Lockdown ‘Libertarianism’: The New Fashionable Mind Sludge

This article by Sukhayl Niyazov, published in Areo magazine, is really really bad, yet reflective of the struggle freedom-lovers have in making their case under the Corona Lockdowns now engulfing 50% of the planet. Apart from citing Edmund Burke as a libertarian which he definitely wasn’t, the author imposes a harsh conservative morality on libertarianism that ought not be there.

It claims that if you are a carrier of COVID NINETEEN, even unknowingly, and by your going out, you unknowingly infect someone else accidentally, by chance, then you are still ‘responsible’ for infecting them. And that if they die, you are responsible for their death.

I can accept an element of causation there, but I do not accept ‘responsibility’. The latter is inherently a moral term. If you do not know you are a carrier, then you are not deliberately infecting anyone – morality is removed from the equation for you are not acting as an immoral agent. If I trip on a paving slab, it is not the paving slab’s ‘fault’ because the paving slab is bereft of moral agency. The paving slab, although featuring within a chain of causation, did not deliberately cause me to trip, and hence cannot be held to be ‘responsible’.

So it is with COVID NINETEEN and any other highly infectious disease for that matter. If you know you have it, STAY INDOORS, until you are better! Else you are being irresponsible like someone who is HIV positive yet goes around having unprotected sex with others.

The reason why it is irresponsible to be reckless regarding the infection of others when you knowingly have an infectious disease yourself, is that it represents an ABUSE OF TRUST. For society to function, we rely on trust. People should be able to go about their business without fearing something bad might happen. Or, more precisely, without fearing something bad might happen UNLESS YOU CONSENT TO IT. Which is why group drug taking is in a different league of moral fixture to say, being the victim of a mugging.

Ay, there’s the rub. In more normal times, people went out despite the risk of catching an illness. The risk was perceived as small, nevertheless it was actually rampant, otherwise no-one would ever catch a cold. But however the risk was perceived, people would go out under a tacit consent that they were willing to take the risk because the rewards of say, a nice meal, or few pints, were deemed to outweigh the risk. If this individual did catch something, and assuming society wasn’t behaving recklessly, and assuming tacit consent on the risk, then if that individual was to fall ill it is actually THEIR responsibility because the risk was THEIRS TO TAKE. Whoever or whatever infected them was not the moral agent, assuming non-recklessness, but the individual who caught the thing WAS.

Of course this does not mean the individual who catches the illness is morally blameworthy because the social conditional premises were all at factory settings. This is why we say ‘bad luck mate’ rather than ‘ha ha you deserve it’. Living in a social world that is embedded in nature just means we’re gonna catch stuff from time to time. But we compute the relative risks in an activity and make the judgment to go out, thereby taking moral responsibility for oneself.

Two things flow from these philosophical observations in relation to the Lockdowns:

i) someone who doesn’t have the disease is being lumped together with those that know that they do and are behaving recklessly. That is stupid and an insult to humanity.

ii) we are being denied our own right to make choices, to take moral responsibility for ourselves REGARDING THE MOST MUNDANE MATTERS.

This is why the Lockdowns must be lifted now. Intelligent advice ought still be given and things like hand gels made readily and freely available. But if the logic of the Lockdown persists too long, we will have no freedom left at all. Which is why the article linked-to is so abhorrent – libertarianism is regurgitated as an authoritarian doctrine.

Mental Health Charities Contribute to the Mental Health Epidemic Today

Forget the painting on the tin – it’s still a tin

 

Why is there a mental health crisis today?

It is estimated that 1 in 4, if not more, people experience severe mental health problems in their lives ranging from psychosis to depression to acute anxiety. My question is why is this happening NOW, given mankind is materially better off than before and individuals face fewer objective threats?

Some say we have always had these symptoms, but just didn’t report them. So, it is argued, a quarter of the population has always been mentally ill at some point in their life but the British reserve of the ‘stiff upper lip’ and a desire to conform to a functional society meant people repressed the truth about how they were feeling.

This notion is dubious on a number of grounds. Firstly, one can agree certain stresses have always been there, but if they were not treated due to under-reporting, current psychiatry would estimate they would inevitably explode. So, the thesis is self-defeating – if past mental illness was brushed under the carpet, it would have led to more outbreaks of psychotic emotions. But that didn’t happen. And so, the idea that mental illness was under-reported in the past probably means it wasn’t actually there in the first place.

