Why are the Conservatives electorally invincible?

British Prime Minister Theresa May: the latest Conservative politician to position herself in the "centre ground"
(Photo credit: Policy Exchange via Flickr/Creative Commons)

Cast your mind back a year: the Conservative Party had won a majority in parliament for the first time since 1992 and they were gearing up for a jubilant conference. This new majority government would, the electorate was assured, reach for the centre-ground of British politics. They would "steal Labour's clothes" on policies like the national living wage. They would pepper their firmness with fairness. The Shadow Chancellor George Osborne was being hailed as a political genius even by his left-wing critics. He had dispensed with stodgy, old fashioned commitment to facts, ascending instead to a stratospherical realm of pure spectacle. Osborne went beyond even Blairite spinners of yore, as Blairites had always implicitly conceded that reality was thing that had to be spun. For Osborne the chief raw material was not cold fact but whatever messaging popped into his head and seemed tof it the moment. The Tory Party, and moreover the vast majority of the British press, seemed more or less content with the happy accident of a Tory majority. What few minor hiccups lay ahead could be gently massaged as they bubbled up.

And then 2016 happened. It turned out that many Tory manifesto pledges had been written with no intention of them ever being enacted. The scale of the promised cuts to government expenditure along with simultaneous tax cuts was impracticable. Labour opposition and the first stirrings of internal Tory descent put paid to Osborne's tax credit cuts. With no feasible avenue left for his planned spending cuts, Osborne's spring budget collapsed in days. Eurosceptic Ian Duncan Smith resigned from the frontbench. The Prime Minister was implicated in a tax evasion scandal. And then the Brexit vote - one manifesto pledge the government could not dodge - ended the careers not just of the Prime Minister and his Shadow Chancellor but practically the entire liberal core of the leadership.

An unprecedented disaster for a majority government unlike anything experienced since the Tories' last tenure in full control during 1992's Black Wednesday. And yet the government has survived, albeit in slightly mutated form. The cabinet had shifted to the right. It is a little more authoritarian than before but not much. It is certainly more eurosceptic. Its anti-immigrant bullying is likely to be more pronounced. Perhaps it will take a slightly more interventionist approach to the economy. But all of these add just a shade or two of true blue to the Cameron-Osborne universe. Theresa May's arrival as prime minister - via a blatant party stitch-up - has been greeted with a cathartic swell in popularity. The Conservative Party's long-nurtured appearance of competence, self-assurance, and steely commitment to weathering the storms of crisis have seen them reach undreamt of polling heights. They have benefited amazingly from a crisis they made.

What explains this startling success? The Conservative Party's historical role as protector of the Union (and in times past of the Empire) gives it considerable clout in British society. The Conservatives are the favoured party of the British state and are existentially bound up with its survival. Yet because of the association of this most durable of parliamentary forces with the task of maintaining the British state, left-wing critics are sometimes tempted to treat the Conservatives as "anti-theoretical" or "anti-intellectual." The apparent pragmatism of Tory policy in achieving its stated goals masks deeper political and moral values and often implicit ontological assumptions. Amongst these is the belief that the endurance of a particular state of affairs - say, the institutions of this or that state - can be viewed as a good in and of itself. The roots of this view can be traced to a profound moral and political pessimism which has often dominated English philosophy: if human nature is frail and reason an unreliable guide in a dangerous world, those customs and habits of collective life which endure the passage of time can serve as an always-imperfect shield. The Tory philosopher David Hume called custom "the great guide of human life." Tradition, custom, and the slow build up of institutions were the English sceptic's response to French rationalism, with its violent political factionalism. Democracy was, for Hume, an "enthusiastic" extravagance. The worldview of modern Toryism was forged in a period of arch-reaction, when convulsions across Europe led to the need for a highly statised, pragmatic power politics able to defend people from the violent outcomes of their own high ideals.

The endurance of high Toryism has some relation to the great internal strength of British state institutions and the tightly knit bloc of hegemonic interests which oversaw its modernisation. The British state has endured largely undisturbed since the English Revolution. And the Tory Party has always been there for those seeking to deepen or entrench their representation within it. The Tories have never been simply the "managerial committee for the affairs of the Bourgeoisie," but indeed have viewed their role as preserver and sometimes as developer of its national institutions. This commitment to the state - to the Union of the British Isles - is not pragmatic at all but rather intensely moral. It is premised on philosophical assumptions about human nature and the nature of social life. It therefore plays a role in constructing the terrain of Tory politics and constraining its capability for action. Thus, Disraeli's great move to enfranchise a narrow section of the (male) working class in the Second Reform Act of 1867 can be seen as a simple act of pragmatism. After all if the Tories didn't do it, Gladstone's Liberals would. But it can also be seen in the broader pattern of the Tories permitting the arrival of a certain rising class strata into state representation. It is an integral part of arch-Toryism to see itself as smoothly directing social change to the state's long-term advantage. Disraeli may have lost the 1868 election but he secured a not-insignificant fraction of working-class support for Toryism for a long time to come.

The inheritors of this legacy are, however, nowhere to be found among the Party's recent leading lights. The Tories have become victims of their own success. In the 1980s Margaret Thatcher led a rapid and highly effective counter-revolution against British state "corporatism" - one stubbornly resisted by old school Tory elites. The latter resisted for what turned out to be good historical reasons: the complete transformation of British state functions actually eroded the old Tory levers of power and influence over society. After the departure of Thatcher herself the Conservative Party entered over a decade of crisis, one which resulted in the marginalisation of the old Tory elite and the emergence of a comfortably neoliberal, socially open-minded, free market, small-state, low tax grouping as the new rulers of the party. But the Cameroons, as they were dubbed, operated a weightless hegemony over a party whose internal traditions had been worn threadbare by the neoliberal onslaught on the British state. For a party so thoroughly imbricated in the traditional functioning of the British state, the upheaval of neoliberalism was bound to be problematic.

