Accentuate the Positive

You've got to accentuate the positive

Eliminate the negative

Latch on to the affirmative

Don't mess with Mister In-Between

                  Arlen & Mercer, ‘Accentuate the Positive’ (1944)

"There is tenderness only in the coarsest demand: that no-one shall go hungry any more" – Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia (1974: 156)

In the new consumer world of the postwar era, popular culture was awash with demands to ‘accentuate the positive’ and ‘eliminate the negative.’ The world was called on to, as Monty Python satirised it, ‘always look on the bright side of life.’ We may snigger today at such unsubtle calls to positivity and productivity, but contemporary mindfulness discourse is really little more sophisticated. Are we really less naive today about the concept of positivity? Self care is based on treating and regarding oneself and others positively. Gender and body positivity both build a politics around the rejection various toxic negativities. Twitter stars like jonny sun (the misspelt ‘aliebn’ who dispenses ‘little pep talks’ on self-care to his 700,000 followers) tap into a desire for redemption from a fallen world:

‘my friend asked me if i was happy & i said i think im going to be & my friend said maybe thats the closest we'll come & maybe thats hapiness’

There is a dozy, heavily constructed naivety to these missives, as if they are someone’s impersonation of what they think a child might say. In fact, there is a whole genre of child-ventriloquising on Twitter, in which parents get to express their own liberal wish fulfilment in the form of some shit their kid says. ‘My 4 year-old just asked me...’ goes the tweet before the child reveals a youthful, egalitarian common sense. Often it involves the most anodyne forms of political mislabeling (‘man-sized tissues’) which seems calculatedly designed to unite as many people as possible in denouncing the softest possible cultural target. Positivity is, in this discourse, the source of resilience and strength, a natural fullness-of-being that our fallen political reality has somehow divorced us from and blinded us to. 

But there is also an obverse trap - the trap of a too-protesting negativity - the so-called ‘hellworld’ pose of Chapo Trap House, the leftist podcast. Here, everything is bitterly, knowingly dejected. Interestingly, both positions - either seeking the kernel of sunny redemption in the fallen world or revelling masochistically in humanity’s destructiveness - could have existed any time since the 1990s. There is something very Gen-X about knowingly misspelt words. It’s as if Kurt Cobain’s teenage diaries, emitting some black smoke from whatever attic they’ve been locked in, are still hypnotising the politics of popular culture today. 

What has become harder to sustain is a critical orientation towards the commodification of culture that does not either fully embrace the chink of light or simply give itself up to the darkness. But then that may be because of the secular crisis of critical theory itself, one stretching beyond the 1990s and back to the onset of the postwar era itself. Critical theory itself is often criticised for being overly negative, even if its greatest contemporary exponent - Habermas - is reconciled to the power of reason, consensus, democracy and - why not? - the Catholic Church. In its early days the so-called Frankfurt School could indeed be radically pessimistic, though this was as much part of its politics as its philosophy. It usually supposed that critical reason could itself escape the power of consumer culture. Only by embracing the ‘critical element’ in thought can reason escaped the instrumentalising effects of bourgeois culture, Adorno and Horkheimer argued in Dialectic of Enlightenment. At times it believed that true insight was only available in isolated moments of critical revelation, such was the all powerful effect of mass consumerism. It was natural, then, that the Frankfurt School would feel its negative method - criticism itself being a kind of proto-deconstruction - was swallowed up by the acceleration and intensification of postwar mass consumerism. 

Nevertheless, there were times when the Frankfurt School could break free of its philosophical negativity and suddenly pen the most limpid of ethical propositions:  "There is tenderness only in the coarsest demand: that no-one shall go hungry any more.” Whatever it was in the dreaded ‘system’ of critical thinking (the dialectical method and so on) which permitted such outbursts, their scope is determined by the overwhelming ambience of pessimism.  After the war, Adorno did not believe that contemporary language and thought  were capable of articulating a vision of a different society that would not reproduce capitalism’s barbarism in a different form. Thus there is only the coarse demand (perhaps unfulfillable) that no one go hungry and no grand utopian alternative.

In this piece I want to argue that the Frankfurt School was not dialectical enough in how it approached the opposition of positivity and negativity in the theory of the commodity form and the spread of commodification across society.  In the advance of the commodity, the Frankfurt School tended to see the spread a single, undifferentiated consumer culture: ‘Culture today is infecting everything with sameness,’ as Horkheimer and Adorno put it in Dialectic of Enlightenment. By believing that an undifferentiated process of commodification prevailed across modern societies, the Frankfurt School surprisingly neglected its twin, negative process of decommodification. Moreover, they sometimes mistook decommodification for the end or erasure of capital rather than as the negative moment of a higher capitalist unity. 

There are a lot of terms being bandied about here - commodity, commodification, consumer society, criticism, and so on - so I’ll attempt first to clarify the key terms.

The commodity

In Marxist terms a commodity is a good that carries a certain amount of labour value which can be realised by being sold on a market. Because it can be sold - that is, it fetches a price - it is said to have exchange value. The point that Marx made about commodities was that, despite their shiny, perfect appearance, they were in fact the product of an invisible process. The commodities that we buy are only possible as a result of a  protracted labour process along with the accumulation of past labour in the form of machinery, property and wealth in the hands of company owners. The ‘form’ of the commodity - whether it is a book, some perishable goods, or an asset-backed security - conceals the social processes that underlie it. Moreover, the labour that produces commodities under capitalism is of a particular type. The labour that goes into capitalist commodities is impersonal, separated from control and ownership of what it produces, and atomised or individualised even as it is anonymously social. Whether grouped in factories or office blocks or scattered among city streets, each worker produces not for themselves but for the market. In principle, no special social distinction guarantees any of these workers a particular role in the social order: each is in theory replaceable. 

The role of the commodity is to stand in place of these complex social processes. The commodity form has been described as a particular kind of reification or thing-ification: the commodity reduces and condenses social relations to the level of a mere thing. 

Fetishism

Commodities are invested with special properties by those who exchange them. The commodities themselves are believed to be value rather than the active or living social labour which prodduces them. Just like the sacred, ritualised totems of ‘primitive’ societies, capital, Marx argues, endows commodities with spectral qualities. If this sounds overly moralising, it can also be viewed from a structural perspective that is vital to Marx’s work. Under capitalism, Marx argued, the use value of things is transformed into a market exchange value of commodities. The market has a tendency to reduce all values to mere quantities. Thus, commodities are not expressions of human need. Instead their value is measured in terms of what they can be exchanged for, that is, other commodities.

