What's love got to do with it?

So this happened:



If nothing else, a rather embarrassing display of Brand's new age proclivities. If it was that alone, it would be best to pass over in silence. I But, "love the police", what's that about?

I've made my feelings about our constabulary known before. I'm more interested in Brand's politics of love. The four-letter word only gets a mention at the end of his video, but was integral to the subsequent rough and tumble on Twitter under the #lovethepolice hashtag. And love has been a recurrent theme in Brand's political pronouncements and writings.

Love, for Brand, is a warm fuzzy feeling. It is antithetical to anger: witness his deplorable commentary on an enraged woman, rounded off with an amateur psychiatric diagnosis. He is not alone in this: love is - by common popular consensus - a feeling. It makes one happy, and therefore causes thoughts of conflict or dissatisfaction to recede. This is only good news in a certain sense: if the state we take to be characteristic of our most intimate relationships is an emotion, then it inherits all the uncertainties and fluctuations of emotions: alien creatures that they often are. Nor is there any prospect for a politics of love that is anything other than deeply reactionary, reconciling us to our lot, at best encouraging us to win round our oppressors with fine words and coy smiles. The problem here is that, at the end of the day, when you have put a flower in the policeman's gun, he still has a gun.

For good reason then, a lot of left-wingers regard any use of the 'l' word in politics with suspicion. It speaks of patronising demands for the cooling of anger and the seeing of reason. Thus, for instance, one of Christie Moore's better covers:



Interestingly, there's an older understanding of love (what it is about the modern age that causes it to be de-emphasised is an interesting question). For Aquinas, as for an entire classical tradition, love is the willing of another's good. This is not simply a matter of feeling; love might render certain feelings appropriate, but then again the warm fuzzies might stop me being sufficiently clear sighted to see how to promote your good. It is certainly less fickle than is love on a purely emotive understanding. Nor is it a matter of doing whatever will make you immediately happy, or of treading the path of least resistance. Indeed, Aquinas - who considers himself bound to love his neighbours - takes this love to be compatible in some cases (a just war, for instance) with fighting them. If you are damaging yourself by oppressing and exploiting then I should stop you. And that might not be a pretty affair. Such is love.

This older politics of love, I would argue, finds its modern continuation in Marxism. For Marx, the bourgeoisie are alienated - they fail to flourish as human beings (or to realise their species-being, in the slightly less poetic terminology of the 1844 Manuscripts) because of the very social relations which consist in their exploitation of the working class. It's just that, tragically, this alienation can only be overcome by the victorious struggle of the working class against that same bourgeoisie. Appeals for social peace simply prolong the mutual agony.

The hard work of love involves a disillusioned confrontation with dehumanising power - yes, even when it is wearing a police uniform. Only on the other side of that will we be able to indulge the Brands of this world, for whom presently there is seemingly no structural injustice so great that matters can't be improved by a hug.

The heart and the head

Talking to people about the Labour leadership election, a recurrent theme can be summed up as follows: "I'd love to support Jeremy; he's a great guy and I agree with his ideas. But realistically Labour won't win with him in charge, and the most important thing is beating the Tories in 2020". The heart says Corbyn, the head says Kendall.

The thought here seems to be that 'the public' won't accept a Labour Party led from the left. Raymond Williams once observed that there are no such things as masses, only ways of viewing people as masses, and much the same could be said about publics. The public -- this seething undifferentiated mass of reaction -- only exists in the minds of commentators and second-rate sociologists. Utterly staid in its thinking it selects between election candidates like a cliched British tourist abroad choosing from a menu. Unmoved by the prospect of exotic dishes, it maintains a studied indifference between egg and chips and ham and chips. For this way of looking at things, Jeremy Corbyn is the tabbouleh of the leadership context. Activists are not part of the public, on this account, nor are the five million voters lost by Labour since 1997. For that matter, the entire Scottish nation is dubiously public. In fact, the public turns out to look very much like a Progress intern's stereotype of a swing voter in a southern English marginal. It's a rather deflating take on the British population.

Crucial to the head versus heart move is an image of the electorate as passive consumers of political programmes. They are not capable of being convinced, persuaded by argument, inspired by campaigns, or transformed by struggle. If 'the public' thinks x then the only response of a serious politician is to find ways of delivering x to the public. Electoral politics becomes a perpetual sales pitch, a transformation describable in two words: 'New Labour'. Of course, the customer is always right only within limits. To misquote a misquotation of Henry Ford, she can have any colour she likes as long as it's blue. Should she have the audacity to believe in the nationalisation of the railways, as a majority of the British electorate do, she should be kindly ignored and directed towards other political wares. The politics of appeal to 'the public' has always been in fact about the creation of the public, their desires and their perception of political posibilities, by a nexus of media and politicians. It is like a worked example in the theory of ideology.

In any case, it's not as though an alternative way of doing things weren't staring us all in the face; if only mainstream political geography didn't stop at Alnwick. The fact that the SNP won an election in Scotland on the basis of an anti-austerity ticket whilst refusing to join in the mainstream assault on migrants (supposedly a practically inevitable bowing to the 'legitimate concerns' of the public), cannot be explained by Scots being somehow magically more left-wing than the rest of the UK's population (even though some Scottish nationalists and the odd jaded English leftist seem to think this is the case). There is racism in Scotland just as there is England. It's just that a party decided to say something different, to challenge that racism. It didn't, it is fair to say, obviously suffer at the polls as a consequence. And - who knows - some of the public may have changed their minds as a result of exposure to an alternative narrative.

