The Death of Jo Cox and Our Shared Future.

Remain lost the vote. It was of course going to be difficult to over turn the impact of the popular press and the nationalist Right. The layers of cultural meaning and resentment that have been implanted over decades were always going to be hard to dislodge. At first I did think the arguments on the economy would persuade many voters who fear another recession. Here there is a powerful case for favoring the status quo in a world of insecure employment, and in a campaign supported by most of the political class this might have been expected to have produced a positive result. Indeed at the start of the campaign, according to the polls, many voters seemed undecided. This could be taken to mean that for large parts of the electorate the nationalistic arguments had simply failed to persuade them. Indeed when I watched news programmes at the beginning of the EU campaign the voice I most often heard was the desire for more information. The public at this point sounded a bit like children cross with their parents for burdening them with such a big choice when really they just wanted to go on their summer holidays. Yet from the beginning the campaign to Remain lacked a politics of the street. Instead 'committed' politics seemed to belong to the Brexit campaign, whose arguments about the regulation of immigration, the national 'shame' of not being able to control our borders and of 'taking back control' seemed to resonate with the broader population. However we also saw just how easily the street can turn into the gutter. Wild claims about Turkey's future membership of the EU, Nigel Farage's anti-immigrant poster and complaints about the distant nature of the European parliament all seemed to strike a chord in an increasingly angry debate. This came home to me one Saturday morning when I met a Brexit campaigner who explained that the EU was a fascist institution. When pressed on this it quickly became totalitarian and then after a while authoritarian. Such was the hatred and the anger the words did not matter. After a fairly heated exchange (and apologies to my embarrassed daughter) I walked home thinking that in a politics driven by anger what matters is outcomes. That institutions are shut down, immigration stopped and the political class blamed. I could not help but think that there was more than an echo of the European politics of the 1930s in all this. The contempt felt for common institutions and the dismissal of the decadence of democracy oversaw the rise of extremist politics within Europe. Having been in many grass-roots campaigns myself over the years I am used to hearing excitable language but this time it seemed different. The closest that I had previously come to this was as a young Labour activist in the 1980s. During this period I came across many people who became involved with Militant Tendency. Many of the people I met in Militant were really likeable and yet some of their arguments and programmes struck me as wild and I was not surprised when Labour sought to root them out. Yet as I got to know them personally I understood that the source of their anger was often the same as mine, having come from poor families who could not get a job in the labour market. I admired their energy and passion, and yet could not understand how a programme of nationalising the top hundred companies operated as a feasible form of politics. If anything the politics of the 1930s teaches us of the importance of the constitutional state, human rights and the law and their restraining effect on more radical political proposals. Not surprising then that radical social movements have concentrated upon changing perceptions and more cultural forms of politics that stop well short of smashing the state. A radical politics of citizenship is still possible but needs to be careful of destructive and hateful language. This does not cancel a politics that seeks to question representative democracy as there are other forms of engagement, but ultimately progressive politics needs to strengthen democratic institutions and not undermine them. Yet such was the hatred held by many of the Brexitiers for Europe that this is what many of them seemed to want to do. The spectacle of Farage a few weeks ago at the EU telling elected representatives to get a ‘proper job’ was deeply uncomfortable. Especially given the possibility that Europe has (just like the nation-state) the capacity to further democratise itself and to protect the rights of the vulnerable. However this politics in the immediate future will have to go on without the UK. My own frustration came not simply out of the simplistic thinking that came out of this exchange, but the growing sense in the campaign that the language we use should not be something we need to think carefully about. If Remain sought to utilise economic utilitarian arguments then Brexit were culpable of not only a return to an aggressive nationalism, but for a series of claims they clearly felt would not be scrutinised by the media or public. The most telling moment here came when the Brexit campaign issued a short manifesto as if they were a government in waiting. This was clearly absurd as this was a referendum and not a general election. However this move mostly went without comment. At the time many of those commenting on the campaign compared it to the rise of Trump in the U.S. through the idea of 'post-fact' politics. This claim is probably half wrong. The ability to mobilise the population clearly depends in a mass democracy on a form of symbolic politics that are not directly determined by facts. Yet amongst the wild and excited talk of the campaign there was clearly a sense of promises being made that would never be delivered upon. The clearest example of this was the NHS ad by the Brexit campaign. This offered a brutal contrast between the NHS now and after Brexit. The images showed what looked to be poor working class people being cared for by the NHS after we had left the EU. Yet the sense was, after the ‘liberated’ society that was to emerge after Brexit, these statements would soon be forgotten. As if politics is a huge exciting spectacle making claims about bright new tomorrows and what mattered was strategic advantage and not truthfulness. The Remain campaign in this respect merely offered the status quo whereas it was Brexit that offered people a more exciting language of social transformation and change. After the vote many commentators have argued that it was the losers of economic globalisation (the working-class population) who were the people most likely to be attracted by this sense of possibility. If within our global world many have been left scrambling to survive, Brexit offered the possibility of radical change. Further that unlike the educated middle-classes, many people did not feel themselves to be European and had a growing sense that their more place-specific identities were under threat in a world of migration and change. I don't think there can be any doubt that these were important features in the outcome. Here I have felt uncomfortable at what often sound like a condescending attitude which argues that people who voted Brexit were simply not informed enough and should accept they made the wrong choice. This, despite the many of us who felt a deep attachment to the EU project, is simply undemocratic and needs to be rejected. There was however a moment in the campaign