Where’s the socialism that involves sharing life’s joys?
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Version 0 of 1. I love the story that John Mortimer used to tell. He was in his 80s when he revealed to some interviewer his habit of having a glass of champagne at 6am. “How long has this been going on?” was the horrified reaction. “Ever since I could afford it,” came the reply. There is something here about what the good life might be, though, God knows, none of us is allowed to say it any more. Of course the anecdote changed over the years. Repeating it on TV in front of a member of a boyband who had just got out of a detox centre, Mortimer was asked: “Are you having counselling?” “Champagne socialist” is now an insult – not merely a description of a lifestyle. To enjoy oneself without publicly checking one’s privilege is some fuzzy betrayal of a thing that was hitherto never quite spoken out loud. The thing now is named as austerity. Belts must be tightened, budgets reduced, frugality applauded. One of the reasons I don’t support Corbyn is an innate political distrust of asceticism. I can’t help it. There is no need to rehearse the solid arguments against him. They have been had and, by now, the process of enshrinement is beginning. In personal terms, everyone describes him as an extremely decent man. Politically, though, Corybynism now represents a kind of purity. And, on the left, purity always shades into puritanism, an unbecoming exercise in self-flagellation that is curiously indulgent. It is entirely unfair to judge a man, or indeed his movement, by a vest, but life isn’t fair and that’s why we have politics. If Corbyn now reigns as the King of Unspin, the real deal, the arbiter of authenticity, then presumably he will appeal to exactly the sort of working-class voters whom Labour needs back. Let’s see! The anti-austerity movement is real and necessary, but the need of middle-class people to pretend to live austere lives is beyond me. It demonstrates a fantasy of class difference fuelled by guilt that I don’t share. If you have been poor, you don’t want to be again. Now a peculiar re-enactment of poverty is available to all in the name of being Green or even healthy. Entire conversations revolve around people who, unprompted, will list the things they are depriving themselves of, with a further 10 minutes on their fascinating “intolerances”. The rise of the individual detox sits alongside the rise of food banks, whose users have no choice about the manner of their deprivation. So, in Labour we now have an entire party going into some spaced-out detox mode. It may feel itself more energised, invigorated even. If it bores on long enough, maybe it can sell that detox to the workers? After all, it works well fo the shiny young women who tell us that unadorned raw vegetables are “a treat”. I am not convinced, because the perennial political question – “What do people want?” – has a very simple answer. On the whole, the same things we all want. Security and nice things. Pleasure-giving things. Part of the political disconnect is do with the perceived joylessness of machine politicians: Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson broke through because of a joie de vivre that the right is less contemptuous of. Poor Yanis Varoufakis, Greece’s former finance minister, got into trouble for posing while laughing with salad on his terrace with his lovely wife. If you are preaching anti–austerity, how dare you even have a terrace? Or salad tongs? This strand of thinking on the left is generally clueless about culture and clueless about its value. The arts are a good thing if they dissent in the correct way. Corbyn’s statement on the arts is typically top-down party stuff about protecting the theatre and the BBC. Kill me now. It is deeply unfashionable to talk of the disruptive power of pleasure, or the power of culture to change this status quo because everything is currently reducible to the economy or inequality. Yet there is a whole other strand of left thought, from Robert Tressell to Raymond Williams, which argues that culture is itself both “ordinary” and brilliant and that everyone must have the greatest parts of it. The purpose of socialism is to spread all of it out more evenly and give everyone more choice. The liberal horror of “bling” is a snobbery about how those you choose to represent may choose to represent themselves. The current wave of puritanism is everywhere, from the policing of language to the denunciation of food groups, so it is no surprise that it should surface politically. It’s all about denial and self-denial. Ascetism may be morally laudable and a real contrast to the excesses of the political class – but it is a dead-end for the left. Remember how Nye Bevan insisted that council houses should be bigger and have two bathrooms, which was considered an unnecessary luxury for working-class people? Remember how Bevan swilled his champagne and was told off for it? Remember how we used to talk of the good life for all and now it’s all about individual wellbeing? It’s so dull. Where is the vision of socialism that involves the sharing of life’s joys as well as life’s hardships? Where is the left that argued that nothing is too good for ordinary people – be it clothes, buildings, music. So you have your Bennite tea, I shall continue to demand the finest wines known to humanity. |