I shouldn’t be surprised that the British Prime Minister – any contemporary national leader, really – is on LinkedIn. It’s supposed to say “I live in the real world, I know about the grind, about the exigencies of business and office life and the ugly necessity of self-promotion.” Maybe also “look, I got to the very top of British public life just by keeping my LinkedIn notifications on.”
But should I be happy that our head of government’s own LinkedIn bio apparently puts the word ‘influencer’ before ‘Prime Minister of the United Kingdom’? Or that this Prime Minister would happily, not to say chirpily, in the manner of a children’s TV presenter, show up at 8.30 on a Monday morning to answer a string of banal questions from friendly business big-wigs on a LinkedIn live?
Should it actually scare me to learn that someone apparently so taken in by the promise of the hustle economy and by the bleak, one-dimensional glamour of the entrepreneur could possibly be asked to lead an actual economy. And to lead it, somehow, out of the long, sad, immiserating experiment of financialisation, marketisation, privatisation and the rest?
And anyway, of course he’s on LinkedIn (all the thrusting, young political innovators at the end of politics are there: Justin, Jacinda, Leo, Emmanuel, Pedro, Kyriakos…), of course he’s animated by the idea of the entrepreneur, the avatar of the shallowest and least productive version of capitalism – the capitalism of personal growth, ‘disruption’, of self-reliance and self-actualisation.
And here also lives the potent myth of the mysteriously gifted individual who can apparently turn around businesses, industries and whole national economies as an expression of will, of impatient, pathological brilliance.
This is the delusional political economy of LinkedIn and the other miserable, alienating institutions of the growth mindset – of the unicorn and the decacorn and the hectocorn and the other mythic creatures in the menagerie of money.
As we’re learning now, of course, the whole teetering, upside-down pyramid of the entrepreurial economy, of 10x and 100x and the profitless tech leviathan depended almost entirely on the long period of cheap money and the epic flow of unanchored capital from the owner class that are both now grinding to a nasty end and on the cruelty of the idea that anyone can join this club, despite what we know about the carefully hidden advantages of the entrepreneur class.
It’s like an episode of the Simpsons in which an actual country is led by an airhead who’s spent his whole working life cheerfully clicking on LinkedIn requests, shamelessly asking strangers for ‘endorsements’ and congratulating other strangers on their inexplicable promotions. Get a life, Rishi.
It is possible for geniuses to explain things in ways that non-geniuses can understand but sometimes they need to switch formats to do it.
This guy
I’ve spent a stupid amount of time trying to understand politics and political science. I ought to have just gone to college or something but it’s too late for that so I buy books and subscribe to periodicals and so on. I follow interesting people on Twitter, I read Substacks and listen to podcasts. I’m all over it. But to be honest it’s not really working. I mean it goes in one ear and out the other. The best I get is a very gradual – almost undetectable in fact – improvement in my understanding. Pretty much the same kind of glacial change I’m seeing in my ability to write poetry (which I’ve also been doing for years) or to construct decent-looking shelves for all the fucking books.
This has go to do with my age obvs but also, it’s clear, to do with the fact that I’m doing this in the piecemeal, unsystematic way of a distracted hobbyist. My kids went off to university and studied this stuff for three years and now they explain it to me like I’m an idiot. I obviously envy their comprehensive, organised understanding, given to them in the time-honoured way by experts and, in fact, by geniuses. But I’m still here, trying to figure it all out.
This guy, Dylan Riley, is one of the geniuses, a big brain who teaches sociology in California and writes books and papers and long articles about Marxism and society and so on. He came to my disorganised attention last year when he co-wrote an influential piece – with an even bigger genius called Robert Brenner (who has a whole area of disagreement named after him) – about the emergence of something they call ‘political capitalism’.
It’s a very persuasive idea that seems to account for the way investors and corporations continue to make increasing profits even as the return on investment declines almost everywhere. The piece has been influential beyond lefty circles and the ideas contained in it have begun to show up in mainstream politics and journalism. A kind of breakthrough for cloistered Marxists.
Anyway, the piece – and the other stuff he’s written that I’ve dug out since then – is full of deep insights and lofty ideas, as you’d expect, and a lot of it goes whoooooosh over my head while I wrinkle my brow. So I was kind of intrigued to learn that Riley had also written a little book made up of tiny, informal notes that he wrote – in longhand in an actual notebook – during the pandemic. To be clear, these are not the shopping lists (“400 rolls toilet paper, 20kg spaghetti”) and reminders (“stay indoors”) that I was writing during the pandemic, they’re notes about the genius stuff – and in particular they’re reflections on Covid, lockdown, the bail-outs and so on.
