February 2009
"Anger is the political sentiment par excellence. It brings out the qualities of the inadmissible, the intolerable. It is a refusal and a resistance that with one step goes beyond all that can be accomplished reasonably in order to open possible paths for a new negotiation of the reasonable but also paths of an uncompromising vigilance. Without anger, politics is accommodation and trade in influence; writing without anger traffics in the seductions of writing."
Nancy, J-L, The Compearance[ref]
How should we describe the extraordinary consensus that existed in this country — a consensus that united us all around core concepts like ‘free markets’, ‘competition is the only way’, ‘private enterprise good, public enterprise bad’, ‘social partnership’, ‘entrepreneurship’, ‘greed is good’, ‘conspicuous consumption’? For a long time we lived inside a bubble. The walls of the bubble were invisible to us, they coloured everything we looked at but everything was that colour anyway so we thought it was colourless. It was, nonetheless, a bubble. What we hear these days, in the media, in conversations, in political speeches and union negotiations is the pop of the bubble bursting. We are faced with an absolute incongruence — between what we have been told and what we see.1 What this incongruence will tell us remains to be seen, but it makes us strange to ourselves, wakes us from our dream of shopping and eating and enables us to look back at our days in the bubble with at least the illusion of detachment.
Sometime during his seven-year incarceration at the hands of Italy’s fascists, the Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci developed a theory of ideological hegemony. It is probable that the idea first occurred to Gramsci during his meditation on another Italian philosopher and political analyst, Niccolo Macchiavelli, for that acute political analyst had observed the self-defeating nature of oppression as a political weapon. What Gramsci argued was that in modern democracies the powerful do not maintain their power — their hegemony — by coercion alone. In classical Marxist thought the ruling classes have at their disposal the police and the army, the prison system and the courts, the market and the all-important threat of destitution. All of these weapons are experienced as coercive by the poor. None of it belongs to them, and all of it, including the law, favours the rights of property and power.
However, it was clear to Gramsci that something else was needed to explain the fact the people voted for, or gave tacit consent to, a system that favoured a very small minority at their expense, actually voted to give power to the people who coerced them. The answer was ‘ideological hegemony’.2
In Gramsci’s formulation, a vast number of actors within a state contribute to the exclusion of hostile ideas. Thus, in a liberal capitalist democracy groups such as the churches, charities, political parties, special interest groups, schools, environmental activists, trades union, etc., all contribute to an illusion of political debate. It is an illusion because all of these groups, though they would like to tinker with the details, are in agreement on the fundamentals. Gramsci called this the ‘common sense’ position3. Genuinely radical voices are treated with contempt, and characterised as foolish and ‘ideological’ from the ‘common sense’ point of view, because the ideology of the majority is transparent to those who live within its confines — the bubble of my opening paragraph. Slavoj Zizek puts it succinctly:
“[I]n a given society, certain features, attitudes and norms of life are no longer perceived as ideologically marked, they appear as ‘neutral’, as the non-ideological common-sense form of life; ideology is the explicitly posited... position which stands out from/against this background.&rdquo:4
For example, it is a given in Western Europe (a) that what we have is democracy (b) that our ‘democracy’ is the best form of democracy that can be achieved (c) that democracy and capitalism are inseparable (d) that western-style capitalist democracy is the form of government towards which all other systems are evolving. These propositions represent the ‘common sense’ view for most people. Nevertheless, in our ‘democracy’, electoral victory usually goes to the wealthiest; once a party has been elected it never consults its electorate for another four or five years; subsidiary democracy (i.e. elections and votes within parliaments) is considered to be adequate to reflect the will of the people; capitalism regards democracy as the perfect ground for its exploitative activities, and ‘democracy’ has guaranteed capitalism 5 and awarded it a free reign by providing what is known as ‘political stability’. We should really coin some new phrase to describe it, something unwieldy like Competitive Plutocratic Subsidiary Democracy! To point to any of this is to question the god — and to be immediately labelled ‘ideological’, which in most cases is roughly equivalent to ‘crank’.