that could have been transformative. Until her tragic death Jo Cox was a little known MP. Fairly new to parliament she had mainly campaigned on the rights of refugees, the war on Syria and for people with autism. After her death I looked on her Facebook page to find a record of fairly unremarkable gatherings that Jo had attended. What became evident in her posts was her 'ordinariness'. She visited schools, local libraries, met refugees and attended openings and fund-raisers, mostly in her constituency in Batley. At first it was hard to see why she would become the target of a fascist attack. Yet her evident belief that politics is local, national and cosmopolitan made her a potential object of hatred. After the shock of her death I was left feeling puzzled as to why her death did not have a greater impact. What then did Jo Cox stand for, and what of my argument that her death failed to change the nature of the debate? If there was something ‘ordinary’ about her politics and daily activity there were other meanings at work as well. There were the images of Jo Cox as a mother often pictured with her family and her husband. Notable by its absence were images of her meeting the rich, powerful or indeed celebrity supporters. Her speeches in parliament were not short on passion and engagement, but there was something to the point and modest about them. In one of her final pieces of writing for the Times newspaper she writes about the war in Syria and yet her concerns seem to be overwhelmingly humanitarian. She also supported the Dubs amendment that aimed to persuade the UK government to take in 3000 child refugees who had escaped Syria mostly without their parents. She estimated in April this year that 95,000 such children currently exist within Europe and that her proposal was that the UK takes in 3 per cent. It seems it was supporting these causes that turned Jo Cox into a target for hatred that eventually led to her death. The Europe that Jo Cox seemed to stand for was pluralistic, concerned about inequality but one where compassion and humanistic concern found expression across national borders. It was this in the end perhaps that became the focus of an uncivil politics. Within the Britain that Jo Cox has left behind these fairly modest ideas and proposals become unmentionable. Lost in the anxieties about immigration, national borders and what it means to be patriotic was an idea about a different Europe that almost never found expression in the campaign. This was not a neoliberal Europe or one based upon more radical forms of transformation. The Europe of Jo Cox aimed at social justice, pluralism and human rights. The debate on Europe had taken such a Rightist turn that even these concerns seem to be too much. Yet in the end I think the ‘too much’ was that she was prepared to apply these principles across borders. This then offers an interesting paradox if we can agree that within a global and interconnected age images, resources, bodies and identities become stretched across borders but that any recognition of this becomes somehow unacceptable. I noted that the Remain campaign very rarely mentioned ideas around globalisation, let alone the role that the EU might play in this world. Instead both Remain and Leave were stuck at the level of the national interest, or as David Cameron reminded us several times, there were patriots on both sides of the argument. Here what became unmentionable was that we can have identities other than our national identity. The phrase ‘take back control’ was clearly meant to apply to national sovereignty. As if the rightful place of identity and citizenship is the nation-state. This of course abolishes any more complex account of identity as well as other versions of citizenship that might have included global, European or indeed local concerns. Here I waited (in vain) for someone to say where is our identity when we oppose, say, fracking? The attempt to prevent new forms of carbon-based energy being opened up in a world threatened by climate change is at once local, national and of course global. Every activist I have met who works on these questions, while often emphasising local risks, knows that they are part of a much bigger global, social and cultural struggle. Where indeed is ‘our’ identity when we oppose racism which we know does not neatly fit into the borders of national frontiers? Yet in the campaign national identity remained ‘the’ identity. Both Leave and Remain offered excessively cleaned-up and tidy arguments. Like many people I tried to watch the ‘big TV’ debates. These were presented as gladiatorial contests between slick politicians hungry for power and prestige. Mostly these resembled a sporting event where the viewers were invited to cheer for the home team while deriding their rivals. Online I noticed a basic lack of civility between ‘opponents’ as people tore into one another. This became apparent when, after a discussion with someone I didn’t know, they seemed taken aback when I thanked them for their time and helping me understand the Brexit case better than I had done previously. Instead the campaign was an exercise in finger wagging, accusations of project fear and of course the exciting language of calling someone a liar. Within another exchange I was called ‘delusional’ for suggesting that human rights and the welfare state set humane standards for our society. The effect of this was inevitably to squeeze out subtle and more complex arguments. In a television-dominated campaign voters were invited to make up their minds as they watched the top personalities slug it out. There were of course all too few spaces for alternative intellectuals or even people who simply wished to offer more complex narratives. On telelvision there were also vox-pop moments when ‘ordinary’ members of the public were asked their opinion which usually began with which camp do you belong to or which side are you on? Not surprising that the charged atmosphere of national patriotism has opened the door to enhanced everyday forms of racist aggression. As many people have pointed out the heightened expectations and raw emotions that came along with the campaign not only gave a new legitimacy to racist sentiments but created a sense of ‘us versus them’. In the weeks ahead the fairly modest politics of Jo Cox is likely to come under threat. Will social democracy survive the assault from the Right as UKIP seek to target Labour sets in the North of England and the Brexit Conservative government moves to the Right in a world of rising unemployment, failing pensions and welfare cuts? What will happen to more civic understandings of nationhood as politicians seek to cash in on a ‘reborn’ Brexit nationalism? If the UK withdraw from the European convention on human rights and adopt an Australian-style points system, will we also see the emergence of Australian style refugee camps? This is less the inclusive agenda represented by Jo Cox, but more like what Agamben called ‘bare life’. Agamben reminds us that before Europe came under the grip of the concentration camp citizens had to be stripped of their rights. Already in neoliberal UK we have seen how humanity becomes treated when it is deemed to be ‘surplus to requirements’ no longer required by the labour market having to rely upon food banks, young people with mental health problems being referred to charities or indeed refugees scrambling to survive. What then begins to