In theory, a given quantity of one commodity can be exchanged for an equivalent quantity of any other. The universal equivalent (the commodity which is used to measure the exchangeability of all the rest) is money. Thus, money is a fetish object: it is a commodity that expresses the exchange value of other commodities. It is therefore endowed with seemingly magical qualities. What determines shifts in exchange value between commodities is not social use value, but the competitive market itself. Need is met - if at all - only once the law of profitability is fulfilled. Moreover, because of the fetish nature of money, holding money (what macroeconomics today calls ‘liquidity preference’) as a store of value can be preferable to putting it to any kind of social use. 

Thus, fetishised commodities conceal the real social processes involved in their own creation. Exchange value expressed in money subordinates social use value to the law of the market. As workers we are alienated from the products we produce insofar as we lack control and ownership over them. As consumers we fetishise commodities, entering a market of reified ‘goods’ rather than authentic human interactions. 

Critical Theory and Commodity Fetishism

Commodity fetishism became the cornerstone of critical theory in the 20th century. Frankfurt School philosophers like Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse took the theory of commodity fetishism and applied it to culture. They saw society as being increasingly infantilised by the growth of mass consumer culture. The latter produced fetishised desires for simple, mass-reproducible commodities and in the process contributed to the increasing reification of society. What the latter means is that people could no longer understand society as a set of relations between people. Instead, society was replaced by a world of things - magic objects that would supposedly fulfil various libidinal desires.

In mass culture, the Frankfurt School saw a dangerous potential for authoritarianism. The irony of the spread of bourgeois culture was that it tended to undermine the basis of its famous individualism. The era of bourgeois heroism, they believed, was long gone and it was being replaced by a consumer society that reduced the individual to a passive, desiring infant. In the aestheticisation of politics (mass rallies, heroic marches, spectacles and propaganda) that catered to consumer desire lay the seeds of fascism. 

The Frankfurt School has often been reproached for seeing the potential for fascism in everything. As Stuart Jeffries argues in his history of the Frankfurt School, this was understandable. As mostly Jewish German intellectuals, they had been forced into exile by the rise of Nazism. It was the defining political experience of their lives. It made the Frankfurt School question the possibility of meaningful change to the capitalist system. Rather than a Teutonic excess, then, fascism was a peculiar political and social pact between the far right and the industrial bourgeoisie.  

De-Commodification

Where the Frankfurt School philosophers were really mistaken was in how they thought of commodification as a wider social process under capitalism. In modern political thought there is no shortage of visions of the progressive subjection of ‘nature’ to what Max Weber called the ‘iron cage of rationality.’ The Frankfurt School embraced a version of this: commodification was always, ceaselessly expanding and subjecting anything spontaneous, creative or autonomous to its law. 

Surprisingly then the Frankfurt School was not dialectical enough in its thinking. What I mean to say here is that commodification comes twinned with its opposite: the equally pervasive phenomenon of de-commodification. In de-commodification, exchange value is removed from circulation and the commodity disappears. Consumption is one obvious example of this: when we eat, we don’t (only) consume exchange value (though what we consume is saturated with symbolic meaning). The commodities in question do at this very fundamental level disappear. They are used up, perhaps to be expended again in the form of reproduced labour power. After lunch we naturally go back to work.

But there are other processes of decommodification going on under capitalism. The market mechanism itself tends to reduce the exchange value of certain items. As supply outstrips effective demand, certain goods become quite literally unexchangeable. There is no market for them. Goods drop out of circulation, contributing to the vast, invisible underbelly of the market system - the waste system. In extreme cases firms actively destroy their own goods in order to increase their price. Improvements in technology brought about by the capitalist search for innovation can lower the production costs of commodities, capital goods, and the barrier to entry for competitors, this undermining the exchange value pf the goods they produce. A business going bust is a case of decommodification via the market. In recent times, digital technologies have threatened to thwart the price mechanism entirely by creating conditions of limitless, free reproducibility of music, TV shows, films and so on. As Paul Mason argues, there is no market price for something that is infinitely reproducible. 

De-commodification is also, at times, capitalist state policy. Since the state is concerned with administering the social conditions that allow for capital accumulation to continue on an expanded basis, at times it will threaten particular industries in order to save the whole. Not only will it allow - indeed encourage - certain businesses to go to the wall, it will also in special circumstances remove unprofitable or dysfunctional sectors from the market by nationalising them. True, it does not do this in a democratic or socialist way. But this is nevertheless a kind of decommodification which is brought about by the very process of commodification itself.

Surely, though, labour is always commodified under capitalism? Certainly in form. There is no denying that very few people exercise meaningful control over their workplace or what they do in it or what goods and services it produces. But the content of labour is not always experienced as alienated - indeed, the reproduction of capital depends on it. When care workers, nurses and doctors look after patients, they do not see them as objects. When people spend hours at work engaged in whatever mildly diverting task is at hand - improvising a way to fix a small glitch in an otherwise smooth process - they are not in the strict sense doing it for money. They are doing it because people are good at problem-solving and irresistibly stimulated by even relatively dull puzzles. This is not an apologia for wage labour. Indeed, precisely because the form of labour is alienated under capitalism, this kind of creative, purposeful application of human skill to relatively mundane tasks is a misapplication. It is in the strict sense a waste of energy.

No doubt a Frankfurt School thinker like Theodor Adorno would reject such views as positivistic in the sense that they attribute to human beings an inherent ‘nature’ which is expressed in their purposeful actions. Adorno did not see anything to be salvaged from such references to nature. While I think there is something valuable in (an admittedly anti-humanist) concept of human nature, that is really beside the point.

I do not mean to say that human nature is creative and expresses itself through labour. Nor do I think that this misapplied human skill is the basis for an emancipated, future form of human labour. Rather I simply want to draw attention to the way that commodification and de-commodification are continually intertwined under capitalism. The social organisation of labour under capital generates the possibility for decommodified working experiences even as it relentlessly commodifies labour forms.

In his book Minima Moralia Adorno writes about the intellectual who seeks to take some pleasure from his work, but is suspected of dilettantism by those who preside over the capitalist division of labour. Thus, capitalist standards of professionalism are imposed on the intellectual in an effort to subordinate the pleasure they may take in their work to a capitalistic understanding of value. Under capitalism there is a fierce policing of the separation between value-creating labour and value-consuming pleasure. The idea of labour-as-pleasure is always at some level vaguely deviant.

Yet the continued existence of the capitalist division of labour relies on a highly circumscribed, but nonetheless real, capacity for creativity and collaboration. And in that lies the source of its strength: in the form of a commodified labour process, capital is nevertheless able to draw on decommodified experience. It is undoubtedly partly parasitic on this spontaneous creative tendency, but - not to fall into a mere vitalism - it also generates certain kinds of collaborative synergy in the way it organises labour processes. Give capital its due: it unleashes, whilst still intending to control, undreamt of opportunities for social interaction. 

