Halfway through this excellent outline of the decline of the UK, and dismantling of the post-war settlement and consensus politics, the author says ‘the right can only win through divide and rule, by telling a series of very different stories to different groups of people and hoping they don’t notice the growing inconsistencies’. This tactic works very well when the media is controlled by super-rich chums of the political classes (you could say the latter work for the former). The ‘mainstream left’ abandoned Labour when the party threatened to become a working opposition, or, ‘lord help us’, viable socialistically inclined government. Dorling details how the ‘red wall’ is a media-created myth and how non-voting was a greater factor in the last elections than dislike of Labour per se.

THE DISEMPOWERED RIOTING AND EATING ITSELF

Today, with Labour in a safe pair of hands – witness recent social media ‘outing’ of Starmer’s cosying up to the likes of the Murdochs – it is hard to see ‘business as usual’ failing the Tory party, despite how awful they are. Those who see this and despair, regarding Starmer as ‘Thatcher’s grandchild’, spawn of Blair, tell me they can’t vote Labour at the next election. I have had numerous conversations along these lines at Bookbuster. Despite the obvious fact that in a marginal constituency such as Hastings & Rother, only gritting your teeth and voting a marginally lesser evil (Labour) can defeat the darker forces of Tory domination, it seems to me a real likelihood that Labour will lose yet again, with a few alternative options on the ballot getting a few more votes to no avail. The establishment laughs all the way to the Commons.

However, as Dorling points out, and illustrates in detail, Britain is ‘shattered’, a broken nation. He regards the current, and rising, inequality as making us a failed state. It seems inconceivable that the degree of cognitive dissonance on the part of large parts of the electorate can hold out in the face of events. Whilst we are not, say, France, nonetheless, surely the worm must turn? It is hard, after years of austerity, Brexit, the pandemic, the high-handed public castration of Corbyn, not to cynically believe that, no, England cannot ‘turn the world upside down’ and institute egalitarian measures to address our multiple crises. Or, that if we do see civil unrest, it will be a toxic combination of the disempowered rioting and eating itself, accompanied by an inexorable rise of the far right.

THATCHERISM AND BLAIRISM AS VERY EFFECTIVE BATTLES AGAINST THE POOREST

This crisis is measured from a statistical ‘peak’, which the author pinpoints around 1974. ‘…on balance it was a good time, a time of Britain becoming less arrogant and more inclusive’.

He is clear-eyed about various inequalities that persisted even then, or that were addressed later (and are all assailed by the ‘anti-woke’ backlash), but a number of markers do appear to line up to ‘our best times’ being half a century ago. That peak was due to the rise of a welfare state, and a political philosophy that spurned the diametrically opposed extremes of ‘soviet’ ‘freedom-from’ and Yankee ‘freedom-to’ instead seeking a balance that allowed opportunity and innovation whilst at the same time ensuring a strong and functional safety net. Whilst the right paint the strikes and union militancy of the early ‘70s as the cause of our woes, Dorling presents a more balanced view, seeing them, instead, as also being a function of workers seeking to protect post-war gains from erosion under neo-capitalist assault. This view sees Thatcherism and Blairism as very effective battles against the poorest in our society, and today as a final assault in that war to ‘free’ the globalised economy at any cost.

‘THE NEW SQUALOR’

Thus, the book gives clear and detailed analyses of the various ways in which greed, globalism, and a self-perpetuating cycle of growing inequality and destruction of our social matrix has shattered our nation. Examples include the way in which highly corrupt ‘academies’ have swept up so much of our state-sector schooling so quickly (close to 80% are now in private, and profiteering, hands); the way in which PFI, an initiative launched by John Major, but embraced by Labour under Blair, has eviscerated public finances for short-term growth; the ways in which ‘the cradle-to-grave UK welfare state has been substantially dismantled’ and turned into a vindictive system of torture (we now have ‘twice as many food banks in the UK as there are McDonald’s outlets’, we are seeing ‘the return of rickets’, and a massive rise in stress-related physical and mental illness); the way our housing crises are exacerbated by greed, a spiralling cost of living and increased ‘precarity’ (‘the new squalor’), a refusal by government to bring back controls stripped away under Thatcher, leading us to a plummeting median prosperity (by some measures we are now below Greece and only matched in inequality and poverty by Bulgaria or Estonia)…

