One Question
COVID-19 and Capitalism

One Question
COVID-19 and Capitalism

One Question is a regular series in which we ask leading thinkers to give a brief answer to a single question.

This time, in the midst of economic and healthcare crises triggered by coronavirus, we ask:

How has the COVID-19 pandemic exposed inherent flaws in the capitalist system?

With responses from: Cinzia Arruzza; Neel Ahuja; Neil Faulkner; Seiji Yamada; Helen Yaffe; Michael Roberts; Sandro Mezzadra; Lindsey German; Dario Azzellini; Jodi Dean.

COVID-19

Cinzia Arruzza

When Western governments started taking into consideration harsh measures such as lockdowns and shelters in place, many on the Left focused on the disruptions and suspension of individual freedoms such measures would entail, fearing an authoritarian turn. While we must be cautious and think about what kind of long-term consequences these policies may have (such as further push towards online education and work from home in regular times), we should also be careful about not misinterpreting the current situation and the contradictions among interests currently at play.

As a matter of fact, the present crisis is exposing the fundamental contradiction between life-making and Capitalism and it should be analysed in these terms.

Governments have been extremely slow in putting in place suppression measures and are still particularly reticent about stopping non-essential production. Having to mediate between concerns about public health, the survival of healthcare systems, and limiting as much as possible the number of casualties, on the one hand, and catering to the interests of powerful capitalist corporations and their organisations, on the other, governments have regularly tended to privilege the latter.

Two prominent examples are the Italian government which, in addition to consistently shifting the blame onto individual behaviours, announced a stop to non-essential production that was a mere mockery (wallpaper production, to give an example, was included in the list of essential productive activities), triggering a wave of wildcat and legal strikes; and obviously Donald Trump, who recently announced that lockdowns will be over at Easter, that is, when experts predict an acceleration of the pace of contagion in the United States. Some GOP politicians, such as the Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, have even gone so far as to make explicit that some lives are dispensable when it comes to saving ‘the economy’.

This is the current, crucial, frontline of struggle today. Capitalist interests and the financial market would like to make millions of lives dispensable in the name of continuing to grow the economy; workers are fighting back, organising spontaneous work stoppages, using mass sickouts, calling for legal strikes, and demanding protections and rigid social distancing rules in essential workplaces that cannot be shut down.

The stories of these rebellions against being literally worked to death have rarely made it to the front pages of mainstream media, yet, it is this refusal to work that can manage to tip the balance in determining how the current crisis will be handled: whether it will be a moment of reckoning with the profound harms caused by neoliberalism or whether neoliberal capital’s logic will once again put us at work until we die. READ MORE

One Question
The New Decade

One Question
The New Decade

One Question is a regular series in which we ask leading thinkers to give a brief answer to a single question.

This time, at the beginning of 2020, we ask:

Are you optimistic about the new decade?

With responses from: Leo Zeilig; Zillah Eisenstein; Prabhat Patnaik; María Pía Lara; Minqi Li; Lindsey German; Doug Henwood; Dario Azzellini; Heikki Patomäki; Henry A Giroux and Ourania Filippakou; Richard Falk.

The New Decade

Leo Zeilig

Two major developments will be central to the next decade – and consequently for the rest of the century.

The last decade ended as it began, on the streets, in occupations and in revolutionary possibilities. The constant grind of capitalism ensures that nothing settles for long. No counter-revolution is secure, but nor is the mighty political riposte from below. The movements of popular classes across the world, in strikes, protests and uprisings, will continue to take place in societies riven by economic, political and increasingly ecological crises that not only generates terrible human misery but recurrent rebellions.

The arch of protest that we saw at the end of the decade, emerging first from Sudan, then Algeria, and breaking out elsewhere, Chile, Lebanon, Iraq and Iran, will continue this decade. However, popular forces must generate the new organisations and politics that the radical Left need, and that can power these uprisings and revolutions to create real anti-capitalist alternatives. If this does not happen, as we have seen repeatedly in the past, the movements will, at best, only yield a recycled elite – a renewal of austerity, under new leadership. A genuine alternative for the world will require action, agency and intervention.

The second major development, not unconnected to the first, will be intensification of climate activism in the 2020s. September last year saw seven million people strike together to insist on action to save the world from a climate emergency. While the major protests were in the Global North, activists also mobilised across Africa and the Global South. From 20-27 September, there were protests in Nairobi, Cape Town, Kampala and Lagos. Demonstrators marched and petitioned in their hundreds, and occasionally thousands.