Even in cultural production, in the form of vintage fashion, new avenues of commodification often depend on the ability to reclaim and recycle outdated commodities. Art decommodifies by reclaiming commodities from the market and reproducing them in autonomous contexts only to return them to circulation via the art market (Marcel Duchamp's Fountain is the zenith-as-parody of this function of art in the age of mechanical reproduction). This higher sphere of commodification relies for its cache on the ability of the artist to augment existing commodity value via the imprimatur of an intangible 'creativity.' 

There is a reason that the critique of consumerism so often just looks like hypocrisy: who is really in a position to criticise the consumption of others without looking at themselves? For the hippy movement, this took the form of a retreat into nature. For the critical theorists it was a retreat into ever more alembicated negative spaces.

A de-commodified mode of production?

It is sometimes assumed that because Marxism makes the critique of the commodity form the basis of its critique of the capitalist mode of production, that socialism (or more properly communism) must be a decommodified mode of production. 

But socialism is not an antimodern asceticism, as if to renounce consumption by attacking one’s own living standards is to enact socialism in the here and now. A mode of production that relied on the decommodifying processes listed here would be self-immolating. It is also an absurdity: as we have seen decommodification is an integral part of the capitalist mode of production. It is the obverse of the supposedly ‘positive’ process of capitalist production. It is the destructive part of what Schumpeter called ‘creative destruction.’

Is it possible then to imagine a non-commodifying mode of production? We can relate this back to the question of reification. When we encounter commodities, Marx argues, we experience them as as magical objects divorced from the conditions in which they were produced. The same could be said of any process of cognition: when you look at a mountain, you don’t see it as a combination of different rock types or as the product of aeons of geological processes. The result of a truly non-reifying act of cognition would be an infinite regression: the mountain would break into its constitutive components and processes and those in turn would be broken up in a kind of schizoid deconstruction.  

We are not going to solve the question of socialism here obviously, but it is worth pointing out that socialism is not merely the destruction of capitalist forms of value nor the closure of the avenues of value augmentation that capitalism thrives on. Rather, it is its supplementation with other, non-commodifying forms of social production. Just as we can’t approach mountains as complex geological processes, it is impossible to imagine an advanced society that does not involve forms of commodification. Nor should all consumption be moralistically and ascetically frowned on (this too, in the Protestant work ethic and the compulsion to save, is itself part of capitalism). But there are many sectors of the economy - care work for example - which already lend themselves to the absence of the commodity form and its replacement by collective, democratic, unalienated forms of collaborative labour. In the conscious regulation of the workplace through democratic means the whole is substituted for the part: we come to see and participate in work as a contributor to its totality rather than as atomised individuals. This noncommodified type of social labour is not simply the obliteration of capitalist commodification. Rather, it builds alternative layers of social relations on top of existing capitalist social ones. 

What this doesn’t mean is that socialism is intent on destroying all semblance of the capitalist division of labour or advanced commodity production or any form of market exchange or the enjoyment of branded goods. These are, at best, ecological utopias, utopias of stringency, asceticism, 'detox' culture and recourse to a spurious natural harmony. At worst, anti-consumerism is a kind of austerity politics – the tightening of the collective belt to stave of the ills brought on by 'overconsumption'. Today, calitalism commodifies decommodification.  Socialism merely wagers that a democratised industrial apparatus would be quicker to embrace ecological sustainability and efficiency than private monopoly control of the means of production. See, for example, the celebrated Cleveland and Preston models for really existing variants of this augmentation of the commodity form with cooperative forms of labour and finance. Socialism is not a bar to development - capitalism places its own limits on that.

Whereas the postwar generation were told to 'get happy' and to 'pack up their troubles', we are asked today to believe that happiness is only available in fleeting moments, in solitude and seclusion, in detox and retreat from the irredeemable poisonousness of modern life. Recall jonny sun's advice: 'maybe thats happyness and thats the closest we'll get.' The attempt to escape negativity through self-mastery is becoming a new kind of capitalist asceticism. It is a parodic reversion to a more authoritarian age: the total administration of the self by means of the body. This new cultural austerity seeks to liberate the subject through disavowal and self-denial. It is a mode of salvation as old as Protestantism. It promises a space outside of commodification that is just as commodified as more obvious forms of consumption.

Against this political quietism, the socialist response should be a resolute commitment to forms of collective joy and communal luxury.

It is at once boring and extraordinary to have to say this: we live in a world of unprecedented and accelerating destruction.

The scale of this destruction is not an accident of nature, not something that ‘would have happened anyway.’ It is the result of clearly identifiable characteristics of the society that we currently inhabit: a social division of labour that places unprecedented power and wealth in the hands of a few. The organisation of social production in this society, based on a principle of existential competition as well as accumulation, allows for an ever more sophisticated level of technical and technological exploitation of both humanity and the planet’s natural resources. 

The name of this society that is structurally compelled to rush continuously forward, ripping apart the foundations of any kind of socially just or ecologically sustainable way of life, is capitalism.

Capitalism gave you the conquest of the Third World, the Atlantic slave trade, the various genocides in the Americas, colonialism, imperialism, the scramble for Africa, Indian famines, the First and Second World Wars, Apartheid, segregation, and climate change. It helps foster the countless fascisms that emerge constantly around the world to crush the socialist movements that attempt to fight it. 

The relative prosperity of a few in the global north is based on the subjugation of the vast majority of the global population. For the rich, the rest of the world, its resources, societies and cultures, exist purely to be used up and exhausted.

The unparalleled destructiveness of the society in which we live is without question. Identifying the cause of this destructiveness is also easy enough: the nature of the competitive, capitalist social relations which necessitate and drive forward expanded accumulation and commodification.

There have been various attempts by mass, working class movements to place an emergency brake on this ceaseless forward movement. The danger of such attempts has been in their inability to build an equally advanced alternative to the supple, adaptive social relations that underpin capitalism’s technological growth. These attempts have often been unsuccessful. They have resulted in crippling economic crisis, political violence, inefficiency and administrative rigidity. But it remains an indisputable fact that these disasters for socialism have been no worse than the alternative. 

None of these disasters affect the fundamental fact that the society we currently live in is rapidly exhausting the possibilities for the majority of people to have a reasonable quality of life.

Yes, capitalism under certain conditions - flanked by an interventionist state and a powerful workers movement - facilitates productivity growth. This is its sole, narrow contribution to human welfare. Everything else is either directly negative or has indirect negative consequences. 

