Continuing the series on the Left

After my brief foray into styles of writing, let me continue my series on the future of the left. Jeremy Gilbert and Hilary Wainwright are 2 writers I very much respect – the first for his Common Ground – democracy and collectivity in an age of individualism (2014), the second for her Public Service Reform – but not as we know it (2009). Here I’m offering two (shorter) books by these 2 authors - first

A New Politics from the Left Hilary Wainwright (2018). Only 89 pages!

By the late 1950s, however, a ‘new left’ was emerging, mainly among the intelligentsia broadly defined – media professionals and self-educated workingclass intellectuals, as well as academics – that rejected both sides of the Cold War. It was 1956, with Soviet tanks on the streets of Budapest and British ships and troops in the Suez Canal, that was the catalyst. One of the new left’s most eloquent early voices was E. P. Thompson. With the instincts of the social historian, he was attentive to what was happening beneath the surface of the institutions of the Cold War. While the international show of the Stalinist Soviet bloc versus NATO and the capitalist West proceeded, he noticed the young people who had slunk out of the theatre to make their own music on the streets.

Prompted by ‘the positives of Aldermaston and the negatives of ‘“hip” and the

“beats”’, he spied a new critical temper. It offered a future outside the political

culture shaped by the Cold War. ‘Beneath the polarisation of power and ideology

in the Cold War world’, he wrote, ‘a new, rebellious human nature was being

formed, just as the new grass springs up beneath the snow’. In “The Making of the English Working Class”, Thompson, writing of the 1820s in a comparable period of retreat and defeat and mild prosperity, quotes a London artisan alerting nineteenth-century historian Henry Mayhew: ‘People fancy that when all’s quiet that all’s stagnating. Propaganda is going on for all that. It’s when all’s quiet that the seed’s a-growing. Republicans and Socialists are pressing their doctrines.’

The quiet decades of the 1950s and early 1960s were the years in which workers’ strength and organization in the workplace began to grow, benefiting from the bargaining power of the economic boom and creating the conditions for an increasingly militant workplace trade unionism, with some autonomy from the

alliance of trade union leaders with the parliamentary Labour Party (PLP); years

in which networked activists against the nuclear bomb converged to create the

Aldermaston Marches, through which, every Easter weekend, over 50,000

marchers from all parts of the left and dissenting opinion created a radical left

politics independent of political parties (though periodically engaging with it)

and a space in which politics and culture came together creatively and

experimentally – even renewing, through the Committee of 100 and the

campaign against regional seats of post-nuclear government, the tradition of

direct action. They were years in which film-makers documented everyday

working-class life, its ingenuity and its forms of cultural rebellion; in which

Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex gave women marginalized by domesticity and subordinated by Hollywood culture the confidence to experiment with autonomy and ways of living that refused male domination; in which popular music provided a language for escaping the narrow constraints of conventional values and morals. Fertile ground, then, for the burgeoning new left which was, in its own way, searching to theorize both the failures and defeats of the Russian

Revolution and the limits of Labourism. 

By the end of the 1960s, and most visibly in the rebellions of 1968, a new

consciousness was emerging among the generation that did not itself experience the war, that benefited from the material advantages and expanded educational opportunities of the welfare state and, as if echoing their victorious forebears, expected something more than material security. In different ways, they demanded democratic control and, drawing on the new traditions of direct

action, took autonomous initiatives to achieve it, whether as students, workers,

women, tenants, or civic activists more generally. In particular, the bond between

knowledge and authority, which was at the centre of the benevolent paternalism

of the post-war settlement, was in their sights and began to be broken.

Moreover, the new contradictions – distinctive to post-war capitalism – posed

problems to which the previous nostrums of socialism, as it was known then,

also had no adequate answer: socialism had become rather vague and confused after the experiences of communism and the nationalizations of the Attlee government. So these were also years of searching, questioning and

experimenting with alternatives in the here and now, rather than promoting a

ready-made programme.