‘A DIFFERENT WORLD IS NOT JUST POSSIBLE, IT ALREADY EXISTS IN EUROPE’

Amongst the cures, though all require time, are mass nationalisation of core services, and a return to a regulated financial sector and stopping up the massive leak of wealth through tax evasion and foreign ownership, as ‘the very rich hoard property, money and services’, thus ‘reversing out of Thatcherism’. Dorling notes, for example, that ‘the highest water quality and lowest sewerage discharge in the UK is in Scotland, where the national water company is state owned’. He also details how other European countries have successfully addressed similar housing crises to ours, despite Tory claims it can’t be done or is too expensive.

Here is what Dorling has to say about our dystopian future: ‘A different world is not just possible, it already exists in Europe. Much of what appears impossible to us is already happening elsewhere’, ‘what is missing is the political will to change, and the understanding that change has happened elsewhere successfully’. Wake from your slumber and rise!

Shattered Nation is available from Bookbuster, 39 Queens Road, Hastings TN34 1RE

By Terry Eagleton

Published by Verso Books, 2022, paperback, rrp £12.99,
available at Bookbuster, 39 Queens Road

Review by Tim Barton

With our fundamentally undemocratic ‘first past the post’ system of allocating seats in Parliament, it is simplistic to suggest that the ‘principled’ way to place one’s vote is with the party you most agree with. It is a luxury many voters do not have if they wish to see ‘their’ party win, or hope to defeat the worst option party. A tactical vote may, in some circumstances, perhaps most, be the ‘principled’ choice. This does of course rankle, which is why some of us bang on about Proportional Representation, a bill of rights, citizenship training, to name but a few constitutional changes we would be the better for.

But there are limits and for many Labour voters I know, many of whom have voted Labour all their lives, ‘even under Blair’, the new Labour leader has been deemed beyond the pale. The latest council election results are interesting but nationally what do they really mean? ‘Labour has limped to success through Tory failure. It is a poor basis for hope’: this is a diagnosis of the position of Starmer’s Labour Party after the May council elections from James Butler in the London Review of Books. I think it a fair diagnosis. Frankly, Johnson lost votes rather than Starmer winning them. With the current governmental clown-show, Labour should have done even better. In Hastings, it seems the Green vote was bolstered by many former voters switching from both the Tory, and in greater numbers, the Labour party.

MORE OF A KILLER INSTINCT THAN HE IS GIVEN CREDIT FOR?

Come the next election, what may this mean? Certainly, past ‘mid-term’ council elections that have acted as a protest vote do not reliably determine the more tribalistic general election results. It seems there are many irons in the fire, including ‘the plague that shall not be named’, Brexit, the Northern Ireland border farrago and the current ‘cost-of-living crisis’. The latter is a perfect storm caused by the other issues, wildly exacerbated by rising fuel prices and the post-Thatcher culture of greed. And it is beginning to get severe criticism from across the electorate.

Can Starmer gain from these crises? A ‘senior aide’ told The Guardian’s Jessica Elgot that ‘Keir has got way more of a killer instinct than he is given credit for.’ Sadly, he has not shown this as Opposition Leader, even a little bit. Where he has shown it is in regards to internal party discipline. Many of the votes lost in May were, frankly, in protest at the shabby treatment of Corbyn as much as with Starmer’s weak record in opposition to the farcical excuse for a government he faces (so far). Witch-hunts that emulate Kinnock’s in the 1980s, and court the Blairites, have been severe and unjust: not least, with regard to the issue of whether to restore the whip to Corbyn. The whole mess around Corbynism has lost a huge amount of good will from younger voters, especially as the Party they supported launched a civil war on their symbol of hope.