Those who want to claim that there is some essential connection between capitalism and democracy are being proved wrong by the increasing threat to democracy that has spread alongside intensified, global capitalist social relations. Liberal political regimes, constitutionalism, various forms of republicanism and federalism - these forms of government, which emerged in the west with the spread of capitalism, certainly provided an opening to movements led by workers which demanded and helped institute electoral democracy. That is not the only route to democracy and nor is the continued existence of democracy reliant on the economic and social relations of capital. 

There must be an alternative to this for the simple reason that we cannot survive if things go on as they are. The wager that we can build an alternative is based on the diversity of ways people have lived and - in part - on the admitted complexity of social organisation permitted by capitalism. A democratic, socially controlled economy that replaced capitalism would put an end to production for the sake of private accumulation and place it at the service of the vast majority. Yes, there are risks. To continue as we are is worse. 

It cannot de said often enough: capitalism must end - we have no choice. Socialism must win - we have no choice.

  

What do the humanities do?

Walter Benjamin: 'Homogeneous, empty time'

I remember once using the toilet at the Sussex University library and seeing, in the cubicle, etched onto a toilet paper dispenser, the legend 'Pull here for humanities degrees.' It even had a helpful arrow to the point where the last sheet of loo roll hung just below the plastic of the dispenser. I remember thinking that this was quite funny, not least because I suspected it had been written by a humanities undergraduate (everyone knows scientists have no sense of humour).

Me and my friends spent a lot of time groaning about the perceived excesses of university humanities courses, again because we all knew them firsthand. There was a lot to be frustrated by. For some of us on literature courses, there was the cold shock of being asked to read Althusser's paper on 'Ideological State Apparatuses' in our first term of undergraduate study. For leftists there was the unceasing abstraction of so much theory; for my centrist, liberal friends there was the seemingly uniform left-wing militancy of the faculty staff to rebel against. I was still politically ill-defined and found a kind of deconstructivist, post-nineties common sense quite amenable to my own lack of serious commitment (not that I had read any Derrida). There was a fairly conservative streak in us - probably a result of an extended adolescence - that felt we were being taught to critique the greats before we had actually read them. I'd like to say I was studiously, cultivatedly lazy, but I was just lazy. One of the myths I endorsed to justify this was that there was no real value to what I was studying. I felt, in a vaguely limp, social-democratic way, that the state had to do some unvaluable things, but value-creation was entirely a function of the private sector. Society had been kind enough to invent this useless thing called the humanities, which was patronised by a benevolent state, and into which I could uselessly slot with very little effort.

There was certainly a smugness to what would now be called the 'campus left'. White people with dreads would lecture other students around campfires on the ills of a commodified culture. The bland anti-advertising sloganeering of Adbusters was a popular read among a certain group of middle-class hippy ravers. Those who had been on gap years made less worldly types - people like me - feel unadventurous, petty-bourgeois, and boring. There was a tendency to denounce all the trappings of modern civilisation and advance only an austere environmentalism in its place (save for the excessive amounts of drugs and alcohol). It probably won't be very persuasive, coming from someone now on the organised left, to say that I think the culture of the left has since improved. But the anti-globalisation left had a lot to say about the wrongness of the world and offered little by way of an alternative. Many who felt estranged by this anti-consumerist moralism felt, rightly or wrongly, that academia itself was doing little to correct this misdirected anger.

Then the financial crash happened. With the recession, applications for humanities courses began to drop. Recently the same trend has been showing in students' A-level choices. The pre-recession 'good times' (the age when top up fees only went as high as £3,000 per year) were not to last. I found myself newly graduated and unable to get a job that would give me regular hours. I was unemployed for a while, then got a part-time job in a pub kitchen and wound up deep in an overdraft that a recently bailed out bank set about trying to claw back off me. The Daily Telegraph intoned its approval of a drop in applications to all courses: universities were, the paper said, 'no longer preparing our children for work.' The especially melodramatic tone and vaguely creepy, proprietary language ('our children') aside, various forms of this argument can be found across the contemporary media. One Guardian contributor recently argued for an outright cap on student numbers. Given that in the same article the author (herself an Oxford PPE graduate) accepts the need for more science students, it's pretty clear which student numbers need to fall. Under the Tory-Lib Dem coalition government that took power in the wake of the recession and embarked on a seemingly endless programme of austerity cuts and restructuring of the public sector, Education Secretary Michael Gove made a point of going after history teachers who teach World War I 'through the medium of Blackadder.' This rather baffling non-sequitur was more than just a play on the old Tory myth of a malign, lefty culture in schools. It was based on a philosophy that academic navel-gazing - that introspective and critical approaches to culture and history - were inherently a waste of time. The humanities should, the coalition believed, be put in the service of patriotic duty and national memory-making. Still, these reforms did not spring up out of nowhere. 'Those who can't do, teach,' as I was told by various smirking men when I informed them that my mum was a teacher. That culture of usefulness - which defines usefulness exclusively in terms of what the private sector can value at a certain price - that underlies a great deal of spontaneous common sense in the UK would become a strand of the new rigour of the early 2010s. Everyone was supposed to knuckle down, not get any fancy ideas, and just get through it (whatever it was it never seemed to end).

It is quite clear to me that I have internalised some of this. I have just finished a part-time MA but filled much of it reading macroeconomics and political science and learning German in an attempt to validate what I was doing. During my masters I read a book I didn't like very much called The Romantic Economist. The author is Richard Bronk and he sets out to prove to the world that romanticism - the irrational, the passionate, the emotional and idiosyncratic - has some real use to science. But any attempt to redeem the arts and humanities with reference to science has already failed, already accepted its role as second fiddle. In this synthesis, the critique of rationalism becomes the somewhat reticent compliment to the real stuff of hard, scientific inquiry. It is not hard to imagine economists nodding at such a book and promising to store up some of its value and then promptly shelving it. It is like the King's disagreeable, counterintuitive counsel. Examples of this tendency on the part of philosophy, critical theory and the arts are surprisingly common. Exiled members of the Frankfurt School worked for the precursor to the CIA and later helped US authorities define the 'authoritarian personality'. The surrealists and poets of Britain's Mass-Observation project helped in the domestic propaganda effort of World War II. Paul Ricoeur has provided philosophical tutelage to the likes of Emmanuel Macron. This is not to argue that theory would do better to shield itself from the real world, any more than 'practical men' can avoid the haunting of academic scribblers, to paraphrase Keynes.