It was not until 1973 that anything remotely comparable with the levels of selfconfidence and radicalization seen in the 1940s flowed through the institutions of the Labour Party again. At that time, it was a result of wider economic and social processes rather than inner-party dynamics. Debates within the Labour Party followed the impact of the growing self-confidence, expectations and militancy of shop-floor trade unionism, together with the reverberations of the anti-colonial liberation movements, the events of 1968 and the assertive rebellions of the first post-war generation as students, women, gay people, black people and other subordinated groups. They wanted more than the material security they had come to take for granted and were seeking to transform the power relations towards which they no longer had deference.

The second book is Twenty First Century Socialism Jeremy Gilbert (2020) 116 pages

Capitalism is characterised by the unlimited pursuit of capital accumulation, by the tendency to commodify resources and social relations, and by the tendency to generate a plutocracy. It’s quite common to refer to a society in which these tendencies predominate as a ‘capitalist society’. This is a useful shorthand. But it’s worth sounding a note of caution here. The idea that we live in a ‘capitalist society’ can often lead to the assumption that ‘capitalism’ is a totally integrated and self-enclosed system, which subsumes every element of contemporary social life.

Some theorists have certainly seen it this way. But this can be misleading. We live in societies in which capitalism has some effect on every aspect of social life and presents an obstacle to the realisation of many social goals. But there are all kinds of things going on all the time that are not capitalism, from teaching in public schools to the commercial activity of medium-sized businesses or to ordinary interaction between friends. Capitalists are absolutely committed to finding ways of using all these activities for the purpose of accumulating capital: they sell services to schools, lend money to businesses, mine every online conversation for data. But those activities can carry on perfectly well without capitalists or capital accumulation.

This is why, when we make statements such as ‘we live in a capitalist society’, we should be careful. This can give the impression that the only way in which we could emancipate ourselves from capitalism at all would be to overturn 

completely the social system we inhabit. There might be times and situations when this is true. But there might also be times when resisting the encroachment of capitalism doesn’t require such total transformation. Sometimes it can simply mean creating, defending or building up institutions that are not organised along capitalist lines – public libraries, non-commercial broadcasters, cooperatively owned social media platforms, the National Health Service, and so on – and pushing back against the inevitable capitalist attempt to take them over.

I do not, however, recommend Warring Fictions – left populism 

and its defining myths Christopher Clarke (2019) - a book which, 

for some reason, has 2 different titles – the other being 

“Dark Knight and the Pupper Master”. Clarke is a journalist and 

son of Charles who was a minister in the Blair/Brown governments and his right-wing 

credentials are very much on display in the book which excoriates

 Jeremy Corbyn.

There are three belief systems which sustain these new movements.

• The first is the belief in a common enemy – ‘us versus them’. Populists rely on a malign foe.

• The second is an anti-establishment default.3 Populists imply that omnipotent and self-serving elites block the ‘will of the people’.

• The third is a sense of decline – often expressed through opposition to growing inter-dependence between countries. This lends urgency to the populist cause.

Drilling down, there are three key areas where we perceive things differently. These can be summed up by three myths, which the far left holds dear and the centre left mistrusts.

The first myth is the Dark Knight, which concerns morality and the political spectrum. The far left usually believes the right is motivated by self-interest or spite. As a result, they regard as immoral many of the causes, methods, interests and institutions which they think are closer to the right. The centre left doesn’t tend to interpret issues through this lens.

The second is the Puppet Master, which concerns power and society. The far left often believes that society’s problems are coordinated and deliberately created by those in power. The centre left, by contrast, leans towards chaos-based explanations, and is less suspicious of government.

The third myth is the Golden Era. This relates to change, decline and the past. The far left’s interpretation is usually that society is becoming increasingly right-wing, and has been for decades. The centre left is inclined to see the positives in globalisation, or to feel Labour has made as many advances as retreats.

Whether we believe in these myths governs our approach, and how we try to turn values into strategies and policies.

Other relevant posts

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2025/10/making-sense-of-left.html

What British People Think

A fascinating (and large) report published last week helps make sense of what seems to be the increased polarisation in western societies. Shattered Britain (2025) is published by what has become one of the most interesting polling NGOs in several countries More in Common.