Here's where the story returns to George Osborne. If postmodernism is the cultural logic of late capitalism, neoliberalism is its political and managerial ideology. George Osborne was supposed to be the political master of both. But in the end the very victories of neoliberalism, those which had brought the likes of Osborne and his predecessor Tony Blair to power, had simultaneously undermined the internal consistency, the raison d'etre, the morale and the actual capacities of the British state. The unintended result of the victory of neoliberalism over the British state and the national economy can be read off in a long list: the financialisation of all the major actors in the economy; the internationalisation of production; the growing dependence on credit to finance consumption; the eternal growth of trade and current account deficits; the race to the bottom on wages and welfare; the decline in productivity and the rise of shit, low-paid jobs; the stagnation or decline in public spending on crucial public goods and state-backed investment; the collapse in unionisation; the collapse of political participation; the retreat of political parties from communities and active social life; the concentration of wealth in ever fewer hands in the south of England; the fraying of the tethers of social solidarity between British regions and countries. This decay of institutions resulted in a series of slow crises and sudden catastrophes for British elites and for the Union itself: the Iraq War, the 2008 financial crisis, the erosion of the two-party system, the collapse of public trust in the state, the near-miss of the Scottish referendum, the bull's eye of Brexit.

Why are the Tories electorally invincible? Among the many factors why, the key is the survival instinct of the social groups who are emotionally, ideologically, and materially integrated into the British state. The Tory Party today is fixed rigidly to this ever decreasing patch of earth, fending off multiple threats to a decreasing pool of wealthy and moderately well off voters. It is not Tory health that has made them victorious but - paradoxically - the long-term ill-health of the system they are pledged and trusted to defend. Those in the media currently celebrating the revival in Tory electoral fortunes need only look at the long-term trends or remind themselves of the events of the last year. Many of those who work in the media along with much of the higher-paid salariat are genetically predisposed to the political centre. But just as they got the last year so wrong, they are wrong again now. Because what they forget is that reality can always come back to bite you, no matter how sensible, centrist and serious your government appears. Another implosion is surely on the way.

Trump is a Love Thing

The cultural theorist Joan Copjec memorably described Ronald Reagan as the "Teflon Totem."1 The media, she said, was so obsessed with reporting Reagan's flagrant lies and "idiotic blunders" that they missed the real point, the core of the President's unshakeable appeal: the love of the American people for their leader. For all the rational evidence of Reagan's gross incompetence, he somehow emerged from each attack unscathed. Though the media exhaustively documented his every mishap "it could not - by its own incredulously tendered admission - menace the position of the president himself." She argued that the media was guilty of a "realist imbecility": the assumption that what mattered was the raw substance of the thing, not the intersubjective beliefs involved in elevating Reagan beyond rational criticism and into the arena of love. For love, she argued, following the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, is immune to concrete criticisms of this or that characteristic. After all, we love the other unconditionally whilst acknowledging their personal failings. The American public felt no different about its Teflon President.

Not insignificantly, for this article at least, a future Republican presidential candidate played an anecdotal role in Copjec's description of the media's imbecility: after Ivana Trump confronted her husband Donald over his infidelity, news crews rushed to report on the empty spot outside a motel where the confrontation had taken place. Citing Roland Barthes, Copjec related this obsession with the raw object - the referent, the dull, empty space of an event - rather than its actual significance to an "illusion." The media, in her view, tended to ignore the unique qualities of the enunciator (the person who speaks) and look only at the objective circumstances in which they speak - yielding an empty space where a proper explanation should be.

Donald Trump has been carefully cultivating a relationship of stagy antagonism with the media for thirty years and has benefited from a similar type of dynamic to Reagan. But Copjec's argument is that figures of this kind - who inspire deep libidinal devotion in their audience - are in fact strengthened by the endless cataloguing of their idiocies. Trump is impervious to rational criticism because he embodies, for some Americans, a moment of pure innocence which precedes all doubt. Although Copjec does not blame the media for Reagan's success, it is easy to extend her critique to those who rather hysterically cry foul over Trump whilst forever returning for more. Trump, of course, is ratings dynamite - but the news networks' and the highbrow media's investment in the Trump car crash goes far beyond the profit. The US specialises in this revulsion-attraction to its leaders. In America the citizens resist the abstract uniformity which their citizenship entails and "require instead this master to accredit our singularity." To be fair, the USA hardly has a monopoly on such offensive buffoonery, from the enduring popularity of Boris Johnson in the UK to Silvio Berlusconi in Italy. Copjec's argument is that sometimes America and the world needs a Reagan - which implies in its turn a further question: Why this time did it get a Trump?

Trump is in fact startlingly unpopular: according to the Huffpost Pollster page he currently has a sixty-three percent unfavourable rating among the US electorate. By contrast the gaffe-prone Vice President Joe Biden can boast that only thirty-seven percent of the electorate find him unpalatable. And yet somehow this bewildering character, who is actively disliked by the vast majority of US voters, stands a good chance of becoming President. To understand Trump's success and his dubious distinction of being the most brazenly offensive, polarising candidate in modern US history, it is necessary to look at the class make up of his support.

As an extensive survey carried out by the PRRI and the Brookings Institution shows, deteriorating living standards and fear of foreign infiltration (in whatever phantastmatic form) have been conjugated into a single discourse among certain sections of the American public. The survey showed that sixty-two percent of white working-class Americans believe things have got worse in the US since the 1950s. Meanwhile, seventy-four percent of Republicans and eighty-three percent of Trump voters feel that "foreign influence" over the US should be curtailed. According to the New York Times Trump leads Hillary Clinton among white working class voters without a college degree, often by large margins. It is often assumed that latent or explicit sexism and - more problematically - lack of education are driving the anti-Clinton vote. The accusations of sexism are undoubtedly true, but those feelings alone cannot explain the enthusiasm that greeted Trump among these voters before Clinton received the Democratic nomination. Writing in the Atlantic Ronald Brownstein declared, "Trump was lifted by a coalition that largely believes the America it has known is under siege." Trump's biggest audience, Brownstein writes, lies precisely "at the intersection of immigration and terror."

