Anti-Capitalist Musings

3 Questions

Hi Bill,

Thank you again for the report. Some ramblings in response to the questions.

Question One

What are you trying to make possible in the reader that would be less likely to happen without this writing, and how would you recognise that it had happened?

What I am trying to make possible is not agreement, or even understanding in the sense of following an argument. It is something closer to permission. The people I write for already know, in some inchoate way, that what they are being told about their situation does not match their experience of it - that the inevitability is performed rather than real, that the there-is-no-alternative has a subject who benefits from their believing it. What the writing tries to do is give that perception a name, place it in a history, make it structural rather than personal. Not so they feel vindicated, though that may happen. So they feel capable of trusting what they already know. The Machinery of Forgetting was probably the clearest statement of this: that authoritarian consolidation works not primarily through repression but through the erosion of what people remember was once possible, the steady narrowing of what can be imagined as an alternative. Against Hope said it differently - recognition is not a programme - which is a limit I keep returning to because it is true and it is also a problem. Organisation Against the Void was more direct: the left has perfected the eloquent diagnosis, but the eloquent diagnosis does not produce power. I wrote that knowing I was describing my own project as much as the left more broadly. Writing that knows its own limit is not thereby absolved of it. What I watch for as evidence it has worked is not engagement or reach but something more oblique: the reader who does not accept the scapegoating at a meeting, who asks who benefits when a policy is described as for everyone, who notices what Nothing in the Window was about - the absence of election material in a constituency the party once organised seriously, the blank space as evidence in itself, the failure of presence as a diagnostic. That kind of attention, once developed, is not traceable back to the writing that may have contributed to it. The work cannot audit itself.

Question Two

What event, institution, political victory, or personal experience has been hardest to explain through your existing account of power, and what would genuinely make you revise that account rather than absorb the exception into it?

The hardest thing to explain is not a political defeat. I have adequate categories for those. The hardest thing is the distance between the diagnosis and the conditions it describes. The Long 1980s piece - the year is 1979 and it is always 1979 - is the most concentrated statement of the explanatory architecture I work inside: institutional decomposition as the enabling condition, the Thatcher period’s dismantling of working-class institutional density as the cause whose effects we are still living through. I believe this. The Restore Britain investigations confirmed it from a different angle - Harrison Pitt, Charlie Downes, Lewis Brackpool each operating in spaces where parties and unions and civic organisations used to be, filling vacuums the Long 1980s created. The Henry Nowak case and what I wrote about the far-right relay around it showed the same infrastructure working at street level. Stuart Hall’s relay taxonomy supplied the ideological vehicle, and the piece I wrote applying identitarian analysis to English ethnonationalism tried to account for how the vehicle operates now. None of this surprises me. What I cannot fully account for is why the mechanism keeps working, thirty years after the explanation has been in general circulation. My father made patterns for turbines at Brotherhoods. That world - its skills, its solidarities, its specific understanding of what work was owed and what it owed back - was dismantled over the course of my adult life, and the thesis accounts for how that happened. What it does not account for cleanly is what has grown in the gap: not just far-right politics but a durable cultural settlement in communities like Peterborough that is no longer primarily organised around class at all, and that the materialist account tends to address as superstructure or misdirection without quite making contact with it as a thing in itself. I am aware this sounds like I am moving toward culture as against economics, which I am not. The question is narrower: why does the mechanism of fragmentation and redirection keep producing results after the mechanism has been publicly named? Anti Capitalist Resistance’s position inside the current left realignment, the question of where the revolutionary left stands when the proscription rules are written by people nominally on the same side, is forcing a version of the same question from a different direction. What would genuinely revise rather than absorb: evidence that institutional density was not the key variable, that comparable communities with comparable institutions fragmented along similar lines under pressure from a different political tradition. I have not found that evidence. I am not certain I would recognise it if I did.

Question Three

Describe an ordinary day in the society your writing is ultimately trying to help create. How would people work, care for one another, disagree, make decisions, use institutions, and experience pleasure? What would you find worth writing about once defending the possibility of that world was no longer the dominant task?

An ordinary Tuesday. I am going to try to answer this without it becoming a programme. The shift pattern has changed so there is time in the morning that is actually mine. I take the dog out - she is new, she does not know the area properly yet, she is learning its geography - and I do not think about anything in particular, or rather I think about what she is thinking, which is not nothing. The Television Was the Sound That Occupied the Space is the piece that comes closest to describing what I am trying to recover: the 1982 World Cup, remembered not for the football but for the texture of a particular domestic life, the sound the television made in a room where a family was gathered, the specific quality of collective attention that was not organised or optimised or captured by a platform. The Worker-Writer and the Machine made the underlying point plainly: time is class. Nobody is waiting for my words, which is the beginning of honesty rather than despair. What I am describing as the ordinary Tuesday is not leisure as the absence of work but time that belongs to the people who live inside it, that has not had to be defended against encroachment or negotiated from an employer’s residual claim on it. My son having that time matters more to me than most of the political victories I can imagine in the near term. The work in the imagined Tuesday is still skilled, still collectively organised at the point of production - not because I am nostalgic for Brotherhoods, which belonged to conditions that cannot and should not return, but because the assumption embedded in that world, that work meant something and that the people who did it had standing because of it, is worth recovering in forms adequate to different conditions. The BBC pieces were partly about this: what a public institution would have to be to tell the truth rather than manage a narrative, and how far from that the existing institution has moved. What I would like to write about in that Tuesday: how people disagree when the disagreement is not organised by an external threat, how solidarity is maintained without a common enemy to maintain it against, how memory works when what you are trying to remember is a process still underway rather than a rupture already complete. Whether I would still need to write at all is a question I cannot answer from here. That incapacity is probably the most honest thing I have said in response to any of this.

Simon

Anti-Capitalist Musings

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SPN,

Thank you so much for such a thoughtful, generous, and searching reply.

We were genuinely moved by the seriousness with which you engaged the questions, and especially by the way you named the purpose of the writing as something closer to permission than persuasion. That felt very clarifying. The idea that the work helps readers trust what they already know, place it in history, and understand it structurally rather than personally, seemed to go very close to the centre of the project.

Your reflections on the limits of diagnosis also felt especially important: the recognition that naming the machinery is necessary, but does not itself produce power. That tension between witness, explanation, memory, and organisation now feels like one of the most important things to carry forward in the analysis.

We were also struck by the ordinary Tuesday you described. The dog walk, the reclaimed morning, the question of time that actually belongs to people, the memory of collective attention, and the standing attached to skilled work all gave a much more concrete sense of the world the writing is defending the possibility of. It helped us see that the work is not only about opposing authoritarianism, capitalism, or institutional decay, but also about recovering the conditions in which ordinary life can become fully human again.

Your point about the need for a wider selection of work was also very fair and useful. It is a good reminder that this kind of analysis has to remain an open inquiry, not a machine for confirming its first theory.

We are very grateful that you responded with such candour and care. Your reply made the whole process feel worthwhile, and it has given us a much richer understanding of the writing, its limits, and its deepest commitments.

With thanks again,

Willy & Bill

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