CONTRADICTORY IMPULSES?

Eagleton’s book is a useful tool in beginning to understand Starmer. Starmer only became an MP in 2015. He appeared to be a safe choice for leader, supporting the Corbyn project but not passionately. To my mind he smacked of opportunistic ambition. And that hunch is being borne out every day that passes. Yet he came to prominence with a track-record of supporting left-wing and human rights causes. How do we square this with his knighthood; with his gallows hangman approach to dissent within the party; with his toe-the-line attitude to the establishment, and in the ‘we are at war’ (but we are not) culture promulgated by Johnson?

He has long shown what many might say are contradictory impulses. He worked hard to protect IRA prisoners’ rights, while at the same time supporting Police use of rubber bullets and tear gas to disperse protestors in Catholic districts who were against Loyalist marches being routed through their streets. Since this Loyalist Orange march had paramilitary regalia, and known extremists, threaded through it, one might have suggested the route be banned. But instead, Starmer did what the state chose in Cable Street, when Mosley’s fascists marched through largely Jewish parts of London’s East End in 1936. It is no wonder ‘the left’ don’t trust him.

SHOULD WE TRUST THIS MAN?

Ironically, in his youth, Starmer wrote for far-left magazines. He also, more recently, stood on a platform supporting boycott of trade with Israel, a stance he and the PLP now deem to be ‘antisemitic’ and cause for expulsion. Not to mention having been, apparently, against the Iraq War. However, as I see it, when he came to prominence as a lawyer, the path to power was harder through centrist Blairism, which had become a big pond (and lest we forget, at least until Iraq, a popular one), but rather through swimming upstream with smaller fry, as a big fish in smaller ponds.

Whilst he presumably had no Blofeld-like plan laid out in crayon at age 10, as Johnson probably did, and whether he was fully conscious of the possibilities of giving the appearance of a left-winger whilst aiming ‘higher’, this dynamic, certainly at least from the mid-90s onward, could help square the circle. At most points he also engaged in Establishment-friendly activity. In my view he played the long game to get to the top, and was not wholly the ‘man of conviction’ he appeared to be: or rather, that he held different convictions to those he publicly supported. Hilary Wainwright has said that Starmer has ‘an insatiable need to ingratiate himself with established authority’.

Should we trust this man? Eagleton will help you to make your mind up, but Starmer’s cards are held close to his chest. However, a week or so ago a story went around indicating that he intends to ‘move away’ from the promises of the last manifesto – a manifesto that did not lose the election, a billionaires’ media war on Corbyn did that – a manifesto that I and many others felt made Labour, all too briefly, both the principled and pragmatic choice.

Confused? You will be, on next week’s episode of PMQs…

By Stuart Jeffries

Published by Verso, 2021 hardback, £20 rrp

Review by Tim Barton

Jeffries is not seeking to give a straightforward definition of ‘postmodernism’, nor does he dig into the originating thinkers who contributed to its philosophical theory. One of the hallmarks of postmodern readings of authors’ works is the denial that an author’s intent is, 1) relevant or 2) known, really, even to the author. Such insights are admittedly odd, and in my view, whilst they have their uses, tend to be pushed too far. Jeffries himself is happy to play with these thoughts, despite his book being in many ways a critique, and this allows him to get away with ignoring a lot of verbose theory and give us instead, an entertaining read.

The range, embracing pop culture as well as high theory, politics as well as candy-floss, reminds me of the current god of pop-culture theory, Mark Fischer, specifically his K-Punk blogs. Mark’s rise is all the more intriguing, as he has been dead for a few years now. Stuart is not trying to fit his shoes but his gadfly approach is similar.