In an article for Foreign Affairs magazine the left-wing writer Michael Kazin argues that the Trump phenomenon is best understood "as an amalgam of three different, largely pathological strains in American history and culture." First, hostility towards immigrants - especially towards those whose religious and ethnic identity "clashes" with that of the majority. Second, populist right-was ing hostility to the corruption of the ruling elite - directed especially at the state (Big Government and so on). Third, attraction to the outrageous charisma of a wealthy outsider. Though Kazin provides a succinct sketch of the individual components of Trumpism, the medical metaphors ("pathological... strains") mask the absence of an explanation of its origins. Similarly, Brownstein argues that, "From the outset [Trump] has stressed three principal identities." First, the politically savvy business executive who can revive the economy. Second, the political outsider untethered to corruption. And third, the "embodiment of resistance to demographic and cultural change." It is this latter, Brownstein argues, which has been most prominent and consistent. If Kazin identifies the cultural strains of Trumpism, Brownstein identifies Trump's method for capitalising on them.

But we are still no closer to understanding how inchoate fears about falling living standards and lack of status have been so tightly conjugated with fear of "foreign influence." Indeed it is not clear if the latter signifies a single phenomenon or a bundle of anxieties about the changing colour of US communities, the increasing visibility of minorities in US public life, the ever-present threat of terrorist violence and the encroaching reality of global disorder. Who does this political messaging really appeal to? As Nate Silver at the FiveThirtyEight website argues, the extent of Trump's working class support is often overplayed: Trump supporters tend to be slightly better off than the median US earner. They are not the poorest who have been excluded from jobs, social security, healthcare, and homeownership by globalisation. "Class in America is a complicated concept," he argues, "and it may be that Trump supporters see themselves as having been left behind in other respects." This is a story, then, of relative decline for a "class fraction" of US society which has been heavily racialised by the US polity: the conservative, white, blue collar worker done good, who was the anointed centre not only of America's lived social reality but also of its reams of propaganda during the Twentieth Century. That stereotype has never been the entire truth of the US working class, but was nevertheless bought and sold as such. It was lived by millions in the postwar era of full employment and homeownership and rising incomes as such. It didn't matter that so much of America's minority working class was permanently excluded from that settlement. Now it has collapsed and its one-time beneficiaries are seeking violent self-validation. According to Drew DeSilver at the Pew Research Center, "A look at five decades' worth of government wage data suggests that... for most US workers real wages - that is, after inflation is taken into account - have been flat or even falling for decades, regardless of whether the economy has been producing or subtracting jobs." Today's average wage adjusted for inflation stands roughly at purchasing power parity with the average from 1979. Little wonder then that white workers in particular view the 1950s as a golden age. And little wonder also that they perceive this relative decline in racial terms - after all, the US was in the 1950s an openly racist society. The white working class is also a racialised construction, replete with a set of presumed social characteristics which elevated them for decades above inferior, truculent minorities. The US remains a violently racist place today, one in which poor people of colour are blamed for their own poverty and those threatened by stagnating incomes can all too easily retreat into a readymade racial comfort zone.

Donald Trump may be generally unpopular - but he is unpopular only among certain sections of a society riven by sexual, racial, and class conflict. Among other sections he is wildly popular. He may consistently lie and abuse others and even prove himself utterly incompetent. But this is not really the point. Because for some Americans he is the long-awaited confirmation of their right to exist - the object of their love. Much of the media has played the role of foil to Trump - publicly exasperated but deriving a covert pleasure from his various slanders and entirely unable to leave his side even for a moment. What would it mean to have a media which, instead of rushing to the broken, forlorn spaces that the Trump car crash vacates, was able confront the hideous source of his antics?

1See: Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists, Kindle location 2200   

Assessing Corbynism

Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, September 2015. Getty

We are being asked to vote again for a Labour leader so it might be worth looking over the past nine months to assess Jeremy Corbyn's leadership of the party. There are a number of things - let's say six for starters - that a radical left leadership of the Labour Party must do. Now, you might not want a radical Labour leadership (I do) but that's a separate issue. Things need to be judged on their own terms.

What are the things that Corbynism has to achieve - the things that are baseline requirements for success? I've got six - by all means chip in with more. But clearly none of them is "triangulate to the right on welfare cuts and embrace austerity." Because by definition if a radical left - or any left - leadership does that it counts as failure (see: Syriza, see also: Ed Miliband). Here I list them and rate Corbynism on each and I find a mix of successes and failures.

1. Win material gains for working people through parliament and on the streets. This is always first and foremost. It cannot be postponed until the arrival of a progressive government

Last year the majority of Labour MPs abstained on a vote on the Conservatives' flagship Welfare Bill, which would cut billions in working tax credits to low income earners. Jeremy Corbyn and a few rebels voted against it. When Corbyn became Labour leader he led opposition across society to further readings of the bill, after which it was hacked away at by the House of Lords, crushing George Osborne's budget. Eventually Ian Duncan Smith resigned as Secretary of State for Work and Pensions and billions remain in the pockets of poverty-wage and poorer workers. The crushing of Osborne's entire budgetary plan for the Parliament managed to fundamentally destabilise the Tory government.

2. Develop a serious economic alternative to austerity ready for government

John McDonnell, Corbyn's ally and Shadow Chancellor, has spent months touring the country and running economics seminars, lectures and major conferences on the British economy with guest spots from economic heavyweights. The end result? Labour is not only a serious anti-austerity party, it also has serious economic ideas. The Labour Party will set up a National Investment Bank to mobilise £500 billion to rebalance the British economy and rebuild the country. Austerity is not only wrong - it's now also a politically dead. Thanks to the intellectual work McDonnell has done alongside the likes of Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, Labour is ready with a convincing, radical alternative to the deficit spending the Tories will now have to embark on because of Brexit - spending which will largely go towards the wealthy. Get this straight: the Tories are now a pro-deficit party. Labour only wants to borrow for investment in struggling areas. This is directly because of John McDonnell.