happen to this ‘surplus population’ if the Brexit government removes their rights? Of course we are not in this world yet although it is more than a remote possibility. This is not the world that Jo Cox stood for and it is for this reason amongst others we need to carefully attend to her loving and generous nature by keeping her memory and her modest (and sometimes radical) politics alive. There are of course reasons to be optimistic as well as fearful and I say this as someone who was optimistic about the potential of Remain. Labour are somewhat predictably in crisis and there are indeed genuine fears it may split. Before anyone tells you this is a good idea let me say that as someone who lived through the 1980s when Thatcher was kept in power by a split between SDP and Labour that it is not. There are voices at the moment suggesting that a radical anti-austerity alliance needs to be formed and that Labour needs to give up on the idea it can govern alone. This is likely to be difficult for Labour to accept although there are progressive possibilities here as well. We are already seeing other radical campaigns post-Brexit beginning. In my home city of Nottingham over the past week I have seen invitations for public meetings from social movements opposing racism, militarism (after Chilcot) and fracking. It is, as Jo Cox would probably have reminded us, too soon to give up hope where a better world remains a permanent possibility. However while I currently think the prospects are not good for those on the Left things can indeed change quickly. Another group of people I spent my time talking to during the campaign could be described as Lexit. For them any possibility of an authentic socialist future was cancelled by the EU, given its commitment to neoliberal politics most recently dramatised by the crisis in Greece. While I also felt more positive about the EU before the humiliation of Greece through a politics of progressive privatisation I remain unconvinced by this set of arguments. Here questions of politics become about a technical choice. The EU remains as capable of reform as any other institution. Recently we have commemorated the Battle of the Somme when soldiers were sent off to die by European states that were barely democratic and had not developed a fuller language of citizenship. Indeed scepticism about war and the militaristic aims of the state has been one of the more progressive developments within more recent European history, and likely to get a shot in the arm after Chilcot. The Lexit case is that without the EU we are now closer to a more authentic form of socialism. This entirely misses the cosmopolitan case that institutions like the United Nations, Europe and the court of human rights can act as barriers to state aggression and the mistreatment of their citizens. This history of European socialism is such that what was once called actually existed socialism was a miserable failure when it came to preserving the ethical core of human freedom. Indeed at present the main beneficiaries of the current crisis are likely to be the nationalist and aggressively neoliberal Right. One of the reasons as a young man I was attracted to Europe (the others being travel and the electronic music of Kraftwerk and Neu) was it seemed to be a place where ideas mattered. In my imagination Europe was the place of Adorno, Simone de Beauvoir and Kafka. Another towering figure who belongs to this stable is Elias Cannetti. One of Cannetti’s most repeated refrains was that we simply don’t live long enough to ever make up our minds. We are the victims of relatively limited life-spans never having truly understood something unless we have lived it. Well in my own limited life span (now well over 50 years) the period I am most often thinking about is the mood in the country after the Falklands War. Thatcher had just beaten Michael Foot to gain a second term riding a wave of nationalist celebration and this proved to be a devastating period for progressive politics. What followed was the bitter violence of the Miners’ strike and a renewed period of intense class conflict. There will be those who say that the current situation has enormous potential for radical politics, but I seriously doubt this is true. However in the coming months as the new post-Brexit world begins to take shape I hope we will take the opportunity as Hannah Arendt might have said to use our language carefully, to be civic-minded, accept responsibility for the public domain and to stubbornly refuse the invitation to invest our hopes in charismatic politicians rather than more careful forms of thoughtful and respectful argument about the possibilities of our own times. If many complained that the 1990s ushered in a period of post-citizenship where relatively affluent consumerist societies allowed many to switch off we no longer live in such luxurious times. Instead we need to recall the spirit of people like Jo Cox and ensure we remember the need for compassion and moral complexity.

Labour and the English Commons

If part of the English question has become how to decentralise political power (see previous posts by Peter Hain and Graham Allen) to become more representative then this will only become meaningful if it is linked to broader attempts to renew democratic forms of engagement. Here I argue that the idea of the English commons has a long history and speaks of a more communitarian set of understandings often missing from liberalism. The commons is not only about a sense of lived connection to the natural environment (see previous post by Ruth Davis) but just as importantly about more bottom-up forms of control and expression. As the New Left in the 1960s well understood unless the democratic settlement is revised within contemporary contexts then the working population are likely to be subject to increasing control from unaccountable forms of power from above. Here I seek to explore the role that the labour movement might play in reformulating this debate in the future. Growing up in Derby in the 1960s and 70s the prevailing culture communicated a sense that Labour stood for poor working-class people. My parents assumed that the slum house they moved into would eventually be knocked down and they could realise their dream of a council home. This however would only happen some 17 years later after a resident’s campaign successfully mobilised the working poor of the area. While Labour was seen as ‘on our side’ they seemed remote and distant. During the early 1980s working in a social security office I joined the party after the sudden spike in unemployment. The people I met each day at work were mostly frightened, desperate and shocked that the cumbersome bureaucratic machine that was state welfare treated them as ‘undeserving’ citizens. Notably the mostly poor working-class people only became empowered in this process if they were accompanied by a member of the claimants union. From both of these experiences I took the view that while the state is important so are citizen’s campaigns and more direct forms of democracy. Much of the writing on the Left can be understood under the banner of ‘how to get Labour elected and then hope for the best’, but really what we should be trying to do is decentralise power and control. Much of the current Brexit campaign (whatever your views on the EU) has struck a chord because it at least seeks to address the overly centralised nature of modern