In the protests in Africa many made the fundamental point that although the continent has caused little of the climate crisis, it is extremely vulnerable to its effects. The economic system of boundless consumption and ecological exhaustion is at the heart of the climate crisis and must end this decade – but like all things, it will only end with pressure from mass movements and activists prepared to take on the polluters and their government backers.

The life and death of millions will depend on these two possibilities – radical anti-austerity revolutions and uprisings, linked to militant anti-capitalist environmentalism. There have been few decades as decisive as the one we now face. READ MORE

Hadas Weiss
The Ideology of the Middle Class

Hadas Weiss
The Ideology of the Middle Class

The concept of being middle-class remains an important rhetorical tool in modern capitalism. The ideal of the middle class symbolises financial responsibility, to which the majority of citizens are supposed to aspire. Politicians target their speeches at middle-class voters, promising to create the conditions for them to thrive. In conditions of economic instability, the middle-class ‘squeeze’ is cause for great concern.

But what does it actually mean to be or want to be middle-class? What kind of politics and worldviews does the use of the term inspire? In her recent book, We Have Never Been Middle Class: How Social Mobility Misleads Us (Verso, 2019), anthropologist Hadas Weiss explores how the nebulous idea of the middle class functions as ideology, motivating individuals to continually chase investments within a system that increasingly fails to deliver. I spoke to her about some of the themes in the book.

Hadas Weiss

Hadas Weiss is a social anthropologist and academic nomad, currently based at the Madrid Institute for Advanced Study. She studies social aspects of contemporary capitalism and publishes primarily in anthropology journals. 

 

What is it about the way the concept of the middle class is used in politics, the media and elsewhere that makes it ideological?

Hadas Weiss: The middle class is a manifestly inclusive social category as well as a vulnerable one: anyone can, in principle, join its ranks, just as anyone can fall out. Its inclusiveness stems from a notion of social mobility that is driven by each person’s own efforts. The category is used in political and popular discourse to suggest, in this light, that one’s sacrifices and investments, primarily in property and education but also in professional training, retirement savings, insurance policies and social networks, will lead to success and forestall failure; and that by implication, people who do well owe their good fortune to these sacrifices, and that those who do not must have invested poorly or insufficiently.

Experience often affirms this notion with respect to relative advantages. For example, if everyone is jostling to buy real estate in a certain area, its prices rise to the benefit of early buyers, and if good jobs are scarce, those with more expensive credentials have a better shot at them. But in fact, the value of a house, a financial asset or a credential don’t always end up justifying the effort, time or money invested in them, as made clear when property bubbles burst, pension accounts deplete, and academic degrees have no pull in the job market.

Still, indebted homeowners, insecure pension savers and struggling college graduates up the ante by investing more, encouraged by the vague belief in the investment-driven self-determination that being middle class implies. This is the sense in which the category is ideological. It deflects attention from the punishments of an economic system to which everyone is subjected (albeit with different stakes), by engrossing all but the most dispossessed in a race for relative advantages and in a struggle to guard against personal misfortune. All the while, the investments it inspires feed and reproduce the very system that so dominates them.

How does the middle class as a category change how we view the politics of class?

HW: Today’s politics of class is largely implicated in an ideology of middle classness. It is driven by the impulse to help everyone – however disadvantaged – become middle class in the sense of having their investments pay off as they ostensibly had in the past, or as they still seem to for the privileged. It seeks, in other words, to level the playing field and create a true meritocracy. This is attempted, for example, by giving scholarships to promising students, loans to workers with aspirations, and by advocating for a safety net that would allow everyone to recover from misfortune and soldier on. Much of the scholarship that diagnoses a ‘middle class squeeze’ promotes such measures.

This kind of class politics is ultimately ineffective because it is blind to the systemic imperative – enforced by a capitalist dynamic of endless accumulation through competitive for-profit production – for every group of people who have attained an advantage to protect its value by withholding it from the next round of investors. It is equally blind to the systemic imperative for every person to keep investing lest their competitors nullify the value of their prior attainments. And it is blind to the insecure and generally declining value of everyone’s investments.

