Upstream - Richard Seymour

Episode Date: June 23, 2016

In this interview we hear from activist and writer Richard Seymour. We spoke about the Orlando shootings, Brexit, Corbyn & the Labour Party, Trump, the decline of unions, and where the Bernie Sanders movement can go now that the nomination seems assured for Hillary Clinton. This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

You are listening to Upstream. I'm Della Duncan, and today I'm in conversation with writer and agitator Richard Seymour. So hi, Richard. First question, I'm wondering if you can describe your background for our listeners and how you came to do the work that you do. Right, well I mean I come from Northern Ireland, moved to London in 96 and I spent a lot of time just doing random jobs, market research, all the rest of it. But through my blog I was noticed by a publisher who asked me to write a book about the pro-war liberals. And I did a reasonable job. And that enabled me to get further writing. So that's how I got into

it. And after that, I started doing a PhD at the London School of Economics. And your latest blog post, I believe, on the blog which is called Lenin's Tomb, you wrote about the recent shootings by Omar Mateen at the Pulse nightclub and how, or in general about shootings and how some people can look at gun control as one of the main reasons and other people have written a lot about masculinity, but you wrote about something not talked about as often. You wrote about the role of inequality in social competition. I'm wondering if you can explain what you mean by that. Yeah, well, I think you could even include toxic masculinity in that as part of that. So, I mean, first of all, talk about inequality. I mean, in the abstract, it means nothing, but concretely, it means inequality between men and women. It means inequality. But concretely, it means inequality between men and women. It means inequality between different social classes. It means inequality that is organized racially.

And the evidence suggests that where there is more of this kind of inequality, there's more violence. And where that's linked with widespread gun ownership, you're going to get more gun violence. So that's just reflecting on what the research tells us. And I'm suggesting that we try to granulate that. We try to find out what kinds of inequality, what kinds of experience of inequality matter. But there's another thing, which is it's not just inequality in itself. It's also linked to vicious social competition, you know, a dog-eat-dog world, backstabbing, and a kind of paranoid world that goes along with that,

where you can't trust your neighbour, you can't trust anybody around you. And that generates part of the psychic fuel for violence. And when you see some of the people who have carried out these massacres, and you look into the individual cases, I'm thinking of the likes of Elliot Rogers, how sensitive they are to social hierarchy and their place within it and what they expect of the world and how it lets them down they the entitlements that they have whether it's um their sense of race or masculinity or class or something else in elliot rogers it's

all three that's very clearly sort of linked into what they're doing. Now, it's not always directly politicized in that way, but you can certainly find aspects of social authority, hierarchy, competition, and, in a manner of speaking, alienation linked into that. Something similar is happening with the Brexit decision. And so, just for our listeners, so Britain's about to decide whether or not to stay in the EU. And this is on Thursday is the vote. And there's a lot of confusion as to who's for and against. And there's even splits between the Conservative Party. I'm wondering if you could explain, particularly for our US audience, but for people in general, why the Brexit decision, what it is about and why it's important. and also who's poised to benefit from either outcome? First of all there's always been a chunk of both the left and the right that has been highly hostile to the European Union for obvious reasons. It's a centrist neoliberal sort of pro business bloc and the right and left would have different reasons to oppose it. The right on

sort of sovereignty grounds, grounds of controlling migration, racial grounds, you know, those sorts of things. But also, in part, and of course, it depends what social class you're looking at. But on the right, there are those who believe that the European Union holds back British strength and power in the world. They believe that it holds back the pound, and that it holds back the pound and that it holds back the city's dynamism. And that if Britain only oriented in a hyper-Atlanticist way toward the United States and towards more global centres of profit and accumulation, Britain would be a lot more powerful. That's their belief. And you've got people from UKIP and others who've said, if we were not part of the European Union, we could have joined NAFTA.