Chapter One provides an overview of the most important forces that are shaping public attitudes on how Britons are feeling about themselves and the country in 2025 and what drives those perceptions of shattered Britain.

• Incrementalist Left - 21 per cent of the population A civic-minded, community-oriented group holding views which are generally left-of-centre but with an aversion to the extreme; they prefer gradual reform over revolutionary change. They trust experts and institutions yet are largely tuned out of day-to-day politics and can be conflict-averse, stepping away from issues they see as particularly fraught or complex.

• Established Liberals - 9 per cent of the population A prosperous, confident segment who believe the system broadly works as it is and who trust experts to deliver continued progress. They have a strong belief in individual agency which can make them less empathetic to those who are struggling. Institutionally trusting, they maintain faith in democratic processes and have a strong information-centric way of engaging with issues.

• Sceptical Scrollers - 10 per cent of the population A digitally-native group whose unhappiness with the social contract means they have lost faith in traditional institutions and seek alternative sources of truth online. Often shaped by their experience of the Covid pandemic, they prefer individual influencers over mainstream media and are increasingly drawn to conspiratorial thinking.

• Rooted Patriots - 20 per cent of the population A patriotic but politically untethered group which feels abandoned and overlooked by political elites and yearns for leaders with common sense, but does not want to overthrow the system as a whole. They are particularly concerned about community decline and the pressures of migration. Interventionist on economics but conservative on social issues, they have shaped much of Britain's politics over the past decade.

• Traditional Conservatives - 8 per cent of the population Respectful of authority and tradition, this group believes in individual responsibility and established norms that have served them well. Nostalgic for the past but optimistic about the future, they are deeply sceptical of many forces of change such as immigration or the path to net-zero.

• Dissenting Disruptors - 20 per cent of the population Frustrated with their circumstances and with an appetite for radical solutions, this group craves dramatic change and strong leadership. Highly distrustful of institutions, opposed to multiculturalism and feeling disconnected from society, they are drawn to political movements that promise to overhaul the status quo and put people like them first.

Chapter Two explores emerging fault lines among the British public. It looks at how Britons’ attitudes to individual agency, multi-culturalism, freedom of speech, appetite for change and other factors are emerging as key dividing lines in the British public. 

Chapter Three introduces each of the British Seven segments that emerge from our indepth polling of the British public, and explores what motivates these segments, what makes them unique and the common ground and division between them.

Chapter Four uses the framework of the British Seven segments to understand diverging public attitudes to three key policy debates: the economy, climate change, immigration, along with changing media habits.

Chapter Five explores how the segments can help understand our fragmenting political environment in the UK, charting the rise of Reform UK, the drift from the Conservatives and Labour, as well as the choices on offer to our political parties. This chapter also previews forthcoming More in Common deep dives into Scottish and Welsh politics using the segment lens, ahead of next year’s Holyrood and Senedd elections.

How Likely is Civil Strife in Britain?

I had a bit of a nightmare last night – caused undoubtedly by my viewing “The coming UK Civil War” in which war academic David Betz discusses the reasons he finds this a near certainty – at one stage he suggests this coming summer as a possibility. Listening to him gives me the sense that he would actually relish this – although other academics in this field (such as Lawrence Freedman or Paul Rogers) don’t give me that sense. This recent article in the Military Strategy Magazine gives a sense of his arguments

The major threat to the security and prosperity of the West today emanates from its own dire social instability, structural and economic decline, cultural desiccation and, in my view, elite pusillanimity. Some academics have begun to sound the alarm, notably Barbara Walter’s “How Civil Wars Start—and How to Stop Them”, which is concerned primarily with the dwindling domestic stability of the United States.[ii] To judge from President Biden’s September 2022 speech in which he declared ‘MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic’ governments are beginning to take heed, albeit cautiously and awkwardly.[iii]

