to people who already agree with them to say hey remember this bad thing isn't it bad it's like yeah fine but you're not creating any new fact you're not sort of building a Gramsci in hegemony you're not building out the truth you're not you're not contesting anything you're just sort of complaining which is why ultimately liberal political movements tend to be more or less different versions of let me speak to your manager i mean what is the people's vote march but a mass demand to speak to the manager and and alistair cambell's sort of

view of of of the people's vote march is the most sort of significant march in british politics in the last sort of you know 20 years sort of downplaying the protest against the iraq war that sort of actually i think by by voicing by the which was a again i think a genuine populist protest voicing a sort of an opposition that unfortunately didn't work at the time but i think did you know create a kind of um a kind of of anti-intervention mood in british politics it sort of helped spur i think the some of the some of the tendencies that kept us out of syria for example good um i mean and and because that was that was a populist movement it wasn't merely complaining it was outrage the student protests that was they they they there was very that got

quite radical quite quickly i think it a bunch of sort of a bunch of people sort of came together a bunch of students came together in this idea that austerity is screwing them over but what is what do the what does this people's vote protest really have what unites these people what is there what burns for them nothing because they think politics ought to be boring they think it ought to be just problem-solving they want to go back in time to when things were normal which is why it sort of so shambolic um and i think that's that's sort of one of one of the one of the ways i see these things as opposed but sort of back to moof um she thinks that the way we institute this is sort of radical reform at all levels of society so specifically not revolution

you know so part of this is so there's this difference between what groups like you know momentum and and people's vote are doing right momentum is doing or at least starting to do something that looks like radical reform sort of building out alternative institutions and facts while pushing in sort of a a leftist hegemony through parliament fine good um but i'm kind of worried i'm gonna bum a saw out again because like i wonder if there is an inherent contradiction you know between durable democratization and mere if radical reformism i mean elites are an inherently revanchist class as a class are enormously patient the gilded age of the 1920s gave way to the radically reformist new deal of the sort of the middle of the 20th century of course the new

deal was not without its own problems it was like designed to keep black people out of out of any of its any of its benefits um but then when because the elites retained power even if diminished power the reduced they were able to use that power to accrue increasing returns and were poised to take advantage of the next crisis of capitalism when it occurred in the 1970s which was high inflation paired with low growth tied to skyrocketing skyrocketing energy costs to remold society in their image right so that any gain we make as long as there are elites is going to be by its very nature temporary so we go back to that thing i was talking about at the beginning what is the distinction between agonism and antagonism practically

when does agonism become antagonism and when is antagonism justified how can we face conservative or republican governments with mere agonism when they are antagonistic to sections of us at a time universal credit is state sanctioned murder by a mission friendliness as is as distinct from agonism as agonism is distinct from antagonism but at at some point right like you know we're sort of being killed and marginalized slowly by people who aren't going to give up power i mean look at the end of the day i'm not as i'm i sure many of the sort of tanky critics of the trash teacher know i'm not a Stalinist i'm not even a Leninist i'm a sort of i'm at base a democratic socialist i genuinely do believe that this is possible but i just i

have my own doubts about my own thinking and i worry that kind of it is rigged against us you know but you know call me a pessimistic optimist because that's where all these contradictions lead is to fun little uh invented phrases that we make up anyway that's why they all love technology too that's why matt Hancock keeps talking about apps or sam jima keeps being like ah delivery is so great it's because you know liberals look at technology as being like ah yes by improving this or that process that we're doing you can remove the inefficiencies from it we can create sort of new media of exchange and then we can reduce the irreducible complexity by merely sort of problem solving by by by by overcoming the political

divide as a problem you know we can we can make an app for the nhs that means we won't have to fund it adequately because funding it adequately you know means say increasing the tax base which ultimately is going to make one group worse off to make everyone else better off like there's no getting around that we are going to have to make some people worse off it's just the people we're making worse off or you know the richest people in the history of all of humanity and the people we're making better off is everybody else um but if we used if we say well though we have a technological solution we can be like okay great we don't have to tax anybody we can allow sort of the market to keep working and we can keep imagining that we are not political so like we

talk to you even so ask yeah hey well what's the relationship between technology and capitalism is that technology is kind of a a game of three card monty where we can say well no there is no divide there's just a problem waiting to be solved you know houston we have a probability but you know that's um i mean hey it's the whole basis for our show um anyway so yeah that's for a left populism uh and i think it's a very worthwhile read i think it actually sets out some ways that we can look at solving some of the problems that i talk about in all of the other kami book clubs anyway on to the rest of it uh so if you're listening to this uh you are a patreon subscriber although i think i might unlock it uh next week because i do kind of want people

to hear it i'm going to keep it for the patreon early access um so thank you uh if you haven't subscribed to the patreon do uh you can hear more of our fun talk for a very small amount of money and it's very good maybe is it very good i don't know at alex kealy tell him um other news so we're doing a live show on tuesday the 30th of october at the seckford come see us we'll try not to bum you out uh we might not succeed but hey who knows um it should be very fun uh tickets are uh available on event bright and you should get them uh if you want to commodify your descent with a t-shirt from lil comrad you can uh you can do that you can get uh your favorite quote from furra left populism uh put onto a t-shirt with our logo on the back it's a great way to cover your top

half so you don't get arrested for walking around naked in public or you don't get like grease on you while you're cooking very very effective and at the same time you'll be supporting like one of the only good kinds of business there is a worker owned one um uh finally our theme music is uh called here we go and it's available on spotify by jin sang i know i save this a lot but i think it's a very good tune and you should listen to it early and often uh and that's it from me so have a lovely lovely evening i hope that um by the time you get to work because most people i think listen to this on their commutes um that your job doesn't suck too much and that you can find some ways to take back a little bit of liberty from your boss but yes that's all from me i'll

talk to you all later and i hope to see some of you on the 30th good night everybody