Tearing the city at the seams #25 - A walk across London in search of British leftism

Two quotes to begin:

‘The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.’

‘At this point it’s worth noting that the economy is not a real thing, it is a man-made system designed to serve us, an ideological machine.  It has gone wrong and is tyrannising us.  We wouldn’t tolerate that from a literal machine...’

The first is attributable to Karl Marx from 1848; the second, some 166 years hence, to Russell Brand.

This is an essay about a walk across London.  A walk that sought to explore the state of contemporary leftism in Britain, and, as the most unpredictable election in decades draws near, what we can possibly expect and draw from left wing ideologies in the future.

The walk began just south of Covent Garden, in the tempest of tourism, on a sunny Saturday afternoon.  On the corner of Russell Street, in what was formerly the Red Lion pub but has now morphed into a branch of All Bar One, Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx were commissioned to write a pamphlet, the aim of which was to formalise in words the burgeoning spectre of disparate revolutionary ideals that at the time was haunting Europe, ‘The Communist Manifesto’.

Some of the Manifesto is now hopelessly archaic, but counterbalancing this is so much that reads as fresh as agit-prop graffiti.  In particular, the revolutionising of production constantly creating an environment of agitation and antagonism for the workers; in its condemning of the global market system that ‘must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere’; and in its assertion that the formation of every society has been based on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes, towards which certain conditions must be kept in perpetuity.

Within the generic surroundings of the All Bar One though, the early afternoon clientele armed with their libations certainly looked as though they’d reject any such assertion of their oppression.  One of the bar staff, a tall and raffish Italian man in his late-20s, was unequivocal in his view that Marx’s theories are still relevant to today’s workers.  “The advantage is definitely all on the side of the employer, especially somewhere like London...I mean, if you don’t like your job there’ll be someone else waiting right behind you to take it off you...and they know that.”

Heading north through the West End, the streets thronged with consumerist bustle, arms locked with chain store bags, restaurants engorged with diners, and coffee shops liberally scattered like a sack of beans split open over a map.

The historian Niall Ferguson has written that our infatuation with the humble bean may have helped fuel our once glorious empire – ‘the English were luckier in their drugs; long habituated to alcohol, they were roused from inebriation in the 17^th century by American tobacco, Arabian coffee and Chinese tea.  The Chinese ended up with the lethargy of the opium den.’

If, as is often mooted, we are living in an age that celebrates the individual, with notions of collectivisation increasingly rendered lacklustre and inert, then one has to search for new arena of communality that this secular post-modern society presents.  Undoubtedly, one such place is the coffee shop; a blend of strong Continental European flavour and aesthetic with the American ‘Friends’-style froth of social discourse.  The Costas, Starbucks and Caffe Neros that sprinkle the country’s streets are where we are elevated to the imaginary realm of the petit-bourgeois, exalting in the freedom of the latte, the cappuccino, the varieties of herbal tea.

The internet, with all its transformative zeal of harnessing a new egalitarian realm, can often be seen in its true atomised form through the window of any high street coffee shop – tables of individuals locked into glowing portals to a digital ether.

Hitching east along Theobald’s Road, one passes by the famous Great Ormond Street Hospital, representing as it does the increasingly taut and frayed rope of socialism that binds our society’s conscience, the NHS.  Forever haemorrhaging capital, the NHS, according to experts, requires a steady and prolonged transfusion of government spending, the acceptable public spending vice that must be satiated just as we crave the caffeine stimulus to fortify us for the day ahead.

Still one of the most fraught battlegrounds of political warfare, with the managerial structure of Kafka’s castle, the NHS occupies a curious, almost fundamentalist, place in the British public consciousness.  For the most part, the NHS is relied upon in the final few years and months of one’s life.  Our unshakable totemic faith in the institution reveals the conviction that, whilst we may cleave to the establishment matrix of class structures and hegemonic institutions, we do all deserve equality in death.  For whilst we may not seek provision for people to avoid indignities and suffering in life, we do at least believe that everyone is entitled to the dignity of a good death.

I peeled off into Clerkenwell, a place whose history is synonymous with radicalism, although you wouldn't think it to stroll through now.  Long gone are the headquarters of the Communist Party, the left wing printing presses, and the places where Bolshevik leaders in exile at the start of the 20^th century would flee to in order to escape the secret police of the tsars and plot the revolution.  On Clerkenwell Green though, there is the Marxist Memorial Library bursting with busts and flags, whilst a beard’s tug away on Farringdon Road is where the Labour Party were founded in 1900.

