The Fires of Moloch - Introduction

Warning: long post - see here.

Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money!

              Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! 

              Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb! 

Alan Ginsberg - Howl

Introduction

On 25^th March 1586 Margaret Clitherow was crushed to death. She was stripped of her clothes, and her face was covered with cloth. After she had been laid down on a sharp rock, the door from her own house was placed on her front, and was slowly piled with rocks and stones. This grotesque penalty was commanded by the York assize as retribution for Clitherow's refusal to enter a plea with respect to the charge of harbouring Catholic priests; doing so would have resulted in the arrest and torture of her three childrenⁱ.

Some centuries later, on September 11^th 2012, Salma Yaqoob, one of the most prominent Muslim women in British politics, resigned from the left-of-centre RESPECT coalition. Yaqoob, who has described her own politics as 'old Labour', had fallen out with RESPECT figurehead George Galloway, who had recently described the alleged rape of two Swedish women by Julian Assange as 'a failure of sexual etiquette'. In an interview she explained “to have to make a choice between [George Galloway's anti-imperialism] and standing up for the rights of women was a false choice.”ⁱⁱ

These stories of two women, both tied up intimately with the intersection of politics and religion in Britain, call into question the dominant narrative about that intersection, not only in Britain but throughout the world. Clitherow's murder was part of the birth-pangs of the Church of England, an institution now widely regarded as the paradigm case of religious breadth and theological moderation, whilst also being thoroughly integrated into the British state and key sectors of civil societyⁱⁱⁱ. Yaqoob, on the other hand, is a Muslim, who takes her faith to be integrally linked to her left-wing politics, a politics which amongst other things is manifest in a passionate concern for women's liberation. The view that “Islam should guide social and political as well as personal life” - if the spectrum of doctrines thus described is sufficiently unified to be called a view - is known as Islamism, and haunts the Western imagination^iv. If Marx and Engels were correct in 1848 to name the spectre then lurking in the interstices of society as communism, a modern rewrite would have to speak of Islamism.

I take no pleasure in the fact that socialism has receded from the horizon of political possibility^v. In fact, as may become clear, I take this to be part of the problem for how our contemporaries tend to think about politics and religion. This is hardly a popular view, and I urge the reader who doesn't entirely share my political sympathies to persist, since the main task of this short book is negative – I want to call into question, by a series of provocations and reflections, a hegemonic account of the current state of theopolitical play. That account, far from being a bulwark of human decency against the barbarism of religious fanaticism, serves to provide ideological support to both state violence and the exploitation of human labour which this violence permits to flourish.

Liberal thought, representing as it does the key modern support for the state in the realm of ideas, has always been terrified of people with problematic beliefs about the religious. In his Epistle on Toleration, Locke explicitly excludes both atheists and Catholics from the remit of the proposed toleration^vi. The former cannot be bound by “promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of human society”, whereas the latter “deliver themselves up to the protection of another prince”, namely the Pope. These days many states find the courts, the police, and the fear of starvation satisfactory defences of the bonds of oaths, and can therefore dispense with the Almighty's services. Meanwhile, at least in Europe and America, a good deal of the heat has been taken off Catholics, since Muslims too are now regarded with suspicion because of dual allegiance, as evidenced by the repeated demands on 'the Muslim community' to distance itself from ISIS^vii.

Locke's present-day successors are more likely to be found in television studios or the opinion pages of liberal newspapers than in society coffee houses. We have deferred long enough an encounter with the story they have to tell about religion. This is, with minor variations depending on who is doing the telling, as follows:

Religion can have a place in modern society. It is, after all, none of the state's business what people do in private. If you want to miss your Sunday lie-in and go to church, or go to the mosque, or the synagogue, or whatever – that's fine – as long as you pay your taxes and obey the laws of the land. The problem with religion is when it exists in extreme or radical forms – then it becomes a problem. Such religion is incompatible with being a good citizen: how can one be both British and a radical Islamist? There is a particular problem with Islam at the moment. The solution is for young Muslims to be encouraged – by a series of civil society initiatives (ranging from the Prevent strategy in the UK, to bans on distinctive Islamic clothing in the cause of French laicité) – away from extremism. Islam itself stands in need of a Reformation, of the sort that produced the possibility for religious tolerance at the beginnings of Western modernity.

