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Sally Davison
This is a response to the Feelbad Britain document, with a few comments at the end about left futures.
© Sally Davison 2007
Feelbad Britain is in many ways a welcome document. At its heart is an account of the major economic and political changes that have taken place in Britain since the 1970s (for more on the significance of this decade see Pat Devine, 'The 1970s and after' , and a Gramscian analysis of the development of Thatcherism, Blairism and neoliberalism more widely. I find accounts such as this useful, especially when taken alongside the other links on the hegemonics website. I agree with the authors (referred to hereafter as D,P,P&P) that it is worth continuing a tradition of discussion that attempts an ongoing critique of the major outlines of British politics and society. D,P,P&P mainly develop the more economic aspect of Gramsci's writings. They, rightly, point to the work of Stuart Hall as being the place where a more cultural politics was developed.
Not surprisingly I think the political economy and historical parts of the document are the strongest. Its weaknesses stem from its neglect of the more cultural aspects of Gramsci (and politics). Acknowledging the absence of this dimension is not really enough when seeking to produce an account of this kind.
The book is divided into three sections. The first part describes the social recession which we are living through, and the inequality and ontological insecurity generated by the encroachment of commodification into more and more areas of our lives. The second part is a historical/political economy account of what has happened in Britain since the 1970s, prefaced by a succinct account of the ways in which Gramsci and Marx help us to understand these processes. My favourite part of this is their quoting from Michael Burawoy who draws on Gramsci and Polanyi to reformulate some observations of Marx:
'Capitalism creates the conditions for its own demise through deepening crises and the creation of an industrial reserve army' becomes 'capitalism generates a society which contains and absorbs its tendency to self-destruct';
'Capitalism creates class consciousness and class organisation, as antagonisms intensify' becomes 'struggle within capitalism takes place on the terrain of hegemony'; and
'Capitalism creates the material conditions for a new socialist/communist order' becomes 'the struggle for socialism is a political project for the subordination of the economy to a self-regulating society'.
The final part of the book is a 'what is to be done' section. This I found the most sketchy (of course it is also the hardest part).
My main criticism of Feelbad is its focus on political economy, to the detriment of any cultural input. I think this is partly what contributes to the document's depressing feel - since it is through cultural politics that we can think about things like conviviality, creativity, difference, pleasure etc. The absence of a cultural dimension also means that whole areas of politics are ignored - especially the areas that those of us who largely live inside the communist/labour tradition don't always think of as being political.
This weakness is also evident in D,P,P&P's brief encounters with questions of race and feminism. Their comments on the way that current immigration policies are placing 'a real strain' on our social fabric (p9), and acceptance that this is the 'experiential basis' for xenophobic and racist 'prejudice', has some basis in truth (i.e., as they argue, inequality is one driver of racism), but they do not discuss the wider failures of British society that mean that few of us are interested in finding ways of living with difference. (And the argument that migrant workers place a strain on resources, for instance, has been widely refuted - very often this argument is dependent on the very particular images of 'migrants' that people have in their minds). D,P,P&P also spend very little time discussing Britain's role in the wider world, which is intimately connected to Britain's sense of itself as a nation, and to processes of racialisation, which often also operate at the international level.
Similarly, the section where D,P,P&P discuss children reads very strangely, since it almost completely avoids any discussion of feminist work on the family and they appear to have no concept of the power structures that exist within families. The analysis is couched within a libertarian/economic framework, with too much emphasis on how neoliberalism has affected family life and no discussion of the power of men, or feminist insights into this (in fact feminist concerns about child abuse are dismissed as coming from 'the more censorious anti-sex elements of radical feminism' (p57)). Concern about the sexual abuse of children is described as a moral panic. There is no acknowledgment that child abuse - like domestic violence - is something that is being brought into the open as taken for granted structures of male authority are having their power questioned (and this includes churches). It is not enough to say, as D,P,P&P do, that the answer is for men to spend more time with children. Men have also got to be challenged when they abuse their power.
A further problem with Feelbad is that, given the collapse of the organisations that were once seen as the basis for a counter-hegemonic bloc (a substantial section of which were aptly described by Beatrix Campbell a long time ago as 'the men's movement'), there is not much recognition given to the immensity of the problem this causes for a theory based on Gramsci's ideas about the working class being at the centre of a new hegemony. Some readers will be familiar with the Out of the Ghetto pamphlet written by Mike Prior and Dave Purdy in the late 1970s , in which they put forward the proposition that the working class and labour movement at that time should move to a more positive counterhegemonic position (as opposed to a politics of oppositionalism). As we know that did not happen (and was not even attempted). Ever since we have been struggling to find ways of regrouping and reconstructing left counter-narratives. This major problem seems to me to call for a much bigger rethink than anything that can be gleaned from within the MT/eurocommunist tradition.
At the end of Feelbad, DP,P&P argue the need for a new political party (the alternatives - a 'rainbow coalition', which they see as a party-political coalition, or placing any hope in the revival of the Labour left - are dismissed). It seems to me that to form a new party is even more impossible than shifting the Labour Party to the left. It would be more helpful to look around at what is already going on and think how we can make links, rather than to set off on a separate path.
We need to travel beyond the well ploughed fields of the MT/Eurocommunist tradition and look around us to see what else is going on. This is where the idea of networks is so important (and I would want the Feelbad people to be in (at least some of) the same networks as me because I am interested in what they have to say - I like some of what they write but not of all of it - that's a better basis for working together than seeking a new all-encompassing entity).
Here I want to take issue with some of the heavy criticism in our online debate of almost every existing left tradition. I am interested in trying to make loose coalitions and overlapping networks from the bottom up, rather than corralling people into a new party. So I basically welcome pretty much any oppositional activity, whether it is Compass, Philosophy Football, the Scot Nats, Stop the War, social forums, Autograph, citizens networks, carnivals, critical journals, trade union action, Ken Livingstone, conferences and events, subversive art, music or literature, Greenpeace, street festivals, talks, meetings, anti-GM groups, demonstrating for justice for Palestine or whatever. I am also cheered by events in South America, and by the activities of countries in the third world whenever they seek to challenge western domination. These are all people we should be seeking to make alliances, even if we don't agree with everything they do - i.e. we need to look outwards. We need discussion, but we also need to be less sectarian about other people's activities. For me Soundings, in a small way, is one place where people can discuss and make links.
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