Misdirection and non-apologies: Idealism in the age of Covid-19
We live in the age of stories par excellence—and yet this is no reason to celebrate. Alongside the glorious proliferation of formal storytelling, a kaleidoscopic proliferation of forms and examples which make this a golden age for narrative art, we experience a digital deluge of data, and a politics of spectacle on a scale that Guy Debord could not have imagined.
This week, an inordinate amount of time has been spent angsting about the nature of the non-apologies of the government of the UK. Last weekend, Priti Patel came out of seeming hiding to smirk that she was “sorry if people feel there have been failings” in the supply of personal protective equipment to NHS workers. Outraged by this cynicism, the media responded—presumably as it was calculated they would—with a chorus of horror about the uncivil, haughty and dishonest stupidity. Suddenly the issue of the material working conditions of frontline health workers was an argument about language and propriety. At a moment when, as perhaps never before in recent memory, the material interconnectedness of populations usually inured from the material privations which animate and drive rapacious capital are obvious, as is the fictional nature of what Alfred Sohn-Rethel called the ‘real abstractions’ of that system: debt, money—as well as borrowing, the moralism of the deserving winners and losers—all feel so clearly hollow. They are real in the sense that they have effects on the material world, but real fictions, shared stories rather than concrete realities. And yet this is a moment when the media class are indulging in outraged morality policing, and the public are impotently performing a weekly spectacle of gratitude which protects no-one but provides collective cover for capital and its agents. (It’s a mistake to be too knee-jerk snarky about the ‘clap for carers’—we are all impotent in the face of this, and it is obvious that we are all clapping ourselves and each other first and foremost. In this, there might be the birth of a collective consciousness, however sickening it is to see politicians who have drained the health service of its material underpinnings performing like trained seals.) Of the many insights of the presiding spirit of this project, these words have come to mind most frequently in recent weeks:
It must be remembered that the aim of our struggle is not recognition by the bourgeoisie, nor even the destruction of the bourgeoisie itself. It is the class structure – a structure that wounds everyone, even those who materially profit from it – that must be destroyed. The interests of the working class are the interests of all; the interests of the bourgeoisie are the interests of capital, which are the interests of no-one.
— Mark Fisher, ‘Exiting the Vampire Castle’
We can all see, very plainly, how existentially vital proletarian labour is at this moment—and how easily so much arbitrary professional managerial class labour can be suspended, furloughed and delayed—without much effect at all. In this unique moment to understand the shared interest of all, and the way in which the class structure has injured all, we are, instead, too often indulging in the mystification of narrative distraction. For anyone interested in stories and the role they play—particularly if one views their organising role with scepticism and frequently with aversion, as we do—this nineteenth century debate between materialism and idealism returns to animate these questions.
To summarise briefly and incompletely, materialism in the words of Engels and Marx can be defined respectively as follows:
I use […] the term "historical materialism", to designate that view of the course of history which seeks the ultimate cause and the great moving power of all important historic events in the economic development of society, in the changes in the modes of production and exchange, in the consequent division of society into distinct classes, and in the struggles of these classes against one another.
—Frederick Engels,
Introduction to an English edition of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, 1892
And for Marx:
The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.
—Karl Marx,
1859 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
Whereas the older tradition of idealism, most closely associated with Hegel, but stretching back over a couple of thousands of years of philosophy prior to that, is defined in the following way by Heidegger:
If the term idealism amounts to the recognition that being can never be explained through beings, but, on the contrary, always is the transcendental in its relation to any beings, then the only right possibility of philosophical problematics lies with idealism. […] If idealism means a reduction of all beings to a subject or a consciousness, distinguished by staying undetermined in its own being, and ultimately is characterised negatively as "non-thingly", then this idealism is no less methodically naive than the most coarse-grained realism.
— Martin Heidegger, Being and Time
At its simplest for our present time we can characterise the contest by paraphrasing Marx: will the stories we tell change our conditions (idealism), or do our conditions create our stories (materialism)? Each of these propositions give ample reasons to take an interest in the stories we tell and which our culture produce, but they produce radically distinct implications as to what is to be done.
This tension is dramatised in The Wire as junior members of a drug gang eat chicken nuggets and speculate about their invention:
Wallace: Yo, D, want some nuggets?
D’Angelo: No, go ahead, man.
Wallace: Man, whoever invented these, he off the hook.
Poot: Word!
Wallace: Mm. Motherfucker got the bone all the way out the damn chicken. Till he came along, niggers be chewing on drumsticks, getting they fingers all greasy. He said, "Later," to the bone. Nugget that meat up, make some real money.
Poot: You think the man got paid?
Wallace: Who?
Poot: Man who invented these.
Wallace: Shit, he richer than a motherfucker.
D’Angelo: Why? You think he get a percentage?
Wallace: Why not?
D’Angelo: Nigger, please. The man who invented them things just some sad-ass down at the basement of McDonald's thinking up some shit to make money for the real players.
Poot: No man, that ain't right.
D’Angelo: Fuck right. It ain't about right, it's about money. You think Ronald McDonald gonna go down that basement and say, "Mr. Nugget, you the bomb. We selling chicken faster than you can tear the bone out. So I'm gonna write my clowny-ass name on this fat-ass check for you." Shit. The nigger who invented them things, still in the basement on regular wage thinking of some shit to make the fries taste better. Believe.
Wallace: He still had the idea, though.
As much as we might sympathise with the naive idealism of Wallace—generation of the idea, instinctively should mean something, the brute materialism that D’Angelo understands has an undeniable force. “Fuck right. It ain't about right, it's about money.”