Secondly, the thesis is implicitly arguing for a ‘hooray’ to today’s society because it is more ‘open’ to discussions of mental health. Certainly, it was terrible in the past when patients were quietly rushed off to various Bedlams and the discussion – therefore, possible treatments – became neglected. The experimentation on mental health patients including such dangerous drugs as L.S.D. was abominable. But if the mass outbreak of mental illness today whereby an NHS budget of £32bn per year doesn’t even seem to paper over the cracks represents something entirely new, compared to a minority of a few thousand here and there being experimented upon and hidden away from civil society, then it isn’t really a lack of openness that explains the disjuncture between past and present, but points to something else that is currently absent from the discussion.

Therefore, it is welcome whenever anyone tries to theorise what is going on. In that spirit I welcome this article in the current weekly newspaper ‘Socialist Worker’, a newspaper published by the Socialist Worker’s Party (SWP) https://socialistworker.co.uk/…/Capitalism+cant+make+you+we…. They argue it is “capitalism” that causes all the stresses people face and leads them into various forms of breakdown. What is novel about the SWP thesis is not just this diagnosis, but that they also recognise the various therapies on offer are little more than “snake oil” (i.e. a fictitious remedy that cannot work). The SWP want people to overthrow capitalism before they can get better, therefore. Although this approach to the issue is insightful, sadly it cannot work. You cannot go into a mental health clinic and argue this! These people really are quite weak and facing a hellish time in their lives. The idea they could be new recruits for a Marxist-Leninist revival is daft. So, if their solution is wrong, what is it in the SWP’s diagnosis that leads to the disarray?

Firstly, there is little in the article that indicts the state. So, for example, a state-funded psychiatrist and his or her team of therapists nearly always fail to make people better. Why? Because the social relation between the individual patient and the official has an authoritarian character. If the therapists and psychiatrist have the power to Section you, why would you ever be honest? And if you can’t be honest, what hope is there for honourable treatment? Nevertheless, to include these remarks in the SWP article makes the challenge even more difficult! Suddenly it’s not just about overcoming capitalism, but also smashing the authoritarian structures of the state as well! This won’t do – a person quivering from anxiety, someone so depressed they cannot get out of bed, someone so psychotic they hallucinate their idols in a poster on the wall, no they cannot do much in terms of confronting the authoritarian structures of the state!

So, secondly, and far moreover, we need a greatly enhanced theory of why the epidemic of mental illness is striking now. For that, I recommend we look at ideological factors, not just the stresses imposed by “capitalism” for an explanation. Capitalism has been around for centuries yet people did not understand their various predicaments in the terms of mental health before. Something new has emerged, and only current ideological themes can get to grips with why the individual has become so diminished.

The sociologist Frank Furedi argued in his 1992 book “Mythical Past, Elusive Future”, that to live in the present moment means you feel squeezed by both the past as well as the future. So, regarding the past, the official account is that Britain was once a glorious Empire. Then, from the right, they mourn its loss, and from the left, they mourn the negative features of this epoch. The past becomes something we hate rather than something that can rationally inform our identities. And meanwhile we are squeezed by the future because we are told the world may end at any point, either from climate change or war. Doubtless, some niches within this idea of the future point to real risks, but they are posed in such ways that we cannot overcome them – we are paralysed through fear of destroying the environment or each other. The ultimate result of being squeezed from past and future is that the individual is left feeling uniquely vulnerable.

Cue then, the messages over mental health that begin in primary school, and ultimately permeate our whole society, now with even beer mats in the pub asking how we feel, enter Meghan “give me the money” Markel’s mental health helpline that has been widely promoted, and suddenly you have an extremely fertile climate for a total national mental health breakdown. The stresses of capitalism, as the SWP argued, pervade in this day, but it is only when they exist in a social context of historical isolation from past and present that you are bound to get a mental health crisis.

The solution? Wise up!

 

Who Killed The Working Class? Towards A Battle of Populisms

The early history of the 20thC panned out much along the lines Karl Marx anticipated. The human bloodbath of World War One exposed capitalism as a dreadful system, and a great many political struggles took place from outright revolution in Russia to lesser fights in Germany and Britain’s women successfully won the right to vote. In Britain 1926, millions of working days were lost to the capitalists by a colossal wave of strike action. The legacy of all these battles is still felt today, albeit with a touch of nostalgia.

