“Do more stuff” was what I said to myself at the close of 2020. Unremarkable aim perhaps, but the best I can muster as the consensus of decades has a panic attack outside my window. The kind of sickening optimism Boris Johnson was hawking at the opening of the year seems to have heralded in, or more aptly accentuated, a slow collapse of liberalism; in fact the cheery faced visage of death that welcomed us into the last 12 months stands now as one of the most grotesque creations of British Politics, a figurehead of mounting catastrophe that oversaw thousands of needless deaths barely hiding the casual flippancy that defined Johnson’s career thus far, the self-aware clown who greeted us on television all that time ago.
The insistence that things will get better soon is an understandable one, but all too often an irresponsible fairytale. In many respects the covid-19 pandemic has seen peddlers of false hope stretched to their absolute limit, defenders of the status quo driven to increasingly absurd feats of contortion to maintain that their beloved institutions are performing as intended, it’ll all work out if you listen to your betters. The cascade of rationalisations has been almost impressive at times, were it not so repulsive. The notion that we let governments off the hook “because they have a difficult job” is, rather than a plea for human sympathy, a corrosive in which abuse of power absolves itself; the fact that the Prime Minister and those in government sit in positions where what they decide impacts millions of people should at no point, and at no stretch of the imagination, be a cause to excuse them. On the contrary, being in positions of power is precisely what should condemn their decisions. The Churchill-esque keep-calm-carry-on bullshit isn’t just a harmless act in a comedy routine, its been used to undergird a lethal programme of pseudo-libertarian economic fairytale-logic, in which the spectral, unified presence of “the economy” is supposed to justify putting ourselves and everyone else at risk, sometimes mortally..
Its fair to say in retrospect this is where things were going to end up. The political-economic thread running through Thatcherism, Blairism, all the way to our present moment always presumed a kind of persistently OK society, the boring dystopia. This reality was all there was. Economic myths like the “national credit card” were repeated so much that it was Laura Kuenssberg’s immediate port of call when it came time to talk about the economic circumstances of the moment. Rather than blowing a hole in neoliberal myth-making then, covid-19 has tested them to breaking point, and it remains to be seen how far they can be taken. The very simple idea, in no way radical, that the state can offer help, has been resisted at every turn with immeasurable cost; at this very moment, prevarication is the name of the game lest the fortress of ruthless individualism starts showing cracks and the squared circle of libertarian conservatism forced to come out of hiding as the deeply authoritarian regime it always has been. State violence as a well-worn fable told through gritted teeth.
What this doesn’t mean is that things will get better, we shouldn’t say it can’t get any worse, not simply because it tempts fate, but because it encourages the kind of passivity we can ill afford. Socialism will not just arrive neatly packaged and fully formed on our doorstep, people will not just rise up when things get bad enough, these are just as much fairytales as those of a self-righting capitalism, or free markets. Left politics is in an… ambiguous place, one where its ideas are more evidently necessary than ever, but lie in obscurity once more. A key lesson of the last few years is perhaps the simplest, that patience is required along with anger, that a movement cannot survive or succeed on enthusiasm alone, that no matter how urgent and immediate things seem, the immediate break with the norm must be coupled at every turn with a longue durée strategy, a recognition of the complexities of the situation in which we aim to bring a new society about, and an honest confrontation with the challenges it faces. Perhaps it really is futile, and it’s a thought that has often hung at the back of my mind, a constant doubt as to whether an emancipatory politics can even be achieved. All this said, it is also important to note the widespread impact of the black lives matter movement in the last year as a demonstration that people can still take action in a meaningful way. Whatever its successes and failures it proved to me that things can still happen, that when push comes to shove we can still “do stuff”, and that is something, if anything, I want to take with me into the future.
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