Chapters here are mostly chronological dating from the rise of neoliberalism, which here is deemed to be 1972. This is philosophically a late start for ‘postmodernism’ but does seem to fit the timing of its bumping into ‘real’ world affairs. Each chapter takes three iconic moments from each year the author has picked as touchstones, taking in pop, technology and politics. This pattern keeps the reader’s attention and he never allows it to be too rigid an approach to cramp his style. Thus, to take two examples, his 1979 takes in the Sex Pistols, Margaret Thatcher, and Jean-François Lyotard; and his 1991 takes in the Gulf War, Vegas, and Silicon Valley. His last chapters bring us from the Credit Crunch up to Netflix, iPods and GTA.

What this approach does is offer a ‘definition’ of the postmodern through illustrative examples. As ‘postmodernism’ is a bit slippery, this is effective and less dry than quoting academic treatises and dictionaries. However, as his argument is intended to show the parallels between consumerist ‘values’ and the neoliberal phase of capitalism, and to then take the latter as the driving force of the former, he misses much out. Aesthetics is a primary area from which postmodern ideas emerged, and it has made an amusing funfair out of the arts and architecture.

A rambunctious aesthetic has emerged, mixing up genres and styles with glee. New architecture might take a bit from gothic and a bit from brutalist; painters might redo Constable in day-glo; musicians might engage in a new ‘kitchen-sink’ production style, as heard from Madonna, Sugar Hill, Stock Aitken and Waterman or Colourbox. This has definitely been FUN. Distracting. Financially rewarding for its successes – people like Jeff Koons in the 1980s and the aforementioned Miss Ciccone – and pocket-draining for punters. It is a fair point that this playful art trend is a boon to late period consumer capitalism, especially as it often involves the public putting their critical faculties on pause and diminishing our attention spans.

So long as ‘postmodernism’ stayed in ‘the arts’ it seemed relatively harmless. Even this is giving too much of a free pass to PoMo pundits, though, as George Sakkai’s new book Whose Truth, Whose Creativity? argues. It has, anyway, long since leaked out and virally toxified much more of our culture, which Jeffries touches on via his analysis of, for example, the Gulf War: starting with Jean Baudrillard’s The Gulf War Never Happened but also more everyday media coverage / manipulation of events. Here we see all narratives being given equal value, or lack of value; the very concept of ‘truth’ being denied in phrases such as Hassan-i-Sabbah’s “There is no truth, all is permitted”. This is the true, toxic, legacy of ‘postmodern’ ideas, the ‘philosopher’s intent’ be damned.

The rise of the World Wide Web and currently dominant social media such as Facebook, Instagram, Tik-Tok, and Snapchat exemplify and exaggerate these effects. There is little doubt the damage done has helped extend a consumerist culture a bit past its natural sell-by date. Nor that it has de-radicalised a large part of the ‘working class’. Indeed, it was Leon Trotsky who first predicted, in 1905 that capitalists would buy off workers by throwing tidbits to them and making of them passive consumers. And here is part of the issue with Jeffries’ thesis: we can see much of the ‘pop culture eating itself’ going on in, say, the 1930s American pulps or in 1950s suburbia, long before the rise to power of the ideas Ayn Rand, von Mises, or Hayek; long before Nixon, or Reagan and Thatcher. Even modernist icons such as James Joyce’s 1922 novel Ulysses in fact fit the aesthetic definition of ‘postmodernist’ just as well. Jeffries is heading in the right direction, but does not go anywhere near far enough in criticising and suggesting the dangers of ‘postmodernism’, and I suspect his book would be a lot less fun if he had.

Because forces in America that promulgated PoMo ideas are far from just capitalist greed-heads, it goes much deeper. The dark rising is on the right, is anti-’communist’, and used PoMo ideas as a means to de-radicalise and fragment the left, student revolt, black power and the anti-Vietnam War generation. A telling anecdote, still heard today says Jerry Garcia fresh from the radicalising ‘Workingman’s Dead’ tour, was recruited by the CIA to depoliticise the flower power generation by switching the Grateful Dead’s output from politically engaged folk-rock to LSD-laced psychedelia. True or not, it stands metaphorically as an explanation for the Left’s political woes of the last 50 years, and is neck-deep in ‘postmodernism’.

