Body Positivity

Earlier in this book we said there are few examples of the liberal left outright militating against discipline and resilience. The culture we wish to see replaced is one of implicit low expectations, and suspicion of those values as outgrowths of social conservatism.

There are some areas, however, where the rule breaks. A classic example of this in the arena of body positivity and fat acceptance. Advocates of this position claim that any acknowledgement of the basic unhealthiness of being fat is ‘body terrorism’. Naturally, this makes our NHS, schools, and the entire world into nests of terrorists:

Body terrorism against people who are fat is insidious, and it’s openly practiced in the halls of our society’s most central institutions—hospitals, schools, the legal system, and the workplace

Let’s start with the germ of truth from which the fat acceptance movement springs. It is an indisputable fact that the profit motive produces a tendency for companies to exacerbate any naturally existing discomfort with our bodies and the way we look. This affects everyone, but it particularly tyrannises women and particular ethnic minorities. Whiteness is the tacit beauty standard. Everyone is aware of the factoid about Barbie Dolls being anatomically impossible. The creation of this kind of body insecurity is a serious issue, and represents a form of misogynist psychological abuse wholly out of kilter with any natural vision of human flourishing.

Fat activism, then, is in the first place an attempt to resist this abuse, finding its origin in the radical feminist and lesbian movements of the 1960s and 70s.

Organisations founded on an explicit Marxism have praised the movement. The Trotskyist group Counterfire, an important player in many of the left’s social movements of the last decade, even alleged that fat activism can be a powerful component of structural resistance to austerity.

Again, we would raise the idea that the left has overcompensated in its embrace of the fat acceptance movement. In the necessary struggle against the hounding of women about the way their bodies look, it is not thereby necessary to promote being obesity. It is possible to reject all harassment of people who are overweight, at the same time as holding health and fitness in high esteem, and making them an ideal to aim towards.

At its most strange, the fat acceptance movement has produced the phenomenon of ‘fitshaming’ – outright hostility towards people who prioritise exercise and a healthy body. One of the worst examples of this came with model Rosie Mercado, a plus-size model who dropped 240 pounds in weight. Despite this astonishing achievement, she began to receive hate mail, and even death threats, from former fans, who could not accept her decision to lose weight.

For the working class, obesity is a historically modern phenomenon – we simply haven’t had the purchasing power to become fat until relatively recently. Malnourishment, rickets and the like were our more common scourge in years gone by. The switch to largely sedentary forms of labour, the rise in the marketing and consumption of junk food, and the concomitant balloon in waist-sizes are not something to be celebrated. Resisting the trend and aiming to maintain our health and fitness is not something to be shamed.

Working-class parents are feeding their kids chicken burgers and chips for £3 because no one can afford fresh veg and no one has time to cook it, but rather than do something about it, campaign for cheaper veg, growing veg in socialist allotments, or arguing for a shorter working day, it’s “let’s start being positive about Barry with his coronary heart disease, he looks amazing.”

Someone struggling with their weight should never be made to feel bad about themselves. But that’s very different from saying “It’s excellent that you’re fat”. This is written off as “concern-trolling” by Fat Activists, but the link between obesity and serious health problems is not medically controversial. Nearly a fifth of all deaths in the USA are obesity-related. This does not mean someone who scalds another person for being fat is any less of a dickhead – but it does mean that we shouldn’t hold it up as a value to actually aspire towards. At its most ridiculous, fat activism styles itself as political subversion, a way of “fucking with western beauty standards”. The piece cited earlier in Counterfire makes a feeble attempt at the same link, describing the existence of a ‘fat bloc’ on the 2011 TUC march and the 2012 ‘fattylympics’ as examples of useful and credible additions to “the struggle against austerity and war”. Let the ruling classes tremble.

Fat acceptance is not political subversion. It is not even political to begin with. As Tom Flanagan, a communist with obesity, writes “Being fat is not “misunderstood” by doctors. It is not stunning and brave, it is not a challenge to oppressive systems”. It is an attempt to bask in the reflected light of liberatory feminist politics by using that language, and shoehorning its concepts into places they simply don’t belong.

Fat acceptance is a relatively insignificant, and yet instructive case. The liberal left has tried here to simply make itself the symmetrical opposite what it thinks the values of capitalism are, instead of creating a rational and systematic critique of that system. Capitalism likes thinness, so we’ll be fat-positive (this leaves aside, of course, capital’s ability to absorb the fat acceptance movement and marketise it, something they have accomplished with trivial ease) They then turn that symmetrical opposite into a subculture that is as alienated from the ordinary person as you could hope to be. This cannot continue if we are going to make socialism a credible idea in our communities.

“given the banalisation of trauma and usage of ‘triggering’ based on the fundamental misunderstanding outlined above, people are being given a ‘get out of jail free’ card to avoid dealing with important political issues. And, of course, trigger warnings come from a place of extreme privilege. Beyond the safe bubble of university campuses, among the Black Lives Matter protesters are likely those profoundly traumatised by their family members, neighbours, friends, comrades, being gunned down in the street by the police. They are in no position to avoid either conversations about police brutality and state violence or indeed those actual things; they’re still going to be harassed the next time they go out, they will still face down the guns pointed at their protests, they can reasonably fear being killed by the police every time they go out” – V important from Jen Isaacson. It is ridiculous to operate on this level of sensitivity, because people experiencing oppression will experience the real thing whether you talk about it or not. All it does is remove the chance to discuss ways to overcome the problem.

Equally, there is a kind of spiritual violence in imagining the oppressed as lambs. We know that the oppressed are capable of astonishing courage in the most dire of circumstances. This is by no means synonymous with saying people do not feel fear. Courage is not a coherent concept unless fear is present – if there is no fear there’s nothing to overcome. Trotsky famously ordered the Red Army not to conceal the truth of the desperate defence of Petrograd in 1919 – that it had been a bitter panic, not a picturesque heroic struggle. But this underscores the authentic of heroism of what they did all the more – even in conditions of terror, the oppressed can pull through, and we lionise and uphold these examples.

The reaction of much of the modern left to the international volunteers in the YPG was quite instructive. We’ve been so conditioned away from any celebration of traditional bravery or appropriately channelled aggression that the first instinct of many groups was suspicion and skepticism. The description of the volunteers as “revolutionary tourists”. The accusation that they were acting as lackeys of American imperialism (as though war can possibly avoid compromise, as though the Red Army did not collaborate with British and American imperialism when it defeated the Wehrmacht). Some even decried it as poseur politics. This would have been utterly unthinkable in the period of the Spanish Civil War and the international brigades, where standing and fighting was an act of pure heroism and revolutionary duty. Significantly, the initial skepticism about YPG volunteers fell away to varying extents – critics eventually began to grudgingly acknowledge the courage involved even whilst continuing to pour scorn on the endeavour. The majority came to celebrate these people.

We will not produce volunteers to fight ISIS in the name of communism by imagining the working class as too delicate to read the rape scene in A Clockwork Orange.

A recent tweet commented that revolutions were ‘anti-proletariat’ because it is working class people who tend to suffer the most disruption, violence and death during them. It is easy, of course, to shoot fish in a barrel on Twitter, and you might accuse us of not taking on the strongest representatives of our opposition here. But we are seeking to identify a trend, and this is a beautiful example of the trend of trying to protect a subordinate group in a way that acts diametrically against their interests. Don’t try to emancipate yourself, kid – you could get hurt. Workers and communists have always known this, and always faced this. When Eugene Levine was tried and sentenced to death for his role in the Bavarian Socialist Republic, he observed to the court that “communists are all dead men on leave”. Working class people do not need or want this kind of poisonous ‘protection’. What we need is people to muck into the struggle. This lesson applies to the broader currents of woke politics, which seek to establish an unobtainable safety for the oppressed – motivated, it must be said, by what looks like nothing so much as a saviour complex, and a desire for moral absolution. The person who tries to pose as the kindest (here the person tweeting against revolution) is only operating with the most superficial and shallow kind of compassion. The proper attitude of socialists is a collective self-steeling, ready for the mountainous and daunting task of seizing power.

Our solution, however, was to fall back on the purity and truth of workers’ status as victims, thereby pre-emptively exonerating them for any potential faux pas. In an earnest attempt to safeguard a space for the uninitiated we thus wound up stripping them of agency and constituting them perfunctorily as victims. Most of the people I know don’t consider themselves such, and would bitterly – and understandably – resent the idea that this was the defining attribute of their subjectivity.

This is an interesting mea culpa from a writer in Salvage magazine, not a publication we anticipate to be sympathetic to us. The writer was discussing humour, jokes, and banter in the workplace, and how to square the circle of workers making off-colour jokes without morally lecturing them (and thereby ruining your connection with those people). Their solution was a sort of Fabian condescension – workers are victims and don’t really know what they’re saying, so they’re off the hook.

There is a similar attitude at play behind the left’s refusal to confront evil if it arrives under the auspices of an oppressed demographic. This has particularly been the case with jihadist Islam. An understandable and commendable desire to shield the ordinary Muslim from Islamophobia, which has reached a similar fever-pitch to anti-semitism in the early 20th century, has created a mealy-mouthed and weak response to terrorism, ISIS, homophobic and sexist behaviour on the part of British Muslims, and so on. This was showcased in the example of the protests in Birmingham against a school teaching students about homosexuality. Local Muslims demanded that LGBT education should not take place in the school. If this had been a Christian protest, the left would have come down on it like a ton of bricks – we have no doubt some would have called for physical counter-demonstrations, and a few would have got excited and described them hyperbolically as fascists. Because it happened to be Muslims demonstrating, what we instead got was tumbleweed. Under pressure, leftists mumbled about the oppression of Muslims itself producing bigotry – an analysis which functions as get out of jail free card for those involved. This is a classic case of a good intentions road to hell. It assumes no agency on the part of the Muslim community, no power to select or cast off prejudice. Agency is only coherent if it includes the capacity to do something wrong and worth condemnation; anything else assumes a community is blindly robotic. It is a racist othering of ordinary Muslims not to oppose something like that wholeheartedly, and a terrible underestimation of the oppressed.

