Political alternatives in an age of catastrophe

In this edited version of the closing address from rs21’s Festival of the Oppressed event, Jonny Jones considers the disjointed times we are living through, the relationship between exploitation and oppression, and asks what the alternatives to an age of catastrophe are.

In 1940, Walter Benjamin wrote his ‘Theses on Philosophy of History’, in which he discusses the Angel of History: ‘His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.’

I feel like I have been able to relate to this over the last few years since the introduction of Facebook Memories, the feature that pulls together all your posts from that day over the years and piles them one on top of the other. 

So in the last few weeks I have found myself reliving the 2019 European elections where Labour got a drubbing, the 2017 election where Theresa May was deprived of a majority, the tenth anniversary of Jeremy Corbyn getting on the ballot for Labour leader. Debates over what position the left should take in the Brexit referendum crash into the disintegration of a British revolutionary party; the counterrevolution in Egypt rises alongside the deepening of the Egyptian revolution

A profoundly disorienting experience that brings to mind Hamlet’s comment that ‘the time is out of joint’. What’s worse is that it repeats, year on year, always leading to the present in which, as the organisers of Festival of the Oppressed put it, ‘the world is in a bad place and the future doesn’t look bright’.

This isn’t just an artifact of social media. In Marx for our Times, Daniel Bensaïd spoke of ‘time stretched and torn apart; concentrated, staccato, broken time; the worst of time, the best of times’. 

So, what about the now? Less than a year into Keir Starmer’s Labour government, the direction of travel is clear. Massive cuts to vital services including billions slashed from welfare spending. Ministers declare that Labour is ‘the party of work’, and they intend to force sick and disabled people back into work even if it kills them. A massive boost in military spending. Not just more money for weapons of war and genocide, but also for boosting military recruitment. 

Every time Labour shifts further to the right on immigration, Nigel Farage’s Reform grows stronger. Reform is ahead in the polls. They could well win the Welsh Parliament elections next year and who knows what lies in store for the 2029 general election. 

Farage, like Trump, has a peculiar relationship with time. In the absence of a positive vision of the future, they have a peculiar imaginary drawn from a mythological past. The noble productive industrial worker features in this imaginary. Remember Farage opportunistically posing with trade union leaflets calling for the nationalisation of the steel industry in his hardhat and safety gear? He doesn’t believe in this, of course, but he knows the potency of the symbolism – the male worker, the breadwinner, the security associated with the postwar consensus.

Farage tells a simple story – you could have a better life if we stopped immigration and cut the ‘woke’ down to size. Men and women can return to their ‘natural’ roles, women can have more babies, trans people can be wished away. Climate change can be ignored. 

It’s no surprise that reactionary fantasies become popular at a time of economic hardship and political uncertainty. It is happening all around the world. The Tories are singing from the same hymn sheet – and how telling that we barely discuss the Tories now. They were the government with a sizeable majority just a year ago. The two-party system is disintegrating on fast-forward as rising reactionary forces call for time to be impossibly rewound.

When we named our event we were channelling Lenin, who wrote that ‘revolutions are the festivals of the oppressed and the exploited’. We need to think about how we stretch Marxism in analysing the relationship between oppression and exploitation – that is, thinking about the reality of class. As the Marxist historian Geoffrey de Ste Croix explained: ‘Class… is the collective social expression of the fact of exploitation, the way in which exploitation is embodied in a social structure. Class is essentially a relationship’. 

How do we experience this relationship? We have been discussing, drawing on Stuart Hall, how class is lived through modalities of oppression. It is clear that the specific ways in which people encounter racism, sexism, transphobia, create profoundly different experiences in the class. Yet, as Ian Allinson has argued, the realities of oppression and domination are also what unites the experience of the class. Our late and missed comrade Neil Davidson put this relationship well:

‘exploitation’ is a category of political economy that describes a process undergone and resisted by slaves, peasants, and workers; but whatever was the case for the first two of these classes, no one experiences capitalist exploitation any more than they experience the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. They experience instead the oppression which exploitation involves.