So where has western democracy (and ideological hegemony) taken us in recent years? It has taken us to war with Islam, to the torture palaces of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, to ‘greed is good’, to Global Warming, to the wars of Africa, to The New American Century, to peak oil, to the credit crunch and the global depression, to the reduction of Gaza, to financial corruption on a grand scale, to mass unemployment, to blood diamonds, to the super-rich and hyper-poor, the jobbing politician and the cartel. In the meantime it has given us as consolation professional football, the celebrity spectacle, wall-to-wall television, talk shows, reality TV. The culture of complaint has drowned the culture of dissent. Television has drowned politics. Listening and looking have drowned hearing and seeing. To see any of this as an aberration of capitalism that ought to be corrected in some way is to miss the point: this is capitalism. What you see is what you get.
Writing in the Guardian in response to the recent insurrection in Greece, Costas Douzinas said of politics in the western democracies:
Contemporary politics aims at marginal (re)distributions of benefits, rewards and positions without challenging the established order. In this sense, politics resembles the marketplace or a town hall debate where rational consensus about public goods can be reached. Conflict has been pronounced finished, passé, impossible. The convergence of political parties in the centre ground exemplifies this "conflict-free" approach. But conflict does not disappear. Neo-liberal capitalism increases inequality and fuels conflict. When social conflict cannot be expressed politically, it becomes criminality and xenophobia, terrorism and intolerance. Or a reactive violence, the emotional response of those invisible to the political system.6
So where do writers stand in all of this?
What our private views are is of no consequence. Maintaining in private a hostile attitude to power is the prerogative of the servant and the prisoner — ‘We two alone will sing like birds in the cage.’7 What is important is what we write because, as the legal maxim says, qui tacet consentire videtur — he who keeps silent is seen as giving consent.
Two other courses are open to us: we can simply point to the ‘commonsense’, identifying and naming the ideological hegemony that has brought us to this pass, a useful function of art in itself, one of its best works, although tainted by the fallacy of objectivity; or we can take sides in the hope of influencing the outcome and thus become part of the debate. This essay advocates the latter.
The traditional stance of the writer in the twentieth century has been oppositional — even in Ireland. That opposition has been by turns republican, nationalist, fascist, and socialist but, one way or another, it has always been on the side of the counter-hegemony. In the interwar years, for example, Frank O’Connor, Sean O Faolàin, Peader O’Donnell and Liam O’Flaherty harried the confessional Catholic and right-wing consensus, the latter two from very public left-wing positions. Even an allegedly ‘pastoral’ poet like Patrick Kavanagh could kick against the pricks in poems like ‘To Hell With Common Sense’ or ‘In Memory of Brother Michael’:
Culture is always something that was
Something pedants can measure
Skull of bard, thigh of chief
Depth of dried up river
Shall we be thus forever?
Shall we be thus forever?
But at no time in the recent past have writers been so integrated into the fabric of power and at the same time strikingly powerless as they are now.
Writers, integrated into the fabric of power, I hear you ask, how can that be?
The Arts Council, established in 1951 with Sean O Faolàin as its chairman, was originally conceived as a conduit for state funding for the arts, including grants and bursaries to writers and artists; Aosdàna, a national body for writers and artists was established in 1981, its only useful function to disburse a cnuas or bursary to deserving members; two further organisations manage grants for translators of Irish literature and grants for Irish artists and writers to travel abroad. Most — probably all — of the festivals that take place around the country on a regular basis are part-funded by these government bodies; most travel by Irish writers benefits in some way from these organisations; many writers who would otherwise be in straitened circumstances draw an honourable pension from Aosdàna. It is, in fact, difficult if not impossible to be a writer in Ireland and not to become the beneficiary of government largesse in some form. And in addition to government funding, most arts organisations draw the balance of their sponsorship from local, national or international business, and, of course, government anyway sees its interests as virtually identical to those of commerce. I do not wish to suggest that a withdrawal of government funding is a good idea — quite the contrary, it is the business of government, among other things, to support the artistic life of the community — rather I am suggesting that it has never been easier for writers to abandon their traditional oppositional stance and cosy up to the political establishment. Of course the political establishment for the most part don’t give a damn about them so long as they’re not rocking the boat — the day when an Irishman might agonise about whether a play of his ‘sent out certain men the English shot’8 is long gone.