 

A reply to critics

The modern left is trained to be appalled by these arguments. It is trained well enough that we are happy to write a preemptive reply to our critics, so predictable are the lines of attack.

1. This is a celebration of the values of toxic masculinity, a culture that encourages aggression, denigrates women, and leads to male suicide.

The basic concept of toxic masculinity needs a major rethink. It’s an unwieldy umbrella term, combining the piercing insights of decades (centuries!) of feminist thought and activism, along with their inadvertent negation.

What is good in this concept, and worth saving? The idea that men should avoid talking about their problems, that displays of emotion are shameful, and that weakness should never be acknowledged really is a grim legacy of the ‘traditional’ view of what it means to be a man. We agree whole-heartedly with Jack Urwin and others when they point out the sad, absurd ends that a culture of stiff-upper lip can reach – refusing to see a doctor about serious medical problems, for example, or Norman Doidge’s pining for the days of concrete playgrounds, where kids could be conditioned into resilience by breaking their shins on a merry-go-round. This is masculinity as a cage, as a social violence that truncates vital parts of our minds and produces men who are warped and broken. A politics of human liberation must smash any pull away from the gentler sides of life for men.

The values we have considered – resilience, discipline, determination – and so on, are coded masculine. They are often now sneered at under the guise of undermining toxic masculinity. “Ooh, what a big tough man”. Sometimes this extends to hostility towards any random aspect of culture liberals associate with machismo – sport (especially combat sport), weightlifting, drinking beer. What has been forgotten (and really only partially forgotten, the underlying truth is too obvious) is those values traditionally coded masculine are excellent ideals that all humans should aspire to. A key part of the fight for socialists, in fact, is precisely the decoupling of those values from maleness, and their extension out to everyone alive, just as compassion, emotional openness and gentleness should be decoupled from being a woman and held up as transcendent human ideals. We have over-compensated past an encouragement to acknowledge weakness to a relaxed acceptance, or even an encouragement of, weakness. We have told people to open up, but then praised almost all outbursts of emotional incontinence at trivial adversity as “stunning and brave”.

Slavoj Zizek has echoed this criticism, saying that sometimes what is characterised today as toxic masculine behaviour is in fact common-sense and appropriate:

“The claim is that men, mostly, when they’re in a difficult situation, instead of talking with others, friendly, they withdraw into themselves and react, decide to act alone in a radical way, even if it will hurt them. But sorry, in many situations, you need to act like this. It’s called simple courage, my God.”

“The claim is that men, mostly, when they’re in a difficult situation, instead of talking with others, friendly, they withdraw into themselves and react, decide to act alone in a radical way, even if it will hurt them,” he said. “But sorry, in many situations, you need to act like this. It’s called simple courage, my God.”

There is no necessary tension between encouraging a healthy and unrepressed inner life for people, at the same time as refusing to infantilise or enable each other. A man reading his son bedtime stories, or hugging him when he’s been bullied, is a good thing. Having an anxiety attack because there was fat-shaming in the latest Avengers film is not. Men talking openly and without shame about their problems is a good thing. Getting upset about teenagers using the phrase ‘on fleek’ because it’s cultural appropriation is not.

There is, clearly, an art to this. There’s a time to love and support your mate without judgement, and there’s a time to encourage them to get their shit together. The liberal left as it stands has leaned so heavily on the former that it now appears justifiably ridiculous in the eyes of most sane people. When Goldsmiths students launched a blistering attack against their Student Union for “exoticising migrant food culture” (they organised a tour of places to eat in New Cross), presumably in an effort to protect local migrant restaurant owners from racism, there was not a person alive outside the student left bubble who could comprehend what they’d done. Including the migrants themselves, who, bemused, simply confirmed that they like students and they were good customers.

The bizarre outpouring of compassion of Shamima Begum when she returned to Britain was exemplary of a trend where sections of the left have mistaken softness as an approach which is at all times and in all situations appropriate. This was a seasoned an unrepentant ISIS militant. The legal issues surrounding her citizenship are neither here nor there for our purposes – the point is that she was a credible threat to the lives of innocent people, and was not even attempting to mask this fact. Certainly there is a case she was manipulated at a young age into joining the organisation; but damage at a young age is commonplace among terrorists and violent criminals. This doesn’t mean compassion is the only appropriate mode to respond with.

Arthur Scargill’s famous injunction to the miners – stand like men and fight – might well be seen as problematic by the tendency we describe here. Isn’t the idea of fighting being inherent to manhood politically regressive? And yet, who can deny that phrases like this stir a little fire in the blood? It’s not the like men that is doing the work here, it’s the instruction to stand up and fight – a behaviour that is coded masculine but is in reality a universal ethic for everyone to strive towards. One of the left’s contributions is precisely to uncouple from this quality from notions of gender – but we should do that not by encouraging men to succumb to weakness, but by recognising the strength of working class women alongside men, as in the song of the women who fought so heroically through that strike:

We are women, we are strong,
We are fighting for our lives
Side by side with our men
Who work the nation’s mines,
United by the past,
And it’s – Here we go! Here we go!
For the women of the working class.

On Courage and Communism Without Guarantees:

The inertia of the existing order, maintained by deeply entrenched desires, prejudices, interests, and misplaced hopes, will most probably continue to thwart any attempts to transcend it. The likelihood that our efforts to attain a genuinely different society will probably be Sisyphean for the foreseeable future may give rise to the temptation of resignation. This is a temptation that must be resisted, however, for it is through whatever small fractures in the world the Sisyphean endeavor is capable of creating that the Promethean fire might one day shine. The following, then, may well be the primary maxim of political practice today: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” But what could possibly sustain the Sisyphean endeavor that searches for the Promethean fire, without any assurance that it will be found? It is in one of Badiou’s early texts that I find a statement on courage that seems to suit Sisyphus as much as Prometheus: “All courage amounts to passing through there where previously it was not visible that anyone could find a passage.”

I think this is an important passage from Min Seong Kim, and speaks as authors to the foundation our communism rests on. Many factors in the world conspire to tell us we are fucked. The Soviet Union was defeated and the left smashed. The trade union movement is a shadow of its former self, barely able to guarantee its own survival into the future. The social democratic wave in Europe has receded. Corbynism is dead. The movement behind Bernie Sanders is dead. Communist parties the world over are minuscule and on their knees (with key exceptions in India and China). The natural environment is being irreversibly damaged with every passing day, and the window of time we had to prevent systemic climate change has probably shut. Even if it hadn’t, we are in no position to challenge capitalism powerfully enough to change course. 100 years after the Russian Revolution, we are further away than ever from the self-emancipation of the working class. We cannot flinch from this. As Zizek writes, “the true courage is to admit that the light at the end of the tunnel is probably the headlight of another train approaching”.

What can be done with such a counsel of despair? The only recourse, beyond miserable surrender, if we’re to live, with Badiou, without losing our souls, is to be resilient, disciplined, and to take courage. Where can this political courage from, when all appraisal of reality militates against it? It comes, we suggest, from courage as a transhistorical human value. As Badiou writes, all courage amounts to trying to pass where no passage has ever been visible before. It is to have no guarantee of success and to step forward anyway. This is the basis for communism in our era, a communism “without guarantees”. We have no illusions about our project. We may never win. The possibility of doing so before environmental catastrophe becomes unavoidable appears very weak. But we will chase it to the last. If we die with nothing achieved, without ever creating a crack for the Promethean fire to shine through, we will have nonetheless acquitted ourselves well.

“Even if we fail, we live by daring greatly”

 

Marxism, where it has shown itself to be revolutionary – that is to say where it has been Marxism — has never obeyed a passive and rigid determinism.” – Mariategui, Peruvian Marxist.

“Marxism that has not be nourished in the fires of struggle, despite its supposed revolutionary aspirations, is in fact a rotting corpse.” – This is relevant for our discussions of postmodernism, and anti-work communism, which have been nourished outside of struggle, in periods of defeat.

“I want to say to you that it is necessary to give the vanguard proletariat, along with a realist sense of history, a heroic will for creation and implementation. The desire for betterment, the appetite for well-being, are not enough.” Materegui rails against the “bland positivism” of groups like the German SPD, who inculcate a “lazy spirit among the masses”. He insists that nihilism must be overcome.

“When the proletariat is fired by the vision of a new society, they will know that it won’t come down from the skies due to the inexorable development of “economic laws,” but through organization and active struggle.”

 

 

 

The “wrong to work” tendency

Bookchin:

Nearly a half century ago, while Social-Democratic and Communist theoreticians babbled about a society with “work for all,” the Dadaists, those magnificent madmen, demanded unemployment for everybody

Following our section on communist promotion of discipline and healthy work (including shit work until such time as it can be abolished), it would be remiss not to acknowledge the “wrong to work / anti-work” tendency, which is a real historic tradition within communist thought. The tendency begins with Marx’s son-in-law, Paul Lafargue, and his infamous text “The Right To Be Lazy”:

“[If we do not] demand the Right to Work which is but the right to misery, but to forge a brazen law forbidding any man to work more than three hours a day, the earth, the old earth, trembling with joy would feel a new universe leaping within her”

The post-work society is based first and foremost on the idea of technological innovation, especially automation, making work a moot point. Many argue that as it becomes increasingly possible to outsource jobs to robotic labour, the idea of human work will become a relic of the past. Equally under socialism we will be able to simply dispense with vast amounts of pointless or outright harmful work. The immediate abolition of all cold-call centres might perhaps raise a smile, but in truth vast sectors of the capitalist economy represent low hanging fruit, which could be scrapped or reduced to a minimum on the first day of economic planning. Packaging for example, is the world’s biggest industry after energy and food, and yet a vast amount of the work and resources used in packaging are exercises in superfluous marketing.

Clearly a communist with a more positive vision of work would nonetheless not advocate its continuation in these areas in order to generate work for its own sake. Neither would we do so where automation is able to outperform human labour in a given task. We would argue for a maximal extension of menial work, and the reduced portion of shit work that remains to be shouldered as a collective shared burden.