The error is rather the view that science is theory-free - or value-free- and that its objectivity is not the result of prior theoretical parsing. But what capital wants is a form of thought without theory. It wants to automatize thinking so that it does not acquire the lumpy, human deviations and deformities of thought. That said, in a world where such a tediously unoriginal politician as Emmanuel Macron can be celebrated as 'philosopher and president', one may be led doubt the value of the label at all. None of this is to say, in the parlance of a much-maligned though rarely endorsed 'postmodernism', that there are no such things as empirical facts. Rather, there are facts and there is a complex, irreducible, objective reality. This is precisely why we need theory - contesting theories - to map it. Moreover, there needs to be some philosophy which is independent and non-commodified, not subject to the utilitarianising impetus of profit (no easy feat when Waterstones markets philosophy as 'Smart Thinking').

For a long time there has been an attempt on the part of the hard sciences to prove the phonyism of the arts. The Sokal affair saw a quantum physicist game the academic publishing industry by inserting a nonsense 'deconstruction of quantum gravity' into a respectable journal. More recently, a group of writers embarked on a year-long campaign to insert ridiculous, 'unscientific' articles - with a weirdly obsessive focus on gender studies - into various academic journals. It was widely agreed by papers like the Wall Street Journal that 'something has gone wrong in the humanities.' The unscientific nature of the hoax aside, it is obviously not the case that literary journals should aim for the same kind of rigour as, say, physics journals. Many of the most damning criticisms directed at the social science journals implicated in the hoax were aimed at its shonky grasp of methodology. The likes of sociology may perhaps suffer from a clumsy over-reliance on dubious empirical research methods to validate its theories. However, fudged data and dodgy research are hardly the preserve of gender studies alone. The economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff famously published a paper which claimed to prove that high government debt slowed growth. The paper played an important role in legitimising the austerity turn of the early 2010s. But it turned out that the economists had fudged their numbers. So, the supposed cold, hard science of neoclassical economics - which prizes itself on its combination of mathematical precision, rationality, and consideration of 'real' economic factors - is not without its profoundly damaging methodological and research scandals.

This is not to say that there aren't major issues with academia. How could there not be? Its ongoing privatisation; the individualisation of study and the restriction of public funding sources; the problematic research-competitive funding structure; the opaque process of research candidate selection; the unrepresentative, very middle class, and white character of most academic staff - all are cause for concern. But the idea that academia can be depoliticised by the implementation of more rigorous research standards is a red herring. First of all, it is clearly a category error to insist that philosophical, cultural or historical studies be held to the same statistical and quantitative research standards as other, more 'scientific' disciplines. But even in the hard and soft sciences, things are not as simple as they might seem. Oversight is clearly deeply important to ensure the greatest neutrality in findings. But analysis and indeed motivation will always have a political edge to it. Making such political motives more transparent is important. But perhaps the best way to ensure a fool-proof system is to make readers more aware of what quality research looks like and to teach them to spot concealed political bias.

Critical theory has lately been subject to another, more physical assault. When the far-right mass murderer Anders Breivik slaughtered 69 adults and children on the Norwegian island of Utoya in 2011, he did so in defence of an image of European whiteness and purity which he believed had been sullied by the influence of so-called 'Cultural Marxism'. The latter is supposed to originate from the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, which was home to Jewish Marxist intellectuals throughout the 20th century. Forced to emigrate to the USA by the rise of Nazism, it is believed by many on the contemporary far right that their advocacy of various 'grievances' (class, race, gender, and so on) was so successful that it infected western societies in a way that would eventually bring about their downfall. It takes a very bizarre leap of the imagination to view the hyper-accelerated consumer culture in which we live - and which the Frankfurt School did so much to critique - as a product of their pointedly abstruse, inaccessible theorising. What a great deal of the far right's conspiracy theorising is based around, however, is a desire to revive a certain kind of macho, unrestrained white heroism that has indeed been overtaken by the constant social convulsions of a restless consumer capitalism. Indeed, Adorno's controversial F-Scale for diagnosing authoritarian personality types has found renewed relevance in today's world.

It may not be a leap too far to suggest that the worship of a certain kind of reified scientific discourse is a sublimated desire for renewed authority. This desire is expressed in the form of an image of an all-consuming, all-encompassing, irresistible force of nature. There is, after all, a popular Facebook page called 'I Fucking Love Science' (it currently has 25 million likes). Could there be a clearer demonstration of the libidinal desire for an all-powerful, unchanging natural will than this? Of course, in this context it would never be enough to say, modestly, 'I respect and appreciate the findings of empirical science' (it wouldn't get the likes for a start). Yet, is the fucking doing some specific discursive work here? Enjoyably for a Freudian, the 'I Fucking Love Science' feed is full of stories about farts, fertility, and faeces. There are copious articles about virility, female orgasms, and successful love lives. Yet its hackneyed glimpses of the natural sublime ('We've finally discovered what it's like at the centre of the Earth') are tempered by an awe at human inventiveness ('Watch as NASA cools down a launch platform with 400,000 tonnes of water'). Science then - the weird, amorphous object that unites studies of penis length with the behaviour of pandas, top tips for professional success with energy policy - is the symbolic quilting point (point de capiton in Lacanian psychoanalysis) which coordinates and directs force per se. Force here can be conceived, obviously, as potency, as will, as a romantic kind of consummating energy. Science is, in this popular discourse, the harnessing of natural force through technique. It's like drinking the magic fertility or - perhaps - virility potion; the key to success and the final authority in human and natural life.

I won't be the first to say that there is something proto-fascistic about this fantasmatic desire for untethered natural force, for the pure will. Of course, you may be convinced by this argument or - as is probably the case - you might suspect me of harbouring my own bizarre perversions. But there can be no doubting the existence of 'perversions', of what Freudians call 'libidinal cathexis' (or investment). Indeed, there can be no understanding of politics without over-identifications and over-determinations, both of which point to a certain interpretive complexity. While evidence for such types of libidinal investments can be captured in statistics, in quantitative as well as qualitative research, they are not simply there. There is a necessary degree of theorisation involved in explicating them that is not the case (for most people) in identifying the presence of an unworn, discarded shoe on the landing floor. The multiple determinations of a particular social phenomenon - by brute materiality, but also by discourse, by unconscious desire, and by reflexive knowledge - come into view here. Value neutrality in the sciences - the claim that facts can be used to test deductive theories and disprove them in a way that does not generate truth claims or involve political motives - is a false idol. There may of course be certain kinds of scientific discourse that exist in a less immediate relationship to the political than, say, sociology or economics. The point, however, is that proximity to the political does not necessarily deligitimise a scientific argument. This is not a call to abandon rigorous research methods in cases where they are appropriate. I am simply saying that an acknowledgement of the always-political character and implications of research can bolster reliability rather than detract from it. Or, to the extent that politics is excluded from research, this gesture is acknowledged for what it is: a simplifying assumption to allow for certain things to be measured and not others.

