Beyond Capitalism?: The Future of Radical Politics by Hardy Simon & Cooper Luke

Author:Hardy, Simon & Cooper, Luke [Hardy, Simon]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781780998312
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
Published: 2013-03-11T05:00:00+00:00

For those who know their 19th and 20th century radical history then it is easy to recoil in horror at some of these formulations.

1968 was not the first global inferno of its kind. Similar globally dispersed but interconnected, indeed seemingly almost “synchronised”, movements emerged in 1848, between 1917 and 1920, and even at the close of the Second World War. And as good sociologists, Marxists will emphasise the role of circumstances, conditions, social and economic processes, transformation in culture, ideology and values, and not just the role played by the single idea. But this should not blind us to the element of truth that Kalle Lasn and Adbusters emphasise; that the right idea, put across in the right way, in the right circumstances, with the right alliances, can have this trigger effect, where it spirals out of control and suddenly grips mass consciousness. Seen in this way, Adbusters alerts us to the importance of using modern language, of being bold but popular, of taking care to find ways of putting across ideas that really resonates.

At times over the last decade the organised socialist left in a number of countries has been able to play a similar role. Socialists in the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts (NCAFC) in Britain during the student movement put out a call for mass walkouts and protests that similarly struck a chord. In the anti-war movement in 2002 and 2003 the organised left were also at the heart of it. These simple appeals for action were able to strike a chord with mass consciousness. They were presented to wide layers without demanding any predefined commitment to an ideology but simply appealed to a shared notion of injustice. In a sense, who put out the call – whether it is Adbusters or socialists embedded within a campaign – is neither here nor there, because we are talking about situations that were crying out for such a move. Adbusters just had the foresight to make the right call at the right time.

Talk to activists involved in Occupy in the United States and they will tell you that many of its “cadres”, i.e. those really at the heart of the protests, often traced the origins of their political activism back to the anticapitalist mobilisations around Seattle. These networks of activists had remained in existence, producing magazines, launching episodic direct action campaigns, and so on, since the huge protests over a decade ago. And there is an important similarity between Occupy and the anticapitalist movements of those years, insofar as they share this “meme” appeal; the idea is at once simple, popular and appealing, but it also introduces a complex argument about the nature of capitalism. Some activists in these movements see them as having a “prefigurative” nature, of creating spaces that simulate future utopias, something which accords with the Situationist ethos of Adbusters. But they also bring together a broad spectrum of ideological outlooks, from varieties of anarchism and libertarianism, to reformist currents. Organised forms of socialist politics,

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