The Joy of Co-Production (on ‘collective joy’ and public services)

Here’s the article I wrote for IPPR about ‘collective joy’ as a potential operative concept in public services administration. Oh yeah!

 

 

The Truth of Zizek

So everyone’s talking about how stupid Zizek seems after that debate with Jordan Peterson. Back in 2007, years before Zizekmania had even peaked, I contributed a highly critical essay to this highly sceptical collection on Zizek edited by Paul Bowman & Richard Stamp. The whole pdf of the book is here: The_Truth_of_Zizek

An inevitable division: the politics and consequences of the Labour split

What it says. The article is here.

Remarks on Brexit

My old friend and comrade from Signs of the Times day, Stefan Howald, asked me to answer some general questions about Brexit for his political blog. The blog is in German and my complete set of answers was translated into German here.

I posted the English version here, but then the excellent George Eaton asked for it to be posted on the New Statesman website.

I elaborated a bit more on the original comments, and George gave it an edit, and here it is.

Notes Towards a Theory of Solidarity (talk from the Goldsmiths teach-out)

 

A few weeks ago, when many UK university staff were on strike against a major attack on their pension rights, I was invited to speak at the teach-out organised by the   UCU (University and Colleges Union) branch at Goldsmiths, University of London.

I gave a 20-minute talk from notes that I’d made the previous day. The talk provoked a really interesting discussion, and I promised a couple of people that I would make the notes available once I had had time to write them up. Well, I’ve written them up and they’ve become quite long, but that’s not all that surprising. This is still just notes – it’s not supposed to be a worked-out argument. But here it is in case anyone finds it useful.

Antisemitism, cosmopolitanism and the politics of Labour’s ‘old’ and ‘new’ right-wings

The determination of the Labour Right to focus on ‘left antisemitism’ reveals as much about the Labour Right’s divisions, history and current existential crises, as it does about the left. I also talk about class consciousness (I’m for it).  On open Democracy.

The Bennites’ revenge: how Jeremy Corbyn and his allies survived political exile

I wrote this for the New Statesman in January. My students asked me to start updating my blog with all my articles again so I am doing! Thanks again to George Eaton for commissioning this.  It’s about how the Bennites, unlike every other Labour tradition, were right historically to eschew both Atlanticism and craven deference to the Tory press (and I think those were the two worst and most persistent strategic mistakes made by all the others).

 

Welcome to the age of Platform Politics- explaining the election result and its implications

So just after the election Alex and I did a talk at the Anti-University of East London event on this subject, which will be central to our forthcoming book (among many other things). The video is HERE

A week or two after that I wrote a long essay on the subject and the implications of the election, but I had already promised to write on this subject for Fabian Review, so I produced a short edited version for them which was published here last week. I did an even shorter version for IPPR but I don’t think that’s been posted yet.

The full length version is on open Democracy HERE.

 

Radical Democracy or Retro Social-Democracy – which Corbynism?

Here’s the latest for the Guardian  where I talk about the different ways of understanding what ‘Corbynism’ might mean as a political project.

There were a couple of points that got edited out for space. One is that the first use of the terms ‘Corbynism’ I can remember was by Alberto Toscano, who was using it, years before Corbyn became Labour leader, to designate a sort of highly principled but totally ineffectual (outside of very local contexts) Marxist activism. How things have changed…

The other was my now obligatory reference to John Medhurst’s That Option No Longer Exists, in order to point out that the division between radical decentralisation and centralising social democracy isn’t some kind of split between that hard and soft left, or whatever, but is as much as anything an expression of an ambiguity that always existed within Bennism:  pro workers-control, but anti-PR; naive about the socialist potential of a sovereign parliament and tribal Left Labourism, but scathing about the corruption of the British constitutional institutions in general. I think that ambiguity is still there within Corbynism, rather than being a function of its relationship to anything outside of itself.

Finally it’s worth saying. Really we don’t want ‘Corbynism’ at all, because the best thing about Corbyn is the way he keeps saying that this movement is not about him. We need 21st century socialism, of which the pro-Corybyn political movement can only be one essential component.

Can Labour win back its heartlands? Not by turning blue

This is the piece I had in the Guardian (print edition as well as online) a couple of weeks before the election. It’s basically a short version of the Stuart Hall Foundation essay, an revised version of which will be up on open Democracy soon.

It seems a bit like stating the obvious now, although the issue of how we relate to those constituencies who DID switch from UKIP to the Tories, and who used to vote Labour, who do exist and lost us some key seats, remains a live and crucial question.