We Need “Outside Agitators”

Pro-Palestine student protesters are being smeared as puppets of shadowy “outside agitators.” The presence of community members and experienced activists in the protests is nothing to be ashamed of: we need outside agitators to build a better world.

By Astra Taylor, Leah Hunt-Hendrix 

May 5, 2024

Source: Jacobin

Protests in and around Columbia University in support of Palestine and against Israeli occupation. A side gate by the bookstore where the crowd is—inside and out (Wikimedia Commons)

These days, outside agitators are everywhere. According to politicians, police commissioners, university administrators, and mainstream journalists they lurk on every campus where there has been resistance to the unfolding genocide in Gaza, especially at the solidarity encampments. Emory University president Gregory Fenves complained that “highly organized, outside protesters” were behind the school’s pro-peace demonstrations. The University of Texas at Austin followed suit, releasing a statement expressing “concern that much of the disruption on campus over the past week has been orchestrated by people from outside the University, including groups with ties to escalating protests at other universities around the country.” In a story that ran under the headline “Professional protestors of Texas unmasked,” the Daily Mail salaciously reported that the infiltrators included an elementary school teacher, a Palestinian shopkeeper, an interpreter, and a costume designer.

No one has sounded the alarm louder than New York City’s compulsive liar mayor, Eric Adams, who has complained that “outside agitators” are out to “radicalize our children” — the implication being that young people would be quiescent in the face of mass starvation and bombardment if not for some nefarious external influence. Recently, the city released data that purportedly bolstered his claims: approximately a third of the people arrested during protests at Columbia University and 60 percent of those arrested at City College of New York were not “affiliated” with those schools.

Encampment sympathizers understandably responded to these accusations by arguing that allegedly “unaffiliated” outsiders are, more often than not, actually insiders of a kind. Progressive journalists and online commentators have highlighted how students from other schools, alumni, community members, curious onlookers, veteran activists, and the like all have legitimate ties to local campuses, and thus their presence hardly merits concern, let alone panic (particularly at City College, which is only one of twenty-five colleges in the City University of New York system, and students of the other twenty-four schools could be included in the city’s number of allegedly unaffiliated arrestees).

Without a doubt, there’s truth to such retorts. But they also risk playing into the hands of our opponents. To affirm that the majority of protesters are “insiders” as opposed to “outsiders” only aids those who want to create fissures and foment distrust in order to divide and conquer our movements. It’s a way of denying the rights of activists to share lessons, learn from movement elders, and collaborate across communities — in other words, to properly and effectively organize.

The “outside agitator” charge is a way to isolate individuals and create social separation, when the reality is that injustice of any kind, but especially war, necessarily concerns us all. On the issue of genocide, there should be no outside.
Nobody Is Outside Solidarity

Of course, outsiders of a certain ilk can occasionally be destructive. They might be real infiltrators (e.g., undercover cops or federal agents) or people acting in bad faith and looking to hijack a cause for their own purposes. But these aren’t the outsiders that we are being instructed to worry about by today’s pundits.

Consider the Wall Street Journal’s reporting on the fact that some Columbia students had consulted veterans of the Black Panther Party, as though this were scandalous. The fact that protesters share knowledge and expertise with each other or seek out the wisdom of their elders is galling to the authorities, who respond by painting the demonstrations as not only overrun by outsiders but also corrupted by “paid” activists or “chaos professionals.”

The New York Times beat this drum when it ran not one but two articles discussing “professional agitator” Lisa Fithian, the legendary nonviolent direct action trainer, who was filmed outside Columbia’s Hamilton Hall as it was being occupied. Fithian was there providing nonviolent direct action training to the students, as she has done for activists from a range of movements going back decades.

Why are outside agitators so threatening to the powers that be? The answer is that outsiders are a special kind of solidarity builder, even when they remain at a distance and lack any particularly useful skills or insights. Anyone who has been part of a movement knows how much displays of solidarity matter.

For example, we will never forget the hundreds of pizzas people from across the country purchased and delivered to the Occupy Wall Street encampment, each box a reminder that someone, somewhere believed the uprising mattered. Something similar happened in 2014 when Palestinian activists advised Black Lives Matters protesters in Ferguson, Missouri, on how to cope with state violence (“Always make sure to run against the wind / to keep calm when you’re teargassed, the pain will pass, don’t rub your eyes! #Ferguson Solidarity”). Being buoyed by people you don’t know is emboldening and galvanizing, and helps weave local acts of resistance into larger, more powerful narratives and coalitions.

This is something to celebrate, not shy away from. Outside agitators are a necessary part of progressive social transformation. People supporting and joining far-flung movements, acting responsibly and with a good dose of humility, is a wonderful thing — as is younger organizers learning from people who have more experience.

As we detail in Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea, outside agitators have always played a pivotal role in struggles for a more just world. Historically, solidarity has been sabotaged by elites who sow division to maintain their power, including by splintering and segregating people spatially and socially. A lack of regular social contact across differences inhibits solidarity in obvious ways: physical separation abets psychological separation. And yet solidarity can also thrive as a result of the perspective distance brings. This is particularly true when divides are intentionally breached.

Over the centuries, committed outsiders have advanced the cause of solidarity, often at great personal risk, overcoming social barriers and expanding people’s conception of the “us” to which they belong. Roaming visionaries and organizers have served as bridges, uniting far-flung individuals and communities.

In nineteenth-century Britain, itinerant activists promoted Chartist principles, building a national movement that demanded basic democratic rights. In the United States, abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass, traveled far and wide promoting a vision of a multiracial society to all who would listen. “Wobblies,” as Industrial Workers of the World organizers were called, hopped freight trains to lend a hand to working people in remote regions, aiming to organize them into one big union. Civil rights Freedom Riders rode buses across state lines, visiting towns across the South to encourage people to challenge Jim Crow and register to vote.

In every instance, the powerful have insisted that, without such meddling by strangers, local people would have remained complacent and content — or, in Eric Adams’s terminology, the children would not be radicalized.

Adams’s hostility echoes a long-standing reactionary refrain. In the twentieth century’s early decades, anarchism and socialism were portrayed as dangerous imports from Eastern and Southern Europe. As Red Scare tactics evolved, movements for peace, labor rights, and racial equality were figured as Soviet plots. Simply holding left-wing ideas made one a subversive, un-American presence — an “outside agitator” subject to forcible separation and removal. The first Red Scare and then McCarthyism trampled basic liberal tenets as a political witch hunt sought to identify and expel radicals. Tens of thousands of people, both foreign and native-born, were threatened with or subjected to imprisonment, deportation, job loss, blacklisting, and sometimes worse.