Even here it’s worth questioning some of the assumptions that inform anti-work politics, though. One such is that the old idea of discipline will be dropped, in favour of a gentle approach to getting the necessary work done. As British anarchist Joseph Kay puts it, without the market, “capitalist notions of efficiency fall by the wayside”. Clearly we will consign the hellish whip-hand of private capital to the past. We will abolish forever a model of labour which chews up workers and spits them out, leaves people to pass out on the pavement from exhaustion, or literally die from sheer exertion. But does that mean we jettison all notion of discipline, efficiency or significant effort in work? Do humans thrive best by bimbling through their tasks for the day without a lick of urgency? Perhaps, but perhaps not. Could it be that there is a sweet spot in which the satisfaction of a job well done and efficiently dispatched is enjoyed without the corrosive and anti-social push of market forces spoiling it?

Anti-work politics is often imagined to be the preserve of the ultra-left, or particular wings of anarchism, but it bursts these boundaries, and affects both the mainstream soft-left, the liberal centre, and at times even the trade union movement. Paul Mason, for example, championed this tendency for the soft-left in his book Postcapitalism, and presumably continues his sympathy for the ideas now as a liberal centrist. In the Netherlands in the 1980s, a wing of the trade union movement began to argue that the May Day bank holiday – won by working class struggle and intended as a celebration of the working class – should become a “day against the work ethic”. (https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/11/post-work-ubi-nick-srnicek-alex-williams) They went on to form an organisation that pushed for this, and produced a magazine called Lazy Bones.

This recalls some of the artistic sloganeering of May ’68. A utopian society of sheer pleasure imagined to be at our immediate fingertips, only a hair’s breadth out of grasp. Beneath the cobbles, the beach. It might be tempting to write this tendency off as a relatively modern piece of ultra-leftism, and therefore a fad, but the trend is an older, historic one in the labour movement as well. Even the IWW in its heroic period of the early 20th century, an organisation lauded by the vast majority of the radical left, flirted with the idea. In their classic repertoire of working class songs, the Wobblies included Hallelujah I’m A Bum, an apparent celebration of the refusal of work. Legend has it the lyrics were found scrawled on a prison wall, left by an old Hobo called “One Finger Ellis”:

Oh, why don’t I work like other men do?
How the hell can I work when the skies are so blue?
Hallelujah! I’m a bum, Hallelujah bum again
Hallelujah! give us a handout and revive us again

There is a winning quality to this tongue-in-cheek delight at unemployment, conditioned by our collective experience of the dire state of work under capitalism. Enough so that it feels almost po-faced to remember this point cannot survive being taken more seriously than whim, that the statistics on unemployment and mental health are bleak, and that the song itself contains a verse hankering after a job and complaining they’re all taken.

Raoul Vaniegeim, a Belgian communist, took the ideas to perhaps their most extreme level, describing a “cult of labour” that went from “the Nazi Arbeit macht frei to Henry Ford to Mao”, a fundamentally mistaken orientation towards work that stretched from capitalism to official communism to fascism.

Absolutely fascinating:

Rather than the rallying cry of a victorious working class, the demand to “abolish work!” is being made in a time of nearly universal defeat. From André Gorz’s “farewell to the proletariat” (1983) to Jeremy Rifkin’s “the end of work” (1995), post-work writers have tailored their proposals to a generation accustomed to losing. In this sense, the current strives for a comfortable “post-utopian utopia,” offering everything to those who have nothing. The turn toward reproduction, as Adamczak notes, was undoubtedly “the historical effect of defeat within the factory.”

Obviously pre-capitalist socialism had no conception of post work. Gerard Winstanley and the diggers, for example, made constant positive reference to working and eating collectively “by the sweat of our brows”, and “working in righteousness”:

The Work we are going about is this, To dig up Georges-Hill and the waste Ground thereabouts, and to Sow Corn, and to eat our bread together by the sweat of our brows. And the First Reason is this, That we may work in righteousness, and lay the Foundation of making the Earth a Common Treasury for All

Another aspect of this is that people tend to despise unemployment even under capitalism. It is not at all clear that this is primarily because of the poverty engendered by claiming benefit, important factor though that is. A huge portion of the pain of unemployment is the sense that one is making no social contribution. As the sociologist Richard Hyman writes, the unemployed believe “that possession of even an oppressive and damaging job… [is] an essential part of their social identity and self-esteem.”

“convince the proletariat that the ethics inoculated into it is wicked, that the unbridled work to which it has given itself up for the last hundred years is the most terrible scourge that has ever struck humanity, that work will become a mere condiment to the pleasures of idleness”

Marxism, self-discipline and mental health

One area these debates tend to crystallise in is mental health. Developing a cogent and convincing analysis of capitalism and mental health is of the utmost importance for the Marxist left; in the economically dominant capitalist countries, it is a central problem confronting our lives today. Around 300,000,000 suffer with mental health problems worldwide today. Almost a third of us experience mental health problems at some point in their lives. Depression is the leading cause of life expectancy decline, after cardiovascular disease and cancer. (https://monthlyreview.org/2019/01/01/capitalism-and-mental-health/). And it keeps getting worse. The NHS’s Adult Psychiatric Morbidity survey indicates a significant rise even in the last decade or two, both for moderate depression and anxiety and for severe conditions requiring intervention. The World Health Organisation projects that depression will become the leading cause of disability worldwide within this year.

It is de rigeur on the modern left to deride Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, for example. CBT has been the mental health intervention of choice for British governments since New Labour, rolled out via the Improving Access to Psychological Therapy (IAPT) units. CBT is hailed as evidence-based, scientific and effective. Its model slaughters the sacred cow of much of the psychotherapeutic models that precede it, in that it is for the most part uninterested in analysing why or how a person has reached a state of mental distress. Cognitive Behavioural Therapists do not ask you about your childhood, and spend no time on Freudian ideas of the unconscious. The rationale for this is that what happened to a person is one discussion, whereas how to improve mental health is another – as one of the author’s heard it from a practitioner, “If a ship is sinking, what went wrong is a useful discussion. But the priority is to fix the leak and to stop taking on water.”

To that end, CBT employs a range of techniques to try to change the way patients think about the world, and to change what they do. CBT really does have a basis in evidence. It was the first psychotherapy to be tested with proper rigour (randomised controlled trials and active comparators), as would be considered normal in the world of pharmaceuticals. Despite a modest decline in hype around the treatment over time, it continues to consistently outperform the placebo, and is particularly effective in the treatment of anxiety disorders.

Why does the left have a problem with CBT, then? The first argument is a proximal and political one – IAPT centres are an exercise in getting people just about on their feet (and back to work) as quickly as possible, without resolving underlying issues properly. There is a strong case for this. Waiting lists can be criminally, life-threateningly long, and treatment typically only lasts a few sessions, often not enough to scratch the surface if a patient has anything but the most straightforward and mild forms of distress. These criticisms hit their target, but could conceivably be remedied while maintaining CBT as the basic model. The left is still unhappy, though, because CBT has one glaring problem at its heart. As Mark Fisher pointed out, CBT represents “the privatisation of stress”. Society as a whole has rocketed towards more and more mental health disorders, and yet they are treated in CBT only as an individual problem. At worst, this approach risks an implicit blame of the sufferer for their own pain. You’d be fine, if you just stopped catastrophising. You create your own problems through your all-or-nothing thinking. No therapist worth their salt believes this, but the model itself inclines that way regardless.

In a beautiful piece, “Always Yearning For The Time That Just Eluded Us”, Fisher talks of London night buses after a rave, the comedown, and “the keening pain of being yourself again”. What he’s describing is the loss of the temporary community and self-transcendence that raves can provide – pill-enabled but real. The gradual ejection back out from that, and into the cage of the self, can be painful.

This loss of community in microcosm is replicated at large across the neoliberal world. Where jobs for life and tight-knit working class communities once prevailed, fragmentation, precarity, and transience now rule. It is this, along with inequality, and not the direct immiseration of neoliberalism that is responsible for the explosive growth of mental health problems in recent decades. For those at the very sharp end – disabled people with their benefits slashed, for example – direct poverty may well be primary in causing psychological distress. But for most of the working class in the UK, our living standards are not so poor as to cause despair in and of themselves. We live in more material comfort than the mentally healthier workers of the 1970s, for example, through the sheer fact of technological progress if nothing else.

What causes distress, then, is (as we have seen) the levels of inequality under neoliberalism, and the erosion of community. The levels this has reached make dismal reading. Professor Robert Putnam points out that between 1985 and 1994, active involvement in community organisations fell by 45 percent [Citation in is Johann Hari’s book, find out where his figures apply to]. The number of confidants people say they have has also been dropping. In 2004, the most common answer Americans gave to this question was none. More Americans have no close friends than any other option.

Loneliness and disconnection from others, at least in terms of individual psychology, is more painful than poverty. If this is a cultural problem, CBT can only fight it partially. It’s not within the power of individuals acting alone to invert a cultural trend, and yet the only basis for CBT to operate on is that the individual should act to remedy her own loneliness. The risk of guilt and self-blame here cannot be negligible.

The primary answer of the left to the crisis of mental health, then, must be political. Just as in the economic model of base and superstructure, it is the foundations that will have to move before our minds do. All our private efforts fight the erasure of community in our own lives are, to varying extents, castles built on sand. This point models an old left-wing slogan. “Do not adjust your mind, the fault is in reality”.

And yet.

And yet this analysis is missing something. Concentrating solely on the socioeconomic circumstances that breed poor mental health involves a small but significant lacuna, which the right seize upon. This lacuna is the realm of personal responsibility. It is certainly a problem that CBT can risk making mental distress seem completely the fault of the sufferer. Statements like “The only person that can help you is you”, intended as a wholesome bromide, contain an inadvertent cruelty. What is the subtext of a message like that, except “You’re on your own”? Nonetheless, the total eclipse of individual willpower and decision-making is sensed by the ordinary person as wrong. That sense is correct. The problem with “Do not adjust your mind”, is that it assumes a person who is suffering in capitalism maintains the integrity of their mind while feeling only a directly rational pain in response to the social circumstances they find themselves in.