We could have signed up to something like TTIP long ago. So it's not just a kind of isolationist thing, although there are elements of isolationism and Little England patriotism. But it's also part of a very, very free market ideology. They believe the European Union union is if anything not neoliberal enough too social democratic um so that's part of it and the left uh by and large since the 80s has lined up behind the european union not all of it the radical left has always had a critique of the european union, but the majority of the institutions of the Labour movement and of the Labour Party have rallied behind the European Union as the last

defence of certain social rights that are minimal, but they're taken for granted within the context of the European Union, they're guaranteed in law, in a context in which Mrs. Thatcher was absolutely devastating the left and the labor movement. So if you were a trade union leader in the mid-1980s and you were getting hammered, one of the responses to that was to embrace what was called the new realism. The new realism meant that you didn't try to fight the government, you didn't try to fight employers, you tried to negotiate the best deal you could in the given status quo. And that meant lining up with Europe.

So there is that. And then, of course, there is the radical left who are still those. Not very many of them, it has to be said, but there's a radical fringe that is still for Brexit. And they argue that even though in the short term, the major beneficiaries of Brexit would be the radical right, there would be the racists, there would be the nationalists, there is the potential that Brexit would create a crisis in the Conservative Party, a split, that it would disorganize them and create opportunities for the left. But more generally, in the long term, the weakening of the European Union would weaken the power of the business class,

would weaken the power of those neoliberal organizations and institutions, and would give the left more openings. So that's the lay of the terrain, if you like. So you mentioned, you know, neoliberalism and how that plays a part in it. And for me, just looking at it, it feels just like there's a lot from top officials in the IMF and even from former people in the Thatcher administration that have kind of admitted that neoliberalism was not what they had hoped and is largely a failed ideology. So we're just seeing more and more of this. So if people are really warming to this realization, why is there this push from UKIP? Where do you think this is coming from for even more neoliberal policies right now? taxi drivers, construction workers who are on loan contracts and things like that,

that sector of society has always been a bedrock of hard right Thatcherism. And their conditions of living, their everyday experience is one of vigorous, ruthless competition. And they feel that the European Union, with its laws, with its rules, with its regulations, is onerous and restrictive, and it prevents them from being able to make a profit so they want to be free from all that regulation so that they can pay workers less they can invest less in health and safety they can abate your regulations and they can make a bit more money and when you've got a a sort of an economy that is in a very bad way, that has been in crisis for a long, long time.

And I'm not just talking about the credit crunch. I'm talking about the fact that profit opportunities are so poor that businesses everywhere, but particularly in the United Kingdom, are hoarding cash. Hundreds of billions of pounds worth of cash that they're not investing and could be investing. In that circumstance, they'll look for anything to try and restore profitability. of billions of pounds worth of cash that they're not investing and could be investing, in that circumstance, they'll look for anything to try and restore profitability. Now, nobody's got any good answers. Even though everybody's saying, well, neoliberalism doesn't work, they don't have an alternative. This government is essentially giving us neoliberalism max, which basically means trying to use as many policy instruments as possible to reduce wages, to increase the

dependence on debt and speculation, and to open up the public sector to more and more encroachment by the private sector. So if you can't make a profit in the private sector, you can come into the public sector if you're a privileged corporation and make money off the NHS, make money off the schools, make money off some other area that has previously not been privatised. So that's what we're getting here. And the choices are between, at least in the sort of mainstream debate, are just between different iterations of neoliberalism. Jeremy Corbyn, as leader of the Labour Party,

has attempted to inject some progressive social democratic politics into this debate, but alas, all too late. And you wrote about this in your latest book about Corbyn. And I'm wondering if you want to just talk a little bit about the book and kind of the different insights or realizations that you came to as a result. insights or realizations that you came to as a result? Sure. Well, the book was written in a flush of enthusiasm. Actually, it was written in a month or two in early 2016, most of it. And it was based largely on a reading of the Labour Party's historical trajectory and its crisis, but it was also based on interviews with Labour Party members. And that was a new thing for me, because I come from the left of Labour left. That is,