Winding past the once Brutalist ghetto now eminently prime real estate of the Barbican, one gets a feel for how the post-war collectivisation programme manifested itself in the unforgiving architecture of the concrete jungle.  Not to mention how, decades later, when property in central London has become the sturdiest financial asset attainable, it can be re-imagined and re-marketed as a prestigious retro location (much like the Trellick Tower has been in Notting Hill), to be snaffled up by a shrewd Russian, Saudi or Qatari investor.

Approaching Liverpool Street, the revolutionary history almost reaches its arms up from the ground like necrotic zombies.

For it is here, whilst excavating colossal mounds of earth as part of the Crossrail project, that archaeological work has begun to try and disinter the bones of some 3000 people buried at the Bedlam site during the 16^th and 17^th centuries.  The osteological analysts hope to uncover the skeletons of ‘Freeborn’ John Lilburne and Robert Lockyer who, aged just 23, led the Bishopsgate mutiny of 1649 as part of the Levellers movement during the tumult of the English Civil War in which the monarchy was usurped and various rival factions vied to enshrine a parliamentary executive power.

Executed in front of St. Paul’s by a firing squad for refusing the leave the City of London and face being ordered to obey the whims of the New Model Army without pay, Lockyer’s death brought about tremendous discontent amongst the Leveller movement which had pushed against Oliver Cromwell’s aims for a plutocratic form of Parliament and instead championed ideas of popular sovereignty, extended suffrage to all households, and equality before the law.  But they were only one of many dissenting groups that thrived during the period, one of the which was the Diggers, led by Gerrard Winstanley, who advocated a form of agrarian socialism in which small rural communities would gain prevalence in a renewed interrelationship between man and nature.

Could it not be postulated perhaps that by disturbing the resting place of these long-dead radicals it might serve as an omen of sorts for the brewing discontent and disillusionment with the financial epicentre that is the City of London?  The long-entombed spiritual energy might soon undulate through the strata of history to manifest itself in renewed unrest, or at the least, a new found scepticism in the sanctity of its institutions.

As it is, the City of London is the fulcrum around which the entire nation slowly revolves.  Ever since being un-tethered from 1979 onwards by Thatcher’s New Right programme, it has come to float like a financial Hindenburg destined for cyclical inflation and immolation.  The kind of sums are traded on the derivatives, currency and stock exchange markets each and every day that make government budget quibbling look by comparison like rather small change. 

The astonishing failure of Labour in recent years is that it has allowed the Conservatives to tarnish them as economically profligate and untrustworthy, while defining themselves as prudent and trustworthy.  Whereas, it was Thatcher, taking the lead from Reagan’s America and a squadron of technocratic monetarists, who subjected Britain to a prolonged economic experiment that gave the illusion of prosperity with Right to Buy schemes and easy credit. What was enshrined instead was something close to an elected dictatorship whereby short-term investments, a decimated industrial base and a nation with higher levels of personal debt than anywhere else in the world was to become the basis of a new and unquestionable faith in the market system.  On the other hand though, Labour, along with its vestigial hope of socialism, had at the time never looked so spent and out-of-touch; in 1979 any prospect of leftism being electable rolled over and died. 

Herein lies the fundamental paradox of Thatcherism and modern Conservatives.  Those on the Right claim as their ethos and raison d’être the preservation of intrinsic British values – the institution of family, ‘a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay’, a small state, hierarchy and order – and yet at the same time push wholeheartedly for the kind of rapacious and unregulated technological progress and economic growth that, as a natural consequence, serve to distort and erode them. 

With free market laissez-faire capitalism, Britain (as with America), was left with a breakdown in family life (higher divorce rates, parents working longer for less pay), high crime and incarceration levels, stagnating and in many cases falling wages, and massive levels of state intervention when inevitably the whole edifice looked set to crumble and fall (the bailing out of the banks, austerity measures and Quantitative Easing).  As one of the leading contemporary left wing voices, Owen Jones, has said, that with their protected interests, propped-up wages and next-to-no threat of unemployment, ‘it seems its socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor.’

Make no mistake, the British left is no less confused.  A quick online search dredges up from the ideological swamp innumerable groups, collectives and talking-shops that offer an outlet for left wing politics – Socialist Party, Socialist Workers Party, Left Unity, Solidarity, Respect, Reality, Communist Party of Great Britain....

