This post is intended as an exercise in saying, reasonably crisply, what my analysis of our current political situation is (as far as it goes, which is not far), and what I think we on the left ought to be doing about it. I invite others to attempt the same exercise - it might be useful to compare notes.

My main observation is that we have two crises to contend with. The first is the fundamental crisis affecting not only the financial markets as they now stand (or totter), but the entire modus of “financialisation” as it was developed during the Reagan/Thatcher years and subsequently elaborated to its current pitch of sophistication. The markets may recover, to a greater or lesser degree, but it’s widely accepted that such a recovery cannot readily be secured against a likely future catastrophe: the conditions for such a catastrophe are endemic to the global financial system as it currently operates. This system, therefore, is acknowledged to be in crisis, and whatever happens next (on a grand scale, e.g. “to capitalism”) will happen in response to this crisis. “Regulation” is unlikely to turn out to be the preferred answer.

The second crisis is “the crisis” as it is instrumentalised by the ruling class in their efforts to impose “reform” and restructuring on institutions. Here the stage is set for a series of confrontations, between workers - faced with job losses, pay cuts, casualisation, increased hours and workload and the general evisceration of any service ethic covertly developed on the job in favour of an endless carousel of stupid and insulting cost-cutting shenanigans - and the management bureaucracy which will seek to enforce these losses as a matter of (regrettable, but non-negotiable) necessity. These confrontations will keep “the left” busy for quite some time. There may be some real gains to be won, and certainly some real losses to be resisted, but in an important sense the conflict over “the crisis” will be a kind of phoney war, a war in defence of an old covenant with exploitation against the privations and indignities of the new.

There are two tasks for the left here. One is to fight the fight that’s handed to us, phoney or not: to support marches, strikes, occupations and other actions of workers and students by providing them with funding, practical support and advocacy. This needs to be promoted as a kind of non-negotiable moral duty, something pretty much beyond discussion: a “which side are you on?” sort of affair. That doesn’t preclude disagreement about the tactics or timeliness of particular actions, or “critical thinking” in the most general sense about aims and conduct; it does mean, however, that solidarity is shown and support is given as a kind of automatic reflex, and that attempts to undermine this solidarity or cut off this support are not indulged.

(I’m not saying this, incidentally, to be butch or “militant”: the point here is not to fantasize about roughing dissenters up in dark alleyways, but to establish a basic commitment which is not subject to the vagaries of shifting opinion. Otherwise, opinion will shift - will be shifted - and instead of struggling to mobilize support we’ll be struggling to persuade each other that support should be mobilized; which is where the left, at its most mediocre and ineffectual, often finds itself).

There are two reasons for doing this. The first, compelling in its own right, is to protect jobs and livelihoods from a “modernising” onslaught directed by the imperatives of managerial necessity. The second is to strengthen the reflex of solidarity, to build up political habits, alliances and organisations. One cannot conjure such things from thin air, and it is not a matter of finding the right slogan or formula and expecting a movement to coalesce around it. The work being done at present by UAF to mobilize opposition to the far right in Britain is a fine example of the kind of work that has to be done. Many people understand the immediate tactical importance of keeping the fascists down; what we wish is for them to discover that finding that they share this understanding, along with the will and ability to do something about it, with many others can be hugely politically empowering.

The second task I see for the left is to keep a steady eye on what’s taking shape in response to the first crisis, the fundamental crisis, and to be ready to “name the system” before it even quite has a name for itself. There are two phases to this. The first is expert analysis, by those who make a study of economics and international affairs. The second is interpretation and intervention at the level of narrative. This latter cannot be free-floating, as if we were swapping stories around a campfire and had only to choose the most appealing one: we have to fill in the “mediations” between the two phases, build up a framework of explication that shows how our stories are embedded within the somewhat imaginatively refractory realities of shifts in a vast, abstract system. I would cite John Lanchester’s piece on the financial crisis, in the LRB a few months ago, as an excellent example of this kind of theoretical bridge-building.

It will readily be seen that the kind of scattershot literary-existential cultural analysis I tend to go in for has at most a peripheral relationship to either of these two great commissions - it sits, if it sits anywhere, somewhere in the stack of “mediations” just mentioned, and may well be a somewhat wayward offshoot of it. That doesn’t bother me now any more than it has in the past. I’m quite happy with Badiou’s image of philosophy as a kind of attic in which one sharpens knives and lays out instruments for inspection. “Poetix” is largely about different ways of putting things together (or of taking them apart, so that they can be put back together again in new configurations). At most, I would claim that investigations of this kind can refresh the imaginations of those considering their options in concrete situations - “imagination” being, in this instance, precisely the power of abstraction: the ability to reconsider which apparent features of such situations are really salient, really determinative of their concreteness.