Along with new laws and institutions to root out “subversives,” Cold War conspiracism painted every progressive ambition, no matter how milquetoast, as alien and unacceptable. Representative John Rankin of Mississippi denounced the civil rights movement as “communistic bunk” — as though black people could not demand equality and liberation without a prompt from the Soviets. The notoriously bigoted Alabama governor George Wallace took a similar tack when civil rights organizers decamped for his state. In 1965, he signed a resolution calling on loyal residents of every “race, color, and creed” to stay home and not participate in “continued agitation and demonstrations, led and directed by outsiders” aiming to “foment local disorder and strife among our citizens.”

The demonstrations in question had intensified after a state trooper killed a twenty-six-year-old activist named Jimmie Lee Jackson and included the now-famous series of marches from Selma to Montgomery that culminated in “Bloody Sunday,” when police attacked protesters with tear gas and truncheons. The resolution implied that local people did not support the protests, which was not true. Yet the fact that some of the activists were outsiders was undeniable: rather than discrediting the demonstrations, the presence of non-Alabamans and non-Southerners spoke to the ways the movement had built effective, and powerful, solidarity. The presence of Communists was undeniable as well, and though Wallace and his ilk made it seem unthinkable, homegrown Communists, born and raised in the American South, had been some of the boldest anti-racist organizers since the 1930s.

In the decades that followed, the phrase “outside agitator” came into common usage as a way to smear the civil rights movement. But outsiders were crucial to the fight.

For example, as part of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), young people from across the country, many of whom had experience supporting sit-ins at segregated lunch counters, set up shop in rural Southern towns, where they registered residents to vote — a dangerous task given the constant threat of vigilantism and police violence. As sociologist Francesca Polletta shows in an analysis of their efforts, these young people brought more than courage and organizing know-how. They also brought a sense of connection to the wider world that punctured locals’ sense of isolation and vulnerability. The presence of activists from other parts of the country was a visceral sign that local people were not alone in their struggle against white supremacy.

As a result, new self-conceptions, associations, and possibilities emerged. SNCC youth “created obligations to a movement with which residents had little contact, and they created obligation to a nation whose promises lay, always, in the distant future.” Linked to the broader movement, locals were emboldened and empowered; their “we” was widened thanks to the presence of outsiders.

As Polletta details, outsiders have various attributes that can make them effective cultivators of solidarity and catalysts for change. Being removed from the social and familial commitments and petty conflicts and rivalries that characterize daily life can help activists open space for people to see themselves and engage in new ways. While some scholars of social change emphasize the importance of deep bonds and a sense of collective identity, Polletta points out that what she calls “dense ties” and a “mobilizing identity” can be at odds with each other.

“Participating in disruptive action requires seeing oneself as different than one was. And that is difficult to do, perhaps most difficult to do, in our closest relationships,” she explains. “Our families and friends want us to be the person we were. This is surely the case when they know that participating will jeopardize our safety, and, for the families and friends of black people in the Deep South, their safety as well.”
Agitators for Racial Justice

Today the term “outside agitator” remains a potent insult, one regularly lobbed at anyone seeking to bend the moral arc of the universe toward justice. In 2020, when millions of people took to the streets in grief and outrage over the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, political leaders dusted off the old bromide.

“Groups of outside radicals and agitators are exploiting the situation to pursue their own separate and violent agenda,” Attorney General Bill Barr said in a statement, conjuring shadowy anarchist evildoers. As is the case today, it wasn’t just Republicans who cast aspersions.

“They are coming in largely from outside of the city, from outside of the region, to prey on everything we have built over the last several decades,” Democratic Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey declared. The state’s Democratic governor, Tim Walz, gave a “best estimate” that 80 percent of the rioters had arrived from out of town.

Patently absurd, both assertions would quickly be walked back. USA Today did an analysis of protesters’ social media data and arrest records and found the overwhelming majority of them were, in fact, from the region. As for those other 20 percent, good for them. In the immortal words of Bernie Sanders, they traveled to fight for someone they did not know.

That’s what Martin Luther King Jr did before he was assassinated for trying to build a multiracial working-class movement that could effectively challenge the evils of poverty, racism, and war — the same problems we must tackle and overcome today.

King, too, was reviled as an outside agitator as he traveled to the front lines of the struggle for racial and economic equality. It was a charge he reflected on in his celebrated “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” composed in 1963, offering words of wisdom that can still guide us.

“I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” King mused. “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial ‘outside agitator’ idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.”

 

The Searchers by Andy Beckett: ‘A vivid profile of left MPs, down but not out’

Morgan Jones

Andy Beckett’s new book is, he writes in the introduction, “the story of a group of political explorers and of a series of interlocking political journeys which are rarely considered as a whole”. The explorers in question are Diane Abbott, Jeremy Corbyn, Ken Livingstone, John McDonnell and Tony Benn.

Beckett’s The Searchers is a group biography-cum-long durée history of Bennism that tracks their political lives through the wilderness and up onto the main stage of British politics with close attention, empathy and verve.

In their time, Beckett’s searchers have been regarded with “fear, contempt or hatred”, but the group – who the author describes as the closest mainstream British politics has to heretics – have also had a complicated, arguably outsize influence on their party and the country’s politics.

Beckett’s subjects came to full political awareness in the same era

Of the five, Benn would seem to be the odd one out; he was first elected to parliament in 1950, long before the others were political, let alone politicians.

Beckett convincingly argues, however, that all of his subjects came to mature political awareness in the late 1960s and early 1970s, influenced by the new left and leftist currents beyond Labour including “anarchism, anti-racism, Marxism, pacifism and identity politics”.

Benn just experienced this awakening at a slightly later stage in his life, while happening to be a cabinet minister. The younger politicians may have been Benn’s “disciples”, but the five’s completely politics-dominated lives shared a common vision.

The drive to fulfil this politics carried Livingstone and McDonnell to innovate at the Greater London Council in the 1980s and on, less fruitfully, into Westminster in the 90s. Abbott started her career at the Home Office before becoming a TV researcher and being elected to parliament in 1987, joining Corbyn, who had become the MP for Islington North in 1983 after some years as a Haringey councillor.

Benn’s later-in-life radicalism led him to contest Labour’s deputy leadership contest in 1981 and lose by a whisper (49.574% to 50.426%). Sitting as an MP until 2010, his long career saw him become, somewhat unwillingly, a national treasure.

Vivid eye for detail meets seemingly effortless narrative pacing

I review a lot of books, and a lot of books about the Labour Party, and the praise one can normally give the prose and writing style of these books is somewhat limited. Beckett’s, in this regard, is a breath of fresh air: a vivid eye for detail meets narrative pacing that seems effortless – but obviously isn’t.