3. Develop a coherent anti-war policy

Corbyn is a lifelong unilateralist and as the recent Parliamentary vote on Trident renewal shows, Labour in Parliament does not agree. Corbyn has failed to win over almost anyone in the Parliamentary Labour Party to his position, despite a widespread lack of enthusiasm for nuclear arms in society at large. This has also not become a make-or-break issue for Corbyn supporters, which must surely count as a major failure. Part of a leader's job is to articulate sentiments into full-blown commitments. Corbyn has not done this on the foreign policy issue closest to his heart. Nevertheless, his speeches on the Chilcot Inquiry into Iraq are defining moments of his leadership and he no doubt gave voice to the lingering fury that exists in Iraq's wake.

4. Mobilise grassroots support and activism within the Labour Party

Corbyn's leadership has brought hundreds of thousands into the Labour Party and many thousands more into active politics for the first time. Yet within Labour and across the wider movements rumours circulate constantly that these members are simply absentee "clicktivits." Anecdotally speaking this is believable: I've heard plenty of Labour people complain of no-shows and even people inside Corbyn's support group Momentum bemoan a lack of groundwork. This is unfortunate, but it's in the nature of political activism: it never runs in a smooth line but comes in fits and spurts. Corbyn could conceivably have done more to encourage not only membership but broader and deeper political action on the part of his followers - however, this would have come at the cost of his ailing support among Labour MPs.

5. Build a vast social movement that reaches into every corner of British society and is willing to come onto the streets

The elusive dream of all leftists the world over. Notoriously difficult to build, even harder to control. No, Corbyn has not done this. He has attended strikes - namely, the junior doctors' strike - held meetings across the country, addressed Union conferences and shown up at every celebration of working class, BAME and LGBTQ culture going. These actions are virtually unprecedented by any Labour leader - or indeed any parliamentary leader - ever. But the dynamic so far just hasn't been there. Part of this comes down to the situation - with the left's long-term institutional weakness - but it is also down to the allocation of Corbynism's limited energies.

6. Carry enough of the country with them to make election viable. The vehicles for this are Labour in parliament the establishment media and social media

Labour support was at, immediately below or just above that of the Tories in most polls up to Brexit (things were much worse a year ago, before Corbyn became leader). Corbyn seemed to be able to exert some control over the majority of the Labour Party. And despite the patent media hostility to him (and let's not forget Labour as a whole) things seemed to be slotting into a routine. Not much, but something to build on. Then came the coup - and the evident drop in the polls - with a no doubt crushing effect on Corbyn's presumed competence. Tactically canny as ever, this will be the line of attack by Corbyn's enemies in the leadership election. Unfortunately Corbyn's success in the country is closely correlated with his ability to command his MPs. Without them he will look to some like a disaster and there's nothing we can do about that. Perhaps a smoother media operation could avert some of the worst damage inflicted by resignations - but that would require much more time and resources than the team can possibly have.

This obviously brings us to the Parliamebtary Labour Party and the mainstream media. Both work through well established networks and both unconsciously reinforce an image of what is acceptable and unacceptable in politics. This is not conspiracy, but simply an outgrowth of how networks of power work. The left must understand this simple fact and be creative in how it responds. I've often felt frustrated by Team Corbyn's inability to  play the media at its own game, rather as Podemos has done in Spain (as explained in Pablo Iglesias's long form interview with the New Left Review last year). But it is worth recalling that Podemos has suffered in recent elections. There are some battles that cannot be fought through media cycles but are long term, patient affairs. Meanwhile, the Parliamentary Labour Party has been more hostile to Corbyn than many anticipated. Though many can be brought round, some will never be. But where would the Left ever find itself in more favourable circumstances? These are costly, wearisome battles - but Corbynism has no choice but to engage in them if it is to be successful in its central goal of rebuilding the labour movement. To shrug in fear would be to evacuate a historic responsibility. Corbyn is not in all ways best placed to fight all these battles. But the situation is fraught with objective contradictions that no leader could simply overcome. These are after all the dangers of wielding power and holding a position of leadership.

One stark fact emerges from the above: success for Corbynism in one area necessarily leads to setbacks elsewhere. Each of these crucial tasks exists in a relation of tension with the others. And sometimes these tensions will explode. Progress organising a grassroots movement immediately enrages Labour MPs who feel threatened by Party democracy. Dogged attacks on the Tories from the left further alienates Labour's wealthy donors and enrages the right-wing media. Time and money invested in formulating serious economic policy leaves Team Corbyn less able to prepare itself for media onslaughts. Making a rational, honest case for remaining and reforming the EU leaves Corbyn open to attacks by his MPs for not being serious about EU membership. And so on ad infinitum. This is not to say that these aims are fundamentally incompatible - only that they are made so under the present circumstances. Team Corbyn is stranded with limited resources at the head of a vast, hostile Party machinery, facing off against an equally hostile state and dodging fire from the many militarised encampments of civil society.

None of this should come as news - indeed many of us were warning of it to begin with. But at the same time none of this means Corbyn's leadership is doomed or that support is pointless. It simply means that successes are limited and provisional. As is true of all politics - just ask both David Cameron and George Osborne, whose careers have just come to a disastrous end. What's all the more surprising about this is that in September last year the whole of the British press believed they were Teflon. George Osborne was supposed to be the ultimate postmodern politician, someone for whom the brute laws of reality no longer mattered as long as he could spin a story. Well, reality caught up with them both. And the past year - since the media helped land the Tories a majority - has been an unprecedented disaster for both the Cameron leadership and the establishment media. They have called everything wrong and now they're out.