politics. The question of authority, control and power goes to the heart of what we mean by more meaningful forms of citizenship. In the modern globalised world power and control has been lifted out of the hands of ordinary people and into the board rooms of financial institutions and distant corporate elites. There is then a need for a vision of the political that seeks to reverse this process that prioritises ecological and social justice while reviving more democratic and responsible ways of living. However if we are to do this we need to rethink what we mean by freedom. English Freedom A few years ago I wrote a short book on the subject of freedom. As I did my research what struck me was how many English authors were exercised by this idea. At the time I was especially interested in the contributions of Mill, Hobhouse, Hoggart and overwhelmingly George Orwell. These debates seemed to span both liberalism and more social democratic debates on the subject. Orwell is a complex writer, but his struggle for a less hierarchical world (discovered in the Spanish civil war) remain with us today. When I looked for more contemporary debates on freedom I was surprised to be met by what felt like a deafening silence. The assumption coming from some quarters was that we now live in a far more conservative age with many people becoming increasingly concerned about questions related to security. Not surprisingly that in the age of ‘the precariat’ many associate freedom with the movement of capital or with an everyday sense of disconnection and fragmentation. Freedom is understood mostly within individualistic terms and had little of substance to offer the Left who are mostly concerned with the threats posed by globalisation. Of course the current debate is more complex than this but as a short-hand it is not far from the truth. The other reason for a lack of interest in freedom is not simply insecurity, but the deep sense of pessimism that tends to dominate political debate. If asked to think about the future then many people on the Left feel overwhelmed by a sense of global crisis whether it is in the shape of refugees, the instability of the economic recovery or welfare cuts. Perhaps inevitably, the state is presumed to be the mechanism to protect citizens against the radical changes ushered in by an increasingly marketised and globalised world. More communally defined and bottom up versions of freedom in relation to the commons are likely to play an important role in this process. The English Commons Here I want to suggest that progressive movements have a great deal to learn from the rise of the alter-globalisation movement and the idea of the commons. These campaigns centrally raise questions of authority, control and freedom. The Occupy protests, radical ecological concerns and attempts to save public libraries can all be potentially linked together through the idea of the commons. Historically there is nothing new about the commons, and it remains connected to radical currents within English history and writing on freedom. The Diggers and the Levellers during the English civil war offer perhaps a different historical root in terms of ideas on freedom. The writing of Winstanley and others situate the question of freedom with the need to defend common land and resources against forms of enclosure and theft from above. This is suggestive of a different narrative to those who primarily see freedom in more individualistic terms. Here the idea of freedom is caught up with the struggle of commoners who seek to defend what is rightly theirs against the ‘theft’ of the privileged classes. In terms of the commons then the popular sentiments it is most connected to is either ‘get off my land’ or ‘stop thief’. These features have become especially pressing after the 2008 financial crisis where many have perceived global elites to be both unaccountable while plundering and privatising the common realm as a response to the failure of the banks. The historian E.P.Thompson added to this history by recovering the lives of the common people from below who sought to resist the class theft implicit in the enclosures movement. In this sense, we might view privatisation initiatives and the ways that our public institutions are governed from above by distant elites as new forms of enclosure. The first waves of enclosure that came along with the rise of capitalism not only produced workers for the factories but sailors for the ships in colonialism and simultaneously disposed women from their role as healers, herbalists and mid-wives. If the enclosures enforced acts of dispossession they did so not simply in terms of their eviction from the common land, but also broke the people’s spiritual and material connection to the land. The land was not only a source of independent livelihood but also sustained an identity and more communal cultural activities. Freedom in this setting was something experienced in common with others and sought to resist the dispossession that emerges when control becomes either overly centralised or hierarchical. Similarly today the shrinking of the welfare state, surveillance of the internet and the exploitation of the earth can be equally seen in terms of questions of theft. The poisoning of the air, the closing of libraries and the disappearance of the civic city in favour of the shopping centre can all be viewed under a rubric that removes cultural and natural resources from local forms of democratic control. As our identities become increasingly commodified they progressively lack a sense of meaningful attachment to the locality as citizens seek to commodify themselves fearing losing their jobs. The key intellectual figure in helping keep alive more communal understandings of freedom is E.P.Thompson’s great hero William Morris. Morris’s best known work ‘News from Nowhere’ remains required reading for all of those who continue to search for more communal definitions of freedom. The novel is often remembered as a work of utopian fiction but should be just as easily understood as telling a story about the commons. If the commons is taken to mean all that we own and share then this helps us understand the world being imagined by Morris. The future communally based society imagined by Morris was actually a return to the pre-capitalist commons. If in the imagined past the right to the forest had granted the people a place where herbs could be harvested, food cultivated and game hunted then life after capitalism could return many of these freedoms. While a generation of scholars dismissed Morris due to his moralism there is a need for those rethinking the traditions of English socialism to critically reappraise his work. This would involve thinking again about the shared ecological commons we can experience through parks, countryside and nature reserves, but also the cultural commons like libraries, internet and schools. The idea of the commons would mean readdressing not only questions of ownership and control but also ideas of co-operation. This would always struggle under capitalism given the economic systems need for hierarchical control and its insistence upon competition which would inevitably lead to civic forms of strife and war. Instead the commons offers a vision of co-operation, peace and friendship. The commons then sought to imagine a world beyond hierarchical control and wage-slavery. Of course there is no easy return to Morris in the context