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.

The task that remains

...the whole history of the Labour Party has been punctuated by verbal victories of the Labour Left which with some few exceptions, have had little impact on the Labour Party's conduct inside or outside the House of Commons, but which have always been of great importance in keeping up the hopes and the morale of the activists              
     Ralph Miliband - Parliamentary Socialism

Miliband was writing in 1961. Little that has happened since gives us cause to question his account of the Labour Left's victories being pyrrhic affairs. The dust has now settled since Jeremy Corbyn's triumph in the leadership election. It is time to ask the hard question: will the election of the most left-wing leader in the Party's history buck the trend of purely nominal high-points for the Left? Or will something of lasting value come out of it? What could that even be?

False hope is a subtle enemy, so let's start by coming down to earth. Things do not look good. The fundamentals haven't changed since May's election defeat: there is not an automatic mass audience out there for the ideas on which Jeremy won the leadership. It simply isn't the case that Labour voters will automatically flock back to the Party now it has a 'proper Labour' person in charge (of course, with a nod to the elder Miliband, we should insist that Corbyn isn't a proper Labour leader; he's much better than that). We need to win the battle of ideas, and that's a job of work. Still less will Corbyn solve Labour's Scottish problem: indeed, the saddening truth is that his attitude towards Scotland has been unionist business-as-usual, an approach which fails to understand either the scale of what happened north of the Border, or the reasons that it happened.

Winning the contest of ideas is not easily done with a substantial proportion of the PLP openly hostile to varying degrees towards Corbyn. Senior MPs are regularly briefing against him, and front-benchers are distancing themselves from policies like nuclear disarmament. The plan is clearly to replace Jeremy as leader before the 2020 general election: I think it's likely the knives will come out as early as next year. Meanwhile, CLPs remain largely in the hands of the right - Corbyn may have won the leadership, his opponents control the party. True, there are thousands of new members who joined to vote for him. But even assuming that their politics are uniformly of the left - a dangerous assumption, I think - they are in the main inexperienced in Labour politics, and their resolve to fight the often brutal, and more often dull, battles that will be a feature of Party life over the next few years is untested. Certainly the failure of Diane Abbott to win the London mayoral candidacy and of the left slate to get elected to the Conference Arrangements Committee shows that we can't simply assume that intra-Party politics will now shift left.

So, two questions. What those on the socialist left of Labour expect from the Corbyn leadership? And how do we go about getting it? Three bullet points in answer to each

• Jeremy for PM! It may be a dream, but it's good to dream, and even better to fight for our dreams. A government based around Corbyn's programme, whilst it would meet with determined resistance from day one, would have great potential to improve the lives of the majority of people in Britain, and to provide a fertile ground for socialism.
• Developing a movement and ideas. The surge of support for Jeremy is a potential new activist base, which could be the foundation of a left movement for the next generation. The established Left can, and should, both learn from it and feed in socialist ideas born through political experience.
• ...which interacts with struggles outside parliament I do not think capitalism can be overcome by parliamentary action alone (there is a danger, which we have to acknowledge, that Corbyn's victory could fuel this illusion). So it's vital that the Corbyn surge feeds back into struggles outside parliament, in workplaces and communities.

Those are the things I think we should aim for. How to get them?

• Get involved in the Party Whether old or new members, we all need to get active in our local Labour Party, support Left candidates in internal elections, and argue for the policies on which Jeremy won. If you're new to the Party, learn about how it works. Join a trade union if you're not a member: unions are crucial to Labour's life, and to the defence of your rights. Subscribe to Labour Briefing which carries, from a Left perspective, news about what's happening inside the Party and how to get involved. Whilst I have concerns about its seemingly top-down nature, I also think it's worth being involved in Momentum, and seeing how it develops.
• Political education The established Left within the Party has to get its act together quickly on this one. We can't lose the new support. In an open and non-patronising way, we urgently need to communicate the nuts and bolts of Labour Party politics as well as putting across our ideas about socialism.  
• Don't ignore extra-parliamentary action. The focus on the Labour Party can't be at the expense of action outside parliament. In particular, the government's attack on trade unions has to be met.

Let's get cracking.