As a character study, and as an evocation of Britain in the last century, it would be worth reading even if you had no particular interest in the subject matter. Beckett takes the reader from the polluted streets of a London quite different to that of today’s to the carpeted quiet of the slightly run-down hotel in Chesterfield where Benn made his constituency home from the mid-80s.

If the latter is channelling Philip Larkin’s Friday Night At The Royal Station Hotel, the book as a whole put me in mind of Sam Knight’s The Premonitions Bureau, making sure – as that book does –  in a sparing, unshowy way, that the reader feels all the distance between the recent past and now and understands that the actions described are products of a particular moment.

These were always people convinced another world was possible; what that other world looked like has changed over time. “This is not the world I would have created,” Livingstone said when he was mayor of London in the 2000s, “but it’s the world I have to live in.”

Beckett gives a carefully observed portrait of Corbyn

Beckett is clearly sympathetic to his subjects, but one of the book’s many commendable features is its focus on how their differing characters factored into both success and failure, effective team-work and devastating fall-outs.

Livingstone was nimble, and a very skilled politician, but inconsistent and self-interested; McDonnell principled and organised but prone to alienate with a “curt” manner; Abbott fiercely self-sufficient but subject to “the double-edged prestige of being a pioneer” and stubborn to a fault. They’re prone to acting in ways unhelpful to themselves, from Livingstone’s GLC-era declaration that “everyone is bisexual” to Abbott’s mid-90s small-scale diplomatic spat with Finland. 

Perhaps the book’s most interesting character study is of Corbyn himself, who it details as hard-working, if not particularly brilliant; intensely personable and genuinely interested with his constituents, collegiate and disengaged from gossip in Westminster. “In a country that often values these qualities,” Beckett writes, “he was seen as reliable, dogged, humble, and seemingly not in any way hypocritical.”

It was this modesty and consistency, delivered by a soft-spoken, middle-class man, that ultimately took Corbyn to the very top of Labour politics – but left him, the author argues, perhaps most ill-prepared for the demands of power, inflexible and considered even by some allies prone to “courting martyrdom” rather than coalition-building.

In Beckett’s carefully observed portrait of Corbyn, the reader sees both all the things that made him so potently appealing to his supporters and the failings that made him profoundly unsuited for leadership.  

The Labour left may be down – but it’s foolish to count it out

Beckett maintains an approach of disciplined sympathy for almost all of the book, but things begin to overbalance in the last section, which concerns Corbyn’s time as leader. The author argues, not unconvincingly, that Corbyn, McDonnell, Abbott and Livingstone are underrated as electoral politicians, able to marshal broad coalitions within their constituencies and consistently increase majorities.

There’s something in this, I think, but it’s the kind of reasoning that will have you shot on sight by the Labour Party’s more important Irish Morgan – there are few “hero voters” in London, after all – and it has limited wider electoral utility.

Beckett begins to over-egg this kind of argument when discussing Corbyn’s general election campaigns – so what if the campaign-produced ‘Corbyn Run’ game garnered more downloads than there are Tory members?

If the first 400 pages of Beckett’s quite substantial book are a masterclass in teasing out complex stories of simultaneous failure and success, the final chapters are a more standard blow-by-blow strung up between quotes from jostling advisers. Here, he ends up reasoning along the lines of Corbyn’s infamous post-2019 “we won the argument” piece. And argument aside, they very much lost the election.

Beckett is more convincing, however, in his argument that our social politics – how Britain deals with race, or aspires to, how it thinks about gay people, or the role of women – is closer to that presented by Livingstone’s GLC than those professed by the Thatcher government. “We won the argument” is stubbornness and cope rather than actual analysis, but that doesn’t mean that short-term defeat cannot mask longer-term forms of success.

If there is a political lesson from The Searchers, it is that dormancy should not be confused with death, and that the politics Beckett’s protagonists champion may often, as it does now, find itself down, but it is patient over long durations and foolish to ever count totally out.

The Searchers: Five Rebels, Their Dream of a Different Britain, and Their Many Enemies by Andy Beckett will be published by Allen Lane on May 2nd.

The Searchers by Andy Beckett review – the leftists who took their lead from Tony Benn


An absorbing study of five Labour radicals – Jeremy Corbyn, Diane Abbott, John McDonnell, Ken Livingstone, plus Benn himself – makes a convincing case for their cultural victories but romanticises Corbyn’s years as the party’s leader


Jason Cowley

THE OBSERVER
Sun 5 May 2024 

This might seem like an eccentric book. As Labour prepares for power after four consecutive general election defeats, Andy Beckett is interested not in what is to come but what has just been. He is particularly preoccupied by the rise of Jeremy Corbyn, what happened to him as party leader and what his leadership represented. The Searchers is mostly fair-minded, diligently reported and researched, but leaves you in no doubt that Beckett, a Guardian columnist, is a sympathetic Corbynite.

In the long, final section, covering 2015 to the present day, Beckett writes nostalgically about the excitement of the early years of Corbyn’s leadership when the left, for so long ridiculed, traduced and marginalised (Peter Mandelson joked during the era of New Labour dominance that they had been contained in a “sealed tomb”), seized control of the party and unlocked a spirit of radical countercultural optimism, especially among younger voters.


The author misses those days but in seeking to recreate the social atmosphere of the country during that period he is perhaps too forgiving of Corbyn’s failures, anti-Zionist zeal and toxic associations. Not forgetting his crass stupidity. This was demonstrated, most emphatically, by his response to the Novichok nerve agent poisoning of Sergei Skripal, a former Soviet military intelligence officer, and his daughter in Salisbury in 2018 when the Labour leader gave the benefit of the doubt to Putin’s Kremlin.

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Tony Benn, inspiration to the other subjects of The Searchers, at the Edinburgh international book festival, Edinburgh, 2003.

 Photograph: Murdo Macleod/The Guardian

In 2023 Beckett attended a Bernie Sanders event at the Royal Festival Hall in London. The cross-class social mix and febrile mood reminded him of old Corbyn rallies. “The audience was multiracial, male and female in roughly equal proportions … It did not look like a Britain whose political time had gone for good.”