of a post-industrial society built upon consumerism, but he needs to be reimagined in our technological and individualised times. Raymond Williams often pointed out that Morris was an important eco-socialist but that he needs to be read cautiously. Williams was especially keen to emphasise that a future technologically based society of the commons would be more complex than capitalism. Morris he felt retained a sense of rural simplicity that was damaging to socialists. A more decentralised and democratic society of the commons would by introducing different ownership arrangements beyond the direct governance of the state and capital offer more popular forms of control that more were messy than the present. Ultimately if everything that we share is brought under the control of large corporations and the need for profit then in the short term our lives in common will become poorer while in the longer term humanity will perish. Perhaps one of the lessons many socialists have learned since Morris is that these ideas are unlikely to flourish in a world where they have been imposed upon other people. Despite the radical nature of the alter-globalisation movement there was no attempt to seize control over the state and impose more co-operative forms of working. With good reason many associated with the idea of the commons are suspicious of state power. Does this mean this generous vision has little to offer the Labour Party and Englishness? No is the short answer. Firstly there are parts of the commons that cannot operate without the state and policy frameworks. Decisions to outlaw fracking, and preserve our libraries and parks all have implications for state policy. The idea of the commons also moves us away from the more pessimistic assumptions that neoliberalism makes about human nature. The idea that human beings can indeed govern their own affairs without hierarchical control and intrusive monitoring is likely to be dismissed by many, but is a life worth living really possible without them? Finally the commons opens up the possibility of the people actively creating their own alternatives without always relying upon the state to do it all for them. This vision of course will depend upon the state playing its part, but it will mean opening up questions about how we might remake our town and cities to reopen them as places shared by everyone and not just those with wealth. The commons is ultimately about more local and decentralised forms of control. This would mean re-addressing questions that enable the decentralisation of political power, giving people a greater sense of control over their working lives. Here we need to think about how the state might best support self-employment (there is no reason why the political Right should control the debate on this question), the setting up of co-operatives and discussions around the basic income. Schools and the Revival of Democracy The idea of the commons is clearly related to a number of policy questions, with potentially most significance for schools. If people’s first encounter with institutions outside of the family is one of being disconnected from the community to study subjects that seem remote and disengaged then they are unlikely to become the democratic citizens of the future. The current academies model increasingly centralises control thereby disempowering teachers, parents and students. In contrast a commons network would develop of schools with different emphasises and specialisms that respond to the creativity and dynamism of the young. The main problem with schools is not their inability to communicate basic skills but that many young people find them boring. School should be a place you can go to discover your own talents without fear of being judged too harshly should you fail. More crucially the art of building relationships is often lost in big structures governed by large academy chains. If the comprehensive era has come to an end then the schools of the commons should, with a minimum of state interference, be both small and personal while under local forms of control. The central control of the curriculum and top-down regimes of measurement and management has not only deprived people of their creativity, but of their sense of connection to the locality. Most civic pride in this sense is not national or global but local. If the ultimate lesson of citizenship is that you can change the landscape then this can only be learned close to home. By this I do not only mean simply school councils and democratic structures, but also the idea that the locality should be seen as an important (if not the only) educational resource. If education was really based upon breaking down the walls between schools and the locality then this will mean not only local structures, but also the attempt to turn what is near-by into a resource that can be investigated. This is obviously a different model of education to the one that keeps children inside sweating away seeking to pass standardised and often meaningless tests. If the precious gift of education is ever to mean anything then it can only work once the curiosity of the children has been awakened. An English education of the commons then would need as much genuinely local flavour to sensitise our children to natural landscapes to understand the complexity of where they live and look at how local democracies function. The danger is of course that this will offer a narrow regionalism not fit for the globally inter-dependent world of today. However this need not be the case as the cosmopolitan mix of local cultural identities and natures becomes the focus of study. Further the technological revolution represented by the internet and more local television stations needs to be utilised giving children the direct experience of constructing new forms of culture. The school standards movement that has successfully colonised the political imagination of education policy makers is currently far too restrictive in the way that it imagines cultural literacies. Schools for the commons need to unlock the latent potentials of the present allowing for a diversity of cultural expression and more arresting forms of cultural production related to the contemporary experience of young people. The Commons and Democratic Futures The reform of schools and education take on a renewed importance within an increasingly post-democratic context as everyday life becomes drained of opportunities to exert meaningful forms of control. Arguably as power has shifted away from the places in which we live (witness how difficult it is for local authorities to oppose fracking) then the more the citizenry has become invested in the forms of anti-politics represented by UKIP. A world without a grass roots democracy and sensible debate and discussion is a world increasingly likely to be attracted to authoritarian solutions of both the Left and the Right. If the idea of the commons is to be revived in our technological and fragmented age then Labour along with others could play a role as local communities across the planet deeply resent the extent to which globalisation and elite controlled politics has taken away their power to control their daily lives. This process is only likely to be reversed through measures that make more democratic forms of citizenship meaningful in the places in which people live. This post was originally published by the Labour and England Seminar Group 2016.