Teach it at colleges and you divert the kids before they can learn to fight the system. For lecturers, the obscurantist rhetoric PoMo thinkers use, often to disguise that the emperor is naked as a new-born baby, helps them maintain tenure by invisibly recycling their old ideas. In the words of Edward Bernays in his 1928 book on Propaganda, ‘In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons… who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind”, yet these invisible puppeteers live here too, and are as manipulated by the beast they have unleashed as we are.

Ultimately, ‘postmodernism’ promotes the ideas that ‘there is no truth’ and ‘all narratives are equal’, ideas that fundamentally undermine enlightenment values, rationality and the sciences. A quick look at stickers and posters pasted up all over Hastings, or the arguments on our local Facebook pages, on the subjects of chemtrails, masks, vaccines, 5G, David Icke, ‘great resets’ and aluminium hats will tell you that the battle is all but lost. We do not need to reform the system, we need to break it down and rebuild.

By Noam Chomsky, Robert Pollin and C J Polychroniou

Published by Verso Books, 2020, paperback rrp £12.99 / Bookbuster price £10.99

Review Tim Barton

A fortnight ago, the government signed an international agreement to ‘save nature’, key elements of which are “a renewed effort to reduce deforestation, halt unsustainable fishing practices, eliminate environmentally harmful subsidies and begin the transition to sustainable food production systems and a circular economy over the next decade” (the Guardian, 28/09/20).

Last week’s government announced measures to ‘ban’ anti-capitalist resources in schools is an attempt to stifle dissent. As to whether they can really roll this out, I can’t comment, but I can advise all teachers to give the government the finger and teach Marxist, and other post- and anti-capitalist ideas more overtly. Economics, Sociology and Geography are in essence partially in hock to ideas that are, by most interpretations, rather anti-capitalist. The Tory war on the Liberal Arts, begun most overtly by the philistine Gove, is reaching a crescendo, and a very dangerous one at that.

A ‘new green deal’ and ‘saving nature’ are clearly not compatible with a rapacious free-market market ideology. The brand of capitalism sourced in the Austrian and Chicago Schools of Economics, then promulgated globally via Reaganomics and Thatcherism, is now ubiquitous. It runs 100% counter to any resource-use reduction or pollution controls. It also guarantees unjust ‘devil take the hindmost’ first world elites will pick and choose who will survive the ravaging of the planet. Any just solution has to manage the economy to ensure equity in ‘solutions’, and viable solutions that can potentially avert war, famine and collapse. 

Intervention (of whatever kind, but here the emphasis is on ecology) is by definition, especially in the neoliberal model, anti-capitalist. Thus, this government reveals who truly holds the puppet-strings in our economy – not ‘the people’, as our so-called ‘democratic’ forms of governance might lead many to believe, as, clearly, the current economic model benefits primarily the rich and bred-to-rule elites. A shift from capitalist modes of economy is now more urgent than ever, yet the rats in the corner are (predictably) fighting dirtier by the day. As the Irish saying has it, ‘you can’t get there from here’.

As more and more people question the ‘status quo’, the government seeks to crack down harder and harder on dissent. The branding of Extinction Rebellion as ‘terrorists’ is yet another example. The irony is we need youth to engage with change, and urgently. Questioning how things are, and positing what could be, is more necessary than ever. A ‘democracy’ is not only not run on autocratic lines, but is a place where decisions are made by the people, for the people – and where ‘the people’ are furnished in their schooling by the tools necessary to become Citizens. Education in England has for decades treated the majority as an under-class, to be cajoled and brainwashed, with a minority of born rulers and occasional self-made upstarts told they are ‘better’, that is to say, also brainwashed. In Marxian terms we may talk of all classes being alienated from their true selves, but that lets our rulers off the hook too easily.