The field of strategic studies, however, is largely silent on the issue, which is strange because it ought to be something of concern. Why is it correct to perceive the increasing danger of violent internal conflict erupting in the West? What are the strategies and tactics likely to be employed in the civil wars to come in the West and by whom? These are the questions which I shall address in this essay……

and concludes

Moreover, it is not simply that the conditions are present in the West; it is, rather, that the conditions are nearing the ideal. The relative wealth, social stability and related lack of demographic factionalism, plus the perception of the ability of normal politics to solve problems that once made the West seem immune to civil war are now no longer valid. In fact, in each of these categories the direction of pull is towards civil conflict. Increasingly, people perceive this to be the case and their levels of confidence in government would seem to be declining even more in the face of the apparent unwillingness or inability of leaders to confront the situation honestly. The result, society-wise, is a reinforcing spiral calling to mind the opening lines of Yeats’ famous ‘The Second Coming’.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold…

The fact of the matter is that the tools of revolt in the form of various appurtenances of modern life are just lying around, knowledge of how to employ them is widespread, targets are obvious and undefended, and more and more formerly regular citizens seem minded to take the shot.

So we are warned! Given polarisation, social media, general distrust of most institutions (not least the police), the indifference developed by the newspapers to migrants and other “scum of the earth” (to use the title of a famous 1941 Arthur Koestler book), anger and fear seem to have become the main features of many British people.

But the David Betzs of this world seem determined to inflame these feelings. Betz developed his view further in this article published in late 2023 The Future of War is civil war

I personally am convinced of the inevitability of outright, active, and wide-scale civil war in North America and Western Europe. The best that can be hoped for, I think, is to diminish the period of horror. Some readers may be more optimistic; none, though, can objectively deny that there are strong and well-understood indicators showing that our current societal arrangements are failing at an accelerating rate.

The second part will briefly address the strengths and weaknesses of the extant future war literature, focusing mainly upon influential works of fiction rather than the quasi-rigorous outpourings of the ‘futurology’ discipline. For the purposes of analysis, I divide these into three groups: military futurism, social futurism, and ‘the unmentionables’. My argument, in a nutshell, is that we focus too much on the first, too little on the second, and especially not enough on the third, which is where most of the important contemporary ideas are to be found.

In the third part, I will attempt to describe the shape or character of the wars to come which, in short form, I expect to prominently exhibit the following: a distinctive rural verses urban dimension; jarring societal splits along the fracture lines of multiculturalism; a ‘hi-lo’ mix of weapons featuring extensive innovative reuse of civil tech for military purpose, particularly attacks on infrastructure; and a ‘shock of the old’ reversion-mutation to savage tactics, notably the use of famine and destruction of shelter as tools of coercion.

This last section of the paper is based in part on approximately ten years of lurking on the darker corners of the internet listening to what incipient revolutionaries, neo-anarchists, and want-to-be militiamen think and talk about….

I shall not conclude with thoughts on what might be done to prevent the occurrence of the civil wars that are coming because there is nothing that can be done about it. The unfortunate reality is that society has already passed the tipping point after which prevention of the eruption of violent civil conflict is impossible.

I’ve taken all day to do this post – it involved a fair amount of background reading eg the statistics on policing or the UK debate on racialism – not least the dispute on whether “institutional racism” exists.

You can almost see this guy rubbing his hands and saying “I told you so”!

You can also see him in this discussion - Civil War is Coming and a new interview on 13 June

Further Reading/viewing

https://www.militarystrategymagazine.com/article/civil-war-comes-to-the-west/

https://www.militarystrategymagazine.com/article/civil-war-comes-to-the-west-part-ii-strategic-realities/

View from the Danube (includes Goodwin input)

The coming civil war https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uG_5dFaTje8

The mad Dominic Cummings supports the notion 

Perceptions of Policing - a review of research (Ukgov 2023)

Policing Surveys (2023)

Guardian article about trust in police (2024)

2023 https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/documents/2024-09/police-activism-impartiality-research-tables-ipsos-2024.pdf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Stephen_Lawrence

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Stephen_Lawrence#The_Macpherson_Inquiry

Institutional Racism – fact or fiction? 2000

Racist Murder and Pressure Group Politics N Dennis et al Civitas 2000 

Ways of thinking about the Future

 The last post was about Geoff Mulgan’s thoughts about the future in which he made a reference to what someone had called the tenth chapter problem – namely these books which spend the first 9 chapters describing the mess we’re in but cannot produce anything for the final chapter except anodyne platitudes and truisms. Mulgans’ lecture shows how it should be done by offering some imaginative ways to think about the future 

But there are many methods that can be drawn on to expand a possibility space. 