It deserves comment that this narrative, at home as it is in Guardian columns, finds disturbing echoes on the far right. Groups like the, increasingly explicitly fascist, English Defence League, the pan-European Pegida movement, and the Dutch PVV present themselves as defenders of cherished freedoms^viii. And the implicit association between reformed religion and civic peace has been trumpeted for years by the Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland, not widely regarded as an organ of the liberal left.

Suggestive though these unsettling affinities are, the focus of this book is on undermining more mainstream proponents of the account of religion and politics outlined above. Implicit in this is the claim that modern society as it presently exists, that is (more or less) liberal capitalist society, is conducive to human flourishing. Outside of the rarefied climes of liberal political philosophy this is rarely supported with argument, and is usually assumed to need no such support^ix. Against this liberal acquiescence, I will afford existing reality no presumption of ethical legitimacy. Explicit in the account are the following claims:

1. That religion is separable from society, both in the sense that religion can be understood apart from wider society, and in the sense that a religious believer can, with integrity, exist as a citizen in the public sphere in such a way that her deep religious commitments do not affect her citizenship.
2. That extreme, or radical, manifestations of religion are damaging in a way that more moderate ones are not.
3. That there is a particular problem, appropriately described in terms of unreformedness, with Islam, and that supporters of human freedom should call on more moderate Muslims to encourage a process of reformation.

Against these I believe that:

1. Religion is a social phenomenon, and cannot be understood adequately apart from the social totality in which it occurs, and into which it feeds. The separation of person-as-citizen from person-as-religious is a product of alienation inherent in the separation of state from civil society, and should be overcome in both thought and practice^x.
2. That some (but not all) forms of religious practice that are extreme and radical, on any reasonable understanding of those terms, should be applauded, whilst some very moderate forms of religion are complicit in horrific violence, not least the violence of states and capital.
3. Islam is in no different position in these respects than other religions; it has merely been thrust into the limelight by geopolitical attention, motivated in large part by the concerns of the oil industry, on the arab world, and the unresolved conflict in Palestine. Islamophobia is a genuine phenomenon, a form of racism, and in its liberal variant should be understood in terms of orientalism and the recurrent liberal trope of the defence of civilisation against barbarism.

It should by now be apparent how the stories of Clitherow and Yaqoob fit my view better than the dominant one. On the one hand we have a particularly brutal instance of religiously-motivated state violence against a woman, perpetrated in the cause of the very reformed religious order that is supposed to provide the conditions for religious pluralism. On the other, a woman in whose entire political outlook sticks two fingers up to the separation of religion and politics, ends up supporting exactly the kind of cause (women's rights; justice for victims of rape) that the pedlars of that outlook tend to regard as best served by liberalism. Reality is more complicated than the dominant view allows. Such is often the way with ideology.

Having laid my theoretical commitments on the table, I will proceed in a much less systematic way. What follows is less an ordered argument than a loosely connected series of interventions, aimed at tempting readers in thrall to liberal approaches to religion and politics away from these. The temptation is intended to be particularly strong to those sympathetic to left-wing critiques of capitalism and state violence; in fact, I hope to expose the holding of these positions in combination as untenable.

The first chapter argues for a view that religion is a practice, and that an understanding of religious phenomena cannot be separated adequately from a theory of society as a whole. The next subjects the current public discourse around radicalisation and extremism to critique, and argues for a liberative form of extremism, that opposes the violence of both states and fundamentalists. The following essay explores the idea of the state as a jealous god as a means of gaining insight into liberalism's difficulties with religious allegiance, and of suggesting that liberals are not themselves free of the kind of absolute loyalties and binding imperatives they find so troubling in others. I next use Said's concept of orientalism to discuss Islamophobia, and ask questions about the reasons contemporary capitalist society produces this form of racism. Finally, I look at ways of reading religious narratives that, whilst no doubt extreme and radical, provide resources for struggle against the nightmare of the present. Ernst Bloch will provide the background here.