I come from the left that has never had anything to do with the Labour Party. When I moved to London, the idea that you would join the Labour Party if you're on the left just didn't make sense, because it was ruled by Tony Blair, it was middle of the road, it was leaning increasingly to the right. But actually getting out there and talking to Labour Party members and learning about their experiences of trying to organise in the party, I got a great sense of, first of all, just how much people underestimate the residues of left-wing organization that still existed within the party well before Corbyn came along, but also just how incredibly difficult they were going to have it, because they've always been a marginal force within the Labour Party. And that's not an accident. That's by design. That's by dint of the way the party has always been organized in terms of its constitutional structures,

its makeup, and its ruling ideologies, which tend to be constitutionalist and electoralist, and privileging those forms of activity rather than, say, mass activity, militancy, and so on. So what I came out of this with was a great deal of sympathy for what Jeremy Corbyn was trying to do. I think he's trying to reconstruct social democracy and to address its crisis from the left, because in every European society, at least, European social democracy is in a crisis. It's in a deep crisis. It's undergoing a series of problems in terms of electability, in terms of membership, and all the rest of it. But previously, attempts to address this have usually come from the right. New Labour can be seen as an attempt to address it from the right by becoming more of a pro-market organisation.

Jeremy Corbyn represents the first attempt to address the crisis of social democracy from the left. It's just one that's against all odds, because they're going to come up against the resistance, first of all, of the traditional powers within the Labour Party, the old elites, the old managers. They're going to come up against the resistance of the media. They're going to come up against the resistance of the opposition conservatives. They're going to come up against the resistance of business. And frankly, they're going to come up against the resistance of many people within the state apparatuses themselves, civil servants and so on. So it's an incredibly liberating time in a way because it creates new possibilities. It's just that the specific things that Corbyn would like to achieve, the odds are hugely against it. Knowing what you know about politics and economics and particularly what you were saying about the people who are voting most in favor of neoliberalism and all of that, how are you kind of negotiating your own role as an academic and want to share how it's, you know, how different things are impacting people, but yet you see people voting particular way or making decisions particular way. How do you kind of negotiate that in your life?

Well, I mean, first of all, I'm not predominantly an academic, at least not yet. Most of what I do is writing. And that's how I intervene. And that's how I negotiate it. Everything I do is based upon how am I going to write something and make a case that can be presented to the wider public. So what I do essentially is I figure out where I think are the main ideological fault lines, where are the main points where it's possible to intervene because quite a lot of the time what you find is that where there is a seeming consensus, whether it's about the economy or something else, generally speaking there is a contradiction somewhere that we may all appear to agree on things like the necessity of economic growth and all the rest of it.

Polls may suggest that most people support austerity. But when you granulate the findings and when you look at what popular ideology really consists of, it's something more like an unstable balance of forces. The people hold conflicting ideas, conflicting values, and that the emphasis can be shifted. The argument can always be framed a different way and so that's what i spend most of my time trying to do and i mean just in terms of the corbin book and how it relates to this the corbin book is very much an attempt to shape things uh in a particular way by saying to people young people who are becoming radicalized who are looking to jeremy corbin by preparing them

for the likelihood that they will have to go back to the drawing board and start again. If they're prepared for that, they will be a lot tougher, a lot more resilient. If they're not, and they get their hopes inflated wildly out of proportion, if they invest too much in one personality, then unfortunately what will happen is what usually happens, they will go back to passivity, they will be demoralized, and we will have lost this opportunity. So what I'm trying to do is inject a degree of proportionate pessimism. So your main audience for your book is young people then?

In my experience, it's not as simple as that, but it's addressed predominantly to people who are coming to labourism and socialism who aren't ideologically fixed yet. But when I've gone out to meetings and talked to people across the country, as I have been doing, usually to Labour Party members, quite a lot of the time, depending on where you go, there's quite a lot of older people there too. Quite a lot of the time, depending on where you go, there's quite a lot of older people there too. So what you tend to have within the Labour Party at the base of Corbyn is the old hard left that comes from the 1980s and has been through those struggles, been through those battles when they were beaten. And they're often very traumatised, but they have survived and they're resilient. And they still carry with them the habits of that older left. And the younger people who've been through more direct action,