But this is not true. The depressed person does not wake up in the morning and think to themselves “I am sad about the social isolation I experience as a worker in a neoliberal society”. They wake up and think “I’m useless, I’m worthless, I’d be better off dead so I won’t be a burden anymore”. The mind cannot maintain its integrity in these circumstances, and people tend to then contribute to their own suffering, over and above their external circumstances. They stop going out, stop responding to messages, stop exercising, stay in their room, and so on. These behaviours accelerate loneliness at a rate capitalism could never manage unassisted. And therefore what a person decides to do matters.

Now this is not to say that a person can ‘snap out of it’, voluntarily shuck the condition off, or anything like that. But what they can do is fight the behaviours rather than surrender to them. And if they’re going to fight, they do need a framework that focuses on individual action, like CBT. In non-clinical cases, they need their mates to get them to pull their head out their arse, stop taking drugs every weekend, eat some vegetables and, god forbid they follow the lobster-man, clean their room.

(Point about how if social reality is warped in some way, it is not that your mind is an unaffected victim – your mind itself warps, and really does contribute to your own suffering. It is not the original cause, but it is a contributor and must itself be remedied)

Note to self – RD Laing, Sedgwick.

Baran and Sweezy argue that consumerism and the warped nature of work and leisure under capitalism contribute to mental ill-health. Where meaningful and satisfying work is so difficult to come by in capitalism, most find it a draining experience. Their exhausted need to revive, combined with the push of the global market, pushes them towards passive idleness in their leisure. We’ve all had the experience of coming home late and knackered from work, and putting on the least demanding show we can on Netflix to zombie-watch. Baran and Sweezy make the case that this process can only enervate the spirit – if work is shit and only the palatable leisure is junk food for the soul, people will tend to become depressed. Do we agree? Needs thought.

In 2017, it was estimated that 13 percent of individuals in Britain had no close friends, with a further 17 percent having average- to poor-quality friendships. Moreover, 45 percent claimed to have felt lonely at least once in the previous two weeks, with 18 percent frequently feeling lonely. What is going on here? Fromm argued that capitalism establishes an unnatural stress on the isolated individual, and this seems true. When Thatcher said “There is no such thing as society”, this is what she meant. Society as no more than the aggregate of competing individuals. The reality of life in capitalist countries is, of course, not this bleak. The natural social tendencies of people burst the boundaries of a model like that all the time – the mass response of the working class (and even, to some extent, some companies) to the Coronavirus Crisis is only the latest instance of a solidaristic trend we are all familiar with and recognise. As EP Thompson argued, “The workers, having failed to overthrow capitalist society, proceeded to warren it from end to end”. Community and collectivity survives. But it survives in a sickly and etiolated form. The logic of the market presses against our social nature, frustrates it, thwarts it. As Fromm argued (and his argument has become an accepted commonplace), people must have a sense of belonging and psychological rootedness for their mental health to thrive. If there is no fulfillment of this need, “insanity is the result” – if it is met unsatifactorily, neurosis follows. This follows closely the analysis of Johann Hari in Lost Connections.

Mental health in the Soviet Union – does not seem to have been a major problem in the way it was for the USA (and still is). This needs research though

Iain Ferguson

Ferguson writes persuasively on one of the most immediately clear analyses the left could take over mental health, i.e that it is the straightforward outcome of poverty. He cites the massively increased risk of mental health problems if you are in debt, the higher incidence of mental health problems among low income households, and the devastating effects of economic crises on mental health. Greece, for example, went from having one of the lowest suicide rate in Europe to one of the highest, with a doubling in the rate of depression, during its debt crisis with the EU.

Fascinating idea that the number of sick days taken for stress and mental health reasons has replaced the number of strike days. “The lines of collective action have been replaced by lines of worry, collective grievances have been replaced by private psychological battles”.

Stress appears to be standing in for older concepts like injustice, inequality and frustration, seen at the level of the individual rather than of the wider workforce

It is worth pausing to highlight what a vicious enemy mental distress is, and why Mark Fisher was right to make it his primary critique of capitalism, alongside environmental destruction. Depression is not a spell of ordinary unhappiness that simply persists longer than expected – it’s often a perpetual psychological agony. To illustrate with an example, the journalist Tim Lott explained that the death of his mother by suicide was considerably less distressing than his own experience of depression years before, which had left him “a half-living ghost”. A 2015 paper in the Journal of Psychiatry discussed how the subjective experience of severe depression is markedly worse than that of advanced and incurable cancer.

At its worst, the left has romanticised mental illness, toying with the idea that it is logical to be mentally ill in a world as cruel and irrational as capitalism. However, this has only been seriously entertained at the fringes – even RD Laing, the leftist whose views are closest to this, clarified that he had “never idealised mental suffering or romanticised despair, dissolution, torture or terror…never denied the existence of patterns of mind and conduct that are excruciating”.

Laing’s essential thesis was that mental illness, especially schizophrenia, was an invented strategy of the sufferer that allowed them to “live in an unliveable situation”. This probably contains some truth. Depression and anxiety can play this role as well. The depressed person who loses their job might find a kind of grim consolation in writing off all of life as an exercise in pointless misery, preferring the dull pain of chronic nihilism to the acute pain of a particular negative event. What Laing and the anti-psychiatry view neglects, however, is that these are bad strategies. However understandable, however traceable to social circumstances, they hinder rather than help their users. The depressed person might succeed in blocking some of the pain of an individual sling or arrow, but in the long run they push themselves towards hell. They win the battle but lose the war.

It is here that the value of self-discipline, properly situated and understood, becomes important. It is not enough to simply love and support someone with mental health problems while they repeatedly slam the self-destruct button. They must be helped to regulate their behaviour in a way that will help them. Such behavioural adjustment does not and cannot negate the social world in which so much mental illness finds its root cause. But it can ameliorate one of the most poisonous and evil aspects of the condition, which is the feeling of apathy and surrender.

 

…at least it [The Victorian asylum system] recognised needs—for ongoing care, for asylum, for someone to rely upon when self-reliance is no option—that the present system pretends do not exist, offering in their stead individualist pieties that are a mockery of people’s sufferings

To some extent we are arguing to rescue what is useful in these “individualist pieties”, while discarding what is absurd, cruel and class-blind.

Who has worked on these individualist pieties as a response to mental health issues? Largely it is the political right, and especially American men. Public figures like Peterson, Joe Rogan and Jocko Willink have all popularised an up-by-your-bootstraps approach. They promote a weaponisation of sheer personal volition as a means of fighting the scourge of mental distress. Willink, for example, labelled by Tim Ferris as “the scariest SEAL”, discussed the issue of suicide on his podcast. His recommendation to anyone experiencing suicidal ideation is as follows:

I don’t really know what exactly to tell you, but I can kinda tell you what I think. I think No. I think No: don’t save that last bullet for yourself. Don’t save it for yourself…

You lock and load that last bullet and you shoot it at your enemy [suicidal depression]. And when you’re out of bullets, get out your knife and attack with that. And if you lose your knife, you grab your enemy by the throat and you keep fighting, and you keep fighting, and you keep fighting, and you keep fighting—no matter what. And you never quit.

Is there anything worth rescuing in such a socially myopic account? We answer yes. It would be trivially easy to mock the above passage. The apotheosis of American machismo, Willink imagines we can dissolve a social crisis decades in the making people grit their teeth and imagining strangling, stabbing or firing a gun at the problem. Such mockery would not be without its justification. And yet…

And yet the injunction to stand up and fight back has power in it. And the softer approach of love and acceptance, favoured by the social justice left, is not unproblematic. “Love yourself for who you are now”, applied without caution, risks simply accepting the depressive state – lowering the horizon to a life of takeaway for dinner and cigarettes for breakfast, with the pyrrhic consolation prize of being ‘loved and accepted’. The point is that who you are when you are mentally ill is, if we speak frankly, dogshit – you struggle to aid anyone around you or the wider world, you spend hours locked in aimless cyclical misery, you let even the basics of self-care go. Failing to speak about fighting back against all of that is really a disservice to a person suffering from that state. The soft implication is, you cannot be more than what they are now.

A language of fighting back, while being careful to avoid a crude “snap out of it” mentality”, is an honest one. It says “Yes, what you are now is badly lacking. You are loved and accepted, but you can and you will be more than this”. That is hopeful. That is properly respectful of the great capacity that all of us have to change and improve.

It is possible to hold the above to be true at the same time as accepting that the greater role in mental health is played by macroeconomic and social conditions. We don’t have to throw out the baby of personal responsibility with the bathwater of social myopia.

An area of uncommon consensus in modern mental health literature is the centrality of subjective perceptions of control. [Citation needed] Common to almost all sufferers of mental distress is a perceived loss of control, the sense that adverse circumstances are taking place with nothing one can do to affect them. Socialists know well that this loss of control is real, and cannot be leapfrogged through willpower. You will not circumvent mass unemployment by following Jordan Peterson’s advice and cleaning your room. But there is almost no situation where control is annihilated. There is always a set of paths one can take, and a choice about whether to exert control over these or relinquish it. Even in Auschwitz and Dachau there was resistance. We are awestruck by that behaviour, and lionise it for good reason. Even where external circumstances make our situation truly hopeless, the correct posture for the human spirit is trying, not surrender, and that requires individual courage. All of us can sense when we are giving something our best and when we are folding. When we feel we are really trying, success is sweeter and failure stings much less. When we coast, the opposite is true.

In the more ordinary case of unemployment, it is clearly true that mere effort cannot provide a collective solution – this is the Get On Yer Bike model of Norman Tebbit. But getting on your bike is, nonetheless, substantially better for your mental wellbeing than sitting on your arse. It is vital for us to feel we are making use of whatever scope of action is available to us.

You work that you may keep pace with the earth and the soul of the earth.
For to be idle is to become a stranger unto the seasons,
and to step out of life’s procession, that marches in majesty and proud submission towards the infinite.