Applying a few simple rules can help anyone or any group to generate options, for 

example to transform an existing activity like childcare, pensions, libraries, tax 

so as to multiply options.  
First you think about extension - taking an aspect of existing practice and going 

further, like Bach’s extension of fugues to six voices or extending the idea of rights 

to new fields, extending school hours, extending suffrage by giving the vote to 

sixteen-yearolds, or six-year-olds.  
Then you try grafting (or combining) taking an idea from another field and applying 

it to another. Again, this is very common in the arts—for example, grafting ideas 

from photography back into painting—and other examples include the way that the 

idea of auctions was grafted onto the management of the electromagnetic spectrum 

(the radio waves used for mobile phones, satellites or television), or how the idea of 

the jury was grafted onto democracy in the form of citizens’ juries.  
A more radical approach is to use inversion, as practised in the Middle Ages during 

Carnival, when for a day the poor pretended to be rich and vice versa.  What if 

farmers became bankers (as happened with the microcredit provided by Grameen 

Bank); patients became doctors; or social care were provided by people who had 

themselves been recipients of care?  What if consumers became makers of things? 
Addition and subtraction are also useful. Baroque and traditional Hindu architecture 

are good examples of extreme addition, and any social service can easily add on new 

elements—like a family doctor who also offers advice on welfare. Much modernist 

art and music favoured subtraction, leading to Malevich’s painting ‘White on White’ 

in 1918 or the silence of John Cage’s 1952 composition 4′33″. This way of thinking 

can also be generative in social contexts: what if you took away half of the roles in 

a hierarchy or introduced a maximum income? Or what if you had to cut a budget by 

half?  Noone likes cuts but I’ve worked with public parks that faced a 50 per cent 

budget cut and were prompted to come up with dozens of creative ways of raising 

money, through events, music, festivals and food, leaving the parks more vibrant 

than they had been before. The cheap prices of today’s supermarkets are only 

possible because Clarence Saunders in Memphis in the early twentieth century had 

the inspired idea of subtracting service staff and letting customers pack their own 

bags. 
Sometimes, not doing things is better than doing them. A surprising example of this 

was found in the military’s experience that taking immediate action to treat soldiers 

suffering from PTSD tended to make it worse. It proved better to let people mobilise 

their own resources and then to focus on the 4 or 5 per cent for whom that approach 

hadn’t worked. Less can be more. And of course veganism is an approach which 

subtracts—excluding meats and dairy products from diets— while much law and 

regulation is now focused on reducing energy use, carbon emissions and travel, 

rather than increasing them. 

If these are some basic methods creative thought can also be helped by mobilising 

metaphor and analogy—seeing one thing and thinking of another (a variant of the 

grafting process described above). Much of social change comes from shifts in 

metaphors. Do we see society as a war, a body or an organism; a building, a machine 

or a family? Is the economy analogous to a household, which means being very careful 

not to spend more than you earn, or is it more like an entrepot or trading post, 

in which case debt may be essential? 
We are at a time of extraordinarily fertile analysis of the past – the ‘long durées’ of 

inequality, governance, values, families – and just as fertile analysis of the present. 

But we’ve made it harder for social scientists to engage with understanding or 

shaping the future. If we really are in a time of multiplying crises then we badly 

need options, and social scientists need to be part of this work. 