social movement type of activity, and they bring an experience that is shaped by climate camp, by Occupy, by the student movement. And they are probably more culturally literate in terms of reaching out to people. They're more literate in terms of social media. So some way, I think that the argument has to be poised to both groups of people in terms of helping them to make the best of both of their resources, because they both have different strengths and they both have different weaknesses. strengths, and they both have different weaknesses. And the worst thing that would happen is if those two groups ended up in a kind of generational cultural struggle over the meaning of Corbynism, they have to come to some sort of detente. So let's move over to United States politics now. So we've heard you draw parallels between what's going on with Brexit and also the fear mongering campaign tactics of Trump.

Can you talk a little bit about the parallel there? OK, well, fairly straightforwardly, I think that and I'm not sure what the research says about the USA, but certainly in the UK, the research tends to suggest that those who are most susceptible to this kind of resentful nationalism that has been growing for some time are not necessarily the poorest, not necessarily one class or other, but sections of different classes whose life trajectory has been on the decline. And that's what we see with UKIP. What's very interesting about them is that they're the one party in the UK

that genuinely has a cross-class basis. They have a significant amount of support from medium to large employers, they have a significant amount of support from the lower middle class, and they have a significant amount of support from a certain group of skilled and semi-skilled workers. So in the US, my understanding from looking at the polls and so on, is that Trump actually is also quite cross class. I mean, this is often represented in the media as if he's overwhelmingly dependent upon upon those who are higher up the income brackets and actually disproportionately drawing support from people who've been through college. That says something. So I think what's happening here is in part that large clusters of people from different social classes, often with highly regionalized experiences of decline,

often with highly regionalized experiences of decline are gravitating to the radical right as a defensive maneuver to attack the ascendant cultural forces particularly those cultural forces that are demanding equal rights for lgbt the demanding equal rights for women that are demanding some forms of economic redistribution so So, of course, the energies behind Trumpism began, I think, with the McCain campaign, and then very shortly after that with the Tea Party. And it was really very much organized a kind of racialized anti-socialism. You know, the idea that Obamacare was essentially equivalent to black people taking your stuff, you know. And behind that, there was a narrative that, well, these feckless black people taking your stuff you know and behind that there was a narrative that well these

feckless black people and the poor they they borrowed recklessly they spent recklessly and they drove us into crisis and now we're suffering and you're going to tax us and our property to pay for them that's essentially the logic of this that's the resentment the kernel of resentment behind all this so and of course that's some of the basis for the support for neoliberal economics. And that's very similar to what's happened in the UK. Although the racial dynamics are slightly different, it's much more focused on migration. It's a very similar type of compound. You've been listening to an interview with Richard Seymour.

He'll be back in the second half of our show. Thank you. Black blood in my heart In my soul it's bleeding out Into fields and black bloom And rotting pastures it won't stop oh oh oh

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oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh That was Black Blood by Witch Dream Mansion. Welcome back. We're in conversation with Richard Seymour. So this show is called Upstream, and it's about kind of going upstream to what are the root causes of these issues. And, you know, I'm hearing you talk a lot about, kind of anger, resentment and kind of stuckness and all this kind of stuff. What is kind of the root problem here that we're facing in the system that we're in?

In a word, it's capitalism. I think that we are living in a strange kind of era in which capitalism is weaker than it has ever been, and yet the alternatives are also much, much weaker. So we are seeing the germinal rebirth of certain ideologies of socialism, though they're quite nebulous, they're not formed yet. But we've also just got a lot of people going through tremendous amounts of social suffering. In the UK, for maybe about eight years now, there's been a consistent decline in living standards and a decline in real wages. Actually, in the US, my understanding is that real wages have been flatlining for about 30 years, almost

even more than that, and that there's been a real terms decline since the 2000s. So it's a very strange situation that we're in. People have been experiencing progressively worsening living conditions, but the infrastructures of labor movement organization, of left-wing organization, of socialist militancy, have been in such decline and have been in such disarray that it's been very difficult to see anybody do anything about it and If you're in certain areas and I again I can refer to certain Experiences in Britain where there used to be a steel industry Or there used to be a mining industry or some big manufacturing concern and that was the major source of local jobs