When you work you are a flute through whose heart the whispering of the hours turns to music.
Which of you would be a reed, dumb and silent, when all else sings together in unison?

Always you have been told that work is a curse and labour a misfortune.
But I say to you that when you work you fulfil a part of earth’s furthest dream

 

Historical materialism and agency

One criticism of our position may be that it substitutes voluntarism and a naive view of agency, in place of a Marxist historical materialist analysis. What is a historical materialist analysis? Briefly stated, it is that all of society rests on a material, physical base – the means and structure of labour and production that enable life to continue its daily round. The nature of this material base determines to a large extent the ideational ‘superstructure’ i.e the culture of that society, its religion, laws, prevailing social norms, and so on. At times, Marx appears to suggest that the patterns of superstructural thought are completely beholden to the material base, flowing out of it in lockstep:

In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of their development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of their material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.

On this reading of Marx, one might conclude that a hyper-determinism is the most accurate way of analysing our place in the world. The material conditions of our lives are dictating our every thought, down to the minutiae. If this were true, it would indeed present problems for the position outlined in this book. What use would it be to encourage self-discipline if there is no free agency from which such a demand could be met in the first place? Discipline will either be present or not, depending on the material base of the society a given person lives in. Trying to force it into being would therefore be an exercise in pointless self-tyranny.

Already we can sense that this level of determinism is a caricature, though – is it a cartoonish version of historical materialism with the power of the material base exaggerated beyond proportion. The development and relations of production cannot sketch out every fine detail of how we think. It is not the socioeconomic structure of British capitalism that makes me support Liverpool or like lots of vinegar on my chips.

It should not surprise us to learn, then, that the above passage from the Critique of the Gotha Program was written with the Prussian censor in mind – anything that looked like exhortation to action had to be downplayed for the book to be able to reach publication.  A more serious interpretation of Marxism involves both agency and structure:

“Men and women make history, but not of their own free will; not under circumstances they themselves have chosen, but under given and inherited circumstances with which they are confronted”.

This is much more compelling. Human beings make free decisions, but they do so enmeshed in a vast web of circumstances over which they have no prior control. These circumstances severely limit the set of possibilities available to each person, and condition the likelihood of the various choices which remain.

A problem lingers, though. How much emphasis should be assigned to structure, and how much to agency? We have accepted that history proceeds through a dialectic of both, but Marx does not give an indication here of how much relative weight each side of this equation holds. Answers on this have varied greatly across the tradition, from the extreme structuralism of Althusser and Cohen to the existentialism of Sartre. For the structuralists, the relations of production create “sets of empty places”, which particular human beings occupy and dispense the functions of on a temporary basis. For those leaning on the agency side, such a vision risks submerging individuals in a sulphuric acid bath of generalisation.

Clearly one cannot quantify the weightings numerically, but we can offer broad estimations. We suggest that the most coherent model of historical materialism is one in which structure plays by far the biggest role, whilst at the same time allowing for ‘wiggle room’ – a small amount of agency. In the dance between the two, agency is the junior partner. But it is a junior partner of the utmost significance. No matter how limited your scope for action, it is your social and moral duty to use what power you have. It is no coincidence that Marx and Engels threw their every waking moment into building the First International. It’s no coincidence that Marx believed the meaning of life was ‘to struggle’. At rare moments in history, it is possible for individuals to seriously impact the course of events on their own. Lenin, on the sealed train. Vasili Arkhipov, on the nuclear submarine. It is structure, overwhelmingly, that shapes our lives. But agency is not negligible, must be exploited to the full, and sometimes rises to the dizzying heights of directing world history.

There is therefore no basis in Marxism for resigned defeatism. It is our experience than many in our generation who are aware of the ideas of the radical left can be tempted to use these ideas to explain their poor mental health, and therefore their poor decision-making. There is a lot of truth in such an explanation. The neoliberal world really has created a terrible boom in mental health problems, and this is one of the “given and inherited circumstances with which we are confronted”. Nonetheless, one’s agency in this situation continues to deeply matter. It is still present, whoever you are, and must be used to the utmost. We submit that the use of this agency, rather than its surrender, is an important component in wellbeing, even for someone in the grip of depression. The abandonment of one’s will to fight back is the deepest horror in depression. The feeling that you are using all of your woefully limited powers to struggle back against adversity is a powerful prophylactic against despair.

 

Communists on resilience and discipline

Lenin speaks quite clearly about ‘voluntaristic’ types of values in Left Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder –  the condition for the success of the Bolsheviks was “the class-consciousness of the proletarian vanguard and by its devotion to the revolution, by its tenacity, self-sacrifice and heroism”.

In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou labor! was Jehovah’s curse on Adam. And this is labor for Smith, a curse. “Tranquility” appears as the adequate state, as identical with “freedom” and “happiness.” It seems quite far from Smith’s mind that the individual, “in his normal state of health, strength, activity, skill, facility,” also needs a normal portion of work, and of the suspension of tranquility. Certainly, labor obtains its measure from the outside, through the aim to be attained and the obstacles to be overcome in attaining it. But Smith has no inkling whatever that the overcoming of obstacles is in itself a liberating activity—and that, further, the external aims become stripped of the semblance of merely external natural urgencies, and become posited as aims which the individual himself posits—hence as self-realization, objectification of the subject, hence real freedom, whose action is, precisely, labor

This is just straight fire – exactly our position. “The overcoming of obstacles is in itself a liberating activity.”

“Really free working, e.g. composing, is at the same time precisely the most damned seriousness, the most intense exertion”

For Marx and Engels it is meaningful and self-selected work that comprises one of the chief victories of communism. This kind of work is not casual and dilletantish, either, but comprises “the most damned seriousness, the most intense exertion”. Opposition to the whip-hand of capitalist production does not in any sense imply opposition to healthy hard work. It is not a vision, to borrow a phrase, of “lying in the long-grass eating peaches” – at least not all day. It is not Fourier’s vision of a lemonade sea.

Under communism “direct labor time itself cannot remain in the abstract antithesis to free time in which it appears from the perspective of bourgeois economy” – i.e, we will no longer see a sharp distinction between work and leisure in the way we do today. In capitalism, most people are either working or enjoying themselves, but in communism work would be one of the principle sources of – if not fun, exactly – satisfaction, contentment and self-realisation.

This is why the trauma psychologist mentioned in the introduction has it so wrong. Using the free time generated by furlough and lockdown productively is exactly the opposite of a capitalist obsession with economic productivity. It is a snatched glimpse of the kind of meaningful labour we would undertake under communism; learning languages, getting into good physical shape, learning instruments, whatever. Admittedly the glimpse is taken through a glass, darkly. These conditions are a million miles from the ones we envisage. But the point is clear – sitting round with our thumb up our arse for extended periods is not conducive to human flourishing or happiness. Productivity, and the ethic of hard work towards something worthwhile, is a value to be upheld, not sneered at.

Equally, until total automation is achieved, we are likely to remain at least partially in “the realm of necessity” for a long time, and some degree of ‘shit work’ will remain, parcelled out equitably among the population. When it’s your turn to do the bins, we won’t be impressed by an attitude of work-avoidance. This may well have to involve a degree of socialist mimicry of capitalist production methods – piecework, taylorism and so on. This is an unhappy thing to have to incorporate, but historical indications so far are that we won’t be able to avoid it, at least initially. The Bolsheviks famously copied the techniques of Taylorism, the capitalist technocrat par excellence, to squeeze all possible productivity out of the factories. Anarchists have attacked this as evidence that Bolshevism is a case of ‘meet the new boss, same as the old boss’, but this is no escape, because their organisations acted in precisely the same way during the Spanish revolution:

The CNT newspaper, Solidaridad Obrera, asked that bus drivers justify their absences from work. On 28 July, another article vigorously demanded that all workers at Hispano-Olivetti return to their posts and warned that sanctions would be applied to those who had missed work without good reason. Although on 30 July Solidaridad Obrera stated that in almost all of Barcelona’s industries work had recommenced, on 4 August the anarcho-syndicalist newspaper called for ‘self-discipline’.

In the end the CNT in Barcelona completely reintroduced piecework, something they had initially abolished, to counteract falling productivity. The workers were not exceptionally lazy; at an early stage in a revolutionary process a lot of what constitutes work is similar to work under capitalism – gruelling and unpleasant, with only the rather abstract comfort that the work goes towards social good rather than private profit. Trying to shirk is therefore unsurprising. That doesn’t mean, though, that the attitude of communists is to celebrate or excuse shirking! On the contrary, the radical left from leninists to anarcho-syndicalists have both, when push comes to shove, demanded work force discipline for the good of the social whole. Where they found clear evidence of worker absenteeism through falsified illness, the CNT condemned this as “incomprehensible” and “abusive” in the context of a working week which had been reduced to 24 hours. They began to apply fines, banned non-work conversations at work, attempted ‘moral re-education’ of workers concerned, and so on – and so they should. Idleness harmed the fight against Franco! But even before the revolution there was no friendliness towards indiscipline – the CNT saw it as their task to eliminate ‘parasites’, ‘idlers’ and ‘good-for-nothings’. Their congress in Barcelona 1936 set out their intention to “seek from every human being his maximum contribution in accordance with the necessities of society”, and use popular assemblies to discipline those “who do not fulfill their duties… in their function as producers”.

We submit that the CNT were right to do this. There is a wider context of fighting for survival which clearly created a stark moral duty to pull one’s weight, but even outside moments of existential threat to a revolution, it is not a communist value to respect laziness, which is only a means of shifting workload from yourself to somebody else. It is anti-social behaviour. Under fully realised communism this tension will dissipate, because all dull and unpleasant work will be minimised or abolished as far as possible, but until that time, the principle of transitional socialism is “He who does not work, neither shall he eat”.