 We need the best brains to be working out how to design and run a zero carbon 

economy; a society with more disability; how to make ubiquitous smart technologies 

serve us rather than the other way round; how to counter polarisation; 

misinformation. We need to populate our fuzzy pictures of the future with complex, 

rich, plausible deas, pictures of the possible – a possibility space that is capacious 

and helpful for action in the present. There may not be an immediate demand for 

these, not least as governments attend to the immediate.  

But it is precisely at these times that we need to look ahead, just as in dark days of 

1930s and WW2 some worked hard to think about what could come after, from 

designing welfare states to macroeconomics, decolonisation to human rights and 

the creation of the UN, which a decade before it was founded seemed utterly 

utopian. 

Further Reading
Future Matters – action, knowledge, ethics  B Adam and C Groves (2007) explores 

the adequacy of current ways of handling the future – although the book is just over 200 

pages, this is only google excerpts
Future Babble D Gardner (2010) more books could benefit from this useful summary
Future Vision – scenarios for the world in 2040 Richard Watson and Oliver Freeman  (2012) 

The book is almost 300 pages and is a useful outline of scenario planning – the epilogue 

traces 10 possible shocks.
Global Trends 2040 – a more contested world National Intelligence Council (2021) 

You can always rely on the security services to demonstrate a realistic approach! 

The final section on 5 future scenarios is particularly worth reading.
Global Risks Report 2024 (World Economic Forum) I’m not a great fan of WEF reports 

which tend to suffer from groupthink. This a short (120 page) report which doesn’t 

mention the risk of pandemics. 

LINKS – and what they tell you about someone

My blogroll lists 70 blogs I try to follow – one being an old site of mine which was suddenly removed, without notice. So, be warned, all those precious papers and books could suddenly vanish!!. And buying a web address is not a solution – as this, just as easily, can also vanish via a takeover. Indeed that’s just happened to one of my bank accounts – NatWest International who seem to have taken over the Royal Bank of Scotland - which has intimated that they are closing the account in which I have 5k dollars in late January. They offer no option to allow me to transfer the money to another account. Such are the ways of corporate capitalism.

But revenons aux moutons – to the matter of what links can tell you about a person. The last post led with a link to a file containing a 100 page list of the hyperlinks I had selected this year for their interest. Both the blogroll and this list of hyperlinks tell you a lot about what grabs my interest – for example.

The Journal of Intellectual History is onec of my favourite journals and occasionally has free articles. Two recent were

Neoliberalism – an intellectual history N Mulder review of 3 recent books

one on Anti-fascism which places the literature in the wider context of anti-colonialism

We are not ready - policymaking in the era of era of environmental breakdown

(IPPR 2020) which assesses the UK against 3 criteria

Putting the Gaza ethnic cleansing in context

https://consortiumnews.com/2023/12/18/chris-hedges-the-death-of-israel/

https://consortiumnews.com/2023/12/12/patrick-lawrence-gaza-confronting-power/

https://contendingmodernities.nd.edu/global-currents/israeli-apartheid-and-its-apologists/

Human Rights Watch 2021 Report on Israeli use of apartheid

polarisation article

https://economy2030.resolutionfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Ending-stagnation-final-report.pdf

In the Ruins of the Present Vijay Prashad 2018

How to understand a world of unemployment and annihilation, of poverty, climate catastrophe and war? What concepts do we have to grasp these complex realities? The modes of thought that come from North American positivism – game theory, regression analysis, multi-level models, inferential statistics – are at a loss to offer a general theory of our condition. Steeped in common sense understandings of power and naive about the role of elites in our world, these approaches might explain this or that aspect of our world.

https://www.councilestatemedia.uk/p/politicians-who-respected-kissinger?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2

https://www.noemamag.com/what-ai-teaches-us-about-good-writing/

Some recent Development material

Newsletter from “thinking and working politically”

Promoting institutional and organisational development 2003

Fragility, Risk and Resilience UN 2016

understanding institutional analysis

civil servants, social norms and corruption

And the number of downloadable BOOKS is increasing eg

• Tomorrow’s Communities Henry Tam 2022

• The Gutenberg Parenthesis Jeff Jarvis 2023

• The Ecology of Freedom M Bookchin 1982

• Institutions Taking Root - Building State Capacity in Challenging Contexts World Bank 2014