and it was unionized and local the major source of local jobs and it was unionized and local migrant or second generation or third generation migrant communities were integrated into that workforce and that was the basis for militancy and class solidarity and all the rest of it then you had a certain sense that you could do something practical with that anger and with whatever was being done to you. But since these forms of organization have been progressively defeated, and let's just register the scale of that defeat, union density has been declining year upon year in Britain and the United States. Strike rates have fallen to the all-time historic low in the United Kingdom and the United States.

And in the United States, I notice the scale of disruption caused by strikes is so low that they don't even bother to put a figure on it anymore. They used to offer you a percentage of total working time lost to industrial action. It's got below 0.005% so that it's not even worth counting anymore. Now, if you're a union organisation and your main job is to defend working and the main way in which you can do that is to disrupt the flow of profit to make business pay attention to you, to make them realise that they need workers' cooperation,

that level of disruption to the flow of profit is negligible. So the weakness of the left and of the Labour movement is leaving this space in which the most reactionary forces turn out to be the best organised forces. And I don't want to exaggerate their ability to encroach upon formerly left-wing areas, because what we tend to find is that they start to organise the old right-wing voters in those areas but nonetheless the fact that they can build there and that other forces aren't building there

says something very poignant about where we are and if i had to place a bet i would say that we have got a job those of us on the left have a job that will take a generation. It will take a generation to reconstruct a habitable, viable, and effective left. So one of my questions then is, you know, it kind of feels sometimes like it's either capitalism or socialism or communism, you know, Marxism in general. But what about, because I'm looking a lot at inequality, but also the idea of gross national happiness. And this idea of even in a country like Bhutan that is relatively unequal, potentially the folks could be happier there because they're basing their economy on well-being and happiness instead of on growth. Whereas in a place like Denmark or Sweden, they may be more equal, but maybe not necessarily happier because of philosophy or something like that. So I'm wondering what your thoughts are about that, whether do you see it as kind of a black and white, either, you know, socialism or capitalism or eco-socialism maybe in capitalism?

Or, you know, are there these other ways that we can change beyond that paradigm? that we can change beyond that paradigm? Okay, well, I think we'll always be looking for intelligent mediations because socialism doesn't have a blueprint. Nobody knows exactly what it would look like. We know roughly what kinds of social organization would be desirable. If you're a socialist, you have a certain sort of desideratum. But in the interim, in the long interim, there's always going to be a struggle for certain mediation. So what forms of capitalism can we live

with until we can develop a basis for socialism, I think is part of the struggle. What I would say, though, I'm very skeptical of any politics based on happiness. And one of the reasons for that is that I think happiness is, first of all, in a way, it's highly manipulable. And second of all, it's not necessarily a reliable indicator of anything in particular. If you look at surveys that have been done in Northern Ireland, where I come from, one of the most telling things is that people were happiest during the wars, during the worst periods in the wars. And one can imagine all sorts of reasons why that might be so. One can imagine that, for example, the struggle gave people's lives a certain kind of meaning that is increasingly drained in a post-political, post-democratic world. Nonetheless, that is not a state of affairs I would want to gravitate towards. And I would also worry that governments would find ways to calibrate

certain measures of happiness and to engage in certain forms of, for example, behavioral economics in order to shape subjectivity such that people would confess to being happy in circumstances where they really shouldn't be happy. I'm thinking in the UK of the way in which young people particularly blame themselves for situations that are deeply unjust. So there were a series of interviews carried out with the young and unemployed before the last election. And it was put to them that it was often said that they had not worked hard enough, that if they worked a bit harder, they would be in a better position and they would be employed and so on. And they were asked, did they believe this? And they said, yeah, they did believe it. Now, I'm not claiming that that made them happy to think that. What I'm claiming is that people's

feelings about their situations partly are contingent upon ideological struggle. They're partly contingent upon the existence of plausible alternatives. And sometimes happiness is not a state that we want to aspire towards. Sometimes restlessness and discontent is a good thing. And, you know, if you come into a situation as an agitator, as I often hopefully will do, I might be accused of making people unhappy. But that's a situation that ironically I'll be quite happy with. What are you looking at for your research for your PhD? It was a study of the role of Cold War anti-communism in the organization of the defensive Jim Crow in the Deep South, not just the Deep South, but the South as a whole. And the argument was essentially that, first of all, the Cold War anti-communist period helped to disrupt a civil rights coalition that was incipiently emerging out of the sort of New Deal coalition.