It is a calling card of the modern liberal left to ‘shit post’ about how poor their mental health is. A positive view of this trend sees it as humorous rebellion against the dark weight of depression. A less charitable take is that this behaviour creates a kind of swamp of malaise that provides no encouragement to adjust one’s own behaviour. Many of these people lay claim to the mantle of the Bolsheviks, and celebrate the Soviet Union. What is missed in this celebration is the Bolsheviks strict standards of personal behaviour. Many nowadays consider personal behaviour to be an irrelevance in the field of politics; what matters is the analysis of the social world, and of course this does remain primary. But personal conduct matters, and always did matter to the Marxist left. As Sarah Grant points out, “Participation in sports, attendance at parades as well as
observance of personal hygiene, diet and exercise were all central facets of being a good,
‘practicing’ Bolshevik”. Lenin himself was a keen participant in physical culture – mountain biking etc.

“though he meant to take away from his ideal Bolshevik the stupidity that enables the normal man to “dash straight for his object like an enfuriated bull,” the new man is to retain the bull’s singleness of purpose.”

Because Russians are hopeless individualists unable to organize, are “lackadaisical, careless, slovenly, untidy,” the Bolshevik must submit to the iron discipline of the Party… and must sink his personal interests and affections in its rigid organization.

Even in the first throes of the October Revolution, as Soviet Power was declared and a Soldiers Charter drawn up, in amongst the abolition of rank and title was a clause mandating “strict maintenance of discipline whilst on duty”. This was never an adolescent vision of free-for-all.

The Bolsheviks were in favour of Taylorism and piecework just as the CNT came to be. They argued that while under capitalism these were tyrannies designed only to squeeze all possible profit out of workers, under socialism they acquired a different character of increasing the social product available to the broad mass of the Russian population. They argued accordingly that “those who do more for the general interest” deserve greater remuneration than “the lazy, the careless and the disorganisers” (Trotsky).

The model new Soviet man of the 1930s was a hero of socialist construction, animated not by the crude impulses of nature but by the rational desire to master and control those urges, to become ‘a conscious lord over himself’. This could be achieved by deliberate programmes of training and self-improvement to shape and develop a disciplined, cultured and technically proficient individual. Soviet psychologists rejected the idea that character was innate, for this could encourage the belief that there were naturally inferior classes or races; in 1934 they were forced by the regime to reject Freudian ideas of the unconscious as decadent bourgeois science, since it suggested that man was a mere plaything of his inner mind. Man, it was claimed, could shape his own personality through conscious self-discipline and proper schooling.

Developments in Soviet psychology all mirrored this trend. The old dialectic of freedom and necessity was resolved through the understanding that properly conceived freedom meant a clear understanding of your social duties, followed by their fulfillment, rather than a licentious ‘do what you want’ attitude. “By the word ‘disciplined,’ we understand the capacity to unite with, and where necessary to subordinate one’s behavior to, the collective; or, as Lenin said, ‘to devote his work, his powers to the general concern’, ‘to serve the world’ as Marx liked to say.”

Engels was a keen advocate of physical fitness, for the military preparedness of the proletariat.

 

Draft introduction

As we write these opening lines, 2.6 billion people around the world live under lockdown. We are confined to our homes to wait out the storm of COVID-19. Amidst a swirl of memes about forgetting what day it is, heroic co-ordinations of mutual aid, and conspiracy theories, an article has gone viral around the liberal left. A trauma psychologist, Alaa Hijazi, urges us all to ‘stop being productive’. For Hijazi, the coronavirus crisis is a collective mental trauma which we need to process. Any encouragement to use our quarantined time in self-improvement is, therefore, “a whipping by some random fucker making us feel worse about ourselves in the name of motivation”.

The liberal left likes this idea. Productivity is always and everywhere derided as a junk value, an inhuman capitalist fixation. ‘Traditional values’ along these lines – strength, responsibility, resilience, determination – meet with open hostility. These are the ideas of toxic masculinity, of child-like blindness to the reality of socio-economic circumstances, a naive swallowing of up-by-your-bootstraps mythology.

It is the contention of this book that the liberal left is wrong.

The shibboleth of the alt-right is the image of the left-wing ‘snowflake’ – a trembling, whining pseudo-intellectual with all the resilience of a chocolate teapot.

There is plenty to mock in this idea. It’s especially stupid as a piece of generational condescension, where the old are imagined as made of inherently sterner stuff than the young. The alt-right like to wield it as a get-out-of-jail-free card when they lack anything better to say. Trump is a self-confessed sex offender who lusts for his own teenage daughter? Stop being such a snowflake!

What is harder for the left to admit is that the snowflake image is true. Witness the shambolic conference of the DSA in 2019, marred by arguments about the problematic nature of – you guessed it – clapping. Some argued clapping made the conference inaccessible to autistic people, who would find the noise stressful. It did not matter that the National Autistic Society is against bans on clapping. The point was not to listen to disabled people. The point was to find a vulnerability they could virtue signal their awareness of and care for. The liberal left have, through all the best intentions, encouraged a culture of inauthentic, breathless hyper-sensitivity that attracts nothing but contempt from the ordinary person – and deserves it. During the Coronavirus crisis, there has been weekly applause for the workers of the National Health Service, at 8pm every Thursday. They are moments of bona fide working class solidarity, enough to create a flicker in the heart of even the most jaded socialist. One must presume, however, that a few radical liberals have taken to Twitter to describe the claps as “literal violence” against the neuro-divergent. We suggest that if our goal is to create a mass movement of the working class, this is a sub-optimal approach.

Obsession with victimhood and vulnerability, and smug dismissal of ideas of personal responsibility and grit, are not the historic calling cards of the left, but rather a modern trend which can be corrected. We will do this by analysing what right-wing thinkers (who have been left to dominate on this subject) have said, extracting what is useful and rejecting what is absurd.

Already, a thousand reviewers are preparing to call us Strasserites, right-wingers with communist gloss. We don’t care. Marxism was built on the back of bourgeois thought – on the political economy of Adam Smith, on the philosophy of Hegel. We have always sifted bourgeois thought for the best of its insights. In any case, as we will show, the historic left celebrated the values today written off as toxic. Now is a good time to revive them.

 

Barbara Ehrenreich – Smile or Die

Ehrenreich, who I have a lot of respect for, disagrees with us in Smile Or Die.

She describes American culture as having a “mandatory optimism”. The unemployed are sent to support groups where they are told being laid off is a good thing because it is an opportunity.

“Delusion is always a mistake”.

At the most extreme this goes beyond Magical Voluntarism and into sheer crackpot mysticism – Ehrenreich cites the success of the book The Secret, and its authors view that tsunami victims must have been sending out negative energy into the world.

 

 

 

Notes on the Stoics – Aurelius, Seneca, Epictetus

Seneca, a founder of Stoic philosophy, was eventually ordered to commit suicide by the Roman emperor Nero. The details of why are not especially important – his response is:

“Undismayed, he asked for tablets to make his will. When this was refused by the centurion, he turned to his friends and said that, since he was prevented from rewarding their services, he would leave them the only thing, and yet the best thing, that he had to leave — the pattern of his life….At the same time he reminded his weeping friends of their duty to be strong….asking them what had become of the precepts of wisdom, of the philosophy which for so many years they had studied in the face of impending evils….Then he embraced his wife — and slit his wrists”

(Described by Tactitus). This shows that it is at least possible for someone to show incredible resilience in the face of the most dire circumstances imaginable. This is not to say that it is reasonable to demand everyone emulate Seneca! Perhaps the story is to some extent apocryphal, and even if it’s not, you cannot expect superhuman heroics at all times from all people. It is ok to be normal. But surely it should be held up as an ideal to strive towards. Who would not want that level of equanimity and poise?

Stoicism can seem to fall into self-parody at times, where all eventualities are greeted with absolute calm, or even positivity. Epictetus counsels people who have lost something to be unaffected by the loss through remembering that they they have only lost a particular instantiation of a general category – E.G if you break a ceramic cup, you haven’t “lost your ceramic cup”, you’ve only lost one ceramic cup, of which there are many. He extends this to even the death of your wife or family – you’ve lost a wife, not your specific wife. I can’t imagine anyone reading this and not finding it bizarre and anti-human.

I actually think it represents a failure to apply the original insight of stoic philosophy, which is that you have the power to choose your response, correctly. Most applications of stoicism involve (to simplify for a moment), taking a step back, breathing, thinking rationally instead of emotionally. It’s meant as an antidote for when your emotions cloud your thought, as they will tend to if left unchecked. But I think that can make stoics fall in love with the specific sensation of otherworldly calmness, to the point where stoicism is recast as the idea to “be calm about all situations at all times” rather than the idea of choosing your response consciously instead of rashly. This is borne out by Seneca, who calls tranquillity “the state of human perfection… as high as we can go”. If your wife tells you she loves you, surely you don’t want to take a step back and respond with serene detachment, but to respond with love and passion.

The true felicity of life is to be free from perturbations; to understand our duties toward God and man; to enjoy the present without any anxious dependence upon the future. Not to amuse ourselves with either hopes or fears, but to rest satisfied with what we have (Seneca)

Again as far as I can see this idea is double-edged. Basically it’s a sound principle, but taken too literally it’s a philosophy of passivity, like Buddhism, in the face of injustice. I don’t think this is too uncharitable a reading either. I watched a YouTube lecture on the stoicism of Aurelius that often gets vaunted as the best on the internet. Parts of it were very good, but I remember at one point the speaker glowingly summarising Aurelius’s thought as “If you are an emperor, be a good emperor. If you are a slave, be a good slave.” I think Jocko Willink provides another example of this double-edged idea with his ‘GOOD’ mantra, where he encourages people to view all experience as good. All problems as learning experiences. The good sense in this is that all problems, with effort, can be viewed as learning experiences. The overreach is in the scrabbling attempt to self-hypnotise our perception of truly horrific experiences as actually, literally good rather than as containing the possibility of a superior or inferior response. Deciding that you will respond to a diagnosis of cancer with dignity, and trying to use it to surmise what is truly important in life is a good idea, and better than emotionally collapsing if you can manage it. It doesn’t mean that getting cancer is literally beneficial, useful or welcome. Youtube links below on this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdTMDpizis8 (GOOD)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkR5EdT5LKk (Mockery)

This is a reification of individual action to an extent that is just not healthy, and would leave in place all social structures as they are. Never mind that you’re enslaved, just make sure you give a good account of yourself! What is missed is again the scope for collective stoicism, collective discipline, collective action. A rational and considered collective response would be for the slaves to emancipate themselves. The limit for thinkers like Seneca is a kind of liberal exhortation to be inter-personally kind to everyone. “Kindly remember that he whom you call your slave sprang from the same stock, is smiled upon by the same skies, and on equal terms with yourself breathes, lives, and dies”

“True joy is a serene and sober motion, and they are miserably out that take laughing for rejoicing.” Again, this is obviously an excessive and warped version of an originally good idea. Contentment mostly (probably?) will come from serenity, but to go from that to hostility to laughter (?!) is stupid.