But London is not Britain. The Corbyn events that Beckett attended while reporting for the book were invariably in London – or Bristol and Brighton, cities with similar demographics to the vibrant multicultural capital. We never encounter him in those faraway Brexit-supporting former Labour towns in which Corbyn and his movement were loathed.
Livingstone and McDonnell worked together in the 1980s at the GLC, which was widely mocked as “loony left”, but its equity, inclusion and diversity policies are now mainstream

But this is not just a book about Corbyn and Corbynism. The Searchers has larger ambitions and more broadly is an absorbing history of Labour’s radical left from the late 1960s to its present marginalisation. It is also a series of interconnected mini-biographies – of Tony Benn and the four prominent politicians who were inspired by him: Ken Livingstone, Diane Abbott, John McDonnell and Corbyn.

Beckett’s Gang of Four (as I shall call them) were all products of the London left. Livingstone and McDonnell worked together in the 1980s, respectively, as leader and deputy leader of the Greater London Council (GLC), which championed municipal socialism and delighted in tormenting Margaret Thatcher. Her response: she abolished the GLC in 1986.

Abbott, a former TV journalist, reported on the GLC and later worked as a press officer for it. She was encouraged by its embrace of minority rights and identity politics. The GLC back then was widely mocked as “loony left”, but its equity, inclusion and diversity policies are now mainstream.

Corbyn, who later had a relationship with Abbott, moved to London after working with the Voluntary Service Overseas scheme in Jamaica and then travelling through Chile, where he observed the rise of Salvador Allende, the elected socialist president whose Popular Unity government was toppled in a US-backed coup in 1973. (The fall of Allende was a cautionary tale for the internationalist left.)

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Diane Abbott and Jeremy Corbyn at the Labour party conference in Brighton, September 2017. 

Photograph: Daniel Leal-Olivas/AFP/Getty Images

On his return to England, Corbyn, who had messed up his A-levels, studied desultorily at North London Polytechnic before working for several trade unions. He became the MP for Islington North in 1983, the same year that Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were elected to parliament (Livingstone and Abbott were elected in 1987; McDonnell in 1997).

The Gang of Four shared a politics and were inspired by Benn’s campaign to empower members and activists in pursuit of “change from below” and greater party democracy. They supported Benn’s attempt to win the deputy leadership in 1981, a bitter sectarian struggle against Denis Healey that poisoned Labour for a generation. As a restless, technocratic senior minister in Harold Wilson’s governments, Benn had become disillusioned with the resistance his reforming ideas had encountered, from within the civil service and his own party. Through the 1970s he moved further to the left.

The Gang of Four were “Bennites” but had different styles and methods. Livingstone was the Machiavel of County Hall, a pragmatist and dealmaker. “There’s no permanent friendships [in politics],” he told Beckett. He was ruthless in achieving what he wanted but, in the end, was a local rather than national hero. His rise in the parliamentary party was thwarted by Neil Kinnock. “He hated the London left,” Abbott said of the former party leader.

McDonnell was an uncompromising ideologue and, according to Beckett, a Gramscian. He was an autodidact, having gone to Brunel University as a mature student. He was from an Irish-Catholic Liverpudlian family and considered becoming a priest. He was patient and relentless and would later emerge as the de facto leader of the parliamentary left and chair of the Socialist Campaign Group, which is now a demoralised faction.

McDonnell was the Corbynite who impressed me most when I interviewed him. He was interested in big ideas and political economy. He was a hard worker, shrewd strategist and desperately wanted to win. And he had a theory of history and of how he wanted to transform the state. For McDonnell, Corbynism was a counter-hegemonic project. For Corbyn himself, the accidental leader, not so much.

The young Corbyn was a rabble-rouser and agitator. He was intoxicated by the upheavals and student rebellions of the late 1960s and the world of leftwing politics as he found it in London: the radical magazines, the rallies, the festivals, the demonstrations. He relished protest but was a reluctant frontman and had intellectual insecurities. He agreed only to run for the leadership in 2015 because both McDonnell (twice) and Abbott had tried and failed before him, and the Socialist Campaign Group wanted to be represented in the contest. During a brilliant campaign, he unequivocally rejected austerity and spoke directly in a manner that inspired activists who were weary of the tortured triangulations of senior Labour politicians. Corbyn won convincingly but was overwhelmingly rejected by the parliamentary party. A long civil war had begun.

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Ken Livingstone (left) and John McDonnell (second left) with GLC Labour colleagues Ken Little and Lewis Herbert (far right) in 1984. 

Photograph: PA/PA Archive/Press Association Images

Abbott was a true pioneer, a state school Cambridge graduate and the first black female MP. She was an adept media performer as well as being a passionate campaigner for racial, sexual and gender equality. Perhaps no other modern MP has suffered more sustained abuse and vilification and today Abbott is an unhappy exile within the party. She, like Corbyn, is stained by accusations of antisemitism.

The book shares a title with John Ford’s great western, from 1956, starring John Wayne as a Confederate veteran of the American civil war. He embarks on a quest, in the desert landscape of west Texas, to find his niece whom he believes has been kidnapped by members of the Comanche Native American tribe. What were the searchers of Andy Beckett’s book looking for?

They were looking for a lot of things but most strikingly for an enduring socialist alternative. They were opposed to rampant capitalism, entrenched privilege, social conservatism and American hegemony. They were economically statist and socially ultra-liberal. On social and cultural matters, Beckett writes, “the left has won so many battles that its victory has become invisible”.

So why the ultimate disappointment, why the sense of lost opportunity that flows like an underground stream through the book? The answer, I think, is that when it mattered most, when they had the opportunity to lead the Labour party to power and effect the political and economic transformation for which they had long campaigned, Corbyn, McDonnell and Abbott were abjectly defeated by Boris Johnson, the clown prince of Tory politics. They told the people who they were and what they wanted and the message in return was: “Enough. No more!” The tomb had been resealed. It is now left for Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves to lead Labour into a new era of government.

Jason Cowley is editor of the New Statesman

The Searchers: Five Rebels, Their Dream of a Different Britain, and Their Many Enemies by Andy Beckett is published by Allen Lane (£30). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

Manufacturing Consent in the 21st Century

BY ERIC ELLIOT AND GRANT INSKEEP

 APRIL 26, 2024

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman wrote Manufacturing Consent in the late 1980s to describe the structural forces which cause an otherwise free media—one lacking government censorship, fear of prison for journalists (aside from those sharing designated government secrets), and staffed with people who genuinely see themselves as holding power accountable—can nonetheless produce systematic propaganda, with a highly consistent message, and a strong overton of acceptable opinion.