Socialism, representing as it does a wide plane of moralistic and progressive values, with collectivism and social justice as a fundamental tenet, can only paradoxically splinter into a myriad disparate factions and cliques that cleave to a swathe of idealistic myths about revolution, the working class and Marxist theory, that draw a resilient potency from assuming the perpetual mantle of the embattled underdog.

Britain has not seen the kind of groundswell of public disenchantment that has elevated Syriza to power in Greece or Podemos to the mainstream in Spain; and perhaps that is due to the largely suffocating force of the City of London.  All the same, that no strong coherent voice of the left has emerged to lay a real challenge at the door of economic orthodoxy during the harshest recession in living memory is a damning indictment.

Continuing north through Shoreditch and on through Hoxton, revelers were out on the streets celebrating or lamenting their fortunes in that afternoon’s Grand National race (a sporting event that typifies the entrenched aristocratic conservatism that defines so much of British society and culture).  Perennial events such as this, along with royal family jamborees, all infused with encouraged intoxication serve as both useful distraction agencies and as necessary valves for energy that might otherwise manifest itself in other more deviant and subversive directions.  (I don’t take against them per se, but it’s wise to recognise them for what they are.)

Will Hutton wrote in ‘The State We’re In’, that Conservatism has become anchored into the collective consciousness as the ‘party of instinct’, bestowing a sense of hierarchy, class and ‘born to rule’ politics.  This can be seen from the church, to the legal system, the media (most notably with the monopoly of the Murdoch press), public schools, the Bank of England, and an obsession with property, towards which the ladders of social mobility are poised just within reach.  This was particularly salient when New Labour soared to power and instead of reforming the Westminster system to a more socialist ideal, came to revel in the hegemonic majority-party power structure that Thatcher had enshrined and exploited to great effect.

 Walking through Shoreditch, the hipster central full of Greek philosopher beards, craft beer and fixed-gear bikes, one could be forgiven for forgetting the principal reason why a major political overhaul towards leftism is most unlikely in Britain any time soon – the demographics.  An ageing population looking towards retirement, with property to safeguard and pass on to children, and pension funds woven into the global money markets, has simply too much invested in the economic orthodoxy to challenge it even if they were inspired to do so.

The younger generations are entering adulthood in an era of utmost political confusion, where disillusionment with the contemporary political order – that has itself become more and more toothless – causes people to latch onto the pseudo-anarchic hyperbole of Russell Brand.  

In many ways, Brand’s book ‘Revolution’ is a perfect encapsulation of the confused and fissiparous times in which we live, sliding as it does between hopelessly vague summations, banal presumptions and snatches of refreshingly clear thinking.  It chuffs comfortably along on intellectualisms from the likes of Noam Chomsky, David Graeber, Naomi Klein and Thomas Piketty, but always ends up derailing down the banks of flippancy and spiritual musings of which the following is a choice quote:

‘We human beings are the temporary expression of a greater force that science as yet cannot explain  but is approaching in its fledging understanding of the harmony and translucent principles of the quantum world.’

My walk ended at the recently opened Trew Era Cafe, that Brand has commendably helped finance with the profits from his book, on the New Era Estate that he last year championed in their fight against being eviction by the perfidious Westbrook Partners.

And so, the journey across London returned to its symbolic beginning, immersed within the coffee shop culture that we now invest with such communalism.  One customer there, a girl in her early-20s training to be a primary school teacher said that she “didn’t think much about left or right wing”, that it tended to resort either way to alienating rhetoric.  Instead she said her vote would be going to the Green Party, due to it being the only party seeking to address the environmental calamity that threatens us.

In many ways this is perhaps the most sensible course for British politics to take; surrendering the banjaxed posturing over fatigued policy points, where Labour can’t even raise the issue of basic rent controls without the right opposition accusing them of seeking to emulate Chavez in Venezuela, and focusing instead on installing a green economy that makes some attempt to draw the ever-widening poles of inequality closer together.

As Naomi Klein discusses in ‘This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate’, the main reason those on the right have been so slow-footed in tackling climate change is that they recognise the necessary steps to alleviate long-term global damage happen to be those that lead away from the improvident free markets and rampant consumerist path they would have us all queue along in an orderly line.

Whether Labour succeed at the General Election or not, leftism in Britain is now a confused network of beliefs and ideas in search of an electrode to earth rather than allow them, as ever, to melt into air.