Seneca does make a distinction between voluntary and involuntary reaction. Throwing cold water over a freezing person he says produces involuntary shivering which can’t be controlled even by the stoic. Prolonged grief, on the the other hand, has an element of complicity.

Stoicism more properly conceived is about avoiding ’emotional hyperbole‘. (Partially examined life) This is a cool term, and perhaps encapsulates a lot of the SJW tendencies around ’emotional labour’ and so on.

The Stoics can, perhaps, end up chasing their own tail if they lean towards the extreme, zen-like aspects of their tradition. Seneca at one point claims a stoic should be “indifferent to fortune”, in order that the rational mind can remain sovereign and unaffected, and make wise decisions. But to what end are the wise decisions being made? In order to promote good fortune, surely. But if we’re indifferent to fortune, there is no serious purpose in trying to influence the tide of events, and no need for wise decisions. Again I think the rational kernel of Stoicism is in creating space between stimulus and response, for the mind to operate sensibly; not in creating literal indifference to stimulus.

Both Seneca and Aurelius discuss the ‘reserve clause’ which is I think the best description of what I have been arguing is the rational component of Stoicism. This consists in “weighing certainty of purpose against uncertainty of result”, and holding at all times the reserve clause, which allows the Stoic to pause and think when obstacles and problems present themselves, in order to (at best) turn them into a help, (more commonly) find a way around them, or (worst case scenario) at least avoid falling into despair.

In terms of the intellectual history of Stoicism I think it merits taking a Marxist approach. All three were either emperors or belonged to the top stratum of the aristocracy, and I think this contributes heavily to the que, serrah serrah angle they take, where the world is accepted as it is. This goes back to the idea of “be a good slave”. It’s something we see in lots of guises – for example, a lot of the initial hostility to Darwinism came from the idea that it undermined the concept of God putting everything in its natural place, and therefore undermined the idea of the social system as natural and pre-ordained. This quick, almost sleight of hand shift from nature to politics can be rapid, as in the Victorian hymn “All things bright and beautiful”. Most remember this as a fond description of “each little bird that sings” being made by God, but many forget the final verse:

The rich man in his castle
The poor man at his gate
God made them high and lowly
And ordered their estate

This reminds me of nothing so much as a celebrated rant by right-wing American author Jocko Willink, where he upholds a stoic mantra that no negative circumstances need to actually be seen as negative – instead all events should be responded to with “Good”. This is the idea of leaving the world as it is. Everything is as it should be. Nothing needs to be changed – at least nothing in the environment. The only change that should happen is one allowing an individual to traverse the pre-existing terrain in a more favourable way.

Is stoicism ‘self-tyranny’? Many question how far its demands could actually be followed in practice. I’ve spoken already about how it could be set as an ideal to aim towards rather than a test one passes or fails. I want to speak about another aspect of it, which is the related question of whether or not you can ‘order yourself to do something’. Jordan Peterson speaks at length about this, and mentions how it sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t, and you have to ‘negotiate’ with yourself, reward yourself when you do the right thing etc, almost as though you were speaking to a friend. For me this opens up a more fundamental idea, which is that discipline is actually social in nature. In Peterson and the stoics they ask us almost to be our own friend, which is to set up a mimesis of social discipline. But the real thing is better! This is why accountability works, and why the devaluing of discipline and resilience among the left is damaging – because it will really work. A culture where push each other (carefully, kindly) forward is the only way we’ll actually find it. This undermines an anticipated criticism radlibs make, which is

The Roman Emperor Nero became wary of an aristocrat who had gained too much wealth and power. He had him arrested, and ordered him to commit suicide. The aristocrat did not protest. Instead, he asked for tablets to write his will – but the centurion guarding him refused. Turning to his crying wife and friends, he explained that he had been denied even this last request, and so he could give them nothing – nothing except the most valuable gift of all, which was the pattern of his life. He insisted they be strong. He told them to remember “the precepts of wisdom, of the philosophy which for so many years they had studied in the face of impending evils”. Then he embraced his wife – and cut his wrists.

This is the story of the death of Seneca, one of the most famous philosophical proponents of self-discipline and control. The story is a kind of Stoic’s dark fable. Even in the face of annihilation, even with the added insult of thwarting his wish to look after his family, Seneca is serene.

Does this principle work? And where does the idea come from?

At its most primitive, self-discipline is an intuitive idea even animals grasp. A leopard stalking towards prey knows it must control itself. The first thinkers to grapple with the idea in philosophy, however, were the Stoics. Stoicism begins with Zeno. But it was the three ‘late stoa’ – Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius – who provided the school’s most enduring work. It’s these three we will now consider.

Stoicism is more accurately described as a literary tradition than a formal philosophy. Its adherents wrote in a meditative style – in Aurelius’s case literally so. Nonetheless, we can boil Stoicism down to a key proposition: We cannot control the world – but we can control our own actions. The Stoics leapt from this foundational idea to a second concept. If we cannot control the world, we should be indifferent to it:

The true felicity of life is to be free from perturbations; to understand our duties toward God and man; to enjoy the present without any anxious dependence upon the future. Not to amuse ourselves with either hopes or fears, but to rest satisfied with what we have

It’s this thought which animated Seneca, even moments from death. What did it matter that he’d been ordered to die at the whim of the emperor? What did it matter that all his wealth would be seized? He would be satisfied with this outcome, and only try to respond well to it.

For us this story contains both the strengths and the weaknesses of the stoic model of self-discipline.

What is it that is strong in this story? Surely it is the recognition that humans really can be brave, resilient, and heroic when adversity strikes. Between event and response there is a space. People can choose how to act. It is not a foregone conclusion, and people are not inherently weak. We collectively celebrate this with the achievements of paralympian athletes, many of whom face down the kind of adversity most of us will never see in our lives, to achieve things the rest of us only dream of. The Stoics do allow that some reactions are outside of human control – shivering if cold water is thrown over you, for example – but beyond this they do take a strong line that each person can master themselves. There is a caricature of this position, which demands everybody tow a perfect line – at all times and in response to all things. We could imagine Seneca berating a family who have lost everything in a house fire, castigating them for their sadness and concomitant lack of fortitude.  Nonetheless a rational core remains here. The general principle that resilience is possible, admirable, and should be encouraged is entirely sound. How would the social justice left react to this? It’s hard to imagine it would not ruffle feathers. The standard language is one which assumes a default vulnerability and weakness on behalf of the oppressed. Mia Mckenzie, for example, insists you can expect nothing from the oppressed because “people who experience racism, misogyny, ableism, queerphobia, transphobia, classism, etc. are exhausted“. Another example, from the ‘How To Be An Ally’ guide:

Imagine your privilege is a heavy boot that keeps you from feeling when you’re stepping on someone’s feet or they’re stepping on yours, while oppressed people have only sandals

The non-oppressed, then, are impervious to damage, whereas the oppressed have been battered into sensitivity by their harsh experience of the social world. Nobody would dream of telling a woman to stop being sensitive about a story of domestic violence, or a black person to calm down about police murder. But this does not mean the Stoic vision is wrong, or that we should lose sight of personal resilience as a value. There is a language of resistance to bigotry that is determined, resolute, and strong instead of being anxious, pitying and plaintive. In 1940s America, the trotskyist Max Schactman spoke against the Jim Crow laws thus:

Working men and working women, Negro and white: the Jim Crow system, segregation and discrimination against the Negro people, terrorism and pogroms against the Negro – THESE ARE OUR COMMON ENEMY. They threaten us both. They are aimed at us both. They must be combatted by us both. Jim Crow terrorism must be given an answer it will never forget… all discriminatory practices against Negroes must be wiped out, and all participants in Jim Crow movements or activities must be made to renounce their anti-labor behavior, or be driven out of a clean labour movement.

This is, in a sense, stoic. Schactman wastes no time in despair or ‘exhaustion’. There is no emotional caving to the horror of the situation. Instead there is an immediate rallying call to unite and fire back. It is the language of collective strength and courage, not victim-hood. Examples abound – the slogan of ‘black power’, the ‘Black and white unite and fight’ protest chant in the UK, ‘Take Back The Night’ as a name for marches aimed at ending violence against women. The left has not always fixated on the language of vulnerability. Who could dispute that this language is better? Which is more stirring – giving Jim Crow terrorism an answer it will never forget, or the announcement of Goldsmiths students that their student union had organised a tour of local restaurants, thereby ‘exoticising migrant food culture’, and upsetting the local migrant community? The social justice left imagines the oppressed as almost laughably fragile.

In another sense, though, Schactman’s speech is a sharp break with stoicism. Where the stoics flirted with an almost zen-like passive acceptance of the twists and turns of events, the communist left throws everything into shaping them. The Stoic asks us to enjoy the present without any anxious dependence on the future. The communist works for “the forcible entrance of the masses into the realm of their own destiny”. Passive acceptance is the critical weakness of Stoic philosophy, and the same weakness lies at the heart of its right-wing analogue in the modern world. The world is what it is, they say. You can only control your response. That you can only control your response is axiomatically correct – but your response should be to try to shape the wider world!