As Chomsky puts it, “the best way to control public opinion is in fact to promote vigorous debate. You set the limits of the debate, showing what the most extreme acceptable opinions are, and then allow and encourage debate within those limits. Thoughts that fall outside the acceptable spectrum are just off limits.” The five propaganda factors— ownership, sources, advertising, flak, and ideology— work through a series of inducements and threats to encourage views which align with the goals of the powerful, and to discourage or marginalize views which expose the reality beyond the spectrum of acceptable opinion. While Chomsky and Herman’s work was describing conventional mainstream media, which are in fact corporations whose product is the audience they sell to advertisers, using the news as bait, the same factors apply to social media, despite the fact that content is now being created by every user of a given platform. When it comes to social media content creation, there seems to be similarities in something like the music industry.

For example, being in the right time and place for your content to go viral, but also because people are paying to play the game.

Many content creators have paid for promotion, essentially buying followers, and use their page as a business just as the music industry functions. Not to go unmentioned is the fact that understanding how to game the algorithm works to your advantage—knowing what type of content to post, how often to share, etc. The parallel to the music industry to me is how some artists have an ability to write catchy singles but these people are not necessarily great songwriters. Conversely, there are plenty of great songwriters who do not have successful music careers.

Take Travis Scott for example. I’m certainly not going to say he’s a complete SHIT artist (I’m no fan of course), but it’s not particularly creative or inventive music, and you can pay Travis Scott up to $500k to appear on your song. Are people doing this because Travis Scott is objectively one of the best hip hop artists or a truly creative writer? No, they’re doing so because making a song with Travis Scott will extend the reach to more and more mainstream audiences. It’s about generating money, not creating quality or impactful material. You know what you are getting with artists like Travis Scott; objectively mediocre content but it will be noticed by lots of people, and most “successful” social media pages are consciously playing the same kind of game.

Most well established social media political pages—leftwing or not—are sharing content with one thing in mind: PROFIT. Recently I saw an anarchist related meme page with 22k followers who was “selling” their account, which they said was a steady income base for nearly a year until having found their ideal job. So what was this person creating the content for? Not to help people better understand these topics but to make money off their sociopolitical beliefs. These types of content creators are well aware that most people on these platforms are uninformed on the nuances and broad contexts of these discussions, as they tend to be themselves, and in turn they simply create content (memes, short hand, etc) that the algorithm is more inclined to share with audiences. I’m sure there are loads of people who see long hand and more involved pieces who simply don’t have the sociopolitical wherewithal to grasp the material or the internal drive to read something that takes 4-5 minutes of their time. There’s also plenty of leftwing social media accounts that treat the people following their pages like capital, that don’t adhere to solidarity with pages similar by collaborating equally, and this is likely because they don’t want to reroute their followers to better analysis and content creation. Like the music industry, though on a smaller scale, there’s a certain level of ego in running a political social media page with tens to hundreds of thousands of followers.

Where some place the time creating these pages into analysis or thoughtful commentary, there are many more who simply produce easily digestible memes, create multiple backup accounts in case they’re banned, and are clearly focusing their free time on amassing followers for their monetized social media presence. If someone’s format is memes or short hand content, then they may present themselves as an intellectual but they’re not having to back it up with any intellectual coherence. There’s a big difference between being a true left minded intellectual and simply making a lot of jokes rooted in Marxist language, which is what the vast majority of left wing political pages are doing because they know what the general public is here for or simply can’t form their own long form sociopolitical content. But if this is the reality of social media, which has now become the dominant way in which most people interact with politics, then we have to specifically address why this is the case. For starters, we all realize that social media platforms are giant corporations, which are now even larger and more profitable than those that own conventional media. Secondly, we almost reflexively note the nature of how these platforms operate, using terms like clickbait’ and recognizing the existence of promoted content.

There are some aspects of social media that go far beyond the control exercised by traditional media. The algorithm promotes content that serves the ends of the corporations— that gain the most interaction, and therefore generate the greatest amount of revenue. The average person is aware that other ordinary people have become influencers, whose income often comes from living subsidized lives of luxury while being paid for their posts. On the one hand, these influencers set the pattern for what posts are *supposed* to look like, which most users instinctively imitate; on the other hand, many users are actively trying to build sufficiently large followings to monetize their own accounts. Whether they succeed or not, these efforts push content in the same direction as is desired by the algorithm; and if they do succeed, then we have yet another large account that replicates and perpetuates the pattern of short hand content for corporate profits. These patterns exist whether the content is models, lifestyle, health and wellness, news and information, political related, etc. They are all pushed toward the formats and type of content that please the algorithm and its corporate designers. Which brings about another parallel between social media and conventional outlets. Social media algorithms champion memes, or content that does not get to the heart of the discussion. Similarly, conventional corporate media shortens everything into concise sound bites that leave little room for commentators to flesh out the intricacies and nuances of these discussions in order to paint a clearer picture. Going back to Chomsky and Herman’s work and looking at the five factors from their original propaganda model, we can see how they apply specifically in the domain of social media.

1 – OWNERSHIP. We all know who the wealthy owners of our platforms are—Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. They have well known biases, and every user can observe how these play out the heavy censorship of pro-Palestinian content for example, where even pro-Zionist accounts will have to write “G@z@” in order to avoid being flagged for mentioning a society that our owners have decided is a candidate for disappearance from history.

2 – SOURCES. Just as in the original “quest to get the story first,” which causes outlets to run stories with insufficient fact checking, or to simply re-run stories from other outlets, and which was manipulated by the Bush II regime by handing press releases directly to friendly outlets; there is a similar trend occurring with social media now. Many pages recycle memes, news content and other posts from each other. Meta decides which sources to flag for supposed “misleading” or “graphic” content and then suppresses the material; using corporate and government approved sources results in better visibility for posts and accounts, and it’s far easier to generate volumes of content by reposting things that you can see have done well, than by trying to generate your own content. These pressures lead to a lot of repetitive posts, recycled content from more popular pages, and an avoidance of sharing from sources that have been flagged, which results in these kind of posts and accounts being suppressed despite the accuracy of their messaging.

3 – ADVERTISING/FUNDING. Of course the real purpose of social media is to influence opinions while generating profit for the owners of the platforms. They don’t want to lose advertising money, which in turn puts pressure on them to curate their algorithms in a way that pleases advertisers, as well attracts and avoids alienating them. As mentioned, users are aware of the kind of content that gains followers and leads to monetization, and this exercises considerable influence on the kind of posts they make. Even where they go against this formula, popularity and monetization go hand in hand, and the accounts or posts that get the most promotion from the algorithm get the most financial benefit for their account operators. Of course, if an account becomes large enough that it is now the primary revenue source of its creators, they simply cannot afford to lose this income; this becomes akin to losing one’s job, which is honestly pathetic in itself as content creating on social media contributes nothing to the functionality of society. Therefore they will be under great pressure to avoid losing visibility, and to continue to have as much engagement as possible.