The ideology of middle classness underlines all of the ways in which we’re divided as competitors over property and human capital, locked in a zero-sum game in which advantages and disadvantages are relative to and at the expense of others. Conversely, it occludes what unites us as people who have to work for a living, namely our common domination by a system that exploits our work and conscripts our relationships for the production of value that escapes us.

In order to fight the system that so exploits and dominates us, we need a politics of class that builds on these unifying features, regardless of differences in how much we earn or own. Such politics would target this system in its most comprehensive and universal manifestations, rather than merely trying to help this or that group do better for themselves within existing constraints. READ MORE

Mike Watson
Millennials, Memes and Adorno

Mike Watson
Millennials, Memes and Adorno

In the cynicism and hopelessness of the 21st century, it can be increasingly difficult to imagine any political possibility beyond the existing order. And when so much of art and cultural expression is governed by value and marketability, it has little opportunity to challenge affirmative thinking. But does the online culture of the millennial generation contain a potential to disrupt order? Can memes and video games open a space to entertain the possibility of a different future? In his recent book, Can the Left Learn to Meme?: Adorno, Video Gaming and Stranger Things (Zero, 2019), Mike Watson discusses the current cultural conditions, and how the art of the meme may resist co-optation by the alt-right for more radical ends. I talked with him about some of the core ideas in the book.

Mike Watson

Mike Watson (PhD from Goldsmiths College) is a theorist, critic and curator who is principally focused on the relation between culture, new media and politics. He has written for Art Review, Artforum, Frieze, Hyperallergic and Radical Philosophy and has curated events at the 55th and 56th Venice Biennale, and Manifesta 12. In November 2019 he published his second book with ZerO Books, Can the Left Learn to Meme?: Adorno, Video Gaming and Stranger Things.

You discuss in the book how we experience political possibility in the present, especially from the perspective of millennials, or those who have reached adulthood in the 21st century. How does the millennial relationship to political possibility differ from that of the previous generation?

Mike Watson: A key difference between the generations would be in their respective use of communications technology during the formative years of their socialisation and dating. Generation X did not have access to the internet or mobile phones as they grew up. This means they have a vastly different mentality in comparison to the millennial generation, which navigated the realm of pre-adult bond making via social media interfaces.

Clearly one can’t apply a precise cut off point to this shift, and social media came via the intermediary of text messaging. In any case, what one finds is a very different attitude towards human interaction between the generations, which can leave the millennial generation looking somewhat nihilistic, or even psychotic in their aversion to personal bonds in ‘terraspace’ or ‘meatspace’.

Carried over to politics there is a misperception of the millennial as socially aloof and by extension inherently cynical. Now, to say “millennial” is in any case a huge generalisation. We are talking about everyone between about 18-20 and 38-39 years old, depending on the dates followed… so I can’t speak for all of them. But what I can say is that the reluctance I’ve found in students to engage with enthusiasm with Marx’s theory – or Adorno, or Benjamin, etc. – is less due to a failure to agree with the basic Marxist assumption regarding the need for solidarity as a means to redistribute opportunity, and more a recognition that all of the efforts of their forebears to challenge inequality have clearly failed.

This may sound extreme, but the millennial in my experience works on the logical assumption that everything that occurred prior to today resulted in us getting to today. Hence any plea by their elders to pay more attention to certain key texts meets with an eye roll and maybe then an ‘OK, Boomer!’ READ MORE

Jodi Dean
Comrade

Jodi Dean
Comrade

The term ‘comrade’ has a long history in socialist political movements, and in the twentieth century came to be used by millions around the world. But what are the specific values and expectations placed on us when we call each other comrade? Is the word still relevant today and able to help unify current left-wing struggles? In her new book, Comrade, Jodi Dean argues that the rehabilitation of the concept of comradeship, as a relationship of political belonging that must be built, sustained, and defended, is a crucial task for the contemporary Left. In this interview, we discuss some of the book’s key ideas.

Jodi Dean is Professor of Political Science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. She is the author or editor of thirteen books, including The Communist Horizon (Verso, 2012), Crowds and Party (Verso, 2016), and Comrade (Verso, 2019).

Jodi Dean

How do you define the term ‘comrade’?

Those who are on the same side of a political struggle. I’m interested in the way that being on the same side impacts those who share it, the way this belonging functions to generate expectations.