In light of all this there is something of the Freudian Super-ego about Corbynism's left-wing critics. Whilst demanding that Corbyn does better, their supposed pragmatism is used to declare the necessary failure of any political project that does not absolutely prioritise accommodation with the centre. Yet by their own definition these are impossible demands. These demands cannot be met because Corbynism's left-wing critics do not really want us to meet them.

In the face of the massive challenges to Corbynism and left-wing leadership more generally in the UK, we should not simply give up. We must instead honestly admit our defeats and build on our limited successes. Corbynism must eventually meet the historical demands placed upon it if it is to win out in the long-run. There will be setbacks in future, but as long as we are strategic that is no cause for despair.  

Brexit is a Pseudo-Event

Alain Badiou: France's most influential radical philosopher
structures his entire philosophy around a notion of the event

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's novel The Leopard, set amidst the heroic arrival of Garibaldi in Sicily and the ensuing unification of Italy, contains one of the great clichés of political reaction. "Everything needs to change so that everything can remain the same," is the assured counsel of Tancredi Falconeri, an aristocrat convert to the nationalist cause. Falconeri here gives voice to that enduring ability of the ruling class to change its stripes and adapt to new facts. No matter the epoch-shaking nature of certain events, they will only ever play into the hands of the ruling elite.

Such is the case with Brexit: despite the mounting political headcount and the seismic shock to Britain's economic and political system, the country is likely to remain firmly in the hands of its long-term political masters. A government inclined to impose authoritarian cruelty on the poor, people of colour, foreigners and women has emerged as the only available option, fronted indeed by a close ally of the former Prime Minister. Even as the Conservatives doubled-down on their immigrant-bashing (refusing to guarantee the rights of European nationals currently residing in the UK), the Chancellor announced plans to further slash corporation tax to just fifteen percent. As the long-term commitment to budgetary discipline is yet again kicked down the road, the Chancellor's emphasis was entirely on soothing the market's jitters over sterling and winning back waverers in the City. Meanwhile, Nigel Farage may have quit as leader of UKIP, but his attendance at the parties of the UK's grateful media barons will no doubt still be keenly sought. Boris Johnson managed a silence of several days before he was back in the cabinet by elite demand.

The French philosopher Alain Badiou advances the notion that some events are - despite all the outward appearance of violence - merely pseudo-events. Before we can sketch how he can make this claim, we have to quickly look at his definition of what an authentic event is. Badiou believes that each dominant "situation" (the prevailing conditions which allow being to be ordered into a world) is constituted via the exclusion of one element. Badiou refers to the much-abused but useful notion of the proletariat as the revolutionary subject, excluded from influence over the circulation of capital, as the subject whose formation intrudes on the situation of capitalism and shatters it with its demands for political representation. This shattering is what Badiou calls an authentic event. Badiou insists that mathematics is the only means by which being can be described (it's complicated) and so therefore this kind evental opening in being - in which the excluded "part of no part" intrudes into the order of being and disrupts it - is productive of truth. Authentic events produce truths - or more controversially, conditions where unflinching loyalty (what Badiou calls "fidelity") can be declared. In Badiou's understanding it is impossible to anticipate an event exactly, they simply happen and the choice is whether to dedicate oneself to the event or to turn away from it. An authentic event must propel its excluded element to a "maximal intensity of appearance" by rupturing being. In a political event, then, a group that is basically invisible or unable to create the grounds of its own visibility in the dominant order, must stake its claim.

It is this appearance of a new political subject that truly marks an event and it is this subject which names the event. There are philosophical problems with such a theory, of course, in that it makes political events purely subjective - nameable only by those who participate in the project. But it is nevertheless useful for understanding Brexit from the perspective of radical philosophy. Brexit is a pseudo-event because it does not rupture being and fails to propel any subordinate group into the limelight. As we can already see from the masses of data, no single political subject can emerge from the Brexit debacle: the very wealthy, small business owners, many petit-bourgeois, and huge swathes of the declining working class are counted among the leave data. There is no sign of some unprecedented emergence and however much commentators attempt to be shocked by the vote, it is clear that it falls into a pre-ordained, easily marked out story.

So perhaps we can adjust Lampedusa's dictum of the renascent aristocracy: "Everything must change in order that nothing new emerges." In its enthusiasm for a return to the days of grand political strategy much of the intellectual left has forgotten this kind of ontological categorisation of events. With oppositions of the left - and also the far right - forming across much of the previously moribund political terrain of the west, this return to immediate engagement with actual politics is both necessary and appealing. But we would do well to remember that the "potentials" and "possibilities" for the left that can be unpicked from the Brexit tangle are exceedingly narrow. This is not fully understood with reference to the "balance of political forces" - it has to be taken to a higher level of abstraction. Brexit cannot yield meaningful opportunities for the left because it is incapable of producing a subject which breaks with the dominant order.

Slavoj Zizek, one of Badiou's closest philosophical allies, describes the pseudo-event as an aestheticised dramatisation of the event shorn of its radical implications, and has used the rise of fascism as the best example. The discourses assembled around the Brexit vote do not present any intensification of class struggle in the left's sense but rather its displacement by racial and national tensions. Brexit even comes with its own racialised others: the usually Muslim immigrant/refugee in whose favour the cosmopolitan Brussels bunch secretly lobby. Brexit, unlike the rise of fascism, is not articulated exclusively around the rejection of the racial other. Rather it is a form of petty-bourgeois and relatively impoverished working-class nationalist reaction - but reaction nevertheless.