4 – FLAK. Just like in conventional media, complaints and official censure play a role. Posts can be reported, many accounts get deleted, and shadow bans are ubiquitous. Users learn where the line is, and either instinctively avoid pushing it, so as to keep to official narratives and superficial takes that barely scratch beneath the surface, or else their content risks being suppressed, their accounts shadow-banned, and even eventually deleted in many cases. The Canadian Government recently passed a law requiring social media platforms to pay news outlets if posts containing their content generate revenue for the platform. Rather than acquiesce, meta has now restricted users in Canada from viewing any news content. This shows how far they are willing to go to protect their profits and control their content. And of course there is no shortage of harassment, doxxing, aggressive DM’s and so on that accounts have to deal with when they post content that crosses the boundaries of acceptable opinion.

5 – IDEOLOGY. Originally ‘anti-communism’, then ‘anti-terror’, the primary form today; it also covers capitalism, communism, anarchism, etc. There are ideologies which are to be promoted, and those which are to be considered inherently vile. Content that aligns with a social media platform’s interpretations will be promoted and protected, while content that criticizes or promotes the *wrong* ideologies or interpretations will simply be branded “pro-terror,” “anti-western,” or whatever else. As in traditional media, it doesn’t really matter how transparent this is. Even pages adhering to subversive ideologies—Marxist, socialist, anarchist, etc—usually aren’t getting to the heart of these discussions and often are simply reenforcing the corporate state’s interpretation of these ideologies by not offering substantial analysis. The point is that at the end of the day, most users will primarily see content that aligns with the political, ideological and economic goals or beliefs of the ruling elites who own society, while subversive but easily digestible content will be presented as evidence of our supposedly open and free “marketplace of ideas,” with anything that actually poses a threat to power simply marginalized, removed, and dropped into the dustbin of history.

Is Another Anarchism Possible?
An Interview with Matthew Wilson

By Matthew Wilson, Mark Evans 

April 3, 2024

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.


Matthew Wilson teaches at Prifysgol Abertawe (Swansea University) where he lectures on People, Organisation and Business. He is an active participant in the UK cooperative movement and is the author of Rules Without Rulers: The Possibilities and Limits of Anarchism.

The questions were compiled by Mark Evans who is a member of Real Utopia’s Outreach and Events Team. We are also exploring the possibility of organising a live talk with Matt on the topic of anarchism. Feel free to get in touch if you have any question: https://www.realutopia.org/contact

First of all, I want to congratulate you on writing what I think is a very important book. But before getting into the arguments you present in Rules Without Rulers, could you briefly introduce yourself and maybe say something about how you became interested in anarchism?

Thanks Mark, it’s always nice to hear people have got something out of the book. I could spend a long time answering this, so, very briefly: I became very politically active in the mid-nineties, initially within the animal rights movements, and then quickly getting involved in other radical spaces – most of which were either explicitly, or at least substantially, anarchistic in orientation. As a teenager I got to know a bit about anarchism from reading pamphlets that I’d picked up at book fairs, demos and so on when I visited my brother in London, and I suppose it just always made sense to me. I think these things are often beyond (or before?) a clear rational analysis – I didn’t sit down and weigh up different ideological positions; I just always felt that anarchism was the political culture I was most comfortable with.

You are very critical of anarchism. However, you also appear to be very interested in saving anarchism from itself. What is your relationship with anarchism? What motivated you to write on this topic?

Obviously there’s a wide spectrum of thought contained within the basic idea of ‘anarchism’, so I’d say I’m critical of the ways some people interpret anarchism, and, conversely, I’m keen to defend and promote those positions which I think make more sense. Another way to think about that is to consider that our relationship to any ‘ism’ is always fundamentally a relationship with the ‘ists’ who bring it to life: I guess that’s obvious, but it’s somehow maybe important to remind ourselves that any debate we have about an ideological position is really a debate between people, and writing the book was a way for me to have a debate (though mostly indirectly) with some of the people who I felt were approaching anarchism in the wrong way. And by ‘the wrong way’ I don’t mean they were mis-reading Kropotkin; debates that try to get to some inner truth about an ideology are entirely pointless as far as I’m concerned. I just think some anarchists do a better job of explaining how the world works, and how to change it, than others.

Probably the most famous living anarchist – Noam Chomsky – has stated “There have been many styles of thought and action that have been referred to as “anarchist”. It would be hopeless to try to encompass all of these conflicting tendencies in some general theory or ideology.” Nevertheless, you write of an “anarchist common sense”. This seems to be the bedrock of your critique of anarchism. Could you say what you mean by this term and how you arrived at it?

I’ll start by saying that when I wrote the book, I’d never read Gramsci, but now that I have, I think there’s even more value in the idea of common-sense as a sociological concept. But at the time, I used the idea of common-sense for one very simple reason. The idea that there are all these different tendencies within anarchism is true, of course, but it’s equally true that when you look at a certain time and place – say, Europe and the US in the 1990s and 2000s – it’s easy to see a huge amount of commonality amongst the broad cultures and movements that see themselves as somehow connected to anarchism. Ideas around consensus-decision making, for example, were extremely widespread, whereas discussions about syndicalism were barely to be found. So yes, there are degrees of diversity, and even contradiction, but still contained within a wider common-sense. That’s all pretty obvious, and it shouldn’t really need to be said. The reason it was important to make that point was that highlighting the diversity within an ideology is often exploited as a way to deflect criticism. If we think of every anarchist as having their own reading of anarchism – if we dismiss, as Chomsky suggests, a ‘general theory’ of anarchism – then critiquing ‘anarchism’ becomes redundant. So then you criticise an individual anarchist, but then all the other anarchists can just tell themselves the criticism doesn’t apply to them. And so you’re left with having to critique millions of individual anarchists to make your point. Which is ridiculous, but people would pretty much say that to me; what do you mean ‘anarchists’ think this? Don’t you know we’re all different? How can you lump us all together? Rather than engage in the criticism itself, they’d hang everything on this diversity, and insist that I couldn’t possibly make such generalised criticisms. So it was important for me to stress that some of the criticisms I wanted to make did apply to very significant sections of contemporary anarchist culture, despite its diversity regarding certain issues.

By the way, this is common practice; I’m reading a lot of books by capitalists at the moment, and they do exactly the same thing when they discuss criticisms of capitalism – but that was just Milton Friedman, that was the 80s, that’s just one company, that’s not my idea of capitalism.

Your critique of anarchism focuses on three themes; freedom, ethics and power. From this you highlight a number of problems with contemporary anarchism that you describe as “unhelpful assumptions” and “unchallenged ideas”. To begin with, could you summarise what you see as the main problems regarding the anarchist position with freedom?