Be in no doubt that the present is a nightmare. Whilst you have been reading this, people have died of hunger – hunger that is preventable in that that humanity has the technological resources to prevent it, but also not preventable in that the way society is currently organised prevents the harnessing of these resources from being an immanent possibility. It is striking, given that this is the case, that a good number of intellectuals, as well as Richard Dawkins, seem to think that the most urgent problem in today's world is the persistence of religion. It is, however, baffling that a good number of professed leftists give the impression of agreeing with them. It is best therefore in ending this introduction to minute this widespread hostility on the left to any discussion of religion that goes beyond denunciation. Terry Eagleton has described the phenomenon well,

...what they usually write off is a worthless caricature of the real thing, rooted in a degree of ignorance and prejudice to match religion's own. It is as though one were to dismiss feminism on the basis of Clint Eastwood's opinions of it^xi.

My pet genealogy of this state of affairs notes the enduring influence of two vulgarisations of Marxism, the scientistic determinism of the Second International and the shallow dialectical materialism of Stalinism. Whether or not this is correct, the problem is not simply a theoretical one. That many leftists have a crude and undiscriminating approach to religion should be a real source of political concern. Increasingly, capitalist states are legitimising themselves predominantly in terms of their capacity to protect their citizens from religious extremists without and within. It is not the job of the left to justify existing society, yet in singing from the anti-extremist hymn sheet on the basis of a visceral hostility to all things religious far too many are doing precisely that.

i

Religion book

Some time ago, I mentioned that I was writing a book on religion. Work and illness intervened to halt that project, but I thought it might be worth sharing it, in its existing fragmentary state. The following posts will be the introduction and first chapter, such as they are, minus footnotes (get in touch if you'd like these). I may share more at some point.

Still singing Galway Bay

It is a mark of a certain kind of good song that it sounds good when sung drunk. I Will Survive, in spite of being a good song of a different sort, does not fall into this privileged category, as many veterans of pub karaoke have yet to learn. Some songs, the baleful Chelsea Dagger being an example lodged in my medium-term memory, not only do not sound good when sung drunk, but are also simply bad songs.  Such is this vale of tears we inhabit that these songs none the less reverberate down many a high street on a Friday night. The Pogues and Kirsty Maccoll's Fairytale of New York, a song that is very much of the moment, it being both a week from Christmas and the fifteenth anniversary of Maccoll's death, meanwhile occupies an elite position. It is a good song, that sounds good when drunk, and is often sung drunk.



At this point I should apologise to an Irish friend who nurtures an impressive loathing of the song, the result of years of over-exposure, confirmation if it were needed that familiarity sometimes really does breed contempt. I think there are things to be said in favour of Fairytale's greatness, since I am unfashionable enough to think that one can actually argue about the worth of art, as well as being sufficiently non-elitist to think that a song's retaining its poignancy when sung by a bunch of forty-something blokes with a blood alcohol content that would make even its author wince counts in favour of that worth.

At this point a nervous critic of a certain sort will catch a whiff of sentimentality. The accusation of sentimentality is one that needs to be handled with care. Its use is shot through with a patrician disdain of popular affect. On this usage, it is sentimental to set up a roadside shrine to the victim of a traffic accident, whereas shuddering in one's seat at the unfolding of a sophoclean tragedy is magnificent. It is a creed for refined monsters. There is, however, a more cutting, and less problematic way of criticising a work's sentimentality. This was at play in Oscar Wilde's barb that 'one must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing'. There is a type of sentimentality that is undesirable because it occludes the truth, summoning our emotions to its aid in this task. In the case of Dickens' novel the untruthfulness resides in the character of little Nell herself, a child who is too diabolically saintly to have inhabited this planet. Rather more damaging is the sentimentality that arises around war. The first casualty of this is, notoriously, truth, but it is patriotic fervour, pride, tears for our boys, and cheers for our heroes that do the killing.

Fairytale is emphatically not sentimental in this latter sense. It is brutally truthful about human failure and fractured relationships. The fake snow at the beginning of the music video in no way prepares us for the lyrical horror that follows. MacGowan's lyrics do not  romanticise the characters whose drink-sodden, hate-filled relationship they narrate, even though they portray them sympathetically. Words and music cohere beautifully, the upbeat accordion-backed call and response carries an exchange between a couple whose contempt for one another is real, but who seem to be unable to shake the need to tell one another this. It is perhaps surprising that large numbers of people quite so readily sing along with lyrics like: 'you're a bum/ you're a punk/ you're an old slut on junk': a point to which I'll return.The strings towards the end, far from being festive musical chintz, add an ironic underlining to the male protagonist's insistence that things might be looking up. He is, we are left in no doubt, a deluded idiot, and yet we cannot help rooting for him.