Radical Education Now

Going to a comprehensive school in the 1970s it did not occur to me that there were any alternatives to schooling. The hierarchical organisation of the school, fear of the cane and preparation for a life of labour was the common bread of our experience. However looking back it was the everyday humiliation of schooling I remember the most. Sorting the children into ranks and ability streams seemingly marked the children for a life of success and failure. Later after leaving school I had a chance encounter with Ivan Illich’s ‘Deschooling Society’ in a radical bookshop. The main problem with confusing schooling with education was named and addressed. Indeed it was only when I got to university before the onset of marketisation that I discovered that education was more a matter of independent reading, dialogue and critical thinking. University at that time seemed to offer not only an escape from a boring office job, but also a space where you would encounter genuinely independent thinkers. It was a long way from the securitised libraries, competition for income streams, satisfaction league tables and compulsory attendance that dominate today. However it was Illich’s now often forgotten book that sent me on this path. His powerful critique of the institutional takeover of education and the radical alternatives that might emerge through self-education and learning networks has never been bettered. What remains important about Illich’s book today is the link between the enclosure of education within institutions and the emergence of industrial and capitalist modernity. In this sense he offers a radical challenge to all those who want to think differently about education today. The education debate at present seems to be stuck in a logjam. Most of the political parties have signed up to a system that seeks to raise the ability of students to score well in standardised tests, thereby enabling the UK to improve its economic competitiveness. This has now led to an understanding of education that is subsumed within utilitarian forms of calculation where the best outcome is assumed to be whatever works to improve exam results. This has led to increased state involvement in education through Ofsted and other powerful agencies who seek to measure school performance. The displacement of local councils, increased power of head teachers, erosion of teacher autonomy and new forms of corporate discipline has pushed us into the age of the academy. Much of the social democratic Left remains nostalgic for the comprehensive era as at least schools sought to mix students from different class backgrounds and promote inclusivity. However it has been notable that while the attempt to save ‘our’ NHS has struck a popular chord the comprehensive system has been quickly discarded with little popular resistance. The reason for this is probably because the main experience that most working-class children took away from school was one of failure. If you wanted to design a system that discouraged people from learning then it would be hard to think of anything more effective than school. One of the most radical features of Ivan Illich’s analysis was his argument that schooling was built upon the alienation of the learner. In other words, schools reduced children to the status of objects to be assessed, weighed and measured. In this process the school presumed the right to force you to learn what it felt was worthwhile knowledge. This mostly leaves little room for the ideas, interests and needs of the students. There were of course radical teachers who sought to fight against this process but this was the overwhelming experience of the many. It seemed to be the job of the school I attended to ‘fit’ the ‘successful’ boys to craft apprenticeships and the girls to a job in Boots and a life of domesticity. There was no opportunity to explore who we thought we were, our interests, alternative understandings of politics and history or a life of the imagination. Schools today, despite improvements in results, are similarly instrumental places if perhaps with the banning of corporal punishment marginally less cruel. I have three differently abled children, all of whom are being constantly graded and assessed as the school sorts out who are likely to achieve the desired test and exam scores. If anything the entry of the market into education has displaced the possibility of more experimental forms of pedagogy leaving instead rigid conformity for both teachers and students. If the alternative to the present does not lie within a return to the comprehensives of the past then where should we look? We need to engage in a double vision when it comes to education. This means viewing education as something that takes place both inside and outside of schools. If schools can be places of learning then so can the media, the family and the community more generally. Our schools could indeed become both more humane and critical places than they are able to be at the present. Firstly, we need to look at size: the American Anarchist Paul Goodman often remarked that schools were on the whole too large to be humanistic. Once you move beyond junior education in England schools lose a face to face character and tend to become very bureaucratic, top-down places full of rules and sanctions. Whereas smaller scale schools can be places of mutuality and learning often secondary level institutions are large and impersonal. This does not create a good place for learning and thinking. Secondly, students and teachers need to be allowed to be more autonomous working on issues and problems that actually interest them. Much teaching to the test is simply a matter of quick fire remembering and forgetting. Third, the role of the state needs to be radically reduced with schools and colleges becoming more autonomous, capable of setting their own goals without the presumption that everything can be measured. Finally I would suggest that, in a class-based society built on the privileges of private education, that state schools need to achieve similar levels of funding per child and should receive a progressive increase in resources. This would both radically reduce class sizes and recognise the importance of education rather than schooling where students become free to learn subjects they are actually interested in with the progressive abandonment of compulsory learning. Ultimately these changes will require a radically democratised state that is less concerned with expensive military adventures than it is the educational development of the young. Further, as I indicated, much learning goes on outside the enforced boredom of the school gates. More broadly we need to recognise the extent to which childhood had been commodified. Children are now explicitly targeted as the consumers of shiny gadgets and designer wear. This is not just a problem for the parents, but also for the children as they learn to think and act like consumers. Clearly moralising about other people’s pleasures is a problem, but then so is the corporate take-over of the imagination. Here radicals need to build critical spaces of reflection where we can think together about what is happening to our children where many are excluded and others prepared for the corporate ladder. If we want our children to become independent minded, creative and critical people then we need to run conferences, work-shops and other spaces where the imperatives of the current system can be carefully questioned and analysed. Instead of presuming that everything of value can be quantified we need to ask questions about the quality of our shared lives. If we are to begin to imagine a world beyond hierarchy and exploitation we will need the critical resources to do so without presuming that the practice of education can be simply left to the professionals. Education is far too important to be left to institutions which not surprisingly mostly have to chase the current agenda. Instead more radical voices are urgently needed to open up more complex questions beyond the current tired talk about standards, discipline and training for upward mobility. There is perhaps a new appetite for these questions as it becomes increasingly obvious that our schools, college and universities become more explicitly designed to meet the needs of the corporate sector rather than people. If the current system is broken as many people are beginning to see for themselves there is no clear path to an alternative. Instead of simply seeking to change the system from above through the state I would argue that debate about education needs to be radically democratised. This can only happen once we have carefully listened to those who in the past have been dismissed as the waste products of the system. The twenty-first century needs an extended debate about the multiple meanings of education and to think carefully about how a more humane alternative might emerge. Dr Nick Stevenson. This blog post was originally published in Discover Society in 2015.