Etymologically, comrade derives from camera, the Latin word for room, chamber, and vault. The technical connotation of vault indexes a generic function, the structure that produces a particular space and holds it open. A chamber or room is a repeatable structure that takes its form by producing an inside separate from an outside and providing a supported cover for those underneath it. Sharing a room, sharing a space, generates a closeness, an intensity of feeling and expectation of solidarity that differentiates those on one side from those on the other. Comradeship is a political relation of supported cover. READ MORE

One Question
Greta Thunberg and
the School Climate Strikes

One Question
Greta Thunberg and
the School Climate Strikes

One Question is a regular series in which we ask leading thinkers to give a brief answer to a single question.

This time, in reference to the title of Greta Thunberg’s book, No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference, we ask:

How have Greta Thunberg and the school climate strikes made a difference?

With responses from: Simon Pirani; Johanna Fernández; Matthew Huber; Seema Arora-Jonsson; Hester Eisenstein; Steffen Böhm; Geoff Mann; Hannah Holleman; Julian Brave NoiseCat; Ashley Dawson; John Foran; Alison Green.

Greta Thunberg

Simon Pirani

Greta Thunberg and the school strikers are not trying to convince the world’s governments with good arguments in protest letters or petitions. Their starting point is that the governments have failed to act on climate change, despite scientists explaining the danger in the 1980s – more than two lifetimes ago, for school students. The strikers know they are dealing with hypocrites and liars, and the power relations of which they are part. Striking is their first, proportionate, response. In this way, they have shifted the narrative.

Since the international climate talks began in 1992, the rate at which fossil fuel burning pours greenhouse gases into the atmosphere has risen by more than 60%. One function of the talks has been to create a self-justifying discourse: governments would use ‘market mechanisms’ to deal with the problem (while subsidising fossil fuels to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars); civil society would be represented by NGOs protesting at the summits. This ‘dialogue’ was about patronising, incorporating and smothering social movements. Of course this is now being tried on Greta Thunberg and the school students. But it will be difficult to silence a movement of tens of millions of people that way.

The organisers of the strikers’ demonstration in London on 20 September focused on allying with movements in the global south, where flooding, drought and other climate change effects are already facts of life. The London crowd cheered the announcement that school strikers were on the streets of 40 cities in Pakistan, and welcomed Brazilian and Bolivian speakers. If ‘climate justice’ is seen in this way, as bound up with social justice, then those who propose individual sacrifice, or state-imposed austerity – rather than to change society – can be put in their place.

Can activists and radical thinkers of earlier generations contribute anything? Only if we learn how better to communicate our hard-won experience. It is not enough to turn up with placards saying ‘system change not climate change’. What system change? What types of technological change could break the fossil-fuel-dependent economy? Can they be achieved under capitalism?

Answers from the ‘Left’ are too superficial. For example: the Labour party conference declared for a ‘green new deal’, but some Labour politicians interpret this to mean investment in electric cars. This false techno-fix may help car manufacturing companies and their shareholders, but it will not substantially reduce carbon emissions. It certainly obstructs the necessary transition to zero-carbon cities where we live and work meaningfully, and where car-based transport systems, traffic jams and other fossil-fuel-intensive urban infrastructure are things of the past. The school strikers deserve more compelling, more coherent visions for the future. READ MORE

PRESS RELEASE
Ideology and the Virtual City:
Videogames, Power Fantasies and Neoliberalism

PRESS RELEASE
Ideology and the Virtual City:
Videogames, Power Fantasies and Neoliberalism

How do virtual cities reflect our modern social realities?

 
Ideology and the Virtual City: Videogames, Power Fantasies and Neoliberalism by Jon Bailes.

Publication date: 27th September 2019 (UK), 1st October 2019 (US). Published by Zero Books.

Available from: JohnHuntPublishing.com; Amazon.com; Amazon.co.uk

ISBN: 978-1-78904-164-4 (Paperback) £9.99 $14.95

EISBN: 978-1-78904-165-1 (e-book) £7.99 $11.96

Ideology and the Virtual City

Ideology and the Virtual City is an exploration of modern society and the critical value of popular culture. It combines a prescient social theory that describes how ‘neoliberal’ ideology in today’s societies dominates our economic, political and cultural ideals, with an entertaining exploration of narratives, characters and play structures in some of today’s most interesting videogames. Through this analysis, the book takes readers into a range of simulated urban environments that symbolise the hidden antagonisms of social life and create outlandish resolutions through their power fantasies. In doing so, it shows how interactive entertainment can help us better understand the different ways people relate to the modern ‘common sense’ neoliberal background, both in terms of absorbing its assumptions, and questioning them.