The idea that the left can easily exploit the ruling class divisions opened up by Brexit is highly dangerous. How then to fight the racial discourses articulated through Brexit? It is important that this fight be undertaken in a way which respects the democratic decision to leave the European Union. It is not Exit itself that the left should resent, only the manner of its undertaking and the political discourses which are articulated through it. Here, it seems to me, it is worth returning to Badiou, who argued a few years ago, in the wake of the re-election of Nicolas Sarkozy in France, that the first gesture of a radical politics must be to assert that 'there is only one world of living men and women.' This was said in the face of Sarkozy's repeated deployment of a cultural-nationalist ontology: 'we' constitute this place, and those not from here should love it or leave. "The single world of living men and women may have laws," Badiou writes, "what it cannot have is subjective or 'cultural' preconditions for existence within it - to demand that you have to be like everyone else. The single world is precisely the place where an unlimited set of differences exist. Philosophically, far from casting doubt on the unity of the world, these differences are its principle of existence." Fighting the racist or at least racialising discourses around Brexit doesn't entail fighting for EU membership. Instead we should work to consolidate that which is universal in all identities. This insistence on universality is not, Badiou argues, an argument to abolish all other particular forms of identity, but rather to supplement them with fully developed commonalities. In other words to say that from the perspective of the world "no one is illegal." Once we declare that we inhabit a shared world - a single world shared by those drowning in boats in the Mediterranean or fleeing war in Syria or languishing in camps in Calais - we can develop solidarities that are universal.    

Corbyn's Critics on the Left

The argument from Corbyn's soft supporters/soft critics about his frustrating poor performance in the media over the last nine months is an interesting one.

There are examples of Corbyn screwing up - like not going for the Tories over IDS' resignation. I'd add some sloppy tv appearances and, more importantly, his failure to rein in the right or minimise the attacks from the right.

Many of the complaints from people like Owen Jones have been nebulous, with few specifics and no concrete suggestions about how anyone could have done differently.

I wouldn't put Corbyn's limitation down to inexperience/personality but rather to style. He is clearly uncomfortable criticising individuals or channelling popular aggression. He is a conciliatory type who stresses unity and working together and though his criticisms are stinging they are often targeted at an anonymous system or at most a loose collective - "a powerful few" "the elites". He doesn't do combative. This sits badly in the Westminster "bear pit." 

Something that's has been missing is mass mobilisations - but he's been treading a careful line not trying to piss off the PLP till now.

I also don't think he's a "master strategist" in the way everyone used to call Osborne (in the end it turned out Osborne's string-pulling was farcical and the harsh economic reality of his own failures caught up with him). Corbyn is good at attacking the government, probing its weaknesses and imposing defeats on it. He's not apparently always best at spinning those victories into a media narrative.

But all of these criticisms are speculation since we simply can't see what's really going on behind the scenes: if there's frustration with him we have to remember his every act is mediatized and fed to us via the press. Do we simply project frustration with the media onto Corbyn, expecting or demanding truly superhuman feats?

On the one hand, Owen Jones wants Corbyn to lead a principled left-wing opposition doggedly attacking the Tories. On the other hand, he wants a media spectacle designed to win over the soft left and hearten the PLP. I'm not saying these two are fundamentally irreconcilable, only that - in the present circumstances - there is simply too much to be done for any leadership team to manage. 

How can you work with a group like Momentum, attend protests and strikes, fight to democratise the party and simultaneously present a friendly media face that can keep the Guardian (which has always hated him) and the Mirror on side? How can you do any of this and not alienate the PLP, thus exposing Labour's internal chaos to the public and having a negative effect on the polls?

For the moment, there's so much to do all at once and the left is so historically weak that it's impossible to expect success from Corbyn's team on all fronts at once. And the constant demand that he "do better" - as opposed to serious ideas about how to improve the operation - just plays in to the hands of his enemies on all sides.

A Radical Solution to the Labour Crisis

The centre-left and the radical left are going to have to find some way of either coexisting or cooperating. I won't rehash the terrible history of sectarianism on the left, but will just mention that the split between the German Social Democrats and the Communist Party was a clear enabling factor in the rise of Nazism.

Surveying the left across the West we find different manifestations of the same problem: a split between centrist social democrats and more radical leftists. Spain just had its second election in six months, one where the left in the form of Podemos was expected to overtake the centre-left PSOE. But unlike Pasok in Greece, Spanish social democracy is refusing to die. In the USA Bernie Sanders could not defeat Hillary Clinton, despite the broad enthusiasm, energy and grassroots funding he managed to raise.

And then there's Britain, where these two tendencies are embodied in one dysfunctional party. The broad centre-left of the Parliamentary Labour Party has struck out against the radical leadership of Jeremy Corbyn.

Both sides need to accept that they lack the popular backing and material resources to win alone. Radical support is concentrated in big cities and is often young, with some links to older workers with memories of long-dead industrial struggles. The centrists tend towards the older, wealthier working class and progressive, well established middle classes. What's missing is the classical organised working class, the disappearance of which is at the root of the split between the two sides.

While neither side can win alone, they cannot function as a single electoral party either. But if they fail to find some formula for coexistence we know the likely outcome: victory for the radical right.

So, here is a simple proposal for uniting the British left: first, radicals should support Jeremy Corbyn and encourage an open, democratic leadership election. We should do so while talking to the broad British public, promising to have our ship in order come a general election.

Secondly, we should accept it if Corbyn loses. I am inclined to resign my Labour membership in that case, but I will pledge to work in a non-sectarian way with people who remain. At the grassroots we aren't really all that intolerant. I'm sure we can continue to work across parties and outside them.

Thirdly, in the event of a Corbyn victory we should approach the centrists with a clear electoral offer: if the radical leadership loses seats at a general election, Corbyn will stand aside and, if we can, we'll field another candidate. We should also invite their input on crafting a Brexit negotiation package that will include an open immigration policy.

Fourthly, we will expand Labour involvement in anti-racism campaigns. We should devote increased funds to social inclusion and education in communities. Labour should be at the forefront of these campaigns.

And finally, if Corbyn is kept off the leadership ballot on a legal technicality, doesn't make the necessary number of MPs, or loses the election we accept it but begin work on forming a new party, which will take Corbynism out of Labour. This formation would seek to build campaigning alliances with other progressive parties and movements.