The degeneration of the Soviet Union into state-capitalism was very costly. It made people think revolutionary ideology was dangerous – nevertheless, struggles persisted in all countries for several decades, particularly after the Right was discredited through a reaction to all the policies of racism of the imperial powers, the worst of which was of course, the Nazi Holocaust.

But the knock-on effects of all the defeats, the failure of new intellectuals to match up to the stature of a Marx or Lenin, was gradually taking its toll. The working class were increasingly losing – but nevertheless, they kept up the struggle as if their lives depended on it. But from the 1970s onwards, workers found they faced a new threat. No longer was it just the capitalists and their state they had to fight. A curious new strain of thinking had grown up in left-wing circles, which we now have come to know as ‘political correctness’.

Instead of your trade union being an unequivocal friend in battle, now they were issuing speech codes and telling you off for a joke deemed to be ‘offensive’ to a minority. No wonder trade union membership began to falter from the 1980s onwards in the imperial countries – workers were losing their allies on the politically active left, particularly those allies that were now bastard students.

A weakened left stood no chance against the onslaught of Margaret Thatcher during the mid-eighties Miner’s Strike in Britain. However, in earlier times, such defeat at the hands of police who were literally beating up striking miners, could have been fixed. In earlier times, state violence merely suppressed one protest at a time. But people would regroup, learn from their own mistakes, get stronger, and go on to win. What was unique about the precarious position of miners in the 80s was that the left was also against them too, despite crass lip service paid to the cause. The unions and the Labour Party were constantly trying to correct bad manners and such among the workers. It was no surprise then that Margaret Thatcher won a landslide in 1987.

Fast forward to the period 1990-2016, workers are subdued in all the imperial countries. Political correctness without many speaking out against it, has become a form of mind control. The working class in this period resemble beaten down drones, struggling to survive, often behaving like rats fighting over a piece of courgette that has fallen into a urinal. In this period, workers even snitched on their cohorts for breaching a code of conduct – it was the only sense of power they could get. Their own character, never mind the surplus value they were producing, was also now being torn away from them by a capitalism in an acute crisis.

However, nothing stays the same for long, thank god! The 2016 European Referendum in Britain showed workers revolting to the extent they wanted to shut down that aspect of Imperialism known as the European Union. In the same year in the USA, Donald Trump, the populist candidate, gained the Presidency.

Obviously these developments are very complicated and more analysis is required. But it seems there is a new populism out there, workers are finding ways to circumnavigate right and left in a desire to rescue their own character and attachments. Donald Trump and Nigel Farage, remain steeped in a barren landscape – the old ideology of the right, so this blogger has no doubt these repulsive creatures will fade away. Nevertheless they have done a service of at least putting a light at the end of the tunnel. The struggle henceforth will be entirely about how much input we can inject into populism and preferably steer it in the direction that all of humanity wants.

The Death of Living Marxism Explained

James Heartfield’s 2002 book, “The ‘Death of the Subject’ Explained” is an often fascinating account of trends in academia that have caught on, recur frequently in media stories, and have become new principles for the reorganisation of public life.  The idea is that the notion of a human being as a Subject, which is one who has freewill and is entitled to a degree of autonomy, is under attack today.  That view initially emanated from the Enlightenment and was at the centre of the organisation of the ensuing bourgeois society.  But in the 21^st century, it is common for children to now stand trial even though they don’t understand the proceedings (a reflection of diminished adulthood) whilst parents are constantly nagged about how to bring up their children.  Under nudge theory, supermarkets are being rearranged (hide the tobacco and confectionary) because our freewill is held to be fragile and a danger to ourselves unless managed by caring professionals.  This blogger has written several articles about how mentally ill patients are treated as beings devoid of any autonomy whatsoever with the new policy coming in of banning them from smoking, even outdoors, when detained in a psychiatric clinic, and beyond.

The book takes apart very well academic theories that became fashionable post-1968, of deconstructionism, structuralism, evolutionary psychology, genetic determinism etc., basically anything that does not hold to the centrality of the Subject, which Heartfield rightly wants to defend.  Heartfield’s most successful strategy for doing this is to reintroduce ‘ordinary people’ in to the realm of academic theory where previously they had been evacuated.  The truth is that ordinary people make countless choices, form contracts, get married etc., every day, and this is oughtn’t be taken as a menacing thing.  It shows that having a society constituted of Subjects works.  And the alternative idea that people are completely incapable of running their own lives can only lead to a powerfully authoritarian situation which would be chaotic, hellish, and uncivilized.  So far so good.