Endorsements:

“Videogames are gradually recognized as a new cultural form which reaches far beyond mere entertainment: they enact new forms of subjectivity and temporality. However, this fascination with the new form should not render us blind for the fact that, in their content, even at its most magic, videogames are firmly rooted in our neoliberal capitalism and faithfully mirror its antinomies. This is where Bailes’s book enters. Through a detailed analysis of selected games, from Grand Theft Auto to Persona, he demonstrates how they reproduce the key dimensions of a modern megalopolis: the City as Playground, as Battleground, as Wasteland, as Prison… Ideology and the Virtual City is not only insanely readable; in its combination of vivid descriptions with theoretical stringency, it provides an unsurpassable introduction into the deadlocks of our real life. In short, an instant classic for everyone who wants to understand not just games but our reality itself.” — Slavoj Žižek READ MORE

Barbara Foley
21st Century Marxist Literary Criticism

Barbara Foley
21st Century Marxist Literary Criticism

In 21st century capitalism, Marxist theory remains a crucial means to interpret the socioeconomic present and potentials for political change. But Marxism as a method is also important culturally, in understanding the ideas, attitudes and beliefs that exist today, and how they have developed historically through various social forces. In her recent book, Marxist Literary Criticism Today (Pluto, 2019), Barbara Foley aims to emphasise the continuing value of a Marxist analysis of literature and culture, and introduce core concepts – historical materialism, political economy, ideology critique – to a new generation seeking to comprehend the ongoing class struggle. In this interview, I discuss with her some of the ideas she raises in the book.

Barbara FoleyBarbara Foley is Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark. Her research and teaching focuses on US literary radicalism, African American literature and Marxist criticism. Throughout her career, her work has emphasised the centrality of antiracism and Marxist class analysis to both literary study and social movements. She has written six books and over seventy scholarly articles, review essays, and book chapters. Her previous books include: Spectres of 1919: Class and Nation in the Making of the New Negro (University of Illinois, 2003); Wrestling with the Left: The Making of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (Duke University, 2010); Jean Toomer: Race, Repression, and Revolution (University of Illinois, 2014).

Why did you feel a new book about Marxist literary criticism, and specifically an introductory text, was important at this time?

Barbara Foley: For two reasons. First, because there haven’t been any introductions to Marxist literary criticism in many years – since Terry Eagleton’s Marxism and Literary Criticism (1976 ) and Raymond Williams’s Marxism and Literature (1977). (I consider Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981) to be seminal; but it is a difficult book, hardly an ‘introduction’.) Second, because there’s clearly a revived interest these days – especially among young people – in left ideas, as these pertain not only to culture but also to economics, politics, and history.

Since even the very useful works noted above largely take for granted the reader’s prior acquaintance with fundamental principles of Marxist analysis, though, I decided that my book should outline key features of historical materialism, political economy, and ideology critique before addressing Marxist approaches to literary criticism and interpretation. Besides, since there’s a good deal of confusion these days about what constitutes a ‘left’ political position – or a ‘left’ act of cultural analysis – I wanted to clarify where Marxism overlaps with but is also distinct from a more broadly leftist critical orientation. READ MORE

One Question
Gilets Jaunes

One Question
Gilets Jaunes

One Question is a regular series in which we ask leading thinkers to give a brief answer to a single question.

This time we ask:

What is the significance of the Gilets Jaunes movement?

With responses from: Nonna Mayer, Gabriel Rockhill, Samuel Hayat, Maia Pal, Philippe Marliere, Julian Mischi, Enzo Traverso, Aurélie Dianara, Prabhat Patnaik, Ivan Bruneau, Diana Johnstone, John Mullen, Richard Greeman, Sophie Wahnich, Joshua Clover.

Gilets Jaunes

Nonna Mayer

The trigger of the Yellow Vests movement, last November, was the 80km/h speed limit on country- side roads and the ‘carbon tax’ raising the price of the diesel fuel – the last straw in a country where 75% of the working population use their car to go to work. But the deeper undercurrent was social insecurity. The protesters are not the worst off. Most of them have a car, a job, a home, and they pay taxes, yet they struggle to make a living. While the elites focus on ‘the end of the world’, their concern, as their posters say, is ‘the end of the month’.