And that lasted from about 45 to 54. And then subsequently, anti-communism migrated to the South and where a lot of little mccarthy institutions were set up to terrorize the naacp to terrorize civil rights organizations to ban them to prescribe them to hunt them uh to hound them out of the state and to polarize politics very far to the right and that was very effective at least for a short period of time. But once the Cold War anti-communist consensus began to break down, and once the global struggles against colonialism began to come to the fore and displaced the Cold War optic, that's when the civil rights movement began to make real strides.

That's not the only thing that's going on, but I fit it in there as part of the picture. And I use the sort of language of Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist theorist, to make sense of some of this. So really, your work is trying to tell the story of Marxism as how it's helped, and kind of how this anti-Marxism is not necessarily totally grounded in something. It's kind of challenging that. Well, I mean, a lot of anti-communism was grounded in something. It was grounded in the USSR, the fact that it was a dictatorial society, the fact that they had invaded other societies in Eastern Europe.

So it had a basis. It's just that it was extrapolated from illegitimately, so that not only was the Communist Party USA falsely depicted as working under the long arm of Moscow, which is far too simplistic, not really how things worked, but the wider left was regarded as tainted by association. And so a lot of left-wing civil rights organizations that were organized around the cpus and did do good work and were valuable were broken up and hunted and taken to court and had all sorts of problems so i'm not trying to make any simplistic claims about the value of communists and marxists in that situation they did a lot of things some of of them were productive, some of them were

unproductive. But what I am trying to say is that anti-communism, as a specific way of organizing political struggles, goes a bit further than just saying, you know, Marxists have their faults, communism has its faults, or that communists are often slavishly loyal to overseas regimes, or whatever. It goes beyond that. It's what one theorist called black hole anti-communism. It collapses everything into a singularity so that all manifestations of left-wing agitation or civil rights agitation became regarded as coming from the same satanic source, the USSR. So that's essentially what I'm talking about. So back to US politics. So there's a debate among the left around the Sanders campaign and Hillary Clinton. And I'm curious if you have any connections between Corbyn and Sanders. And also,

since it looks like Sanders won't make it past the convention, people are struggling, including myself, as to who to vote for, whether you should vote for Hillary or for Jill Stein and stick with values. I'm wondering if you have any thoughts about that. So essentially, I think there is a connection between Sanders and Corbyn. I think that Sanders is slightly more popular than Corbyn. But I think they both come from a similar political moment. And how I would describe that is that for some years now, decades actually, the structures of representative democracy have been entering into a decline and increasingly a crisis on all fronts, party membership, voting, party identification. So what we're seeing is people are increasingly detached

from the structures of representative democracy the mirror of democracy is cracked and warped and people no longer recognize their reflection in it and that also extends to the media the media is if you like the representation of representation it tells us how the political world reflects us but people no longer feel reflected in the media either so there's this general cynicism towards the state and towards the media and towards the old political elites and that creates a space in which new forces can come to the fore and these new forces whether it's Podemos in Spain, Syriza in Greece, Corbyn in Britain, Sanders in the USA. These forces are often very, very weak