I think R.H Tawney summed up the fundamental problem with freedom very nicely with the simple maxim – freedom for the pike is death for the minnow. Ultimately, freedoms conflict with other freedoms. Politically, and emotionally, freedom is obviously an extremely powerful word; but analytically, it’s pretty much useless. It’s a classic ‘empty signifier’ which is filled with different meanings, depending on who’s using the term. You only need to look at how commonly freedom is evoked by people with entirely opposing views to anarchists to see it really doesn’t do much work as a concept on its own, and is always filled with other ideas, some of which can be pretty reprehensible. For the most part, making a demand for this or that freedom is really just a way for people to promote their own values whilst appearing to defend some universal and unambiguously positive position. Motorists need to be free from environmental zealots, hard-working people need to be free to get to work without being disrupted by protestors, markets need to be free to harmoniously organise the world, and so on…

Now, there are two ways to respond to this: either you say that certain claims to freedom aren’t legitimate – that they’re not really about freedom. Or you acknowledge that they are claims to freedom, and from there recognise that, as Tawney suggests, you’re often going to have to find a way to decide between competing freedoms. Option one just isn’t really tenable. It’s certainly not going to get us anywhere productive, because we’re just never going to get agreement on what constitutes a legitimate or illegitimate notion of freedom. So we’re left with option two, which is to do the hard work defending certain values, certain practices, certain beliefs, and making the case as to why they should have priority over other values, practices, beliefs. The problem with that, of course, is it offends our anarchist sensibility, because we’re supposed to be the defenders of freedom, not the people who take it away from others. But that’s just fundamentally dishonest and gets us off the hook from having to reflect on which things we would protect and defend, and which things we would somehow prohibit and prevent.

Ultimately, any society needs to make choices about the way it functions, the things it allows and disallows. A society can be more or less open, more or less controlling, and so on, but no society can be based on the simple notion of freedom. We need to be more honest about this, because we can’t avoid making those decisions; we can, however, stick our heads in the sand and pretend we’re not making those value judgements, and convince ourselves that we can just decide between freedom and unfreedom. By the way, this is exactly what liberal capitalism does, allowing the powerful to pass their own value judgements off as though they’re representative of everyone’s freedom. Again – we’re just defending the freedom to drive, the freedom to shop, the freedom to accumulate wealth… It’s pretty depressing to me that anarchists have so often followed the same logic, and if we ever had something approaching an anarchist society, I’d be very worried if we did so without getting a better grasp on what the abstract value of freedom really means in practice.

Next, could you summarise what you see as the main problems regarding the anarchist position with ethics?

The anarchist problem with ethics is really a corollary to its problem with freedom. And again, we see exactly the same problems within liberal capitalism, in theory and in practice. Ultimately, if you have to decide between competing demands for different freedoms than we need to make those value judgements, and if we’re going to do that, we need to think more about those values – in other words, we need to think more about ethics. I won’t go into more detail here about what that would look like, and I don’t really offer my own guidance in the book; I think this needs to be a collective, democratic project where we confront the possibilities of reasonable conflicts of values and find the best way to navigate them.

Finally, could you summarise what you see as the main problems regarding the anarchist position with power?

Anarchist views of power are more complicated, or at least, more diverse; there’s less of a common-sense. That said, the common-sense around freedom and ethics discussed above feed into anarchist understandings of power to a large extent, and the up-shot of that is that power is often seen as a totalising force held by certain elements of society – the state, capitalists, and so on – which is then used by those elements to deny the freedom of others. That’s true, up to a point, but power isn’t something we can get rid of, and if we got rid of the state and capitalism we’d still be left with questions of power. And, remembering that we’d still need to make value judgements about conflicting freedoms, we’d want to use our power to ensure certain decisions are upheld. As with freedom, and ethics, too many anarchists now believe in some possibility of a society where everyone is simply free to live the lives they want, and where power is never used to limit any one’s freedom. It’s a powerful vision which has inspired anarchists for a very long time, but I don’t see any empirical evidence or theoretical argument to suggest that’s a possibility.

Many anarchists propose consensus decision-making as a solution to these problems. You, however, are critical of this position. Could you say why?

I think there’s a lot to be said for the ideal of reaching a consensus, and I think the work that goes into finding a decision that everyone is happy with can be extremely productive. But the cultures of consensus-decision making which I’ve witnessed a lot are significantly informed by those common-senses we’ve been talking about, and it’s in the practice of consensus decision-making that you start to see how some of those flawed ideas come into play. So, for example, consensus cultures will always have certain ground rules, certain red lines, and so on, which are not covered by the process of consensus itself; too often, these are passed off as obvious, neutral positions which don’t need to be discussed or defended. So you see the parameters of particular values, of particular ideas about freedom, being enforced (implicitly or explicitly) without being open to debate. Now that might work well in a group of people who share those core values – and indeed, it often does work very well; the problem is when anarchists think that this same process will work just as well within a larger, more diverse community. It seems pretty obvious that a bunch of anarchists would struggle to reach consensus with a bunch of racists, or free-market fundamentalists or whatever. Consensus only really works when you exclude certain views from the start; of course, that is precisely what we should be doing, but we need to be honest that we’re doing that. And thinking back to power, we need to be more honest about what happens when consensus isn’t reached; there’s a great deal of depressingly naïve thinking within anarchism which sees consensus as the way to resolve those questions of conflict and power – if we all just agree, then there’s no problem. But it’s just a fantasy to think people will all just start to magically share the same set of core values, and we’re being pretty dishonest by not considering what we would do when people in a community simply can’t agree on some fundamental issues.

You propose a prefigurative approach to organising as a more hopeful way forward for anarchism. Could you say what this entails and what some of the challenges for such an approach to organising might be?