It is similarly obviously and instinctively ‘right’ that the UK government apologise for the lack of PPE equipment for frontline health workers. But fuck right, it’s not the apology that matters—it’s about money, and who has power and resources in an economy structured by class which, very plainly right now, injures us all. It is possible to see the idealism of the demand for a ‘proper’ apology from Patel as simply the latest chapter in an ignominious recent political history: castigating Trump for describing the novel coronavirus as ‘the Chineses virus’ while he conspicuously failed to respond with concrete protections for his citizens; Nancy Pelosi’s performative tearing up Trump’s 2020 State of the Union speech, while endorsing and sustaining the material structures of the political economy he represents; fetishising either civility or incivility as if material change would follow from right thought and a conjuring of the correct formulation of properly civil (or uncivil) magic words; preoccupations with the supposed vulgarities of Trump or Brexiteers… the political cultures of the liberal anglophone world have been distinctly idealist in recent years. The goal of contemporary liberalism—the politics of the perpetual present—has always been equal representation in an unchanged world; these idealist fingerprints lay that bare.
And this is also true of their antagonists: the project to ‘Make America Great Again’ exists largely at a symbolic level—exemplified by the much vaunted resurrection of Christmas from its supposedly politically correct tomb. The promises of Brexit are usually made in entirely intangible forms: sovereignty, national pride, honour and patriotism. The bravado of Boris Johnson belies his own deep idealism contra ‘doubters, doomsters, and gloomsters’ and the charge that any concern about his chosen policy direction amounted to the cardinal aesthetic and idealist sin of ‘talking the country down’. This macho idealism extended to the Prime Minister’s health in extremis, secure according to his deputy because of his Churchillian spirit; an idea countered in class-conscious terms from unlikely materialist Emily Matlis in the widely shared opening to Newsnight. The difference—crucial to their electoral success—is that Trump and Johnson have created national myths which speak, inadequately and ultimately impotently, to the material concerns of those who have suffered most from the neoliberal consensus: those at risk from dying from deaths of despair through the rustbelt states of the US, or the decimated post-industrial north of England.
And so, to date, these contests do not appear as the age old contests between idealism and materialism, but between the idealists of the right and those of the liberal left. How then, if we unreliable narrators are firmly of the historical materialist team, do we account for the success of idealisms of the right in the face of not only the abject failures of the neoliberal soft left, but also the electoral collapse of good faith projects of the materialist left, most recently in the forms of the Corbyn moment in the UK and the Sanders movement in the US?
Reports of the death of neoliberalism as the most significant casualty to date of Covid-19 have certainly been premature, but even acknowledging this, one of the features of its life support system is the mythic misdirection currently underway. Neoliberalism is not powered by stories—rather, it retains the hulking material power that capital has always had and narrates its inevitability with compelling idealist force—but its position as unassailable is sustained by this narrative idealism. Neoliberalism is the politics of spectacle not in the sense that capitalism is somehow downstream of the story that ‘there is no alternative’, rather those who have, on the face of it, opposed its hegemony have all too often implicitly bought the claim that it is unopposable by framing their opposition as a narrative performance. Electorally, the idealism of Joe Biden’s ‘hope and change’ revival project did overcome the materialism of the Bernie Sanders campaign for democratic socialism, just as the macho idealist patriotism of Boris Johnson’s ‘Get Brexit Done’ election just a few months ago overwhelmed the incoherent but good faith materialism of Jeremy Corbyn’s ambitious structural social democracy (even as both were drowned out by false friends championing identity politics in the forms of the culture warriors of the DSA, or the uncritical proponents of the bluntest and simplest stories belying the complex relationship of the Labour party with antisemitism). In each case, idealism didn’t beat materialism, rather, the material reality of the dominance of capital was left unassailed while its opponents squabbled over idealist questions.
The materialist-idealist debate was never socialist top trumps: in which the superior arguments of materialists inevitably win the day. The left has for generations been more comfortable interpreting the meanings of things and maintaining its monopoly on understanding, rather than seizing power as if Marx had never claimed in his 1845 Theses on Feuerbach, that “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”
If a political project is animated by the maintenance of the status quo, then a narrative politics is simple to deploy and serves you best by mystifying the stakes or legitimising that which already exists—either can be easily accomplished by shouting, or better still invoking your opponents to shout, ‘Over there!’ while business continues as usual. If your political project is anti-systematic you have a more complex task: building a fresh mythology which can unite material antagonisms into a project, not just of tearing down, but of building, too. The manifest asymmetry of this is unfair, but why would we expect it to be otherwise—and to whom but ourselves can we hope to appeal? This is unequalisable and so the odds will always be against us. But we can stop crippling ourselves by refusing the poisoned chalice of misdirection that exists in buying into the idealisms of political psychodrama or identitarian handringing.
The Chinese Virus. The non-apology apology. The fighter-hero in intensive care. We can have a storied argument about the vulgarity, the stupidity, the racism and the incivility of these tactics. Or we can seize the unique opportunity to understand that our wellbeing is materially interconnected, that our collective value is built out of the labour of a working class currently most endangered and with least power and wealth, that there is—and always was—an alternative after all. Through a glass darkly, these truths are bluntly available, and, without anyone needing to be convinced by some superior story, global capital has ground to a halt. While we cannot get out of this mess with ‘better stories’ this deep training in mistaking story for reality is one of the bulwarks against seizing the opportunities of these new material conditions.
And in the meantime, a shoddy magic trick is underway. If we participate in the misdirection, this potent moment can only be a tragedy. Nothing ever changes in material reality simply through the exchange of differently unreliable stories.
But material reality has, unarguably, now changed. We must not let the forces of capital repair and rebuild its stranglehold while we are watching the shadow-puppetry of power pointing us dumbly back to the walls of the cave.