Chomsky has for many decades been America’s foremost Left/Anarchist intellectual. In this new book he joins a growing crowd of public intellectuals, including most recently Naomi Klein, in calling loudly and firmly for a green new deal, one that must by necessity have Boris and his gang of pirates frothing at the mouth. Chapter Four addresses specifically the need for ‘Political Mobilization to Save the Planet’, and the Appendix outlines a ‘Framework for Funding the Global Green New Deal’. It is not accidental that the catchphrase ‘New Deal’ has been adopted so widely – after all, the US economy was rebooted from the Great Depression by Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’, an economic plan that many libertarians and right-wingers in the US regarded as essentially ‘communist’.

Well, something similar, but global, is an urgent necessity right now, and the UK government have very clearly aligned themselves with the forces of destruction. Chomsky and Pollen debate many of the factors driving the global economy to ecocidal self-destruction: their new book offers an urgent and necessary focus on real change. Buy this book, give copies away at Christmas and ensure it is widely read. Boris won’t like it but future generations truly will.

Review by Tim Barton

In After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair, and Restoration (Verso, £16.99), Holly Jean Buck quotes SF author Kim Stanley Robinson, who says of “a good future place”, “what’s hard is imagining any plausible way of getting from here to there.” Buck is a technophile, and although positing, via fictionalised future dialogues dispersed throughout the text, a worst case scenario, she is at pains to describe rather optimistic, mainly hi-tech, large-scale methods of reaching a zero-carbon emissions society as quickly as possible to avert this. Read critically, as a primer on geo-engineering (GE) her book is a valuable read. “So, is this after-zero society techno-utopia? Or is it a small-is-beautiful utopia?” she asks. This review will be the first in a series exploring these topics.

We face immanent global systems failure, of which greenhouse gas emissions are just one facet (pretty much the only one ‘addressed’ by GE ‘solutions’). Discovering this has been painful, and for many players the psychological stage they are in is one of denial. A mis-guided optimism, plus short-term greed-driven factors, leads to a response that is ‘too little’, and to a failure to face the possibility that it is already ‘too late’ for many of our basic life-support ‘systems’.

Collapse is inevitable without action. We have had decades of warning, yet, whilst giving lip-service to issues around ecological stability, we have accelerated ever faster into a cul-de-sac with an abyss at its end. Buck’s hi-tech solutions are ones where the very destroyers of the Earth become its guardians, by force majeure, from above. In this context, my primary concerns are with the ‘precautionary principle’, decentralisation, flattening hierarchies, and allowing an autocratic guardianship to become instead an integrated stewardship. Although this may sound like a hippy utopia, I believe these considerations will be core to any viable long-term solutions, ones only available if short-term measures respect them. 

THE IDEOLOGIES DRIVING OUR ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL STRUCTURES ARE GREED-DRIVEN 

Buck’s attempt to see a way from “here to there” is highly flawed, relying on an unfounded techno-optimism, and trust in an industrial-machine that has caused much of the damage. It is inevitably run from the ‘top’, and is in effect a modified ‘business-as-usual’ scenario. The ideologies driving our economic and political structures are not only greed-driven but deeply hubristic, and untutored in the foundation of engineering – science itself. ‘Scientism’ is a sin that is to be found primarily amongst mis-educated politicians, corporate financiers, industrial profiteers, and a fourth estate that largely kow-tows to their prejudices. Although scientists often have to give lip service to ‘scientistic’ fantasies to get funding, or even pander to it in fudged papers for cash, the majority are aware that science is not a magic trick, where if you can imagine it it will inevitably occur. It is a process, in dialogue with social and historical factors, yes, but ultimately dictated by fundamental laws and limits. New paradigms do emerge as knowledge grows, but at no point is wishful-thinking and a wand involved.

