The Economic Lysenkoism of Late Capitalist Realism
This is rather a fascinating documentary from local history - from the year I was born in fact. The eventual result was a loss by Benn by a single percentage point. Dennis Healey, a hard-bitten, cynical realist of the Labour right, received 50.5%, while Tony Benn, an idealist whose radical ideas for reforming the Labour Party to include commitments to extra-parliamentary and even revolutionary action in support of the Labour movement, received 49.5%. This was in spite of a ridiculous bloc voting system designed to prevent radicals like Benn from ever winning internal elections that were put to the vote.
This proved to be a turning point. Labour had come dangerously close to allowing a man with revolutionary proclivities into a front bench position, and it would be 30 years before such an opportunity arose again with the last minute inclusion of Jeremy Corbyn onto the leadership ballot to “widen the debate”.
In this respect, the 1981 Deputy Leadership election in the Labour party was more significant than any General Election would be, since it scared the crap out of those who believed that capitulating to Bennite principles of direct democracy and the promotion of state-owned cooperatives would eventually lead to the collapse of the Labour party as a parliamentary force altogether. Benn himself was transformed from “the most dangerous man in Britain” into a “national treasure”. In other words, he was, to coin a phrase “Mandela-ised”.
Militants were purged from party ranks, becoming scapegoats for what many saw as a problem with widespread entryism into Labour by Trotskyist groups. Neil Kinnock, who became leader after Michael Foot’s disastrous stint “impersonating the leader of the Labour party”, to use his words, obsessed over the issue of how to deal with Militant Tendency, a very small but highly organised and disciplined group who had gained effective control over Liverpool City Council. The Tories, as well as Labour, began to collude in their ideas about transforming the traditions of collectivism within the working classes into a dangerous “enemy within” - a Red menace that had to be marginalised from society and from the Labour party in order to make that party “democratic” and “electable”.
Of course, what this led to was the complete ideological disintegration of the Labour party, and the bitter reality that the world's first real Thatcherite to come to power would be one in charge of the party opposing hers. Thatcher famously said that her greatest political achievement was Tony Blair. She had, in a war of brutal attrition, managed to transform Britain into an effective one party state with no working class representation in the political system or across the media, which had fallen into the hands of a small number of extremely rich right-wingers.
My theory, probably repeated elsewhere, is that the political doctrines espoused by dominant groups and repeated over a generation tend to ossify into political facts, especially among those who are selected to become members of elite establishments. This is particularly true with doctrines like neoliberalism, since one of the goals of neoliberalism was to eradicate the conceptual framework of class as a way of understanding conflicts across a society. Every politician in power from Thatcher onward has espoused more or less the same idea - that the class war is over, that poverty is a decision rather than the result of a lack of opportunity, and that the working class no longer exist as a group.
This doctrine continues to be undermined by the ongoing collapse of the principles held dear by this ruling theocracy - a theocracy that would prefer right-wing populism and xenophobia to any progressive alternative. Corbyn's landslide victory, along with his electoral gains against the Tories, came as a complete shock to everybody in politics and in journalism, who had internalised the logic that nobody was a socialist any more, barring a tiny minority of “unreconstructed” socialists who refused to keep up with modern times.
Since this definitive 1981 election, the mantra within the Labour party gradually came to be this: "we don’t want to, but we have to capitulate to the interests of right-wingers to be electable." This eventually turned into a competition to become as right-wing as it was possible to be without joining the opposition party. Becoming right-wing became synonymous with wanting power. And power was predicated on accepting the “reality” of life - that people were selfish and stupid. In other words, cynicism became the realism of fools.
This is an example of what Mark Fisher calls "capitalist realism" in his book of the same title. The doctrine is that neoliberalism is factual and real, and that any alternative is for dreamers and ideologues doomed to live on the margins. The fact that this theory, which became reality through Thatcher and Reagan, has now been proven to be completely wrong. The problem is that this will not prevent our political elites from repeating it. They will continue to make ever more absurd claims based on the associated doctrines about human stupidity and selfishness that used to be the best way of achieving positions of power in political systems and in journalism - when you couldn’t be bothered or lacked the time to research anything, assume the worst and people will think that you’re intelligent anyway: now, we see this in the increasingly pathetic-sounding attempts to reassert the old regime: "peak Corbyn" has been reached; if a "moderate" were leading the Labour party, they would have won a historic landslide against the Tories rather than simply erased their majority; Corbyn, a lifelong anti-racism campaigner, is a vicious "unconscious antisemite" and an "existential threat to Judaism", according to the right-wing Jewish press. Such claims were not even levelled at Adolf Hitler.
What we are really witnessing is a group tantrum by esteemed "realists" whose shtick no longer works. Their “realism” is no longer real, and they have decided that the only course of action in the face of this dissonance is to deny the existence of reality itself. This is Trumpism at its finest. Everything disagreeable is “fake”. Everything can be spun into an delusional affirmation of how great an individual you are.
It feels, to me, like the concluding chapter of a seemingly unending nightmare that began in the year that I was born into. Like all final chapters, it is also the most dangerous one, because loose ends need to be clumsily tied up, and many are looking for simple answers to a very complex and interconnected problem. Slavoj Zizek notes somewhere that fascism is “a desire for capitalism without capitalism” - in other words, fascism is an irrational desire for all of the positive features of capitalism, without any of the antagonisms contained within it, which are all conveniently outsourced onto a token scapegoat. As said repeatedly on Scooby Doo, “We would have gotten away with it if it wasn’t for you pesky kids.”
The most dangerous thing to happen among the elites has been to conclude that their failure - catastrophic and repeated failure - to predict future events with any degree of accuracy, using economic theories that they themselves had elevated to the status of an objective science, doesn’t prove their theories are wrong. Indeed, for them, it proves that something is wrong with reality. In short, mainstream economists have ceased to become objective reporters of truth, and are now, even more so than usual, hired propagandists and theologians who are chiefly there to spout doctrinal gibberish, the main point of which is to intimidate the layman from engaging with the issue by offering them a courtier’s reply.
Yanis Zaroufakis, the Greek economics minister during the election of SYRIZA and the negotiations with the European Union, suggests that the complete detachment of EU technocrats from the real world was first expressed in their response to the Greek debt crisis, in which Zaroufakis was centrally situated. For them, reality itself does not matter - only their “realism” does. Their “capitalist realism”. It is a form of economic Lysenkoism, and the next global financial crash, whenever it happens, will further cement this bankruptcy. Since the radical left, in a surprising turn of events, are the only group of people with any realistic idea about how human societies can adequately respond to the demands placed upon us, it is vital that we respond to the next inevitable crisis with a serious, concrete set of proposals, and a narrative that people can relate to.