• The Government Analyics Handbook – leveraging data to strengthen public administration D Rogger and C Schuster World Bank Sept 2023

• Passion, Craft and Method in Comparative Politics Gerardo Munck and Richard Snyder 2007

• Globalisation and contestation - the new great counter-movement Ronaldo Munck 2007

• Digital Transformation and public services A Larsson and R Teigland 2020

• Struggle makes us human Vijay Prashad 2022

• Prisoners of Time - prussians, germans and other humans chris clark 2021

• Walter Kempowski’s Familienchronic thesis 1990

• The Language of Politics Adrian Beard 2000

• Faith seeking Conviviality Sam Ewell 2020

WHAT SORT OF FUTURE ARE WE LEAVING BEHIND?

Climatologists may overwhelmingly (the exact figure is some 97%) be convinced that global warming is a real and immediate threat - but the public is not so easily persuaded. Our reasons are many and diverse

• The world's climate tends to go in cycles – remember the Ice ages

• experts are increasingly suspect – their forecasts often turn out to be falsified

• technological innovations will save us

Beneath such rationalisations lies an almost religious belief in the idea of “Progress” which has recently become the subject of increasing criticism

As individuals, we deal with the threat of global warming in a whole variety of different ways -

• we deny it

• we mobilise and protest

• we accept fatalistically that future generations are doomed and feel guilty

• we invent a new vocabulary – of “resilience”

• and resort to notions of local self-sufficiency” and “degrowth”

This post is about two climate activists whose writing has engaged my interest in the last few days – Rupert Read and Jem Bendell. Read is one of the founders of Extinction Revolution but has just left his posiyion as a philosophy academic to concentrate on his activism. Bendell is a geographer who has edited a book jointly with Read

Let me start with Read's latest book - Why Climate Breakdown Matters (2022) which starts with reminding us of the anxieties we had in earlier decades

Not so well known is that in 1983, we came even closer to nuclear war. This was instigated by a flock of geese flying across the edge of the Soviet Union. The USSR’s radar systems misidentified this avian excursion as a series of incoming nuclear missiles. It was only due to the prompt action, or (if you will) inaction, of an intelligent and calm Russian officer (not even a very senior officer), that nuclear missiles weren’t released in response to those geese. Against protocol, he delayed authorizing a retaliatory strike, until the looming threat was unmasked as simply birds. This episode is documented in a film called “The Man Who Saved the World” and the title is apposite: he did.....

Thankfully, Read's book is a short one. We are so overwhelmed with books on the subject (and many others) that I have several times appealed to writers and publishers to discipline themselves and give us shorter books (ideally half his length!). But because its a recent book, it's able to trawl over the writing of the past four decades on the issue and identify their shortcomings -

While discussion of the science is abundant, discussion of the social, political and economic ramifications of taking the science fully seriously is typically far more marginalized. For instance, most of ‘Political Science’ and of Sociology still simply ignore the way that the ecological crisis will entirely transform our world in the lifetime of students now studying these subjects at university. Browsing through the latest issues of top philosophy journals reveals a similar lacuna in the discipline, with some notable exceptions. This is insupportable and unethical. But it is part of a wider trend.

And why has there been so little focus on adaptation in climate activism, climate politics, and climate science? Adaptation is creeping steadily up the international agenda, but is still not being taken anywhere near as seriously as mitigation/prevention.