in and of themselves. They are not vibrantly strong. They just happen to have been able to exploit a weakness on the part of the old governing elites. So I think that's the connection between the two. And obviously, that means that they have some other things in common as well, most saliently of which they are despised by the establishment forces in their own parties. Corbyn by the Labour right and Bernie Sanders by the Democratic Leadership Council. As to the coming election, I personally would not vote for Hillary Clinton. That's just me. I couldn't bring myself to do that because I think that her form of politics is far too complicit in the trends that lead to Trumpism. think the kind of corrupt centrism, the pro-militarism, the sort of pursuit of neoliberal politics, which produces inequality and produces a lot of social misery, the mass incarceration, all the stuff that Hillary Clinton has been complicit in over the years. And the fact that she lies through her teeth. I mean, you know, talk about Trump. Hillary Clinton is somebody

who will come out and make up a story about her adventures in Bosnia, and when caught out about it, will make up another lie in order to double down on it. And she is not embarrassed about this. I find that an indefensible position. I don't see how she can possibly be a viable candidate for the Democratic Party. I think she's a candidate for them to lose with. Perhaps in normal circumstances, when they had much more control over the political system, they could rely on someone like Hillary Clinton. She's not a politician without skill. But this is not that type of situation. People are angry, and they don't want to be lied to, and they're sick of being patronized to. And Hillary Clinton, for some reason, she just can't help it. She can't resist lying to people, and she can't resist patronizing them as well. That awful, odious moment during her campaign when she said, I know the young people aren't supporting me, but I still support them. I think if I was a young person in the United States, I would find that incredibly condescending. So there are all sorts of reasons why I would not support Hillary Clinton. But apart from the negative point, there is also a positive point.

What I would like to see if I was living in the United States, coming out of the election, was not just the status quo in the form of Hillary Clinton getting an overwhelming majority or some horrendous outcome in which Donald Trump sweeps to office by energizing his base while Hillary Clinton demoralizes hers, which is just as possible, I would actually think that if the left made a good showing, if Jill Stein got over 5%, for example, that would be a crisis for the Democratic Party leadership. And it would push the whole discussion a bit more to the left. And it would energize quite a lot of people. And it would give a lot of people hope for remaining organized. Because one of the biggest challenges now is how do you keep people

organized who've been involved in the Sanders campaign? The Sanders campaign was often spoken about as a social movement. And of course, it isn't that. It's an electoral campaign. The Sanders campaign was often spoken about as a social movement. And of course, it isn't that. It's an electoral campaign. An electoral campaign stops existing when the election stops existing. How do you perpetuate a social movement? I think that one way you could do that is to harness it to the Stein campaign for the time being, and then link it back into the other campaigns that have always been in the background here, the campaign for $15 per hour, the campaign against police violence, or Black Lives Matter, and all the rest of it. So I would try to look a bit beyond the election itself,

see what kind of situation, what kind of terrain do we want to face after the election. Personally, I would like to see an energized, optimized left, optimistic left, and not one that felt cowed by Hillary Clinton, and not one that was terrified of Donald Trump. And what are the things you're working on right now and some of the questions that you're thinking about right now? Right. Well, having just finished the Corbyn book, I'm doing most of what I'm doing at the moment is a lot of publicity events. So I recently did an event in Waterstones, a major bookshop in the centre of London. And I've been doing launches across the country and talking to members of the

public, members of the Labour Party and so on. So that's taken up a lot of my time. Otherwise, I'm doing the odd article here and there to keep money coming in. And I finished teaching for the year. I do have a book coming up, and I'm working on that. Unfortunately, I can't really talk about it because I have to wait and see whether publishers are going to dig it. But it's a major project, and I'm very optimistic about it. I'm very hopeful for it. So it will be more, actually, I should say, it will be more in the domain of psychoanalysis than politics for once,

although it will inevitably have a political thrust. And people can find out about it on your blog, right? People can always find out what I'm up to on my blog, or they can find my Facebook page or my Twitter page. Wonderful. Thank you so much, Richard. Thank you. You've been listening to an upstream interview with Richard Seymour. For more information about him and his work, visit leninology.co.uk. And for more interviews and episodes, please visit www.economicsfortransition.org. In the whole place Flowers blooming from our boats that break

To the morning we run To shoreline Calling us to speak of serenity Waves under the earth and rocks Casting ghostly shadows Tall like diamonds I love you.