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/319/ The Dead Left (II) ft. Steve Hall & Simon Winlow (Patreon)

Published:
2023-01-31 07:02:00
Imported:
2026-06
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Content

On the left's understanding of freedom.

[Patreon Exclusive]

We continue our talk with Steve Hall and Simon Winlow, social scientists in the northeast of England, about their new book, The Death of the Left: Why We Must Begin From the Beginning Again.

This is followed by the After Party, where we debate the extent to which Thatcher 'sold' freedom and what the left's understanding of liberty is. 

Links:

/65/ Bunga Gets Ultra-Real ft. Steve Hall

/111/ Big Money Talk: The Case for MMT ft. Bill Mitchell

/68/ Big Money Talk: The Case against MMT ft. Doug Henwood

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Comments

Davka Smolah Collective

Ok, so if this isn't a Left project, which I like, how does it avoid capture by an established political bloc? In the UK you have Tories, Lib Dems, and Labour. If you're not Labour and not Tory, and you fucking hate the Lib Dems, how do you stay independent and tied to your class base?

Davka Smolah Collective

Bunga Boys arriving to human-rights Leftism being the militant wing of post-politics. Yeeeeeees. Welcome to my party!

plechazunga

Wasn’t a big part of the appeal of Thatcherism its promise, however perverse in retrospect, to deliver the future? Not just incentives operating at the individual level (increased personal freedom, better consumer goods, higher standards of living) but the notion that actually there had been a grave misunderstanding of the economy that had led to the malaise of the 70s—and now that the magic of markets was properly understood, a cadre of algorithmically selected super-entrepreneurs were going to appear and create the future. All the more seductive because the pitch was have your cake and eat it too: participating in this revolution means having fun, getting rich, consumption-as-citizenship in the capitalist universal state. Point being: it feels like that sense that it was a movement that said “the new science says that the old way of doing things was keeping us from realizing our potential” was an important part of the appeal.

Richard R

It seems a bit odd to declare the death of the left when it's so clearly such an essential bogeyman for virtually everyone--even these professors (Bunga Boys included) require the left as a foil for their own distinct analysis. Leftists are going to destroy Christianity, wreck community, dominate the government, take away your guns, turn your children gay or trans, infiltrate and corrupt the trade union movement, abolish the police, abolish free speech, sell us all out to China or Russia or whomever, all while they sit back, shooting heroin, dyeing their hair blue, and drinking expensive lattes all day in the wrong sort of cafe. Communism remains a ghost and a haunting, it seems to me.

Nathan Beesley

I love beating up on middle class left liberals as much as the next guy, but the central conceit of a lot of this nostalgia for an authentic materialist left is the fiction that there remains something called 'the working class' which is exists independently of a cultural formation. Trying to shoehorn contemporary society, with it's complex division of labour, into a 19th century Marxist analysis is like fitting a square peg into a round hole. The reality is that advanced capitalism has brought about the decomposition of the contending classes, not their consolidation. In such a context, the idea that the left should advance the interests of train drivers but not small business people is purely arbitrary. The only way forward is to return to first principles, which means normative questions - what does the good society look like and how do we bring it about? Materialist politics often functions as an excuse to avoid thinking about these more normative questions.

Richard R

It really seems like everyone just threw out "On the Jewish Question" by 2017. We've arrived at a point where we're more or less saying, "Capitalism's supposed equality enables social inequalities to persist, but that's fine as long as enough workers want those inequalities."

Kenneth Smith

Time to reset the Phil Mentioning “Lockdown” counter back to zero

Stone

Is Liberty really the problem here?. Is it not more an issue of the Left have not really developed a narrative around Autonomy in Political Philosophy and Moral Philosophy. Conceding it to Analytic and Neoliberal thinkers. This seems to be a theme that Steve and Simon talk about but phrase it as Liberty.

Knoroz

When are you guys going to get Chris cutrone to talk about all these things?