It is for this reason that Fairytale's popularity gives us some reason for hope. I do not want to try to convince my friend to change his mind about the song, but I do want to suggest that there is something interesting about its continued appeal. What I've just described is a track soaked in moral complexity, charting the sheer mess of human existence. These themes are no more approved of in contemporary society than the cigarettes and alcohol prominent on MacGowan's piano throughout the video. Ours is an age of censure, of a law from on high that does not negotiate with mortal frailty: the profound moralism that has near ruined the contemporary activist left echoes a broader love affair with the super-ego. There are, it is thought, saints and sinners with no middle ground; whether the mark of sin is having insufficiently checked your privilege, not being a member of a hard-working family, or having consumed more than your daily units of alcohol is a secondary matter. Yet, in spite of the odd predictable complaint about some of the language in the song ('slut', 'faggot') from people constitutionally unable to understand the concept of narration, Fairytale remains widely loved. Large numbers of people recognise that its anti-heroes are in many respects clearly complete bastards, they would certainly be judged unsafe by the standards operative in New Statesman columns, whilst also seeing where they are coming from and wishing them well. This reveals a recalcitrant ethical sophistication that the times have yet to kill; as art can sometimes do, it reminds a society of truths they would rather forget.

That, in any case, is something I think that deserves noticing about this song. And, at the very least, nobody is foolish enough to ask if they know it's Christmas. Of course they know it's Christmas, and that's the problem.

Naught for your comfort

The only thing worse than not getting what you want, the saying goes, is getting what you want. Having spent my entire adult life wanting the Labour Party to have a left-wing leader, the months after Jeremy Corbyn's election have left me disorientated and strangely deflated, more fearful than revelling in victory.

Partly this is because of a sober recognition that, in spite of having won the leadership, the left is far from having won the Party. The British left loves its comforting stories, more so now that it can share them instantaneously through the perpetual emotional maelstrom that is the internet. Unable to distinguish support from sycophancy, hardly an hour passes without the self-declared Corbynistas birthing a new Jeremy-themed meme or Facebook group. Where once an activist might show her commitment to socialism by picketing, now she is more likely to do it by photoshopping. A left which once prided itself on possessing a certain amount of intellectual weight now communicates mainly through hashtags, declaring uncritical support for the leader of the Labour Party. One would be tempted to quote against this phenomenon the lines 'no saviours from on high deliver', were it not for the fact that those most in need of the message would be unlikely to get the reference.

There a decent argument to be had that uncritical support is no support at all. Corbyn deserves comrades, not worshippers. Any successful political movement, let alone one aiming at the radical transformation of society, requires a base that is critical and, to some extent at least, autonomous. This, however, is not a truth that sits comfortably with the mood music of the moment, which is driven by the relentless optimism of those who do not realise that the light at the end of the tunnel comes from a very fast oncoming train being driven by a maniac with nothing to lose. However much we murmur the mantras, 'decisive victory', 'mandate', and 'will of the party', the truth is that the hard work remains to be done. And here I'm talking about the effort we need to stand still, to retain the leadership. Winning the next general election is a different matter altogether.

Here again the absence of any tangible sense of reality is an obstacle to the change of gear the left so desperately needs. Once more the comforting tales get told: we won Oldham with an increased share of the vote. This was hardly a noteworthy victory for an opposition party a few years off a general election, but for parts of the Labour left the news was greeted with the near-orgasmic joy of a Tranmere Rovers fan learning that their side has pipped Barcelona to UEFA glory. Oldham perhaps seemed remarkable because Corbyn's opponents in the press had talked up the UKIP threat, but with the benefit of hindsight, it is a good deal less impressive. What is far more deserving of attention is the fact that Labour, already facing an uphill challenge in 2020 because of boundary changes, is tailing  miserably in the polls nationwide.

I must change tack at this point, because I'm in danger of subtly participating in the most worrying trend of the moment, an excessive focus on the parliamentary. It is a familiar criticism of socialists in the Labour Party that we focus on slinking our way through the corridors of power at the expense of class struggle beyond Westminster. It is also charged that we place the unity of the Labour Party above that of the working class, and certainly above that of the wider left. If any of these complaints were true, the only appropriate response from anyone with a claim to be a socialist would be to leave the Labour Party immediately. Our loyalty to Labour is not of the sort one might have for a family pet or a football team, whatever the modish talk of the Labour 'family' might imply. Labour is a means, not an end, and the end is socialism.