To be clear: none of the above proposals is intended as succour for those who wish to "heal the wounds in the Labour family." Instead each would allow the laying of the foundations for an eventual split. Only by formalising the de facto split which is already tearing the party apart can the two sides conceive of each other as equals - distinct sides with competing, equivalent claims that can be legitimately negotiated between. The split would in fact aid cooperation between the two sides.

The centrists could swat down each of these moves - this is after all about power. But there is little we on the left can do to alter the other side's sectarianism. We can reach out to them in full knowledge of the gravity of the situation. We may not be able to persuade them or even to function productively alongside them. But we should still try. If we are forced into fighting, we will have to do so.

The status quo is not on offer. The other side is too powerful to beat outright: they have almost all Parliamentary positions and most of the media. We have the grassroots and the (historically very weak) trade unions. We need to institutionalise our antagonisms, making explicit the two sides' goals, and finding a way to cooperate.

Allowing ourselves - the radical left - to become fully subordinated to the centrists again will only cost us in the long run. Labour will remain undemocratic and neoliberal whilst its vote shrivels further. We should seek to make the divide between the centre and the left explicit and to make it as collaborative as possible. If we can't win over Labour MPs, we should open up campaigning ground which is autonomous from the Labour Party but still willing to work with it. These ideas my be unrealistic. But the alternative is disaster guaranteed.

What the hell just happened? Or how capitalism ate democracy and what voters finally did about it

"A failed parliamentary candidate and former commodities broker with a
penchant for casual racism is now the most influential man in British politics."

More than ever, economic power seems today to have become political power, while citizens appear to be almost entirely stripped of their democratic defences and their capacity to impress upon the political economy interests and demands that are incommensurable with those of capital owners.

- Wolfgang Streeck, The Crises of Democratic Capitalism

The dam of British politics has finally broken. In the madness of these last two days the media has provided a blitz of micro-narratives portraying the movements of the rich and famous as they react to events in real time - from David Cameron's last supper in Downing Street to Boris being booed by the incandescent London mob. Meanwhile social media has formed a torrent of rage, with accusations flying between rich and poor, the educated and uneducated, and the old and young. Yet none of this captures the enormity of what has happened.

Britain's integration with the EU is at an end; the UK may be finished as a functioning entity; Scotland is on the verge of leaving and Northern Ireland might like to follow; the Tory Party is in disarray (but will most probably pull through); and the Labour Party is about to disintegrate entirely. Meanwhile, the most influential man in politics is a failed parliamentary candidate and former commodities broker with no experience of government and a penchant for casual racism. To quote the esteemed German sociologist Wolfgang Streeck the "delayed crisis of democratic capitalism" has just caught up with British politics and brought the whole thing tumbling down. Understanding why this has happened will require looking at things in the broadest possible perspective and slowly honing in on the details. Of course, the story told here cannot nearly cover that why. But we have to begin somewhere.

It starts, as with all the big stories of capitalism, with a crisis. After the Second World War the USA funded the reconstruction of both Europe and Japan along capitalist lines. That era is sometimes seen as profoundly national: nationalised industries, capital controls, and labour market regimes, with suppressed finance. But it is important to remember that this was a world system established by the many tendrils of the American state for the purposes of globalizing American power. A global system was developed after the war and then was brought down at the end of the 1960s.

The United States helped redevelop the German and Japanese economies after World War Two, only for both to catch up and threaten the US's trade position in the global economy. Under conditions of intensifying competition in the 1960s, with labour able to demand higher wages and investment reaching the limits of its ability to raise productivity, the US suddenly ended the dollar's convertibility to gold. This began a decade of volatility, crisis, and civil strife across the West. Underlying many of the West's difficulties was the end of a wave of technological innovation that had helped drive productivity rates after the Second World War and enabled rising wages and living standards.

During the 1970s the official architecture of a regime of floating exchange rates was put into place by US institutions intent on maintaining US hegemony. Simultaneous with this was the unleashing of financial markets, with the end of US exchange rate controls in 1974 and the growth of markets in new-fangled financial products like derivatives.

Meanwhile, the US had been careful to integrate the German and Japanese exporting juggernauts with regional deficit trading partners. What would become the EU started life as a series of developmental trade agreements among states flush with US cash. That cash was then used to buy American goods and the dollars were repatriated to the US in a virtuous circle. Until of course the subordinate regions caught up with US capitalism and began to outpace it, with the US eventually becoming a deficit state (that is, importing more goods than it exported).

But throughout the crisis decade of the 1970s and into the 1980s the US was preparing what Yanis Varoufakis calls the "Global Minotaur", through which the US would use the dollar's reserve currency status to maintain its capacity to run deficits and finance imports, while Wall Street collected the profits of the trillions of dollars it recycled through the financial system. It was precisely because of the crisis decade that the energetic Chairman of the Ferderal Reserve Paul Volcker was able, in the early 1980s, to finalise the new system. Since Nixon had removed the dollar peg to gold, new fiancial products and new capacities of the US state-financial nexus began to blossom. The Volcker Shock hiked interest rates, causing a rush of foreign money into the US whilst dampening domestic demand and killing off inflation. In order for the domestic economy to cope with this, wages would have to fall and so Volcker and President Reagan embarked on a campaign to crush wages and to crush the unions that had extracted so much from capital in the 1960s and 1970s.

Meanwhile, in Europe, as the economists Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin write in their book The Making of Global Capitalism, European integration underwent a new lease of life "in the context of the continuing integration of European and American capitalism." First, Europe had been bound to the US by Bretton Woods. Then for years Europe floundered through various floating or semi-fixed currency arrangements. Finally, the makings of the euro were put in place with the foundation of the European Monetary System in 1979. The US turn towards deflation was quickly emulated by European economies such as Germany, which had always been sceptical of Keynesianism, and the UK, which was undergoing a monetarist revolution under Margaret Thatcher. Only France held out, with a radical Keynesian policy which would aim to socialise key sectors of the economy. However, France's Socialist leaders U-Turned in the depths of the early-80s global recession and in the face of the extreme deflationary measures being pushed, especially by Germany, but also by countries around the world.