One of the best things about critical theory is its power to unveil in a new light social things that were previously taken for granted. Memory is one such thing. Perhaps the most widely-read and celebrated of 20th century critical theorists was Walter Benjamin. So we'll take one of Benjamin's own reflections on memory from his autobiographical sketch Berliner Kindheit um Neunzehnhundert (Berlin Childhood around 1900). This deeply melancholic reflection on a German-Jewish diasporic youth - irretrievably lost through the destructive rise of Nazism - puts into action Benjamin's philosophical belief that the past could contain the seed of the salvation (Erlösung) of the present. For all the coddling, bourgeois comforts of Benjamin's childhood, it is clear that the loss of prosperity is more than just a material loss. Instead it is the loss of a specific wellspring of familial strength. Benjamin may have been locked in a permanent Freudian war with his prosperous, bourgeois father, yet it is clear that his memoirs are a way of maintaining a not uncritical relation to this vanquished past. In the process, Benjamin sketches a social function of memory. In the occasional, careful detail, Benjamin's memories elaborate the social trappings of the German-Jewish bourgeoisie and the political complacency which allowed it to ignore the rumblings of fascism.

In one vignette we find Benjamin at the age of eight or nine playing in the wilderness of the garden at his family's summer house as one of his maids stands at the gate (eins unserer Mädchen steht noch eine Weile am Gittertor). This static, dreamlike image of the maid - no doubt a servant transported from Berlin to the family's Babelsberg retreat - is cut through with another, even earlier memory, this time of an actual dream. Benjamin had kept the past night's dream secret (geheimnis) all day, perhaps because of the vaguely scandalous content. In the dream a ghostly apparition (ein Gespenst) had appeared in front of him and had stood before an altered version of a corner of the room in which his parents slept. The corner was transfigured from its usual brightness into one of immeasurable darkness and sinister energy. The ghost had found its way to the place where his mother stored a profusion of knick-knacks and minor treasures - an array of silks and fancy dresses and jewellery - and was stealing them. Benjamin, it must be said, was quite obsessed with such objects. They held for him a weird power to unlock the past. Vanquished commodities revealed an image of what people had fleetingly loved and discarded. The meaning of the dream is only revealed the following night. Then, his parents come into his room in order to avoid a many-headed gang (eine vielköpfige Verbrecherbande) that is now robbing the house for real. The house was stripped. The vignette ends with Benjamin implying that the working-class servant girl had let the marauders into the house, while he is left with a sense that his secret damned his family to the robbery.

Benjamin believed that the meaning of the past could sometimes only be revealed by its encounter with the present, or in other words that the significance of past events was not in the events themselves but in their recollection. He argued against a concept of history based on 'homogeneous and empty time' (homogene und leere Zeit) and for one that was fulfilled in the 'here and now' (Jetztzeit). Recovering the past for the purposes of the present was like a 'tiger leap' (Tigersprung) into the past. In the vignettes of his childhood memoirs, Benjamin exercises a series of memory-shifts in order to uncover the past: there are, existing in seeming simultaneity, the evening games outside the summer house; the dream of the ghost; the night of the robbery; and the morning after, all presented at once. And running through it we have the various mysteries of the family's precious objects - the lost commodities - which are now no longer recoverable. If it was Benjamin's ambition to recover the past for the services of the present, that which is unrecoverable - the family's wealth and comfort of the pre-War era - becomes particularly painful. Lurking in the story is the reality of social class, the frail security of commercial wealth, and the looming spectre of a present in which Jewish property could be legally ransacked. This partial recovery of the objects of bourgeois social life - the silks and other trinkets stolen by night - serves as a reminder of the way in which capitalist society gives and takes away with equal speed. What emerges is a world that seems at once secure and permanent - the complacent world of a childhood lived in bourgeois comfort - and terribly transient.

The concept of homogeneous, empty time implies, as if often said, a certain kind of bourgeois linearity. In the context of a text that is partly a critique of progress (Fortschritt) as a destructive force that obliterates the past, it could seem that this is merely a critique of the way in which events are chronologically ordered by Whiggish history. But this is not a Heideggerian elegy for man's thrownness (Dasein) into the world or his alienation from his real being. Rather, a concept of homogeneous, empty time implies not succession but synchronicity in space. It is as if, from the perspective of bourgeois society and bourgeois science specifically, time becomes analogous to space. This is a concept of time that lacks historicity - historical value - at all. In this concept of time, any event could feasibly have taken place at any moment. Each moment is exchangeable for another since in the end the determining factor in human behaviour is not history but nature. Think, for example, of the static equilibria - adapted from an outmoded 19th century physics - of neoclassical economics. In these models, quantitative factors (prices) determine that over the course of time, things will revert to how they were. The market will clear. Prices will adjust to a new set of signals. It is no surprise, then, that the models deployed in neoclassical economics - the IS-LM graph, the Phillips Curve - are spatial rather than temporal models. They represent back and forth shifts in quantities rather than trends over time. What Benjamin is trying to redeem (erlösen) is the singularity of the past, its unrecoverability. In the fact that what happened then could not in fact happen again now, Benjamin offers us a stark reminder that society cannot be reduced to the scientific world of abstract models and behaviour patterns. By recalling the qualitative difference of the past, a qualitatively different - and better - future becomes imaginable.

Aufstehen: Authentocrats on the German Left

In Germany, a precautionary tale: earlier this year, veterans of the German left set up a new, supposedly ‘grassroots’ movement called Aufstehen (Rise Up). Its aim was to bolster the left and to move the national conversation onto Germany’s underlying social issues like low pay, austerity in public services, and inequality. 

‘Aufstehen is a social and democratic movement for renewal (Erneuerungsbewegung),’ its website declares, adopting some of the anti-ideological post-leftish vocabulary of populism. They are not seeking to become a party, but ‘etwas Neues... eine Bewegung für alle, die gemeinsam für unsere Ziele kämpfen wollen.’ That is, something ‘new’ - a movement which collectively can fight for ‘our aims’. These aims are all honourable and trade heavily on what die Linke (hitherto the dominant party of the radical left in Germany) specialises in: a group of themes around ‘soziale Gerechtigkeit’ (roughly, social justice) in the form of better pay, public services, housing, gender and racial equality.