The Death of David Bowie

I woke up on Monday morning to the shocking news about the death of David Bowie. The previous Friday his new album ‘Black Star’ had been released and over the week-end I had been listening to the music. Inevitably we will now be told by the media that it was a masterpiece however for once this may only be slightly exaggerated. For the first time in a long time Bowie’s music sounded well integrated and had captured a new flavor by working with some New York based jazz musicians. As much of the commentary has confirmed the album sounds like a farewell statement given that it is now common knowledge that Bowie made the album while struggling with cancer. The themes of human mortality and death are not new to his work and these themes have become more prominent since 9/11. Bowie at the time of the assault on New York gave interviews about how his wife Iman had watched the twin towers collapse from their flat in New York. This event had seemingly had a deep and lasting effect upon Bowie’s cultural output which when coupled with his own withdrawal from touring after a heart tremor meant that ideas of death and dying were never far from the surface. His previous recording ‘The Next Day’ released in 2013 had been his first album for a decade. Most of the media attention became focused on how he had managed to keep the release a surprise with the recording emerging on his 68th birthday without the usual media fanfare. However listened to more closely the album revealed a preoccupation with human vulnerability, the passing of time and some recollections about his past. If musically this album was not one of his most successful this can-not be leveled at his current release. The eclectic influences of Jamie XX, modern jazz and some of the more recent work of Scott Walker are all in evidence as well as long-time collaborator and producer Tony Visconti. A preoccupation with human mortality in much art, literature and music is hardly novel. Not surprisingly other popular musicians as varied as Kate Bush, Bob Dylan and others have addressed this theme. This matters as we currently live in a scientific culture that seeks to bring death under control. Indeed I recently read about some researchers working in the United States who were aiming to entirely defeat death from the human experience. The pervasiveness of science and technology while extending our lives seeks perhaps to banish more existential questions from popular human experience. Art and culture in this respect continues to have a valuable role to play as it is only with a sense that one day our lives will come to an end that we can make our lives meaningful and vital. The attempt to erase this shared experience simply stokes a sense of collective fear and displacement. Bowie’s final gift to his many fans across the world was to try and communicate a sense of what it means to live with a sense of his own limits. When I wrote my book on Bowie ten years ago many of the fans I interviewed (the final chapter) talked movingly about what Bowie meant to them personally. The theme of death and dying was never far from the surface. Many who had followed Bowie over his career were worried about him dying and there being literally no more new music. Bowie for them was someone who not only had acted as an inspiration, but also as someone they had grown up and grown older alongside. The other theme that came up was how Bowie had literally grown old with a considerable amount of grace. In this media age of celebrity where many are concerned with appearance and the defeat of ageing and death it seemed that Bowie was a successful survivor from the 1960s. This is a considerable achievement in the culture of instant obsolescence. Many people recognise that modern capitalism produces a precarious society and the music business in no exception. More personally Bowie had dealt with divorce, drug addiction and financial collapse. Bowie’s dignity in this respect was often contrasted with other people who not only craved the limelight, but who had become desperate in the process. For many of the people I spoke to Bowie’s vitality came from his ability to take risks and sometimes to fail. This was less a sense of financial risk and speculation, but artistic endeavor and creativity. Listening to some of the comments about Bowie circulating within media today, it is as if he never put a foot wrong. This was not the impression created by the fans who felt positively about Bowie not because of his wealth or fame, but because of his experimental attitude towards being alive. They all recognised that Bowie had produced music that was hard to like (here the Tin Machine albums were often mentioned), but that it was not really possible to make interesting and innovative music unless you pushed the limits of what seemed to be possible. This perhaps contains an important message in a society that treats failure as a mark of shame. What seemingly matters in a celebrity and consumer capitalist culture is less the quality or indeed value of culture, but more that it is successful in making a financial return. Along with Bowie’s resonance with the lives of his many fans comes the importance of recreating ourselves while accepting we may indeed fail in this venture. Perhaps part of the reason that Bowie resonated with so many people was his capacity to speak (despite his evident success) from the position of the outsider. As a cultural sociologist I am used to exploring the more mythical elements of our shared cultural experience that goes beyond the usual appeals to rationality, predictability and control. Bowie remains important for his subcultural capacity to reinvent himself without sacrificing a sense of value and credibility. David Bowie continued to communicate a sense of strangeness, mystery and otherness which despite living within a secular society we need in order to make human life worth living. The ‘myth’ of David Bowie is significant as it speaks of our shared need of poetry and the human imagination to make sense of the most challenging aspects of the human condition. Dr Nick Stevenson (Reader In Cultural Sociology, University of Nottingham). This post was originally published in 2016 on the University of Nottingham blog site.

Neoliberal Democracy and Alternative Democracies

The current election is already shaping up to be a fairly depressing spectacle. After the discussion about the television debates, whether or not David Cameron would like a third term or indeed the mostly negative posters seeking to cover one another in dirt you could not really blame the public for lacking interest. Following the debates thus far I began to think that there was a conspiracy amongst the parties to make sure that the election was as bland as possible. On the BBC’s ‘The Daily Politics’ the other day a member of UKIP challenged a ‘protestor’ that if he had better ideas then he should put himself up for election. Within this exchange what we can hear is a desperate narrowing of political debate. Most of the public are well aware that when they vote for political parties they are voting for packages of policies (a fair number of which they may not agree with) and that many of the votes cast are simply strategies to stop other people being elected. Further when it comes to the election the public have (despite the protests to the contrary) very few opportunities to question the political parties. Indeed any members of the electorate ‘accidentally’ find themselves questioning a prospective member of parliament this then becomes a potential point of embarrassment. We can all remember the hapless Gordon Brown in the last election being confronted by Gillian Duffy on questions to do with immigration. These situations are mostly avoided through the publication of glossy campaign material, well-scripted television exchanges with ‘professional’ journalists and of course images of prospective candidates enjoying photo opportunities with their supporters, all designed to hold the public at a distance. I used to think that we should try and think of creative ways to open spaces where the parties had to face members of the public. The arrival of local television for example offers the prospective of more disorderly exchanges or even more face-to-face