We're in danger of making the means the end. As a revolutionary socialist I do not believe that socialism will ever be handed down by a Labour government, which doesn't mean for one moment that I don't very much want a Labour government. It does mean, though, that I think a narrow Westminster focus is a mistake. Struggles outside parliament matter. The day by day fights against cuts and closures, for better pay and conditions - these ought to be bread and butter for socialists. I can't avoid the impression that we've taken our eyes off the ball in this area. Leftists who a few years ago would be boring the will-to-live out of their more Labour-orientated comrades with lectures on 'the importance of building the fight against the Tories in the workplace' have taken to following the latest shadow cabinet escapades with the resigned enthusiasm of the new junkie. Leaving aside the well-worn debate about reform and revolution - it could, after all, be that I am wrong - many battles won't wait four years. Take, for example, the current attack on our trade union rights: imagine what a difference would be made if the Momentum group made as simple a move as asking each of its several thousand members to join a union.

Ultimately there is no opposition between fighting austerity at grassroots level, on the one hand, and consolidating Corbyn's position and aiming at a Labour government, on the other. The truth is, as witnessed by the experience of Podemos and Syriza (remember them?), that the radical left wins political power not in spite of, but on the back of, movements that transcend the boundaries of politics as usual. Britain is far from having any such movement. The biggest mass-membership bodies with political potential and a significant presence in the working class remain the trade unions, strangely ignored by Labour's new left. There is a void here that needs filling. Instead, we're dancing over the precipice and falling into the darkness

We weren't supposed to be - twenty years of Different Class

"In the dark times 

Will there also be singing? 

Yes, there will also be singing.

About the dark times.” 

Brecht 

"We weren't supposed to be/ we learned too much at school/ now we can't help but see/ that the future that you've got mapped out is nothing much to shout about". Those words spoke to me, and continue to speak to me. I first heard them as one of the last students in England to get a full maintenance grant and go to university, the first in my family to do so. The others who bought Different Class were, in the main, from that same generation, one which even at the time had the tangible feel of existing at the end of something. The welfare state continued to be dismantled around us. For those on the political left there was precious little hope around; defeat continued to be multiplied upon defeat, a minor variation in theme being provided by the fact that, under the leadership of Tony Blair, some of those defeats were now internal to the Labour Party. Meanwhile, for those who hoped for from music both a relief from and a critique of reality the creeping success of Britpop already threatened to be its undoing. What had once told us about ourselves, consoling us for our failures, steeling us for our fights - rock music at its best, has the double-edged character Marx attributes to religion, both analegesic and expression of rage - was already fading into mood music for an age without hope, an age which didn't need consolation since its inhabitants were increasingly unlikely to do anything interesting enough to regret.

Different Class, which was released twenty years ago yesterday, captured this moment with a poignant beauty. Still to come were the betrayals of New Labour, the descent of popular culture into the blandishments of Coldplay and Jamie Oliver, the new puritanism, and the sheer accelerating bloody cruelty of a world unable to see virtues beyond the entrepreneurial. Ahead lay the institutionalised inability of rock music, with occasional honourable exception, to say anything remotely useful about anything whatsoever. It's kind of fitting that This Is Hardcore felt like the musical equivalent of waking up with a sore head.

Different Class observed this conjuncture sardonically, sometimes acerbic in its criticism ('you'll never understand/ how it feels to live your life/ with no meaning or control'), sometimes affectionate in its telling of ordinary lives and loves (Disco 2000). This latter aspect already set it apart for its humanity in a period when the done thing was to sing of being a rock and roll star, or at least to document the ordinary with a tone not innocent of mocking appropriation (thus, Blur's Parklife). And here's where the most striking thing about the album: at precisely a time when working class identity was being passed off as a fashion statement, whether worn authentically by Noel Gallagher or with the conviction of a hastily manfactured fake in Justine Frischmann's mockney drawl, Jarvis Cocker wrote about class. Mis-shapes told it like it was, with a gentle anger. Common People, a song which now reads like a prophecy of the hipster phenomenon, documented the frantic condescension of 90s Britain towards a fetished working class, and did so at a very personal level. So, for that matter, did I Spy, a song which is sick, in an older sense of the word than that now current amongst writers about music. Part of Jarvis' greatness as a songsmith is that he writes truthfully about the sordid. This is not a virtue that is obvious in the output of Travis. F.E.E.L.I.N.G.C.A.L.L.E.D.L.O.V.E combines this taste for the depraved with a real romance, a feat only Shane MacGowan amongst contemporary lyricists can carry off with equal profundity.