They don’t mobilise the have-nots and the wretched like the ‘poor people’s movements’ analysed by Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward. Rather they express the revolt of a lower middle class at risk of poverty, resenting the rich above, who do not fear tomorrow, as well as the ‘undeserving’ poor below, on social welfare, whose anger finds no outlet. The feeling that nobody hears them, that nobody cares, drives them against mainstream parties and elites, either towards the extremes or away from politics altogether. The same discontent fuelled the surprise victory of Brexit, the election of Donald Trump or the record score of Marine Le Pen in the 2017 presidential election. However different Brexiters, Trumpists and LePenists may be, they belong to a squeezed middle class afraid of losing the little it has, feeling at the edge of the precipice.

The declining numbers of the French Yellow Vest demonstrators and of their imitators in Europe (Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain), do not mean that the revolt is near its end. Its roots go back to the mid-70s. The end of the post war economic boom marked the return of social insecurity, with the development of mass unemployment, new forms of poverty and atypical precarious employment. Globalisation and then the Great Recession of 2008 exacerbated these trends. And a new risk is developing fast: automation. It first hit industrial blue-collar jobs that could be easily replaced by robots. Now intelligent machines and algorithms are threatening routine white-collar jobs.

These workers, with mid-level skills and education, could be a potential reservoir for future disruptive protests such as the Yellow Vests, and also, to a certain extent, to support the radical Right. Our study in eleven European countries shows that the electoral impact of automation is conditioned by the perceived economic situation. The most likely to vote for radical right parties are individuals in occupations at risk of automation who feel they are still coping financially with their present income, but fear status loss and downward mobility. While those who, facing the same risk of automation, say they cannot cope, do not even bother going go to the polls. READ MORE

One Question
Social Media

One Question
Social Media

One Question is a regular series in which we ask leading thinkers to give a brief answer to a single question.

This month we ask:

Have social media become a divisive force?

With responses from: Paolo Gerbaudo, Christian Fuchs, Lizzie O’Shea, Geert Lovink, Eva Anduiza, Joss Hands, Zizi Papacharissi, Alfie Bown, Panos Kompatsiaris, Eugenia Siapera, Eran Fisher, Dal Yong Jin, Tanja Bosch.

Social Media

Paolo Gerbaudo

It is fair to say that there has been a 180-degree turn in the debate on social media and politics. At their inception in the late 2000s, there was much hope about their democratic potential. The US Department of State Internet Freedom agenda pursued by Hillary Clinton in particular stressed how social media could be the harbinger of freedom of expression and democracy in many authoritarian countries. The Arab Spring in 2011 and the wave of movement that ensued from the Indignados in Spain to Occupy Wall Street in the US seemed to be proof of that idea.

These were indeed movements that were largely organised and mobilised on social media, hence the rather cheesy moniker ‘Facebook revolutions’ was not all that misplaced. These movements had realised the political potential of a time in which internet and social media access, for long the preserve of a tiny minority of scientists, artists, and journalists, was eventually becoming more of a mass space for ordinary people, with average income and education levels, to join the fray.

Yet in recent years, social media seem to have become in the public imagination much more a weapon for the extreme right. Notably Brexit, the election of Donald Trump and other right-wing populist insurgencies have had a very strong social media component. Furthermore, we have become aware of how much social media platforms are conducive to fake news, extremist political cultures such as the alt-right, forms of aggression and symbolic violence of all sorts, and how they embolden fanatics who were previously isolated and marginalised.

Faced with this situation it is important not to fall to prey to the ‘liberal panic’ that has become common in commentaries about the present situation, and which leads to a very pessimistic and ultimately self-defeating posture. We need to realise that we now live in a ‘plebeian’ internet, one that is more representative of the actual sentiments and views of society, including some that we as progressives would have preferred not to be too exposed to.

Rather than retreat and disengagement, or wholesale condemnation of the internet ‘deplorables’, what is required from Left activists is a great effort of political education both online and offline that may counteract the tide of right-wing populist hegemony. Young alt-right bloggers and YouTubers that are now often dominating attention need to be met with a new generation of socialist bloggers and YouTubers that may explain complex political ideas in simple way that is persuasive to social media publics, and thus turn against the present tide of resentment and xenophobia. READ MORE