Most books on the subject are equivocal about future prospects but Read is emphatic that we are far beyond the tipping point - hence the emphasis on adaptation. He stresses the need to think about our children and the importance of future generations

Conventional wisdom in mainstream climate activism has until recently – until the game-changing advent of the likes of Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion – said that if we direct people’s attention to the scale and severity of present and impending ecological collapse, then they will abandon all hope in the face of it and will fail to act against it. The consensus has largely been that messages of hope and progress motivate, while those of impending catastrophe and failure demotivate and alienate otherwise receptive audiences. In short, put on a happy face (p16)

Social responses we can expect to emerge as the intensity and frequency of disasters is amplified – as it will be. I draw on the work of disaster studies scholars that shows that the popular narrative of these events as a catalyst for the worst elements of our nature is (thankfully) hugely inaccurate. Instead, thoughtful and attentive empirical research suggests that disasters are often the scene of intense community building. This shatters an important cultural myth about human nature. More importantly, it is also a source of real hope for fast changes in our attitudes to climate breakdown. It may be that from the aftermath of disasters we can seize renewed vigour for creating a better and more resilient world. (p21)

An important theme which occurs in the book is that of challenging our obsession with economics growth - and leads me to the subject of degrowth which has been the subject of some challenging books eg Post-Growth – life after capitalism; by Tim Jackson

During the year 2020, the world witnessed the most extraordinary experiment in non-capitalism that we could possibly imagine. We now know that such a thing is not only possible. It’s essential under certain circumstances. The goal of this book is to articulate the opportunities that await us in this vaguely glimpsed hinterland. (p12) Post Growth is an invitation to learn from history

Beyond the ‘fairytales of economic growth’ lies a world of complexity that demands our attention. Those fairytales are coded into the guidance manual of the modern economy. They’ve been there for decades. They continue to distort our understanding of social progress and prevent us from thinking more deeply about the human condition.

The broad thesis of this book is that good lives do not have to cost the earth. Material progress has changed our lives –in many ways for the better. But the burden of having can obscure the joy of belonging. The obsession with producing can distort the fulfilment of making. The pressure of consuming can undermine the simple lightness of being. Recovering prosperity is not so much about denial as about opportunity.

Robert Kennedy's Kansas speech attacking growth

That single number ‘measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country’, concluded Kennedy. ‘It measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.’.....

JS Mill was saying that a postgrowth world may be a richer, not a poorer, place for all of us. And it’s that vision of a richer, more equitable, more fulfilling world – glimpsed by Mill and demanded by Kennedy and developed by Daly – which provides the inspiration for the arguments in this book.

There's a great conversation with Jackson here and a critique of the book here

Let me end with a superb post from my favourite blogger about the chaos which seems to be descending on us all

In ‘chaotic’ economic and political systems that means oligopolies, bribes, extortion and other ‘officially illegal’ activities may prevail without limit. In some cases, organized crime actually substitutes its own laws, rules and constraints, to deal with the chaos.

What I think we are starting to see this century is gradually increasing levels of chaos in much of the world. In fact, the increasing number of the world’s economies that are dominated by oligopolies and organized crime might actually be a little less chaotic than countries that are still trying to play by the rules. In countries ruled by oligarchs and organized crime, you at least know who you have to pay off, and how much, and the consequences if you don’t. That may be despotic, but it isn’t chaos.

If the system collapses to the point that even oligopolies and organized crime cannot maintain order, then you have at least short-term chaos and possibly anarchy. Immediately, in order to get essential things done (like food and energy diThe Future is Degrowth A Vetter and J Vansint 2022stribution), ad hoc systems will emerge.

Resource

 a review of degrowth literature (2022) 

 Deep Adaptation – navigating the realities of climate chaos ed J Bendell and R Read (2021)

Rethinking Readiness – a brief guide to 21^st century megadisasters 2020

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii128/articles/kenta-tsuda-naive-questions-0n-degrowth 2021

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii115/articles/mark-burton-peter-somerville-degrowth-a-defence.pdf 2019

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii112/articles/robert-pollin-de-growth-vs-a-green-new-deal 2018

Previous posts on the issue

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2012/08/climate-change.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2014/07/why-we-disagree-on-wicked-problems.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2012/08/climate-change.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2021/11/is-patriotism-answer.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2022/08/why-polarisation-and-what-can-be-done.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2023/07/oberheated.html

And a newsflash https://bylinetimes.com/2023/09/06/courts-to-face-wave-of-protests-as-climate-campaigners-say-right-to-jury-trial-under-attack/