So I thought “that’s going to be right up my street, it’s going to be accessible stuff that I can get my head around, in small chunks that aren’t going to put me off and make me feel stupid.” I always jump on texts that promise to make the abstruse and theoretical transparent to me (in the same way I occasionally buy the latest ‘Quantum Physics for Know-Nothings’ from the table at the front of Waterstones).
And it is right up my street. I mean it’s still full of big ideas and a lot of assumptions are made about the reader’s understanding of politics and sociology (get ready for a lot of Durkheim) but it’s also full of nifty, two- or three-line insights – aphorisms, I guess – that genuinely illuminate the whole scene, the whole post-pandemic, end-of-the-end-of-history, collapse-of-neoliberalism thing – but also Trump, Biden’s green programme, lockdowns, Trump’s announcements, music education, the economics of slavery, utopias, illness…
Riley’s language is never less than academic and can be po-faced. I’m going to say that he’s a pretty orthodox Marxist. He has no time for ‘IDPol’ or for ‘liberal hand-wringing’ in general. In his writing he never doesn’t take himself seriously. And this is something I also kind of envy, actually. I mean the confidence to lay down idea after idea without at any point feeling the need to make a joke at your own expense or understate your intelligence or whatever.
Like, for instance, demolishing the whole idea of democracy in four lines:
To imagine a postcapitalist political order is to imagine an order without sovereignty—and therefore without the metaphysics of sovereignty and its terminology, such as “democracy”—but with coordination and rationality.
Or illumating the present moment via the ancient state:
The state is an object of struggle among competing political-capitalist cliques. In antiquity two models emerged: the universal monarchy, which to some extent disciplined these groups; and the unstable republic, which allowed them to run rampant. Are there not analogues in the current period? Putin’s Russia could be thought of as the Roman universal monarchy, and the United States the unstable republican form.
And it’s one of those books that make you think “come on, geniuses, why don’t you do this in all your stuff? If you can make big ideas clear in a flash and in about 300 words of pellucid prose in one format, why can’t you do it when you’re filling a big, fat book?” There’s obviously something about the stylistic liberty provided by the informal layout that permits these more relaxed, generous, explanatory insights and something about the academic format that inhibits them, that explicitly excludes them.
Anyway, Riley’s book is a jewel – and it’s so short you’ll read it in a couple of days – or, since it’s not in any way linear, you can just keep it by the toilet.
Robert Brenner wrote another piece (free PDF from the Internet Archive) earlier in the pandemic which also crossed over a bit and was picked up in the wider debate about bail-outs and support for ordinary people. He called it ‘Escalating Plunder’ and the phrase has become a kind of shorthand for the enormously lucrative raid on the public finances staged by big business during Covid.
Top book buying tip. You can buy the book in all the usual locations but if you buy it from the publisher, Verso you get the eBook for nothing along with the print edition (and, in fact, the eBook on its own is only £1.50, as against £7.99 at Amazon and, because it’s not copy-protected, you can read it on any device). This, in fact, applies to everything you buy from Verso, so might constitute a good reason for you to get started with your own hopeless effort to learn about Marxism. Not that there’s necessarily anything hopeless about it but you know what I mean.
The idea is that an opposition party assembles focus groups and runs polls to identify the government policies that are popular in the target electorate and then copies those policies. Remember Gordon Brown’s pledge to stick to Tory government spending commitments? Jack Straw’s reprisal of Tory crime policy? David Butler and Dennis Kavanagh, in their splendid book about the 1997 election, say that the Labour Party in opposition
…tried to ensure that it was never seen in fundamental opposition to popular government policies. Each party was getting similar messages from its focus groups about what the public wanted or would react favourably to; each therefore tended to find itself saying the same thing.
There’s much about the Starmer regime that resembles a Tony Blair tribute act. This is not an insult. Blair and his machine were hugely, unprecedentedly successful – and there was a lot more to it than close-marking during the 1992-97 Major government – but it’s Starmer’s profound hope that staying tactically close to the Conservative government’s programme will enable Labour to slide into office in 2024 in much the same way. Close-marking is back.
Close-marking explains the delicate way the Labour front bench steps around criticism of big government policies – even ones that have been shown to be catastrophic or that stick in the throats of members and supporters. Government policies are always ‘poorly-implemented’ or ‘too little, too late’. Sometimes they just ‘don’t go far enough’ or they’re ‘what Labour suggested years ago’.