encounters at hustings that might revive the political process. However my experience of these events over the years has been fairly disappointing. Few members of the public tend to turn up, and when they do they are mostly met again with the well scripted response. There are of course a few brave souls who try and stand as independent candidates but their voices are often drowned out by the workings of official party machines. As someone who first joined a political party when I was sixteen and campaigned enthusiastically in the 1983 election the most notable difference between now and then is the power of the media of mass communication. The spectacle of the election not only leaves many people feeling cynical and powerless, but also bored and frustrated. In the context of neoliberalism and our market-orientated democracy political parties have become increasingly centrally organised and controlled. This often leaves ordinary party members feeling like foot soldiers with little voice inside the top-down party bureaucracy. The current accepted wisdom is that the media punish political parties who fail to offer strong leadership (this means we like authoritarian control) and are harsh on campaigns that seem to be ‘plagued by in-fighting’ (we are not that keen on argument and disagreement either). The question which these reflections inevitably open up is where does all this leave democracy? If one definition of democracy is that we each have an equal vote in an election where we choose a leader there are other, alternative definitions. Democracy should also mean an opportunity to have your voice heard, the possibility of listening to critical debate and unruly forms of exchange or at very least the opportunity for dissent. We might argue that these features are perhaps better met by more grass roots campaigns. Here we also need to tread carefully. Many organisations within the charitable sector or wider civil society are equally hierarchically organised. Just like political parties they need to make sure activists are ‘on message’ and often act like an extended form of public relations. Here it is probably important not to be too pessimistic, but sometimes there is not as clear a distinction between the so called alternative and the mainstream as many people think. The real problem was probably best summarised by the philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis (2011) through what he refers to as the privatisation of politics. As a society we often dismiss those who turn their backs on politics as apathetic. However Castoriadis argues this converts lack of engagement into a personal failing when there are actually few opportunities to genuinely govern ourselves. The top-down organisation of work places, schools, political parties and yes even some so-called social movements are in fact designed to produce a sense of powerlessness. This produces a vicious circle in that the more that citizens withdraw their interest the more that the state, centralised bureaucracies and markets take over. Partly this situation has been amplified by the collapse of the New Left after the 1960s and the closing of more revolutionary options after the ending of ‘actually existed socialism’. Historically popular uprisings like Budapest in 1956 and Prague in 1968 or indeed more recently anti-roads protests, feminist campaigns on the body or the Occupy movement offer a sense that struggles for popular control have a long history, but these have been mostly air brushed out of view by a Left that rarely questions beyond the hegemony of parliamentary democracy. The retreat of these ideas from the horizons of the vast majority of the population Castoriadis (2011: 10) describes as evidence of ‘the ideological exhaustion of our age’. Neoliberalism within this vacuum offers consumerism, precarious forms of employment for increasing numbers of people and of course unemployment. In the era of privatisation the political is vacated by citizens and becomes largely controlled from above by ‘professional’ groups like politicians, spin doctors, strategists and think tanks. Freedom under the guise of neoliberalism requires very little sense of commitment, but is something that the system offers without any effort involved. However as Castoriadis (2011:18) reminds us, within more radical traditions of self-management ‘freedom is an activity’ that needs to be able to set its own limits. If it is literally impossible to subject everything to more popular forms of control - and in any case would require ‘too many meetings’ as Oscar Wilde once quipped - then this is a tradition that needs to be revived. Before the conversation becomes too pessimistic I have however noticed a new turn in the debate. The arrival of the environmental movement and the anti-globalisation protests have revived questions related to self-management. These movements have sought to ask why our town squares, libraries, universities, schools, work places and natural landscape are places that are literally becoming enclosed by capital. If, as E.P.Thompson’s (1968) historical masterpiece long recognised, the first wave of enclosure acts not only separated people from the land by converting it into private property it also created the wage labour for factories in the city. This is significant as we are currently being assaulted by a second wave of enclosure this time focused upon public resources and the environment. Today as activist David Bollier’s popular web site (www.bollier.com) makes plain there is a growing world-wide movement to resist the enclosure of the commons by an alliance of capitalism and the neoliberal state. This means groups seeking to promote the cause of co-operatives, public resources not yet privatised, the rights of indigenous peoples and a sustainable planet. The commons movement in its multiple forms of expression resists a system where more productivity, commodification and environmental exploitation is never enough to meet its needs. The attempt to resist the new waves of enclosure that links up demands for fresh water, food and other more cultural resources the world over cuts across a number of issues and questions. The movement for the commons will require commoners willing to give up their time and energy to resist the current ideological consensus that argues that the best way for us to manage our society is through hierarchical forms of control. What is beginning to emerge here is a progressive critique of representative democracy, but this time without the need for violent revolution. If the history of revolutionary movements in the past became deformed through the attempt to replace capitalism with the state, the idea of the commons is more of a permanent war against the enclosing logic of the market. Whoever wins the current election we will be faced by a state that has progressively drained civil society of any sense of control. This has not just meant a war on the power of local authorities, but on a range of other institutions as well. Schools are controlled by Ofsted, fuel by energy companies, food by supermarkets, our streets by privately owned cars, our bodies by the advertising industry, our towns and cities by car parks and shopping centres, and our work places increasingly by the needs of capital for endless forms of growth. These forms of enclosure which have emerged over the course of the historical development by capitalism are unlikely to be confronted by one large movement but by a multitude of agencies from below. The struggle for the commons may yet turn into one of the big sociological and political stories of the 21st century, but you are not likely to hear this during the election campaign. The need for democratic control did not disappear at the end of the twentieth century, but is silenced within a debate dominated by the fight over the privatised needs of ‘hard working familiies’. Dr Nick Stevenson Reader in Cultural Sociology University of Nottingham. Bibliography Castoriadis, C. (2011) ‘No God, No Ceasr, No Tribune!: Cornelius Castoriadis Interviewed by David Mermet’, in Rockhill, G. (ed) Postscript on Insignificance, London, Continuum. Thompson, E.P (1968) The Making of the English Working Class, London, Penguin. This article was originally posted in Discover Society in 2015.