I’ve actually stopped using the term prefiguration, because it’s become so associated with a particular reading of prefigurative praxis – a reading I don’t really have a lot of time for. I’m personally using the term ‘reorganising’, but any way, the basic idea for me is that we need to be developing a counter-power, or counter-hegemony, in the here and now. For me, that means acting within and throughout every level of society, trying to organise according to different social logics; obvious examples are setting up cooperatives, building networks of mutual aid, running people’s assemblies, connecting to more progressive municipal projects like the Preston Model, and so on. None of this is new, and will be very familiar to your readers, but i think prefigurative forms organising too often fall on one side of an unhelpful binary: on one side, you have an overly purist vision where compromise is viewed as unacceptable, so you have these activist silos where people convince themselves they’re acting entirely outside of the system and that they’re not engaging with the corrupt practices of the market, or the state, or whatever. The other side almost flips this, and seems to just ignore the challenges of trying to organise differently within the systemic constraints imposed by the world we currently inhabit. So you end up with what some people call a post-political mindset, where you convince yourself it’s just people’s imagination that’s the limiting factor; inspire enough people to shop locally or whatever, and the job’s done. I think we need to be walking the awkward middle road, pushing as much as we can, recognising that the system will fight us, recognising that we’ll be making compromises. Obviously a lot of this is guided by our vision of a better world; if we want a world without anything resembling the state, or the market, then this form of organising probably feels too compromised from the start. Personally, I don’t see us ever getting rid of the market entirely, or the state for that matter. That doesn’t mean I have to celebrate either of those things, but it makes it easier to engage with them on some level. All of this raises obvious challenges – of that ever-present question of compromise, of being coopted, of fiddling round the edges… but it seems to be the best chance we’ve got.

With regards to prefigurative organising, you make an important distinction between “authoritarian models” and “positive vision”. Could you say a little bit about how you see the difference between these two notions and why you think it is significant for left-libertarian organising?

I have a real problem with the general anarchist refusal to outline elements of a world they’d like to see; it acts as a get out of jail free card, when awkward and difficult questions arise – I don’t know what an anarchist society would do with rapists, that’s for them to decide – but it’s also strategically hopeless; how are we expected to inspire and convince people to fight for change if we refuse to even consider what sort of world they might be fighting for? Arguably capitalism’s greatest weapon is the fact that so many people believe that, no matter how much they might dislike it, there is no viable alternative. We just keep helping capitalism with that, by denying the legitimacy of considering those alternatives in any meaningful level of detail. So yes, I think we absolutely need to develop some clear ideas – about how an economy might work, about how we’d deal with issues of violence, political governance, and so on.

The fear that this would be an authoritarian imposition on future societies is fundamentally flawed. Firstly, future generations will be impacted by our decisions – whatever they are; refusing to outline a blueprint has an impact on the future just as much, if not more, than offering such a blueprint. I doubt those future generations will thank us for refusing to offer people an alternative to capitalism because we didn’t want to limit their own options to decide how their society would function. Secondly, I think it’s quite clear that we can and should be considering multiple visions of a future society, and that actually the more we do that, the less likely we’ll find ourselves all beholden to one authoritarian vision.

It seems to me that the analysis that you present is very in-keeping with that which informs Real Utopia. However, rather than talking about anarchism as a proposed system for a post-state society we talk about participatory politics (parpolity). My feeling is that parpolity is a vision for a non-authoritarian political system that avoids what you refer to as the “simplistic” and “false” “promise of absolute freedom”. In other words, it addresses the authoritarianism that concerns the anarchists whilst also addressing the concerns about anarchism that you raise. Do you have any thoughts on this?

I think there’s a lot to be said for these ideas – and as I said above, I think they can be part of a larger mix of possibilities which we can draw on, now, and in the future. I think the really important question is how we think strategically about how to get to a world where this level of democratic politics is possible. It’s obviously not going to happen overnight, but it makes a difference to how we organise whether we think it’s possible in ten years, or a hundred years; and, of course, it matters how we think we’ll get to such a society. My concern with these sorts of visions is not that they impose something on the future, but that they impose a certain mindset on us now; by that I mean that we fall into that purity trap where we reject anything less than this ideal. So question one – how do we start building towards this vision, especially in terms of transition? (For example, can we work on reforming the system we have – strengthening local councils and weakening national government, or do we need a revolutionary fresh start?).

Anyway, I digress. Yes, I do think this offers a more honest way of thinking about a genuinely democratic politics, and which avoids some of the naïve ideas we see in a lot of anarchist discourse. I’m not sure I’m convinced about the level of engagement expected from people – which is one reason why I’m not convinced by parecon – but I think this provides a good base level, if you like, from where we can think about intermediary steps, and from where we can consider other proposals. It’s certainly doing the necessary work of getting those conversations started, getting the ideas out there that there are other ways to organise the world politically.

Critics of anarchism often associate it with things like being unrealistic, a rejection of organisation and even a celebration of chaos. Obviously anarchists deny all of this. However, given your critique, it might be argued that the critics have a point. If so, wouldn’t it make more sense to drop the label and use an alternative that does not carry the baggage of anarchism? At Real Utopia we use the phrase participatory society, for example. Any thoughts on that?

I agree, and I don’t really call myself an anarchist, or refer to my politics as being reflective of anarchism. That’s partly for the reasons you mention, but also because I’m not sure I really am an anarchist when it comes to rejecting the state out-right. I don’t really know how we would conceive of a strategy to destroy a national government, and I’m not convinced doing so would be a good idea. I don’t think many people who do call themselves anarchists have thought this through either, and for them I suppose the idea is to at least ignore the state and try to organise outside it; that’s fair enough, and has produced a huge world of mutual aid projects and so on, but I’m not convinced we’re getting as far as we might if we could open ourselves up to other strategic options. Like I said earlier, I think we need to be more open to engaging with institutions and political spaces – local councils, etc – which anarchists would often reject.

So yes, I’m not really defending the A-word; the question then becomes, what do we call ourselves, our politics, our vision? This is actually what a lot of my current thinking is focussed on; it’s a really important strategic question which we tend to overlook. But anyone familiar with counter-hegemonic thinking will know that words are of huge importance – regardless of the ideas we place into them. Like you say, words have baggage – sometimes good, sometimes bad – and we need to think carefully about those key terms – what Laclau and Moufee call articulatory principles – which can connect different political movements. I’m not convinced by participatory society, but I wouldn’t reject it out of hand, and I think the real test is how these terms fair in practice. I’m reluctant to open up a can of worms by mentioning this all too briefly, but I’m currently writing a defence of the term fair market socialism. I won’t go into too much detail here, but thinking counter-hegemonically, this is a way to take us from where we are to somewhere else; it connects to the common-sense we have now – that we need the market – to a different reading of that market; and it helps reduce the association between socialism and the horrors of the 20th century.

The last thing I’ll say on terminology; we should be more engaged in how we talk about the system we have, and not just the alternatives we want. I’m really advocating for people to stop referring to our current system as a democracy; every time we use the word, we reenforce its ideological power – and we also rob ourselves of a word we should be claiming for our own politics.

Thank you for your time! Is there anything that you would like to add before we finish?

A millions things, but I’ll leave it at that, otherwise I’ll never end. Maybe there’ll be other opportunities to mull over some of these issues in more detail in the future. Thanks Mark.