Aufstehen attracted support from leftward intellectuals like the sociologist and economist Wolfgang Streeck, whose public spats with ‘cosmopolitan’ intellectuals like Jurgen Habermas have raised the question of left-euroscepticism in Germany. It was co-founded by the former SPD Finance Minister and ex-Linke leader Oskar Lafontaine, who has participated in debates around the deflationary effect of the euro on the European economy as well as Germany’s own economic imbalances. His ally, Heiner Flassbeck, co-authored a book arguing for the end of the single currency and a revival of national-democratic Keynesianism. There is, to be sure, some promise in the revival of a kind of macroeconomic ambition on the European left that is not afraid to propose far-reaching reforms to the EU. Even better if it can root itself in a mass membership ‘social movement’ (or Sammlungsbewegung as Aufstehen styles itself). 

However, in its desire to short circuit the dynamism of Germany’s far-right, it has made disastrous decisions on the question of migration policy and international solidarity. Lafontaine’s express goal in setting up Aufstehen was to steal votes from the far-right Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD). As he put it, he wanted the movement ‘prevent’ (verhindern) further growth of the AfD essentially by foreclosing the issue of migration. How would it do this? Not by insisting on solidarity as an inalienable principle, but calling for a limit to migrant numbers into Germany. Migration, he argued increased competition for wages (Lohn) and rent (Miet). As die Welt put it, ‘Er gehe davon aus, dass die AfD geschwächt werde, wenn der Zuzug beschränkt werde.’ (The AfD would be weakened if the influx was slowed down). 

All of this puts Aufstehen in a peculiar position. By wanting to reach out to the largest swathe of the population, it is triangulating to the right on immigration. The bland language of its website and its supposedly ‘common sense’ approach to the issue of the migrant ‘influx’ suggests more than a hint of cynicism. As has been widely argued, migration has little impact on working class income. Open borders are, even at a purely utilitarian level, good for public budgets. Germany has an ageing population and it needs people to arrive to fill its jobs and skills gaps. The chaos and misery caused by Merkel’s shifting Fluchtlingspolitik (refugee policy) should have been exploited by the German left. Yet, Aufstehen has positioned itself rhetorically to the right of Merkel’s CDU on the issue. 

In its recourse to a revival of the democratic polity against the greed of the markets (drawing distantly on Streeck’s opposition of Staatsvolk and Marktsvolk), Aufstehen has closed off the opportunity for a left populism that would articulate itself around class rather than the nation state. The typical left argument - that working class people have more in common with each other than with national elites, whatever their passport says - if you simply want to defend national democracy. It is a strangely rhetorical positioning: when Lafontaine makes such arguments, it is not clear even he believes what he is saying. Instead it is merely meant to signal ‘toughness’ and ‘understanding’ on borders. Joe Kennedy has called this type of gesture one of ‘authentocracy’. In its attempt to ‘understand’ the ‘concerns’ of ‘real’ people, it reduces the complexities of class society to a simple opposition between authentic, common sense, real life and the inauthentic, exotic, cosmopolitan world of the academic left. 

Die Linke has, it’s true, been struggling in recent years to cut through to the German electorate, despite the woes of the German centre-left SPD. Divides in its leadership over strategy and over message have hampered it. In its pursuit of coalition government with the SPD, it hasn’t been radical enough. Its loss of some votes to the AfD in the former east Germany has propelled the ascent of Sahra Wagenknecht’s anti-migration politics. Precosely when it should be holding the line against racist ‘solutions’ to Germany’s social problems, it is fatally weakened. Aufstehen looks like a symptom of this weakness, an offshoot of its general incapacity to articulate popular discontent to radical ends. It is a worrying example of what an organisation like Momentum could become if it is not held to account by anti-racist groups.

Last week a genuinely large, if inchoate protest hot the streets of Berlin under the slogan Unteilbar (Indivisble). Up to a quarter of a million people demonstrated against racism and the exclusion of migrants and refugees from civic life. The protest was no doubt fuelled by a series of violent mobilisations in Chemnitz by a nascent neo-fascist movement. It came on the back of a series of mobilisations across the country under the slogan ‘Wir send mehr’ (We are more), which attempted to highlight the minority status of far-right opinion in the country. Wagenknecht’s reaction to the huge Unteilbar demonstration was to question the demand issued by some for ‘open borders’. She said: ‘Wenn wir über ,offene Grenzen für alle' reden, ist das eine Forderung, die die meisten Menschen als irreal und völlig weltfremd empfinden und damit ja auch recht haben." Here then was the perfect example of a politician -deeply immersed in the antiracist traditions of the left, no less - treating a huge mobilisation of anti-racist opinion as an extreme, alien, minority hobbyhorse. Most people, she said, would see the talk of open border as ‘unrealistic’ (irreal) and ‘completely unworldly’ (vollig weltfremd). Wagenknecht was seeking to contrast the ‘moderate’, ‘realistic’ view that borders should be strictly policed and migrant numbers forcibly limited with the ‘extreme’, ‘unworldly’ idea that border policy could be humane and welcoming. This, obviously, is a deeply depressing spectacle.

The evidence is also that it won’t pay off. As support for a tired CDU-SPD governing coalition falters, support for the AfD remains undimmed. While the beneficiary of an upsurge of open, tolerant pro-migrant sentiment has not been the left, but the liberal Greens. Polls now shows die Grunen in second place behind the CDU nationally, which is backed up by very impressive results in Munich in the Bavarian local elections in October. The German left has rendered itself incapable of mobilising a similar demographic upswing in its eastern heartlands by triangulating to the right. Where it goes from here depends to some degree on how it taps into the Unteilbar demonstrations. To its credit die Linke itself has been fully supportive. If it wants to avoid further marginalisation, it should make a break with Wagenknecht and the hopeless pursuit of anti-immigrant sentiment. 

How Rotten Deals Are Done

After the nightmarish Euro Summit talks between the leaders of the Greek government and representatives of its creditors on the 12^th July 2015, a seven-page document emerged that outlined the price of Greece’s future as a eurozone member: the Syriza government’s ‘red lines’ on pension, VAT and privatisations would be trashed, deeper austerity would be introduced, and the government would have to create a €50 billion fund which would channel the proceeds of privatisations towards its loan repayments and the recapitalisation of its now-bankrupt banks. The contents were a democratic scandal, especially given the government’s recent victory in a referendum which rejected the creditors’ bailout terms. The Greek authorities were now obliged to ‘legislate without delay’ - and so they did.

Two votes were held in the Greek Parliament – one on 15^th and the other on 22^nd July – which passed the so-called ‘prior actions’ in full. The government and its creditors had worked quite successfully together to make speed the enemy of dissent. In a total of ten days, the bulk of Greece’s public sector assets had been mandated for privatisation. Moreover, a left-majority parliament had somehow passed the largest austerity commitments in the country’s history. In the two votes, Syriza left-wingers and some moderate dissenters voted against the deal (39 and 36 deputies respectively), but that was not enough to prevent the package passing with opposition support. By holding the votes at the earliest possible date, the government and its creditors had ensured that the measures would receive the least possible scrutiny. The deadlines also left very little time for dissent of either left or right to really organise itself. For their part, the Syriza left were disoriented by the speed with which the successful referendum result had been converted into enthusiastic support for austerity by the Tsipras leadership.