Often it’s down to style. The key is to try not to come at a policy in policy terms but in presentation terms. Government policies are ‘panicky’ or ‘desperate’ or ‘chasing headlines’. Politics of this balletic form can evidently produce the goods – it can reassure voters nervous about change and it contributed to Labour’s biggest victory ever – but it can also be confusing and alienating. It necessarily weakens important political contrasts, drains the antagonism out of the democratic to-and-fro, makes it harder for voters to identify with a platform that is, apparently, very like the other one.
Close-marking produces a shallow politics of aesthetics, of carefully-maintained presentational difference and it’s by definition helpless in the face of more agonistic forms. Populists laugh in the face of this kind of positional calculation. Only Britain’s anachronistic electoral system – where total victory can be secured by moving a small percentage of votes from one side to the other – protects it. This approach is an irrelevance now in almost every other democracy.
And an obvious problem with this kind of focus-group-driven strategy is that if it works and you win power you risk being stranded on the arrid policy plateau just vacated by your opponents, with all of its weaknesses and vulnerabilities. You’ve inherited the exhausted, lame-duck programme of the defeated party and switching into a viable policy programme that’s not tethered to the loser’s manifesto takes genius-level political skills. Good luck with that.
Occasionally, of course, it’s possible to identify a government policy you think you don’t have to shadow closely – one you can safely distance yourself from, that you don’t need to dance around. Ed Miliband tried this with immigration (remember the mug?) and Starmer has settled on locking up paedophiles as his signature policy for the opening of hostilities.
As many have pointed out, though, the risk here is that electors don’t believe you and the message doesn’t land because what you propose seems out of character or opportunistic. Worse, you appear clumsy and cynical and Stevenage Woman remains unmoved.
The Conservative Party is, famously, the most successful political party in history.
The party is a shape-shifting cockroach that’s survived the whole industrial era, the expansion of the franchise, the growth of the cities and the urban middle class, revolution all across Europe, secularisation and the erosion of the power of the gentry. It shouldn’t be here – it should have died in a country house in Hampshire in about 1920. The Tory party is obviously indestructible. But it has its moments – usually right at the end of a long period in power. Like now for instance.
I’m a bit geeky about the fantastic Nuffield Election Studies books; fat retrospective reference books, full of data and scholarly description, published a year or so after each election since 1945. For many editions, the books were very much the domain of celebrity psephologists David Butler and Anthony King. I’ve got a pile of them, going back to 1966.
The data’s mostly redundant, of course, since you can get it all on Wikipedia now but the essays are the main thing anyway. And often a useful reminder that there’s not much that’s new even about the present political polycrisis (clusterfuck? Imbroglio?).
I was looking at the 1997 edition, mainly because I was getting all sorts of weird deja-vu vibes from the conduct of the present government. The same kind of end-of-the-line feeling that haunted the Major government swept away by Labour in 1997 clings to the current lot. Sunak and his crew of millionares, spivs and bullies seem to have got stuck at the tawdry end of the conservative policy spectrum, much as Major and his awful cabinet did.
For years now it’s been all VIP lanes, complicated tax avoidance schemes, highly-remunerative second jobs, huge secret loans and preferment for old pals: the whole shopping list of cheesy political misbehaviour. It won’t have escaped your attention that we’ve even got a full-blown ‘cash-for-access’ scandal brewing.
So let’s catalogue some correspondences between the end of the Sunak period and the end of the Major period:
Of course, in comparison with the record of the current Tory government – especially over the last five years or so – the offences of Michael Mates and Neil Hamilton and Alan Duncan begin to look almost quaint, especially when you consider just how difficult it has become to dislodge an offending Minister or MP. Surely time to update the A-level Politics sylabus.
The chicken run
A chicken, running
As the Major government ground on, Tory MPs – conscious of the polling and of their already-dwindling majority – began to seek safer seats to stand in. Boundary changes announced earlier in the Parliament that were hitting smaller, Tory-held constituencies, contributed to the spectacle. Today’s polling, even after the Rishi bounce, continues to look grim for the government – the Tories could be reduced to an all-time low of 113 seats in 2024 (or worse). Boris Johnson’s Uxbridge and South Ruislip seat certainly can’t be considered safe, and, although his constituency party reselected him last month, it must be likely that he’ll be switched to a safer seat in time for the election (Johnson must be regretting that he didn’t become MP for Hertsmere – 172 places further up the table of safer seats – when he had the chance). The thoroughly Darwinian shuffling and selecting and deselecting has already begun – and they’re calling it a chicken run again. It will certainly be unedifying but probably quite entertaining.