It was the defeat of the French Socialist government, Panitch and Gindin write, which guaranteed a neoliberal order in Europe. Politicians like Jacques Delors promised to win over Europe to socialist policies even as they imposed austerity at home. A single market for goods and capital, which failed to integrate the key domestic political struggles over distribution on which democracy relied, was doomed to become a deflationary, apolitical order. As Varoufakis argues in his book And the Weak Suffer What They Must? this was a "Europe of the governments" not a "Europe of the people." No European consciousness could be fostered in conditions where key political demands had been taken out of the realm of democracy and put in the hands of technocratic experts.

For Wolfgang Streeck, politicians must arbitrate between two constituents, whose demands are in fundamental conflict with one another: voters and the markets. Since the end of the era of high growth in the 1970s, Streeck argues, these two sets of interests have become increasingly difficult to reconcile: "More than ever, economic power seems today to have become political power, while citizens appear to be almost entirely stripped of their democratic defences and their capacity to impress upon the political economy interests and demands that are incommensurable with those of capital owners." Yet today we find desperate voters, driven to despair by the collapse of their connection to "normal" politics, taking destructive measures.

Along with this new political regime, a new labour regime was imposed, which definitively ended the era of postwar class struggle. At the same time that the European Union was ending the era of national democratic politics, neoliberalism was ending any semblance of democracy in the workplace. But whilst destructive, the Thatcher-Reagan years also created  something new and disturbing. Paul Mason writes in his book Postcapitalism, "After 1979 the workers' failure to resist allows key capitalist countries to find a solution to the crisis through lower wages and low value models of production." Although there has, since the onset of neoliberlism in the 1980s, been an amazing wave of technological innovation, labour has been so definitively smashed that capital has not been driven to adopt that technology for productivity-driving ends. Instead technological innovation has simply eliminated good jobs, thus decimating skilled, unionised sectors, and encouraging the creation of low-end, unstable jobs in the services and "servant" sector.

Neoliberalism is sometimes viewed as an ideology and sometimes as a description of real processes happening across the economy. The truth is that it's a bit of both: it is the worldview which espouses the deepening penetration of markets into every facet of life, while the market itself is depoliticised and taken out of democratic control. It legitimises the twin processes of globalization and financialization. The former requires the integration and interdependence of states; the latter that an increasing number of activities once provided by the state be provided by the market and funded by growing debt. Underlying all of these secular transformations thas been a decline in productivity, a decline in growth and a massive increase in debt.

So to the crisis of politics and political representation in a neoliberal world. When you piece together the story about the transformation of global capitalism since the crisis of the 1970s, the link between neoliberalism, globalization, and the crisis of democracy becomes obvious. The European Union's in-built hostility to democracy is closely related to its hostility towards redistributive economic policy. The EU is constitutionally sceptical of meddling by social-democratic parties. Market management should be left to the experts. Because above all the EU and the world of globalized financial flows on which capitalist profits today depend is a world of experts. It needs to be aloof in order to survive. In other words, if you go about democratizing the EU it will collapse. Almost all the economic policies the EU enshrines in its treaties - not just the regulations, but the trade liberalization, the budgetary discipline, the privatizations and the price stability - are deeply unpopular. Yet they are also permanent, forever shielded by law from democracy

But this is just a symptom of the institutional world that global capitalism has created. Because in reality the policies of the EU are no different to the policies of any UK government of the last thirty years. The crisis of British democracy is linked to the triumph of the same kind of politics: the major parties converged following the onset of neoliberalism, the representative link collapsed, and with it voter turnout. In order to escape its 1970s crisis period, capitalism had to ditch the fiery democratic politics of the postwar era altogether. But neoliberalism would of course give way to yet another crisis: in 2008 the US mortgage system collapsed. It was no surprise that in a heavily financialized system built on debt, it was subprime mortgage defaults that triggered the meltdown. Decades of financial integration left German and French banks exposed. Those banks had also funded lavish spending in the south of Europe. In 2009 the combined exposure of German banks to the Greek, Irish, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian states totalled €704 billion. These losses were quietly transferred onto the backs of the most fiscally-stressed states in Europe.

The neoliberal financial paradise - in which huge surpluses could be lent to deficit states by German banks with no social controls or democratic oversight - led directly to the debt bondage of the poorest countries in Europe. Meanwhile, the German ruling class continued to benefit, having restructured its economy and bought off its unions, imposing harsh neoliberal wage restraint to keep its exports high. Financial experts have long bemoaned the excesses of German trade surpluses - ignoring the fact that Germany is simply behaving according to neoliberal type, free of any sense of solidarity with its allies and deflationary to the core.

In Britain the only institution that rivals the European Union for lack of trust is Westminster itself - and yet a majority of people has just voted to give Westminster more powers.!people did this in the vain hope that it will improve their social standing in a world that is openly contemptuous of them. The collapse of strong political identities of either left or right under neoliberalism has left a gaping representational void. In their place often violent, but also it must be said mutually supportive, cultural identities have emerged. Politicians have spent years blaming external meddling by the EU or foreign infiltration by immigrants for the breakdown of political and economic democracy. These two have become the key obsessions of people whose access to "normal" democratic politics disintegrated decades ago.

The fragmentation of the UK is rooted deep in the historical transformation of British and European capitalism under neoliberalism. It has ended up causing a profound constitutional crisis at both the national and supra-national levels. Now that the UK is leaving the EU it is highly likely that the British state will cease to exist in its current form. The secular processes which undermined democracy and imposed neoliberalism from above, and came to a head in the form of a deep economic crisis in 2008, may well end up finishing off two unions. Within a matter of years both the European Union and the United Kingdom, along with many of the institutions and political modes of representation on which they were based, may have ceased to exist.