The new laws did eventually split the party, with the Left Platform breaking away from Syriza to form the ill-fated new party, Popular Unity. At exactly the point of the breakaway’s formation, however, Tsipras pulled the same stunt again: not wanting formal opposition to emerge to his left, he called a snap election with just six weeks’ notice. Popular Unity was still-born. Syriza was re-elected on a wave of popular abstention. It was a grim denouement to a tumultuous nine months of ‘radical left’ government.

There are not many similarities between this and the British case: Greece wanted to remain a eurozone member but renegotiate some of its prior bailout commitments. The British government, on the other hand, wants to negotiate exit from the EU on relatively favourable terms. The structural position of the UK is very different to that of Greece, not least in terms of its currency arrangements. The Brexit negotiations now pivot on a matter of geopolitics – the Irish border question – that was entirely absent in the Greek case. Nevertheless, the story of Syriza’s capitulation in 2015 is a good example of how rotten deals are done.

Reports have recently surfaced that Theresa May is hoping to rely on opposition votes to pass her own deal. The bait here is naturally different to that of the Greek deal: some leave-supporting Labour MPs will see May’s deal as the only way to secure Brexit, while some Remainers way even see it as preferable to a hard Brexit. Her gambit is likely to be similar to Tsipras’s: that she can secure an outline of a deal at such a late date, and with a no deal exit looming so close, that many unsympathetic MPs feel obliged to vote with her. If she can rush the vote, she can avoid a protracted build up of opposition on her own benches and avert some defections. The government will be hoping to once again make speed the enemy of dissent. This may sound ironic-bordering-on-the-absurd, given the length of the fruitless negotiations to date, but the key decisions are all yet to happen. The news now is that leaders of the EU27 have decided to shelve the November Brexit summit that was supposed mark a turning point in the negotiations. This may, perversely, work to May’s advantage. The incompetence and failure of the government may not be ‘deliberate’ in any obvious sense, but in the final weeks of the negotiations the lack of progress – of concrete shape to the deal – will be the one card they hold.

If a deal emerges at the last minute, what will it look like? You can expect a ‘fudge’, but that doesn’t tell anyone anything. A fudge will conceal a certain balance of interests. My feeling is that the EU and UK government will reach some kind of ugly last minute compromise on the question of the backstop for Northern Ireland (a way of avoiding trade disruption between Irish Republic and Northern Ireland in the event of stalling transition or a no deal Brexit ). Extensive recourse to legal and technical contortions (‘a backstop to the backstop’) aside, what will it all mean? Right now the DUP doesn’t want any form of backstop or backstop-to-the-backstop that will only apply to Northern Ireland (thus imposing some kind of customs border between NI and the UK). Theresa May doesn’t want that either and needs the DUP’s support. It’s unlikely that the Irish Republic would support the kind of exit that would see a hard border imposed between it and Northern Ireland because of the way it would jeopardise the Good Friday Agreement (which is one of the things that makes a backstop so important). Because of May’s abhorrence of a customs border in the Irish Sea (basically partitioning the UK), she is now seeking temporary customs union membership for the entire UK as an alternative to a NI-only backstop. Michel Barnier, the EU’s Chief Negotiator, has said he wants to ‘de-dramatise’ the Irish border question by avoiding actual border checks while ensuring that the backstop only applies to Ireland. Tory Brexiters who will be crucial in getting the plan through the Commons don’t want an indefinite commitment to remain in the UK after the transition because Customs Union membership means no new trade deals with states outside the EU. It may be the case that the EU can be persuaded to accept some formal commitment to the temporary UK customs membership ending at an unspecified definite point. It may also be the case that some Brexiters can be bought off by May’s assurances that the UK will definitely leave the Customs Union even if she ultimately gets no formal date. Of particular significance will be May’s few key Leaver allies – people like Michael Gove, who has argued that any deal will be up for some sort of later revision – in encouraging pro-Brexit Tory MPs that this is the only way they can get Brexit done and is only for the short term. It won’t convince everyone, but it may work for some.

If all this sounds confusing, that also works in May’s favour. The very complexity of it means that different interests can take what they want from it. The alternative needs to look just bad enough – and the time to seek an alternative just slim enough – to get a majority to vote for it. Nevertheless, this might not save May. Tsipras got his deal and won his snap election, but at the cost of his party. May would probably not survive even a small Tory defection. She might get the deal through parliament with some opposition support only to be turfed out of office in the ensuing months. That would see either a Tory leadership election or a general election or both. May’s legacy could ultimately be securing a deal to which her successor – whoever that may be – is committed.

For those on the Labour side there is little solace in May’s impending downfall. Most MPs want the softest of all Brexits – Brexit in Name Only – followed, presumably, by re-entry at some later date. The Labour leadership wants a permanent Customs Union. Were it in power, a Labour government would very much be at risk of two outcomes: either being bounced into membership of the EEA (or the Single Market for both goods and services) or being bounced into exactly the kind of backstop for Northern Ireland that the EU would like. In the former case, the few left-wing benefits of Brexit become impossible. EEA membership means accepting neoliberal EU policy on state aid, competition rules and procurement policy. It is better to remain in the EU than wind up in the EEA but without full EU membership. Exit minus the EEA but with a new Customs Union (Labour’s current position) would no doubt require an Irish backstop of the kind proposed by Michel Barnier. There is nothing in principle wrong with that – but imagine the political opposition to a Corbyn government that imposes a border between the UK and Northern Ireland. Corbyn, who has historically supported a united Ireland, would be accused of creating a de facto united Ireland. It is not necessary to be a full-throated Remainer to see that some thought needs to be given to how a workable Brexit agreement can be secured. It is still not entirely clear how Labour would make that work in practice and avoid its own defections. Principled socialist opposition to the EU has rarely coalesced into a meaningful path to exit. This is not to say that Labour should have all the answers by now, but it should at least have grappled with the political realities of it.

In the real world, the Labour leadership is likely to whip its MPs to vote against May’s deal. If it wants to win that vote – essentially by ensuring its MPs actually vote with the whip – it has to make its alternative clear. The more confusing and complex May’s deal looks, the clearer Corbyn’s alternative should be. This means ditching the ambiguity about a People’s Vote and making clear what its deal would look like. Above all, somebody needs to explain what the solution to the Irish border question is.