But what if the nay-sayers are right? What if a Corbyn-led Labour Party would be un-electable? I'm reminded here of some words of Tony Benn's,

In Labour Governments we did our best to make capitalism work in a civilised way. And we failed. It never can work. It will always exploit and oppress people.

Those who think that the programme of  a Cooper, a Burnham, or -- heaven forbid -- a Kendall could ever be a sufficient balm for humanity's wound could remedy this by watching the news, or even by leaving their house occasionally. The homeless on our streets, to whom we have disgustingly become accustomed as though they were part of the scenery, as natural as the trees; the lives eeked out in poverty; the migrants dying in the sea; the creativity and talent sucked dry in jobs with no social purpose beyond the production of profit; the accelerating destruction of the environment -- these are not ills that can be set right by a little tinkering with the system here and there. The only strategy  that stands a chance of addressing them -- let alone the context of international injustice and inequality within which they sit -- is a socialist and internationalist one. Jeremy Corbyn at least begins to understand this.

For that reason alone -- for the hard-nosed pragmatic reason that only Corbyn sees the world as it is and recognises the immensity of transformation we need -- Jeremy deserves your vote. He is, contrary to the received wisdom, the only realist amongst the line-up. Because this is about so much more than 2020. This is about the future, about hope, and about socialism. It is the politics of the heart and of the head.

#Jeremy4Leader

This blog has taken a bit of a gloomy turn of late. I make no apologies for that. Things are rubbish, and a first step towards changing that is to see things clearly as they are. There's too much facile optimism on the left.

That said, it's nice to have something political to feel enthusiastic about. Jeremy Corbyn's candidacy for the leadership of the Labour Party is just this. It deserves your wholehearted support.

As I've said before, what we need is a counter-hegemony, challenging the austerity mindset that pervades our society. Jeremy's campaign is a chance to get alternative ideas out there and to challenge the consensus across all the main parties in favour of neo-liberalism. This is about much more than the leadership of the Labour Party, it is about our capacity to imagine another world.

It would obviously be very good indeed if Jeremy's name ended up on the ballot paper. For this to happen he needs nominations from Labour MPs. With this in mind - please pick a few MPs to email. Even people who are not natural left-wingers are worth targeting; argue that it would be good for the Party to have a proper debate about its future direction, and that this requires that Jeremy be on the ballot. An MP nominating him doesn't commit that MP to voting for him. Numerous MPs, including David Miliband, nominated Diane Abbott for the leadership in 2010 but didn't go on to vote for her.

If you're stuck about what to write, here's a sample letter from the excellent Red Labour.

Dear ___________

I am writing to you regarding Jeremy Corbyn’s decision to seek nomination for the Labour Party leadership. Jeremy’s announcement has undoubtedly electrified the leadership race. In the first 24 hours, he managed to secure the nominations of ten MPs, 2,800 people signed an online petition asking Labour MPs to nominate him and an incredible 10,000 people ‘liked’ the Facebook group ‘Jeremy Corbyn for Labour Leader’, more than all the other candidates put together. This is a clear indication that there is a thirst for a real debate amongst grassroots Labour Party members. It is now in Labour MP’s hands whether that debate takes place, or whether we have a leadership election where large swathes of our membership feels unrepresented and ignored.

As has been witnessed already, an election where the candidates broadly agree on the main issues only increases the public’s cynicism for the political process. It casts the Labour Party in a bad light after the shock of the general election not to be seriously discussing the issues raised by that defeat. For that honest, serious debate to happen, it is vital that Labour Party members, supporters and affiliates are be able to pick from a broad range of candidates representing the full range of opinion within our party. Jeremy will stand on a platform against austerity and in favour of a democratic economy which provides housing and services for all, while arguing for a fair immigration system and in favour of nuclear disarmament and humanitarian foreign policy. On those issues, Jeremy speaks for a substantial section of the grassroots of the party. If Jeremy is unable to overcome the substantial barrier to entry and make it on to the ballot, then we will not get that choice and the quality of the debate will suffer as a result.

It is in all of our interests to have an open and extensive leadership debate, one which is about the future of our party and how we move forward, stronger together towards the next General Election in 2020. Whether Jeremy is your preferred candidate or not, there is an overwhelming case for including a voice like his in this leadership contest. At this stage, it is not necessarily about who you are voting for - and we saw in the 2010 race how many MPs ‘lent’ their nominations to candidates in order to ensure a proper debate. That can be explained to both the candidate you intended to nominate and the wider electorate. In doing so, you will be putting the future of the party at the top of your list of priorities.

If you agree with me that a serious debate is needed and are able to offer your support to Jeremy’s campaign, I would very much appreciate it if you could let me know and cc in info@jeremyforlabour.com

Yours sincerely,

And if you want to be able to vote in the leadership election, become a Labour member or supporter. It only costs a few quid.