Paying attention to this link between exploitation and oppression can help us to bridge different moments in processes that could otherwise be taken for granted. We’ve discussed Zohran Mamdani’s exciting New York City mayoral election campaign and how his campaign speaks to the everyday experiences of working-class New Yorkers, addressing their needs in relation to consumption – free and fast buses, childcare – reforms that can address oppressive, often gendered and racialised, experiences of capitalism.

Yet the other side of these imperatives of consumption are moments of labour: bus drivers forced to idle in traffic, breathing in fumes, or carers underpaid and stretched for time. These barriers can be torn down in arguing for solidarity – alliances of commuters and drivers, parents and childminders. This is part of what it means to unify class interests, to build a universal politics that connects communities and workplaces in struggles for a better life.

After Lenin declares that ‘revolutions are the festivals of the oppressed and the exploited’, he goes on:

At no other time are the masses of the people in a position to come forward so actively as creators of a new social order as at a time of revolution. At such times the people are capable of performing miracles, if judged by the narrow, philistine scale of gradual progress.

A decade later, at the onset of the First World War, Lenin, rereading Hegel, noted in the margin: ‘Gradualness explains nothing without leaps. Leaps! Leaps! Leaps!’ 

Benjamin argues that the site of history is not the ‘homogenous, empty time’, through which social democracy suggested we gradually progressed, “but time filled by the presence of the now’. The present, the current conjuncture, in which we face the dilemmas of Bensaïd’s ‘broken time of politics and strategy’. It is through politics that it becomes possible to grasp history and break ‘through the barrier of time’ and from the vantage point of the political, the undifferentiated wreckage of catastrophe resolves instead into missed opportunities.

What politics? Benjamin described the revolutionary socialist tradition as ‘the tradition of the oppressed’, which ‘teaches us that the “state of emergency” in which we live is not the exception but the rule’. We have discussed so much this state of emergency – racism, sexism, transphobia, ableism, war and genocide. The question we face is how we impose our own state of emergency – revolution, Benjamin’s emergency brake. 

The empty time of progress feels dead now. Nightmares of progress are sold through the hollow promises of artificial intelligence, as tech firms that have invested a trillion dollars into a billion-dollar problem insatiably seek more funding, while we hurtle ever further and faster into a world of renewed wars and climate catastrophe.

The left must pose an alternative, our own version of the good life. Instead of cuts we could have our needs met. Instead of being forced to work longer and harder we could work less and have more time for ourselves. Instead of being dictated to by our bosses and the state, we could collectively wield control over our lives. Instead of tighter borders and government-issued regulations on how we express our gender, we could be free to go where we want – or to stay where we are – and be who we want to be. Freedom, democracy and liberation must again be the watchwords of socialism.

Labour, Reform, the Tories, all think this world is impossible and undesirable, that the best anyone can hope for is to be the most sheltered from a worsening world. But we have seen the resources for this future in protests and mass movements, from the Black Lives Matter uprising to the strike wave against the cost-of-living crisis to the global movement of solidarity with Palestine. All of these give us a glimpse of the potential power of a multiracial, multigendered working class. The election of five independent MPs, including Jeremy Corbyn, was a sign that people who are furious about the genocide in Gaza and worsening standards of living are prepared to break with Labour.

When we do away with the notion of history as progress, as Bensaïd put it, ‘The present is no longer a mere link in the chain of time but a moment for selecting among possibilities’. What we do now is vital if we are to avoid missing another opportunity. We must knit together the emerging strands of resistance into a force that can challenge both the cruelty of Starmer and the dangerous false promises of the right. It is urgent that the left comes together to take advantage of this opportunity to build a genuine alternative in workplaces, communities and the ballot box.

At the centre of this, rs21 wants to develop and argue for our vision of socialism. We think that revitalising Marxism and rebuilding revolutionary organisation are crucial to navigating these disjointed times. We need to take a leap – we hope you will join us!