Review of "Now we have your attention; the new politics of the people"

Once again I find myself wanting to write 'this is good, but has a hole at its centre'...so I am acknowledging that this might be more about me, and how I am feeling at the present, than about the book. Then again, maybe not.

First, the good. Jack Shenker is a very good writer, with an eye for detail and a way of telling illustrative anecdotes that illuminate and bring to life a political argument. I can completely understand why he was shortlisted for an Orwell Prize - in this he is actually rather like Orwell, who was also a very clear writer with a great eye for detail and anecdote. The prose just carries the reader along, and book about our present political condition just flies past like a novel with a plot.

His analysis is good, too. He has a good understanding of the roots of what some of our less insightful centrist commentators call "populism" - the toxic mix of racism, and nationalism, and a sort of plebian "anti-elitism" that is directed at experts, and London, and intellectuals, and the media, much more than it is directed at bankers and the super-rich and their corporate vehicles. I'd like to see him write even more about this, because it's a really important phenomenon. I have a sneaking suspicion that at least sometimes these people and movements could go either way - I'm thinking of the Yellow Vests in France, who started out as an anti-metropolitan, anti-environmentalist backlash movement, but now seem to have aligned themselves with the Left, - at least in the pension reform protests. I think he could and should write a really good book about this, and about the impulses behind Trump's working-class supporters that goes further than the familiar "left behind white people" stuff.

There's lots of good analysis of social movements in here, particular the mushrooming new unions like IWGB and United Voices of the World, and renters' unions incuding ACORN. He writes about some of the links between these and the groundswell of Momentum in the Corbyn-led Labour Party. In some ways this feels already out of date, because Labour's defeat in December 2019 has had a huge impact on the internal politics of Labour, and the tensions that he describes within Momentum have risen to the surface. It's possible that the whole movement has had its day - I'd like to see what he thinks about this, and will look online to see what I can find.

Now to the hole. This is all about defensive organisations, trying to improve wages and conditions, and fight back against the worst, most exploitative and vindictive landlords. But there's nothing transformational in there at all, nothing that could be either a vision of how things could be different or a route map of how to get there. He almost heads into that territory when he starts to consider just how radical the program of Corbyn's Labour really was - because actually by Northern European standards it was all pretty tame. For the most part the program was an attempt to drag anglosphere financialised Britain back towards the north European capitalist democracy mainstream. It most certainly did not envisage the end of capitalism. It would be nice to have some better welfare protection, more protection for tenants, and some non-private housing for rent, but none of this would fundamentally challenge the huge inequalities of wealth and power that exist in Britain.

There are visions for how this might happen, though they are not always convincing. My old chums in the revolutionary left imagine some sort of insurrection, which I think they hoped would happen after the ruling class had been so thoroughly discredited and demoralized that it wouldn't put up much of a fight; I assume that this is what they hoped, because they never actually did much preparing for insurrection. A few serious social democrats think that the Corbynist progam would be a first step towards a gradualist, parliamentary road to actual socialism, in which the capitalist tiger would sit quietly while it is slowly skinned claw by claw.

And there's another vision too, which is gaining ground these days, which is a sort of revived utopian socialism; that it will be possible to build little islands of equality and justice, through co-ops and community-owned enterprises, and Community Land Trusts (to be scrupulously fair, Jack Shenker does write about these latter with some enthusiasm). In this scenario the socialist commonwealth just grows within capitalism, and its success means that capitalism will eventually be bypassed and wither away. There are 'techno-utopian' versions of this, in which new technologies like open source software and 3-D printers are the enabling technologies for this new society in which most things 'want to be free'. Paul Mason - who also writes a lot about struggle - has sometimes inclined to this view (and ties it into a dissection of current conditions), as has the theorist of the Commons Michael Bauwens, and the anarchist Kevin Carson.

There's nothing about this in Jack Shenker's book - fair enough, it's a different book. But like I said, I did miss a bit of the vision thing. Perhaps he's written about this elsewhere, or perhaps he's going to. I do hope so, because his intellect and his eloquence suggests that he'd make a good job of it.