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Comments
I'm in broad agreement with this article
i'm interested in the question of form above all, and how a poetics of anger might be directed at dismantling and subverting the hegemony of the well-told-tale or the one-page-lyric
Much irish writing seems unaware of the advanced and experimental literature of the last one hundred years.
Much of that experimentation and advance was forged in the context of vast political movements between the wars, and in the post 68 period, and nearly always by writers with radical political sympathies. so i think its important to be formally contrary, not simply propagandistic, as i know from your own writing, especially your short stories, is soemthing you will agree with
for me, its not enough to simpy attempt to represent, or 'speak for' the oppressed in a poem or a short story or novel- which is what a lot of the most gifted young writers are very good at doing. For me, unless the work is formally subversive it ends up being soporific or, god love us, consolatory
I'm for shocking.
A whole lot of things need be turned over and re-examined- the relationship between writers and publishers, performers and audience, political artists and political movements/parties etc.
probably a journal looking at these questions should be founded, as a beginning
anyway these are a few short thoughts, i'll get back as the conversation hopefully progresses
Much food for thought, william, both in your essay and the comments. Thanks for going to the trouble of writing it. As with electorates, most writers are too busy keeping their heads above water, until pushed to anger when their heads sink below water, as has happened in the huge demonstration in Dublin last weekend (Feb 21, 09). I've linked to your essay at Slimming for the Beach
A journal is a really good idea. And I do agree about form as well as content. This whole essay arose from some musings on why Ireland has never had avant-garde writing or at least avant-garde movements (with a few remarkable exceptions, mostly people who left the country!). Someone objected to me once that they see avant-garde writing as 'pointless experimentation', but, firstly, it's only pointless in retrospect and, secondly, the 'pointless' avant-gardism refers merely to the movements that failed or self-destructed. Modernism was avant-garde once. Postmodernism too. In addition, the avant-garde is alive and well in other languages. We should try, as far as we are able, to avoid anglo-centrism here.
Thanks for that Philip. I was out of the country on the day so I only know what I've been reading about the demonstration. But it may well be the beginning of something. This is where my idea of naming the enemy - the taxonomy and the genealogy – comes in. People need to see clearly what the problem is, and I think we should make our contribution to that debate - which is, and is no more or less than, the contribution of another trade within the polity. But as it happens, our trade is words.
Maybe I got a little carried away with that last post. There are very good writers in Ireland who are very dedicated to what they do but most of the time when I read Irish poetry, I feel like I'm being taken through somebody's family photo album. It doesn't do it for me. I also do not mean that I'm the only person my age interested in learning the discipline of the craft or that I'm even very good at it myself. But I want to learn. That shouldn't be so hard to find. -John
I know exactly what you mean about 'being taken through someone's family album'. I'm not really sure how all this anger is to be expressed by writers. I leave that to the writers themselves, I suppose. Also, I don't necessarily feel that a poet has to be engaged in her/his poetry. We write a lot of other things besides what gets published between hard covers - there are essays, reviews, colour pieces, radio pieces and so on. It's even possible for a writer to attend a demonstration (even a riot) - it has happened before! The main thing is we should get off what we think of as our ivory towers, but which are actually fences.
"Our trade is words" As always I find your ideas interesting and thought provocing. I do think Irish poetry needs to grow a pair. The poetry journals seem full of lovely little nuggets of domestic reflection and more than once I've had to sit through the lyrical sex flashback of a promising young up and comer. But I am wary of being formally subversive. If anything I think a return to form is needed. In college I struggled in vain to find writers my own age even slightly interested in structuring verse. Poetry didn't need to be structured, it needed to be safe emotional and lyrical(with lots of 'I') or experimental (often not very experimental but a rehash of Eliot) Tradition, it seems, is too much work and we( the twenty-somethings) have been disinherited by a shoddy education system. Now I am no expert and I am guilty of many of the same sins (sex flashbacks, Eliot, and all) but I can't help thinking that if any poet wants to use the poetics of anger to contribute to the problems we're facing, then he or she needs to know the tools of the trade or else spend their anger in some other more constructive manner. If we really believe that we can accomplish anything than that enterprise needs to be taken seriously.That is not to say I want to see a 6 sonnet sequence on the HSE.Bad poetry is bad poetry. I just hate to see good writers wasted in the Domestics and good anger wasted by the uninitiated. Regards John (Japan) P.s: Excuser the typos. Typing on an iPod here.
