Paul Watson’s posts tagged “Politics”

The purpose of school is not to teach children kindness, or the love of animals or how to play together nicely. The purpose of school is to teach children how to make money (almost always for somebody else).

Bubblegum dystopia perfectly captures the vibrant yet achingly vacuous aesthetic (after all, bubblegum is totally ineffective as form of consumption) that dominates our media and popular culture, reflecting the contradictions and catastrophes inherent in capitalism. In our bubblegum dystopia, the surface is endlessly appealing, even as we’re totally aware it conceals our demise and sells the end of the world back to us.

Defining themselves as “Normal” also made everything that wasn’t like them “political”. And then they told us not to talk about politics and whined about politics in art (🤔 those people don’t know much about art or art history… turns out lots of people who make art, today and in the past, are queer or otherwise outside the lines of “Normalcy” and often politically opinionated).

Was it all a nightmare from which we're waking up?

Narrator voice: they were not, in fact, waking up

Yes, the neoliberal order is ultimately the cause of this dynamic, but not simply because of the disruptive effects of the market. The root problem is that neoliberalism has effectively eliminated the left wing of the political spectrum, meaning that the only apparent challenge to the system as it stands comes from the right. In other words, the political problem under neoliberalism is political, not narrowly economic.

I suspect the lack of this kind of societal support and stability drives a lot of conservative politics, because without them, people are scared and exhausted. Even the wealthy have become an overworked class in constant competition to help their kids get ahead (or at least not fall behind). The vibes for everyday Americans, rich and poor, are bad.

There is something decidedly hauntological about all of this. The way in which a phantasmal and retrospective political and cultural movement has choked the life out of the pro-European futures articulated in the political and musical ground zero of post-punk (Empires and Dance, Europe After the Rain, Europa and the Pirate Twins); an insistence that the only way forward is a ghoulish simulacrum of Britain’s finest hour. It’s hard not to see echoes of Fisher’s assertion in Capitalist Realism that the only way forwards is backwards.

It’s possible that we as individuals read too much into what we like, that we invest too much of our identity into corporate properties or even art by individuals, and that part of the harm we feel on discovery of harm is associative: that by enjoying something made by someone who did bad things, some of that badness must rub off on us.

begin to remake who we are and how we live

Moreover, the kind of activism that mixes a deep affinity with the landscape with a hardened political edge is more visible than ever. The two things have an obvious symbiotic relationship: the worse environmental destruction gets, the more precious nature seems and the louder people get.

The parallels between the turbulent epochs preceding the medieval Renaissance and our present age verge on uncanny. Today, intersecting economic, political and environmental crises have incited widespread disorientation and despair reminiscent of the Dark Ages. Below these swirling surface breakdowns, advanced digital technologies are birthing new platforms for human creative participation that could see the dawn of a modern-day Renaissance 2.0.

A lot of people seem to be are having rough times at the moment. There’s a faintly British legacy psyche of putting up with it I think, but a lot of it seems more existential than just getting through a bad patch. Omnishambles is turning into Permashambles. Demographically, we have yet to acknowledge the true cost of a retired population. Democratically, individuals are becoming more powerful than nations. Economically, global capitalism is running out of road in a lot of places. Systemically, there is a big question mark over the state of our combined health – of people, places, and the planet.

I have lived my whole life within this ideological wasteland. It is a landscape where perpetual economic crisis and political scandal reign supreme, where public funding is forever swallowed up by the religious fervour of free-market philosophy, and environmental catastrophe and technological existentialism loom ever closer. Here, even culture exists in a time out of joint, ever repeating the hits of the 20th century as the markets demand. Yet, if you look towards the horizon, you will not find the slightest pretence that things will ever truly change.

BUT… It was not “the internet” that did this.

It is capitalism and its insistence that the only value anything in life has is the profit that can be extracted from it. It is capitalism that sees anything that is not generating profit as waste. It is like acid spreading across every aspect of our lives and devouring it all, burning it away until there is nothing left.

In this spirit, Acid Communism was meant to strengthen the political imagination. A recently published anthology of Fisher’s writings includes a draft for the introduction, which reads something like a manifesto. Fisher had taken a cue from his friend Jeremy Gilbert, a scholar who had long maintained that the sixties might serve as a blueprint for contemporary leftist revolution.

Not quite weeklinks, more a 6-month backlog of links. Think I’m going to post these here for a while – at least until I get round to setting up a different personal blog.

We have conditioned ourselves and each other to believe that artists, musicians, writers, inventors and creators must orient themselves as entrepreneurial go-getters - monetising their work into startups, small businesses or branded products. This myth of the creator-entrepreneur radically narrows down the complex motivations of human creativity and pressures creators to view financial success as the highest marker of their worth. It's economic reductionism, and it has found its way into domains of life that have traditionally been motivated by a richer array of human aspirations.

The time for sending messages in bottles has passed. As seas toxify and rise over the shorelines, who will be left to read them? Nonetheless, we have to communicate. So we communicate. To anyone who will listen. Through the haze of wine, cannabis, SSRIs, exhaustion, overwork, climate depression, and an overwhelming anxiety at the rise of new fascisms, we communicate. Because we must. Because, for the time being at least, we are human.

England is a country in which every last space where conviviality might flourish has been colonised by a commercial imperative …. supermarket check-out operatives replaced by crap robots… unexpected item in bagging area… every surface plastered with corporate graffiti and haranguing hashtags … no trick missed to screw every last penny out of people… exorbitant parking charges in NHS hospitals (exact amount only, no change given), all the profits going to private providers …

Acid communism? Psychedelic Corbynism? Freak left? Call it what you will – but re-infuse endeavours with a spirit of radical collectivism and unselfing to revivify co-opted countercultures for a world that would be free.