Romance, it should be said, is pervasive. Something Changed is a wonderful, touching, bucket of slush. Underwear charts the delicate, frightening, thrilling negotiations of romance. This is important, and not just because our capacity for love marks our humanity, for which reason every songwriter worth attending to has written about it. It also stops the, socially aware and, at least in a broad sense of the word, political Different Class from descending into preachiness. The world presented to us in the album is one in which politics is everywhere, but not everything is political. There is no succour to be had here for the kind of emotionally stunted leftist who wants to hear songs with titles such as 'fuck the Tories'. If Jarvis Cocker were to write a song about fucking Tories it would be in a rather different sense. This even-headedness is a necessary corrective to the idiotic idea that music can change the world, an error whose Blairite incarnation Pulp were later to pastiche with Cocaine Socialism. Leaving aside the politically paralysing nature of this delusion, it leads directly to the aesthetic horrors of Chumbawamba. Still worse, it leads to Bono.

Bono is a good topic on which to conclude a post on Halloween. We live, alas, in a world that is not safe from Bono. It is to just such a world that Different Class is the soundtrack.

 

We need to talk about Stalin

"When the Hungarian people erupted in revolt against the Russian occupier, the question was: which side are you on? When the Algerian people fought for liberation against the “socialist” government of Guy Mollet, the question was: which side are you on? When Cuba was invaded by Washington’s puppets, the question was: which side are you on? and when the Cuban trade unions are taken over by the commissars of the dictatorship, the question is also: which side are you on?"

 Hal Draper

I am, and remain, a passionate supporter of Jeremy Corbyn's leadership of the Labour Party. The job of a genuine supporter, as distinct from a sycophant, is sometimes to criticise. And right now some criticism is called for. Jeremy has appointed Seamus Milne as a press officer.

Milne, not to mince words, is an unrepentant Stalinist. And for that reason, if for no other, he ought not to be appointed to a prominent post in Corbyn's team.

In some quarters it's being suggested that this kind of criticism is sectarian, or unhelpful, the kind of archetypical leftist fiddling while Rome burns which we'd be better off without. This in itself is quite revealing of a left that has never come to terms with the horror of Stalinism: as though death tolls rising into the tens of millions were a niggling political detail, which shouldn't allow us to be distracted from proper politics. As though the crushing of Hungary, the imposition of marshal law across Eastern Europe, the gunning down of people at borders, the walls, the barbed wire, the dehumanisation, the humiliation, the routine day-to-day normalised suffocation of freedoms, as though all of this shouldn't be allowed to get in the way of unity. No, on the contrary, the question of Stalinism is a question of a duty to the past, a duty not to forget its victims.

It is also a question about the future. The attitude we take towards Stalinism speaks volumes of what we mean by that misappropriated word 'socialism'. For me, socialism is something that happens from below, by workers and oppressed people learning to assert their collective agency. It is about the extension of democracy and freedom into every area of existence, the unleashing of human possibilities and creativity. It is the exact opposite of the extension of top-down state control, imposed by committee and enforced by Russian tanks. I do not want a man who accepts the latter, this grotesque parody of socialism, speaking for the labour movement in this country. The reality of Stalinism set back the cause of socialism for generations, and we cannot distance ourselves from it decisively enough.

Finally - and this pales into insignificance compared to what I've already said, which is the stuff of moral imperatives and basic choices - this appointment is a gift to Corbyn's critics. The Labour right are already gleefully tweeting away, and the Tories will be sure to follow. And I, for one, will not be defending Milne against them. There are some causes for which we ought to be prepared to go to the wall. The career of a journalist who is prepared to overlook the odd genocide in the interests of world-historical progress is not one of them.

The Political Economy

So, after a little hesitation, Labour voted against the fiscal charter. Well, when I say 'Labour', I mean 'all but twenty Labour MPs'. And those who heroically abstained did so, not because they thought the fiscal charter - committing British governments to obtain a a budget surplus by 2019 and maintain it subsequently unless GDP growth falls below 1% - is a good idea, but in order to have a pop at McDonnell and Corbyn.