The stoics themselves concede this, indirectly. When Seneca and Aurelius discuss the ‘reserve clause’, they mean that whatever happens to you, you can respond well. But ‘well’ is only a coherent idea if there is a set of outcomes we would prefer to see in the world. Genuine indifference to outcome would render any weighing up of courses of action meaningless. We might weigh “the certainty of purpose against the certainty of outcome”, but purpose cannot coexist with indifference.

In their more coherent moods, then, the Stoics are not a counsel of absolute detachment, but a guide to prudent action. What kind of action?

The Stoics tell us to act as rational individuals, reigning in our most immediate emotional tendencies and trying instead to use objective thought. Their vision of what this looks like was sometimes questionable. (Epictetus attempted to reassure those grieving the loss of loved ones by  reminding they had not lost their own spouse, but merely that one instance of the general category of ‘spouses’ had been lost, and was therefore not worth being upset about). But the basic idea of seeking to limit one’s emotional hyperbole where possible is surely a reasonable one – it constitutes a significant part of the maturation process in children, and we recognise its extension as a virtue in adulthood.

It is not clear, though, that the contemporary radical left agrees. Of course we don’t see many examples of people directly praising unnecessary emotional incontinence, but we suggest that it has become a norm of behaviour in radical liberal circles – and the ostentatious performance of protectiveness towards this behaviour a means for gaining social credit within those circles. The website Everyday Feminism records the following incident:

A few years back, a White woman burst into one of the People of Color caucuses, throwing herself on the floor, crying, asking for forgiveness, bemoaning her Whiteness and her role in oppression.

This kind of bizarre, infantile display is quite common on ‘Leftbook’ (The broad ecosystem of social-justice based Facebook groups), if less egregious. People will, quite suddenly, announce that they find the discussion too emotionally difficult to continue with. They will say that it is not their job to educate you (usually when your questions questions are getting difficult to answer), and that they are too emotionally drained by the experience of oppression to explain.

Of course, we cannot discount the possibility that this is true. Let’s imagine a scenario where a woman who has recently been victim to domestic violence from her partner is asked to justify why more effort goes into preventing male violence against women than the other way around. No sane person would think the woman had fallen short if she did not set the questioner right.

Nonetheless, we suggest it is unlikely to be true in the aggregate. Both authors are working class, from one of the most deprived areas of the country, and therefore bear the marks of that experience. We grew up poor. We grew up surrounded by drug addiction and poor mental health. Our social mobility was much more limited. One of us went through serious abuse, homelessness and prison. It is simply not our experience that we find ourselves therefore devoid of the emotional strength to argue a socialist case. On the contrary, we find ourselves endlessly re-explaining our argument, secure in the knowledge that 90% of the time we are engaged in a Labour of Sisyphus. We don’t refer people to search engines. This is not an act of brave or extraordinary effort. It is ordinary commitment to an idea. The contemporary campus left, however, is everywhere lowering the bar. The oppressed are presumed to be too delicate to handle the process.

Following from this is a semantic drift, which again pushes the oppressed into a position of fragility they simply don’t have in reality. Perhaps the classic example of this is in Woke Culture’s appropriation of the phrase “literal violence”, whereby verbal abuse, misgendering someone, or at times failure to agree with a discussion point, since this is ‘overriding black/female/trans voices’, are now reframed as a form of actual violence. This is a model which equates questioning the usefulness of the concept of white privilege with punching someone in the face, uncertainty about the Gender Recognition Act as tantamount to a pogrom. It is a condescending and lowering approach, and it attracts contempt from ordinary people, who sense and detest when they are being babied. 

Why then do woke activists – who at least verbally style themselves as interested in the real emancipation of the oppressed – stick to such a condescending conception of the classes of people they wish to liberate? Why do they reject the language of socialists and anti-oppression activists of eras gone by, a language of collective power, strength and determination? They do so because their politics are not fundamentally orientated towards the genuine parsing of social reality or the achievement of practical victory. Their politics are for the most part a strange version of one-upmanship, where the goal is to broadcast how deep you roll with the anti-oppression struggle. Adolph Reed captures this trend perfectly:

A predictable moment in progressive meetings of virtually any sort, even at incipient stages of an organizing effort, is when someone— more or less piously, more or less smugly, always self-righteously— rises to introduce the concern that, “As I look around the room, I don’t see enough of the X, the Y or the Z present” and to issue the standard calls for inclusiveness and for making greater effort to reach out, etc. This intervention has a pro forma, gestural quality. It is a ritual act that seems automatic and obligatory. Like a mantra or a Catholic prayer, its purpose seems more therapeutic and aesthetic than instructive. It is typically offered as a self-sufficient commentary, seldom accompanied by specific proposals for correcting the perceived imbalances.

The key point is Reed’s final one, which is the lack of concrete proposals. It’s not wrong, at an appropriate moment, to think about demographic imbalance – the embarrassment of an all-white Black Lives Matter stunt, for example, might have been avoided with such an intervention. But the vast majority of the time these interventions are only made to boost the social stock of the speaker. They are proving that they see oppression where others do not. This then produces a kind of rat race where the campus left digs ever-deeper in search of oppressive slights that they can acknowledge for social brownie points. The only way these slights can be imagined to be worth discussing is if one implies an increasingly presposterous model of vulnerability on the part of the oppressed. How else could we reach the stage where “Dear White People” style articles are being penned condemning the phrase “On fleek” as an example of “appropriation from black queer subcultures”? We humbly suggest that black and queer people are made of sterner stuff than this and that they can withstand a few teenagers using their phrase to complement each other’s eyebrows.

We suggest a different model – a left stoicism.

However, it is not enough to adopt the stoic model wholesale. The three late ‘stoa’ all suffer a howling lacuna in their model, which is the possibility of collective action. They insist that between stimulus and response there is a space to think and act with prudence. But the only activity they will consider is individual. This leads them into all kinds of political absurdity. A modern lecturer summarises Aurelius’s thought as “If you are an emperor, be a good emperor. If you are a slave, be a good slave.” The power one has as an individual to affect the world is, in truth, feeble. As soon as the power of self-control is shifted to the realm of collective action, the scope for action increases exponentially. You can be a good slave. Or you can organise with other slaves and kill the master.

The fatal weakness of classical stoicism, as we have seen, is indifference to the world – and although they do not at all times adhere to this aspect of their philosophy, it carries over into a myopia about

Notes to self –  MBSR as cover for avoiding politics,

The less known aspect of stoicism is its metaphysics and the idea of the logos. They end up saying that you can still pursue preferences because that’s what we’ve been endowed with by nature and everything I’d part of a divine plan. This dovetails very neatly with Victorian teleological hostility to Darwinism. Cuts against Mark Fishers idea of destroying the idea of natural pre ordainment

 

Notes on Jordan Peterson and 12 Rules For Life

My starting point assumptions before reading his book, but having watched quite a lot of his youtube content, are these:

1. Peterson is vilified excessively and sometimes misrepresented by the left
2. He is especially hated by the Social Justice Warrior section of the left, who we have little in common with
3. His political ideas genuinely are silly – he just doesn’t know very much and so is out of his depth without knowing it – but his psychological ideas have much less to argue with.

I think we are basically in favour of his pro-responsibility, stand up straight with your shoulders back schtick. It’s not earth-shattering stuff, at one level. I remember someone summarising his thought quite memorably as ‘wash your bollocks every day’. That said, it actually is quite controversial amongst the Tumblr left, who lionise ‘self-care’ much more than self-discipline, which they either ignore or are actively hostile to as a value they perceive as capitalistic and indicative of obsession with productivity. This leads to excuses being made for all kinds of neurotic and shit behaviour – failing to shower for days on end, or respond to messages, or whatever else, under the guise of ‘radical self-care’. To be clear, we’re not saying people who fall into those behaviour patterns should be shamed. That’s what poor mental health does to people, and people should be supported into escaping the rut. What we’re saying is it should not be actively celebrated or protected as a reasonable way of carrying on, as the radlibs try to do.

As Eddie Dempsey has pointed out, the left never used to have any truck with those ideas at all. The Communist Party of Britain always put a high premium on respect, dignity, high standards in your personal behaviour.

Peterson and his co-thinkers, however, present an excessive version of the principle that lapses into silliness at times. In the foreword to 12 Rules, his colleague complains of a ‘safe spaces culture’ that has led to ‘soft-surface playgrounds’. I’m all for encouraging responsibility and resilience in children – it seems obvious to me they don’t need to break bones when they fall over to achieve that. p. xxiii

They are much, much more on the money when they say “Millions feel stultified by this underestimation of their potential resilience“. p. xxiii. This is exactly right. A huge part of the hostility to the left among ordinary people it aims to fight for is the perception that we’re a patronising, pitying force trying to protect them because they’re too vulnerable. People despise that. The vast majority of the left are exasperated by that view because it’s for the most part false, but the radlibs do act like this. So much of what animates them is built around a language of victimhood and vulnerability, and inexcusably so. To take race as an example for a moment – the insistence that right-wing politicians (as opposed to fascists) should be no-platformed for their bigoted remarks, so as to ensure ‘safety’ for minority students is well-meaning, but also fundamentally mawkish and sickly. People are not that delicate. In the 1970s when the KKK was still lynching black people in the US, the civil rights movement used the language of collective courage, strength, and black power. Now, at a time where things are considerably less dark than that, they emphasise vulnerability. People don’t like it.

“We are not happy… unless we see ourselves progressing – and the very idea of progression implies value” – Yes, agreed. In terms of personal wellbeing, it’s the act of progression, not the outcome, that is primary. This is another big problem with the left’s attempt to tear Peterson down and vouch for the ‘self-care’ model. You actually do not produce improvements in wellbeing for people by telling them to have a few bubble baths and eat chocolate. They’re much more likely to feel better if they can get off their knees and chase a goal.

“Everyone needs a concrete, specific goal – an ambition and a purpose – to limit chaos and make intelligible sense of his or her life” p. 226. Absolutely!  Very similar to this quote from Trotsky, a leading Bolshevik:

“Life is not an easy matter…. You cannot live through it without falling into frustration and cynicism unless you have before you a great idea which raises you above personal misery, above weakness, above all kinds of perfidy and baseness”