The weak point of the book is where Heartfield accounts for the broad acceptance of the idea of degraded subjectivity.  In his view, the collapse of the left, as expressed in declining amounts of days lost to strikes, and the absolute collapse of far left parties with the Labour Party ditching all its principles, is a real basis on which the idea of degraded subjectivity can grow like a weed.  He says:

“…whatever cause the dramatic decline of working class organisation and militancy is put down to, the fact of that decline is hard to deny, and the idea that the grand narrative of the emancipation of labour was a myth begins to look more plausible.  The defeat of the working class, and its allies on the political left…begins to look like a reasonable account of the roots of the ‘death of the Subject’ announced in the theory of postmodernism.” {my italics}

This will not do.  ‘Whatever cause’ isn’t something that can be brushed over like this, it is the very thing that needs investigating.  In this blogger’s view, the form of organisation of workers has traditionally been rather pointless, and workers have now wised up to that.  That is a good thing.  The forms takes by workerist organisations were varying mixtures of trade unionism, Labourism, Stalinism, or Vanguardism.  It is actually a good thing all these things are discredited in the eyes of workers because they were all on the wrong path.  The end of these wrong paths opens up the potential to explore a new path, an undistorted Marxism with Marx considered here as the key theorist of human liberation.  Therefore, the decline of traditional workerist organisations cannot explain the rise of ideas of ‘degraded subjectivity’.  There is for sure, a historically short period of atomisation following those declines before the working class reasserts itself in a new, better way.  And in that period, we are vulnerable to the attacks from on high of those who wish to take our choices away.  That is all degraded subjectivity is – it is not a new human condition, just a new cloak for repressive social policy.  That is a problem and we must oppose it.  But eventually the working class will rally around a big idea, thereby coming together, and fully sort out the problems.  Heartfield’s book is not the idea that will cause the rallying around.  Nevertheless, it identifies clearly a short-term problem, and gives us good reason to oppose certain policies that emanate from on high.

How am I so certain the working class militancy will return, forcing theory to come to its senses?  Because the outlook of every worker already possesses revolutionary class consciousness.  This idea, from Marx, does not mean every worker is a ready-made mini-Lenin.  What it means is that they are conscious of being one-of-many having to undertake alienating and highly coercive labour which they don’t want to.  It is revolutionary in that their outlook is directly opposed to capital, which runs society.  That condition hasn’t changed, can’t change, didn’t even change in the repressive days of USSR totalitarianism.  Worker’s resistance does already take place in many ways from strikes, go slows, sabotage, malingering, etc.  And it will grow so long as we have free political conditions.

However, there is one important danger associated with Heartfield’s outlook.  The book is open to the misinterpretation that everything that happens today is a manifestation of ‘degraded subjectivity’, and therefore must be opposed.  This is not only wrong, it is extending the timescale of the atomised period and creating a pretty dodgy political outlook.  When Britain was on the verge of declaring war on Iraq shortly after Heartfield wrote this book, the 1m anti-war protestors were seen by Heartfield’s friends as only manifesting ‘diminished subjectivity’.  The online magazine spiked which could have done so much to unite the protestors with intelligent ideas against the war instead just attacked the protestors themselves.  The result?  The war went ahead and half a million Iraqis lost their lives.  And to bring us up to the present, Heartfield’s friends now see the Black Lives Matter protest as an example of diminished subjectivity.  The result?  They seek to quash a potentially vibrant movement that might be able to tackle police brutality and develop new forms of working class solidarity.  Finally, spiked is so obsessed with the idea that the whole of society can be explained through the notion of ‘diminished subjectivity’ that there are things they just don’t cover, lest it remind us of a different era (God forbid!)  Hence spiked has written nothing on the anti-strike laws that have already been drawn up and are likely to go through Parliament just as soon as Jeremy Corbyn is out of the picture.  Therefore it is possible that this book, as a basis for a new politics, actually sustains the very thing it is supposed to be opposing.

The book should be read, but it’s not Heartfield’s best work.

Buy “The ‘Death of the Subject’ Explained” by James Heartfield.