Solid Workers

That moment when you're walking to work and remember a point you were supposed to make in last night's piece . And, perhaps, this is the most glaring error in Bolton and Pitts's Corbynism: A Critical Approach . In their book, they answer previous criticism for their being unconcerned with providing an alternative politics or strategy to Corbynism with a shrug of the shoulders and a dismissive meh. All well and good if you're interested in merely writing things and building careers as soi-disant Marxists with a neat little niche. And yet, their book is explicitly located as an intervention in strategic debates about socialism today. Remember, their argument is two-fold: the left should be in the business of defending its gains and holding the centre against the brutish, populist hordes. It's almost as if their declaration is a rhetorical flourish to try and position their critique of Corbynism from within the left for, well, marketing purposes . The second point fl...

In his recent interview on Politics Theory Other about the long-term decline of Conservatives and Conservatism, Andy Beckett suggests incuriosity about Corbyn and Corbynism is a symptom of the establishment right and establishment left's disengagement from political reality. It's a point this blog has made plenty of times . Apart from the ridiculous “explanation” favoured by sundry right wingers that a quarter of a million Trots were waiting for their moment to swarm into the Labour Party as soon as Jeremy Corbyn gave them the green light. But the claim of incuriosity does not apply across the board. Gavin Shuker recently had a go explaining Change UK's failure, an endeavour that, euphemistically speaking, left a lot to be desired. And last year we had published Corbynism: A Critical Approach by Matt Bolton and Frederick Harry Pitts, which claims to be a Marxist critique of Corbynism. For this reason alone it is worth considering. It begins, as you might expect, with an...

One of the key points this blog has hammered time and again is how the Conservative Party is in long-term decline, and many of its pathologies, from extreme short-termism to the predominance of unprincipled, incompetent chancers are symptoms of a slow burning crisis now coming to a head. I say slow burning because the argument the party is in long-term decline was first ventured by John Ross in his 1983 book, Thatcher and Friends: The Anatomy of the Tory Party . And as might readers know, I'm working on a book on the very same topic. What then does a book a stone's throw from 40 years of age reveal about the Tory party today? Quite a bit as it turns out. The main thrust of John's argument is based on the declining votes of the Tories since their peak in 1931. Prior to then, between 1859 and 1931 the party was in a long term ascendency , and assumed a dominant position from 1886. Of course there were peaks and troughs in both periods, but vote proportions plotted in a grap...

Have just finished reading Maurizio Lazzarato's The Making of the Indebted Man , a work that packs a helluva punch for such a slim volume. It covers everything: the origins of neoliberalism, the constitutive character of debt to the project, the 2007-8 crisis, social security reform, shifting governance in capitalist societies, a critique of the risk society thesis, and an advancement of a theory of the ubiquity of stupidity. Lazzarato, famed for being the originator of the concept of immaterial labour , is able to accomplish his wide-ranging analysis by drawing on the young Marx, Nietzsche of On The Genealogy of Morality , the late Foucault, and Deleuze and Guattari and remain entirely readable. You should therefore seek it out and read it for yourself. This is not a review by any means ( here's one , and more on Papa Lazz here ), but he does throw down a challenge to the work of Hardt and Negri long championed on this blog. First off, debt precedes exchange: in other words, ...

Just finished reading Ralph Miliband's (AKA Best Miliband) classic work, The State in Capitalist Society . Partly on the occasion of 50 years since its publication, partly because Alex recently had a show on it , and lastly because of some additional reading concerning the old book on the decline and fall of the Tories. The book plan is coming along nicely and can't wait to start writing properly, though if you've been following my commentary on the Tories since returning to blogging in 2012 you will have a good impression of the lines of argument. Anyway , reading always partially involves quote mining, so here is what he had to say about conservative parties. ... conservatism, however pronounced, does not entail the rejection of all measures of reform, but lives on the contrary by the endorsement and promulgation of reform at the least possible cost to the existing structure of power and privilege ... conservative parties ... remain primarily the defence organisations, ...