I find this the most refreshing article I have read on the condition of writing in this country for a long time and, more directly, the condition of writers. For years, while still a reviewer with Books Ireland, I argued in this and other journals and in reviews for The Irish Times that Irish poets (for instance) refused to take stands on political and social issues because there was the subtextual fear that they might upset a funding agency or be seen as in any way divisive. I believed many of them had taken comforting refuge within Aosdàna and the 'acceptance' of being offered readings at festivals here and abroad; that eventually some had congealed into self-serving and self-protecting cliques who would brook no criticism. I am more convinced than ever that this is the case. I have never seen any of our more 'eminent' poets demonstrating against the US presence, now permanent, at Shannon Airport, for example.
I did not ask that poets use their work to propagandise, but that they begin to write letters to newspapers when a stark injustice, at home or abroad, was brought to their attention. I have not seen this happening save with one or two (yes, the figures are as low as that)who have been known to have a political consciousness and are not afraid to demonstrate it.
But one should have no illusions about how the State, through the Arts Council, can exercise its will. Dissension of any kind is not tolerated: the shock is still with me of finding out that our Western Writers' Centre in Galway had its Programming Grant removed based partly upon clippings of letters I had published in Galway papers critical of the arts' world there, and which were forwarded to the Council under a very uncertain name, with a letter requesting that our money be taken away!
Interestingly, The Irish Times, though initially curious about the story, suddenly veered away from it and nothing ever made print. No, I am not getting away from the point, here. This is precisely the kind of thing that writers have learned to be afraid of, namely that criticism of the status quo - whether it be the circumstances at Shannon or the way the arts are run in a small town - will result in some sort of damaging back-lash or, indeed, a damning silence. Most definitely, our poets need to get off their duffs and start paying attention to the world around them, and write letters and not use poetry to hide behind. Yes they will risk something. But poetry is not, to my mind, a drawing-room occupation and cannot be, especially in the increasingly class-divided country we live in.
Asking Aosdàna to take any action collectively is like pulling teeth, and what really annoys me is to see poets who refuse to be active in the social or political realm using lines by poets who have suffered or died under Soviet and other regimes to epigraph their work - as if this proxy suffering might more soundly legitimise their own work.
At the end of the day, I hope William Wall's essay opens a larger discussion. I read of it in the admirable magazine, The SHop but I feel certain that it will never be taken up by the The Irish Times.
Hi William,
Read your article, which I heard about through Western Writers Centre web site. It's great - power to your pen!!!
I'm interested in how writing can be subversive - challenging - illuminating and share Dave Lordan's thoughts about importance of form - ie it's not just about content - political themes, but how it's presented, or as Marcuse would say, art is subversive in that it can change the world by showing something from a different and challenging angle - or slant as Emily dickenson might say.
All best,
Pete Mullineaux
I think fred has hut the nail on the head as regards the material basis of the anti-political phobias of many. I think what william calls the counter hegemony can only become a pole of attraction by substituting its own forms of self funding, mutual support, and networks of distribution and honest constructive criticism. Art collectives could model in this regard, and the recession will make self reliance, and collectivity of some sort a neccessity.
John is quite right in what he says in some senses. But we cannot fear experiment. And the greatest experimenters are always masters of form.
all of this has been argued out before and, rather than keep blabbing i would direct people to Herbert Marcuses 1972 essay 'Art as a form of reality' which goes over a lot of the ground we are all interested in.
it is here http://libcom.org/library/art-form-reality-herbert-marcuse
to add a few recent thoughts on 'convergence collectivity'
Three things are going to condition avant-garde artistic production in the new period we are entering.
Number one is the fact that the funding climate is going cold. The Arts council is, like the rest of the public service, going to be devastated. Bursaries and all the extras are going to be hard to come by. On top of that the pressure is going to be on funding bodies and institutions that survive the recession to only fund work that is politically acceptable to the ruling class, not that a lot of them arent already doing that out of a combination of philistinism and careerism.