The combination of hubris, greed and scientism helps us understand the enthusiasm and drive of GE advocates. Most projects are large-scale, often global, as indeed they may need to be to achieve the goals they set themselves. The techno-optimism they display brooks no doubts about unwanted side-effects or runaway synergistic processes: yet look at most of the large-scale industrial projects of the last two centuries, from the Pennsylvania oil-boom of the 1850s, the subsequent oil-addiction of factories, transport, and ‘green’ revolution agriculture, through the mid-twentieth-century tobacco, plastics, and bleaching industries, and you see a failure to predict unintended, lethal, consequences; and a failure to put aside profiteering by admitting and addressing consequences. Generally, it is those responsible that first realise side-effects, and a pattern of decades-long cover-ups, and investment in ‘scientific’ reports that support the ‘it’s safe / it’s not us’ narrative, is common in every case. Frankly, I question the sanity and moral integrity of GE advocates. But, in Buck’s case the charge is ‘naïve over-enthusiasm’.

One of her main enthusiasms is solar GE. She advocates spraying particles into the atmosphere to mitigate fossil-fuel, livestock-sourced, and coolant emissions: as an on-going and global project, with, naturally, a large fleet of fuel-hungry airplanes. In other areas she looks at a variety of methods, but with solar she seems dazzled by this, a borderline insane one. Ironically, more rational methods of solar GE exist – for example, putting vast ‘umbrellas’ in space at stable points between Earth and the sun can modify albedo without toxifying the atmosphere. Once up, little fuel is needed, and if they need to be furled or even totally removed they can be. I am not advocating that, either, as a crepuscular midday has severe biological consequences.

ACKNOWLEDGING MODERN TENDENCIES TO SEE HUMANITY AS SEPARATE FROM ‘NATURE’ 

I think her embrace of GE is a psychologically driven need for a fix she can believe in, now things are so far gone that only extreme options seem open to us. I sympathise with this position, but if such methods are ‘necessary’, it is already ‘too late’. Mitigation is, it’s true, all that’s left, as we have reached a stage where you cannot make the omelette without breaking a lot of eggs: GE in the current ideological paradigm will break the wrong eggs, too many, and too late. ‘Appropriate’ mitigation requires a strong ethical drive to work whilst leaving a liveable society: GE’s productivist infrastructure cannot lead to this without very different contexts for action.

This is a shame, as elements Buck brings to bear are on the right path – for example, she quotes Giorgos Kallis on how organising principles of “simplicity, conviviality, and sharing”, and “frugal living” are required, and  Ursula Le Guin on the need to “change the goals of human domination and unlimited growth to those of human adaptability and long-term survival”. She also voices some positive views about societal and political system change: in answering her own questions regarding “technoutopia or small-is-beautiful” she says, “perhaps it can be both. I’m interested in a synthesis between these industrial technologies and something that appears to be on the other side of a binary from them: degrowth.” 

Her chapters on ‘regenerative food systems’ and ‘carbon farming’ are integral to real solutions; her laying out of serious issues with long-term carbon capture and sequestration are important; she
is very good on how oil-price fluctuation has stopped many of the grand ‘capture and storage’ projects; in discussing rural labour and the global south she acknowledges the need to address social justice issues (but, whilst acknowledging modern tendencies to see humanity as separate from ‘nature’, shows scant awareness of ideological over-determining structures in neoliberal capitalism); she posits a 10-point list of necessary transformations for GE to ‘work’ as a long-term ‘fix’, some of which are clearly necessary in other survival scenarios (‘cross-cultural and multispecies empathy’, ‘interdisciplinary systems thinking’, and ‘decolonial practice’). Yet her hopes are too unanalysed, and the briefest critical thought applied to her arguments shows up her wishful thinking.

Whilst I feel technophilic optimism doesn’t come close to squaring the tech-utopia/small-is-beautiful circle, in future ‘Near Horizon’ reviews I will
look further at concepts such as ‘degrowth’, the ‘Anthropocene’, ‘appropriate technologies’, and ‘productivist’/’consumerist’ business-as-usual approaches with a view to illuminating some necessary elements of a “plausible way of getting from here to there”.

Verso Books, RRP 14.99, Bookbuster price £12.99

Review by Tim Barton

Andrew Murray is Comms Officer for ASLEF, and it’s fair to assume he is used to addressing rousing speeches to a large audience. In this paean to the British Left he delivers his analysis of the failures and resurrection of the left in general, and of Labour in particular, with exactly that kind of impassioned and moving delivery. This makes for an exciting and engaging read. But, the book delivers a lot more than that, as his analysis is deep as well as empowering, showing off to great effect his grasp of the political, social, and economic landscape – and its alteration – through the post-war decades.