We're at the half-year mark, which means three months have passed by since last time . And so, for no reason in particular, here's what I've got through during the last quarter. Kill All Normies by Angela Nagle Corbynism: A Critical Approach by Matt Bolton and Frederick Harry Pitts Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov True Blues by Paul Whiteley, Patrick Seyd, and Jeremy Richardson Glamorama by Bret Easton Ellis Imperial Bedrooms by Bret Easton Ellis Edgework by Wendy Brown Injury Time by Beryl Bainbridge Leviathan Wake by James SA Corey Hawksmoor by Peter Ackroyd The Posthuman by Rosi Braidotti Great Expectations by Kathy Acker Displaced by Stephen Abarbanell On Populist Reason by Ernesto Laclau The Stories of Eva Luna by Isabel Allende The Timekeeper by Mitch Albom Crowds and Party by Jodi Dean Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem by Peter Ackroyd Caliban's War by James SA Corey Jeremy Corbyn and the Strange Rebirth of Labour England by Francis Becket...

Have an interest in the far left and Trotskyism? Perhaps a member of an organisation within these traditions, have a past activist record with them, or have developed an interest with the minutiae of left wing history? And happen to be in or near the Nottingham area on Monday 1st July between 7pm and 8.30pm? Then why not join me and Evan Smith, co-editor of Against the Grain and Waiting for the Revolution , and author of British Communism and the Politics of Race for an evening discussing Trotskyana, sectariana, far left history, Evan's work, and what the rich history of labour movement struggles in the UK and Australia have to teach us today. The event is at Five Leaves , Nottingham's radical bookshop. Tickets are £4 waged, £2 student/unwaged and you can book your place via events@fiveleaves.co.uk. Hope to see you there!

Growing up in the 1980s, communism didn't have a lot going for it. The taming of Siberia and the stellar achievements of the Soviet space programme were never talked about, and its depression-busting economic performance was long forgotten. The crushing conformity of Soviet life, its concrete vistas and secret police, and the queues in Moscow supermarkets for a single loaf of bread did a better job of queering the pitch for communism than voluminous anti-communist polemic and occasional speeches from Margaret Thatcher. Communism was poverty stricken, dictatorial, and backward - so much so the good people of the Eastern bloc countries wanted a piece of the capitalist action, and duly got it as the so-called "people's democracies" and the USSR came tumbling down. Capitalism, at least in the advanced West and Japan was dynamic, modern, raising living standards and appeared the wave of the future (or, if you like, the end of history ). Communism was dead. Its presence as ...

Populist politics is back in a big way. Nigel Farage's Brexit Party is upsetting the polls based on a very simple premise: Leave won the 2016 EU referendum, and the parliamentary elites are taking your Brexit away from you. Crude, not strictly speaking true, but effective . How do you beat Farage, then? How can the populist surge be pushed back and the Brexit Party made as irrelevant as, say, Change UK? Unfortunately, there's no quick fix - an effective counter to far right populism doesn't begin in the period immediately prior to a set of elections. This we know, or at least should know. We are, after all, talking about the collective wisdom - a term I'm using advisedly - of mainstream politics. How to get to grips with populism? On Populist Reason by Ernesto Laclau sounds like a good place for, well, precisely the reasons why his most famous work, co-written with Chantal Mouffe, got the brickbats. In their Hegemony and Socialist Strategy they provoked a great deal...

A great new show in which Alex interviews Adom Getachew about her new book, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination . As always, please support Alex's work here . More money = more quality interviews.

Broadsheet litcrits consider Glamorama among the blackest of Bret Easton Ellis's sheep. It's over long, it's repetitive, it goes nowhere, it's needlessly graphic, and dwells too hard on the superficiality of consumer culture like so many novels have done. For a novel heavily and self-consciously laden with mid-late 90s fashionistas, getting panned as unoriginal and derivative upon publication is pain indeed. Yet this is to miss a trick. Glamorama is a novel of its time, like all novels are, and was absolutely tethered to the contemporary zeitgeist . The 'critique of consumerism' argument is as lazy and a superficial a take as the culture Ellis sends up. What species of criticism is this? Of the shopping sucks killjoy-leftydom variety? Or a wearisome conservative worry about materialism (in the conventional, bourgeois sense) displacing real meaning and connection? This is why, read in their context, Ellis's novels are so compelling. They eschew the earnest...