Secondly, we are obviously entering a time when class conflict and class tensions are on the increase. social partnership is finished. We will have strikes, riots etc to attend. I have no doubt of that. This will put into much sharper focus the relationship of artists and writers to movements of social defence and social progress, and reopen in a contemporary context all of the old debates around politics and art, which are likely to become less of an academic or marginalist concern and more and more relevant to living arts practice.
Thirdly, and this is the one that makes the fundamental and above all challenging difference to previous periods of social upheaval and artistic advance, is the impact of new convergence technologies on the way all of the arts are produced, distributed and, crucially, experienced. The net and 3g phones and multimedia devices have changed the way people store, access, and interact with art. There isn't now, for growing numbers, a seperate place for text (book), film (cinema or TV) music (stereo) etc etc etc. these along with photography, animation, visual art, etc are all on one device. People flit back and forth between songs, videos, wiki articles and so on without any respect for the old divisions. In other word the technological conditions that separated the art forms from each other have been swept away. The new arts will not be separated into literature, art, music etc but new and unknown combinations of those. Of course obstacles remain to artists taking advantage of the opportunities to truly make it new. Chief among those is their own conservatism, attachment to past forms, simple individualist contariness, reliance on funding models and contracts that depend on them producing art in a strictly limited way, fear of ridicule etc. But for those of us who dont suffer any of the above there is the simple fact that, without being a new leonardo da vinci, we cant on our own be expert enough to make serious art in more than one or two fields of activity. We writers will have to combine with all kinds of other artists to stay abreast. So, my point is that the financial pressures and political radicalisation of a deep recession will combine in our time with the most fundamental change in the way the arts are produced and experienced since the renaissance. Tis combination of factors will create the conditions where 'convergence collectives' of radicalised artists from a multiplicity of artistic backgrounds come into being. These will be self reliant in terms of funding, and distribution as wellas experimental in terms of work because that is the only way they will both survive and be relevant.
It's a very interesting essay. For me there never has been and never could be any seperation between poetry and politics or, indeed, between poetry and anger. And I absolutely agree with what Dave Lordan has to say about "dismantling and subverting the hegemony of the well-told-tale or the one-page-lyric", although I don't like that the word 'hegemony'. It's too often used by decayed leftists to explain their lack of real outrage at everything from the Janjaweed to female circumsision, but I digress...
I agree totally with William when he says that "reasonableness, quietness, calmness, meditativeness, are continuously advanced as terms of affection by literary critics when the world calls for anger, savagery and satire." However, when he goes on to ask "Where is our Jonathan Swift, our Shelley, our Saramago, our Neruda, our Orwell, our Huxley?" I don't know. This is a rather eclectic list. Neruda was a great, great poet; but I don't think anyone should take general political guidance from the man who wrote an entirely unironic 'Ode To Josef Stalin' on Stalin's death in 1953. George Orwell, also on William's list, would no doubt, had he had the chance, have poured many vials of poison on Pablo's ode to the man who made millions of innocent Soviet citizens 'disappear'.
William says "let us begin by the simple process of naming our enemy." Would that it were simple. I do in the fullness of time get around to naming most of my enemies in poems. In one, 'The FAS Cometh', from my first book which came out in 2005, I name our beloved state training authority. It was of course based on experience. Last year, during the FAS expenses scandal I rededicated the poem to the five Trade Union apppointed members of the Board of FAS and published it in The Galway Advertiser. In response a member of Galway Alliance Against War, who is also a loud supporter of our 'left wing' councillor Catherine Connolly and campaigned on the No side in the Lisbon referendum, wrote in to the paper and said that anyone who attacked FAS was attacking everyone who had ever participated on a FAS scheme! And no-one on the left had a word to say in response; the SWP in Galway entered one of their periods of strategic silence. And as Dave Lordan has said, silence amounts to support. I know what Fianna Fail are. But I also know that the far left is riddled with croneyism and opportunism which can on occasion make the jaw drop.
I think the key thing is to encourage views to be expressed as vigorously as needs be; that way it'll be a real, living discussion which will go we know not where, but somewhere.
We give platforms to writers of every possible political viewpoint at the Over The Edge events we organise in Galway. We even once had a campaigner for the Palestinians and a declared Zionist clash poems in Galway City Library. And let there be more of it. There is nothing to be afraid of.