It is, after all, manifestly obvious that the charter is not a good idea. In order to recognise this, you don't need to be a signed up adherent of any specific school of economic thought . In particular, you don't need to buy into the 'Keynesianism' attributed to McDonnell by some of his leftist critics, a doctrine whose relationship to anything Keynes actually said is decidedly minimal. No, to take this view, you just need to think that it's sometimes handy for governments to be able to borrow outside the terms dictated by the charter. You could think this for any number of reasons: deep or shallow, right or left. Thus, for example, the wide-eyed Trotskyists at The Economist. Or, for that matter, some character called George Osborne. To be honest, you don't even need this level of justification for rejecting the charter: the simple empirical observation that governments have borrowed far more freely than the charter allows without the sky caving in ought to suffice.

Now, George Osborne knows all of this. He does not, for one moment, think it is either possible or desirable for a government to abide by the terms of his charter. To understand why he brought it to the floor of parliament, we need to see that it is about politics, not economics. Or rather, it is about economics as politics. He knows that a section of voters think Labour is 'weak' on 'the economy'. Hence all the rhetoric about Corbyn being a 'threat to your family's economic security', and hence the charter, which is designed to mark out the Tories as the tough, responsible, party who can be trusted with 'the economy'. Quite why someone struggling to make ends meet should care much about some abstraction called 'the economy' may not be apparent, but this is where a powerful analogy kicks in.

Government accounts, for this analogy, are our household budget. And, as the less than feminist Margaret Thatcher put it,  'every housewife knows' you can't spend more than you earn. Even as an approach to personal budgets this is simplistic at best. It's an image born in a time before mass consumer credit and student loans, one of the insufficiently told stories about debt in advanced capitalist societies being the extent to which it has shifted from the public to the personal. But as a picture for government borrowing and spending it is grotesquely misleading. Still, it is powerful: not only simple, but comforting, it ties the abstract and economic to the homely and familiar, speaking of collective responsibility (being 'responsible' with 'our' finances) in a world that can seem both atomised and amoral. It is ideology in its pure, brilliant, form.

And the picture has captured hearts and minds. I've lost count of the number of conversations I have had where the household analogy has been flung back at me when I've opposed cuts or one sort or another. This audience member on Question Time is a good example of the phenomenon:


Varoufakis is obviously correct; his answer is quite literally a textbook one. But I doubt very much that the questioner was convinced, and I'm not too sure about viewers at home, beyond the echo chamber of the already-converted Left, who shared the video clip with gleeful abandon on every social media website known to humankind. The man is speaking common sense, which is one way of describing successful ideology. Varoufakis is speaking economics.

The function of the household analogy is not so much as to build up support for near-perpetual budget surpluses - I've said already that this is not Osborne's purpose - but to render a section of the population suspicious of public spending, and to thereby gain consent for the dismantling of collective provision, privatisation and welfare cuts.

The household analogy is not the only manner in which an image, picture, or cluster of ideas serves to reconcile people to economic attack in Cameron's Britain. Think of the what has been called the business ontology, the way so many of us view the world as one big interplay of consumers and individual entrepeneurs (rather than as, say, a site of conflict between workers and capital). The language of entrepeneurship is endemic: what might once have been thought of as terrifyingly insecure short term work might now be presented as an opportunity to advance one's CV in the cause of career entrepeneurship. Then consider all those television programmes inviting us to view our homes as investments (rather than, for example, shelters), and murmuring suggestively that we too might make big on the property market.

This stuff is long-standing and deep-seated. Unless and until the Left can establish some kind of counter-hegemony, a socialist common sense as well-entrenched as that visible in the wide grin of the Question Time inquisitor, until we can communicate clear and attractive accounts of the world to rival that of it as one big market place, we will not make progress. We can have all the correct arguments about the economy we like. We can explain how Osborne's policies are wrong, as indeed they are. We can even make the case that capitalism itself is a barrier to human flourishing, as indeed it is. But politics is about more than arguments, however much those of us who are most at home in the world of facts and figures might wish otherwise. It is about pictures, broad-brush ideas, hopes, fears, and dreams. As any housewife knows.