As one may surmise, to begin with a ‘fall’ implies a height from which to tumble, and it is the post-war Labour government’s success in making a compact that raised the ordinary working people of the country out of poverty that is the peak from which ‘the left’, arguably, fell. From the off, it’s clear that ‘the British Left’ is intended to encompass a lot more than the Labour Party (and his chapters on the fall of Foot and Benn, and the rise of Blair and Brown, illustrate how greatly the party came to no longer represent the left).

His most devastating critiques of ‘New Labour’, perhaps predictably, are those on the imperialist ventures of the time, especially the Afghan and Iraq wars. He quotes Tony Benn (“who was no Marxist”) – “Modern imperialism, by which I mean capitalist imperialism, was motivated by the drive for raw materials, for markets and for profit”. He might have also noted Blair’s Catholic hegemony and chauvinist attitude to Muslim countries. The Stop the War coalition is a turning point – at the nadir of New Labour’s ‘left’, new shoots arose from old soil. Amongst the most stimulating of the longer quotes Murray marshals in making his argument is Jeremy Corbyn’s address in Hyde Park, in February 2003. “Stop now, or pay a political price!” Corbyn said of Blair’s government, and so it was – membership plummeted and support for Labour evaporated country-wide.

At the mid-point of his narrative, Murray drops in a quote from Antonio Gramsci – this quote can be applied to many moments in recent UK political history: the 1978-79 winter of discontent, the rise of monetarism, the selling out of the working class under Kinnock, the Iraq war, PFI, ‘Brexit’ too… but the focus here is the financialisation of the City, the consequent casino economy, and the 2008 banking crisis. “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

The new shoots rising from the ashes of the Blair years were, of course, new alliances between pressure groups to the left of New Labour, whose fruits were to include the contingent and surprising emergence of Corbyn as party leader. To the Blairites in the Parliamentary Labour Party, no doubt a massive faux pas, but it is estimated that 76% of the Constituency party – the ordinary members – supported Corbyn even before the incredible membership explosion his leadership triggered. So, flash-forward to 2015: Finally, a party of the left was seen as a possibility.

A significant factor in this rise was Momentum, ‘accused’ by the media of ‘just’ being ‘the radical militant tendency’ – Murray deconstructs this view fairly comprehensively, showing both negative and positive changes in the terrain.

And it is here where the few blind spots are most glaring – throughout the 80s and 90s there was a shift away from a relatively monolithic unionised left toward one of more obviously disparate fellow-travellers. Whilst occasionally, grudgingly, acknowledging the positive aspects of this shift, Murray seems out of touch with it. He seems blind to the activities of, say, Road Alert, Earth First!, the anti-WTO protests, a growing LGBT+ coalition… There are a number of issues with individualist life-style factionalism on the left, and it’s true they need to be addressed (for example, the LGBT+ community is particularly negatively riven over a few things, and particularly misunderstood by those outside it), but they are also important – diversity needs to be embraced, not choked by an old fashioned ‘worker as clone of his fellows’ ant-hill mentality. Frankly, that was a major factor in my embracing a ‘social ecologist’ viewpoint, trying to square ‘left’, ‘anarchist’ and ‘green’, and avoiding the ‘old left’ like the plague for thirty years – and I’m far from alone.

Like many of us, we joined Corbyn’s Labour because it offered a return to some core left values in a younger more diverse party. Now we’ve an election, bring it on, we need real positive change and it’s only this newly risen, broader left that can offer it.

Overall, I can’t recommend this book enough in this freakishly unique moment – a crucial crossroads between civilised socialistic and greened mixed-economy (with a view to more radical reform in time) under a revitalised Labour Party, or outright thuggish right-wing planet-trashing barbarism.