It was no pandemic – less than 200 people in Britain have died from the human variant – but the BSE crisis was a classic of the genre and now looks spookily like a preview of the Covid-19 catastrophe. It was very much a Conservative creation – first when the Thatcher government loosened regulations on animal feeds, permitting the feeding of infected brains and spinal chords to beef cattle, and subsequently when the Major government first ignored and then played down the nasty effects of BSE before being finally obliged to admit the grim connection with human CJD in 1996. The impact of the crisis rattled through the UK economy for years – over four million cattle were slaughtered and the final international bans on British beef were not lifted until 2018.
It’s not just the Tories who seem to be re-living the early nineties. Starmer’s Labour party has made a close study of the successes of his party while in opposition and hopes fervently that he can reproduce them.
The Nuffield books are textbooks and they’re often, obviously, out of print, so they’ll usually be stupidly expensive. Amazon has the 1992 edition for over sixty quid, for instance. But if you dig a bit you’ll usually find a second-hand copy for cheap. Here’s the same book for £16.95 on Abe Books, for instance.
I love poetry. I write poetry, I love rhyme and rhythm and structural play of all kinds. I write in rhyme. But I can’t see metre.
I know what metre is, I can hear it when it’s pointed out. I know it’s there. I just can’t see it or use it in any non-clumsy way. I’ve half convinced myself this is a condition or a syndrome, or maybe a disorder. Or the malignant trace of a buried trauma.
Metre is not present everywhere. It’s not in most ordinary writing, which observes a kind of anti-metre which, if it’s good, mixes rhythms and emphases to form a kind of counter-metre that flows and is readable. We can’t call it metre because it’s not regular, it’s the deliberate (or accidental) absence of metre. So it’s something else (of course, ask an actual poet, or a literature prof, and they’ll probably tell you this is rubbish, that metre is present in all deliberate writing).
Metre is a structuring device, a way to impose structure on the flow of language, on the unordered. So now I’m wondering if I’m missing structure elsewhere. That if I can’t see the repeating structure in poetry, maybe I can’t see it in other forms. Does this explain why I need an expert to point out the connections and the hidden figures in books and movies? Why I quite often miss the plot twist on first reading, or the recurring device in a movie or the huge, obvious repeating theme in a piece of music?
Is it also why I often feel like a mug in the presence of a politician or a persuasive communicator. Why it takes me a while to parse a new policy, locate the nub of the argument. I’m not an idiot but I’m missing the structure in some way. I’ve got half a grasp. I’m a bit slow.
This is also why I’m convinced that, for all of us, our main concern with regard to politics and to policy should be not to be mugs, to make a serious effort to spot the hidden structure, the concealed rhythm. In day-to-day politics this means not being drawn in by the superficial meaning of a new policy, making a conscious effort to go deeper and find the truth.
Anyway, I asked ChatGPT if it uses metre in its output:
Overall, my primary focus is on producing coherent and grammatically correct text that is appropriate for the given context or purpose, and any use of rhythm or meter would be secondary to this goal.
ChatGPT-3.5
Then I asked it to summarise our conversation, only in iambic pentameter:
Sure, here’s a summary in iambic pentameter:
As an AI language model, I write With neutral style that’s clear and concise. My focus is on grammar that’s just right, And punctuation that will suffice.
While rhythm and meter are not my aim, I can recognize patterns in the text, And sometimes use them to create a frame For output that is of high quality and next.
My primary goal is to produce text that’s fit For context and purpose, without any fuss, And so, I strive to follow each writ Of standard language conventions, without any muss.
ChatGPT-3.5
And I think you’ll agree, it’s kind of amazing. So I asked it to make the stresses visible. It obviously doesn’t have the character-set needed to do proper stress markings so it’s just used capitals:
As AN AI LANguage MODEL, I write WITH neuTRAL style THAT’S clear AND conCISE. My FOCUS is ON gramMAR that’s JUST right, AND PUNCTUation THAT will SUFFice.
While RHYthm and METER are NOT my AIM, I can recOGnize PATterns in the TEXT, And SOMEtimes USE them to CREate a FRAME For OUTput THAT is OF high QUALity and NEXT.
My PRImary GOAL is TO proDUCE text THAT’s FIT For CONtext AND purPOSE, WITHout ANY fuss, And SO, I strive TO FOLlow EACH writ Of STANdard LANguage CONvenTIONS, WITHout ANY muss.
ChatGPT-3.5
The first thing you’ll notice is that it’s not strictly iambic pentameter but that it’s pretty close. This seems to correspond with what we know about the AI models – they’re making a probabilistic stab at the answer so it will often be off in some way, sometimes drastically but often in a subtle, difficult-to-detect way. This is also how I write poems.
I make a probabilistic stab. Sometimes it’s a bit off.