From my own point of view; exposing the fact that most of the far left has learned very little since the cold war (and forgotten some of what it once knew about solidarity) is one of the things I've been writing angry poems about of late. Most of them wouldn't really work as propaganda pieces for People Before Profit. But there you go.
The important thing to remember is that writers cannot be exempt. The argument that 'art is above politics' is, first of all, patently not true, but secondly a claim for good old fashioned elitism, an expression of the grossest arrogance or, conversely, but equally likely, petty-mindedness. But even if art could be 'above' or 'outside' politics, the times call us to be engaged. We cannot control the source of our work, or even, I believe, the direction of our work, but we can be open to the political, and this might take the form of simply making our position clear. I believe if a critical mass of writers were to declare their political position openly, a climate of real debate about the political (as opposed to mere politicking) could develop.
Thanks to everybody for their comments on this piece.
I think the complete silence on the blasphemy laws from the institutional far left, as far as i can make out, tells us all we need to know about what artists can expect in terms of support from that source. Critical Independence is a basic requirement, not only for dignity, but even for survival. Strategic silence is the main reason I distinguish myself from the institutional far left. The left's inabilility to honestly disagree with each other is a form of suicide. I don't want to die like that.
I think radical artists must distinguish themselves in practice, and not just in theory, from the existing far left, exerting pressure on it like so to open up. I think we can do that promoting open debate, plurality of practice, and free-thinking, and above all a confrontation in our work with power that is fearless of the consequences.
I take issue with Kevin on the naming of enemies. Firstly, the focus in my piece is specifically on the hegemony of the neo-liberal system. I advocate the naming of the system and its effects, not as a means of settling scores, but as a way of breaking the bubble within which people live. Recently I heard someone complaining about the TSB's decision to raise its interest rates. My response was - That's capitalism, what are you complaining about? My point was that you can't be a capitalist and complain that people want to make more profit out of you. We should use our skills as writers to depict in one way or another how the system has so taken hold of people's minds that they no longer see the system.
As regards bitching about other members of the left, I don't think we should give aid and comfort to the enemy or do their dirty work for them. Nevertheless, we should try to identify where the left really is. For example, it is difficult to see contemporary trade unionism as anything more than a business that represents its members.
My list of radical writers was not intended to suggest that they would have agreed with each other, or me, but that they didn't hesitate to write about Politics. The list could as easily have included Virgil, Dante or Sophocles.It was intended to be eclectic.
I hope, with Dave, 'that the financial pressures and political radicalisation of a deep recession will combine in our time with the most fundamental change in the way the arts are produced and experienced'. I've seen other recessions, though I think this one is deeper and more radical. Time will tell.
Also signing off: I think that all criticism's of the existing left should be public. The 'don't wash your dirty linen in public' argument - though I know in William's case it comes from a good place - has been appropriated by too many little Stalins down the years as a way of avoiding awkward questions. If there is a better alternative to capitalism, which could work in practice, as well as in theory, then democracy and openness and democracy and openness again have to be at its heart.
We must learn the lessons of Russia and really get it this time. I do take your point about the list of radical writers. I suppose for me the left's attitude to cultural freedom has become a kind of ultimate test; the man or woman who can allow the contradiction of liking a poem, while at the same time disagreeing with what it is saying, will not send you (or perhaps more likely me) to the gulag.
In Galway the organised far left's attitude to the cultural scene here has appalled me; they seem to prefer a few cheerleaders telling the faithful what they want to hear at the end of a demo to the hugely vibrant literary scene which exists on the ground here and is very open to politics but won't be easily co-opted to praise this or that Dear Leader.
To sign off:
I write in, of and for the left: specifically that part of the left which is seeking and preparing for the rescue of the species from the death sentence of capitalism, that is, the revolutionary left.
I agree with William that we must use our art 'use our skills as writers to depict in one way or another how the system has so taken hold of people's minds that they no longer see the system.'
In my own words this means expressing and encouraging the human will to freedom. It means trying to unleash and sustain the latent capacity for self-emancipation in ourselves and in those we can affect.
All the art I respect tends towards this provoking in one way or another, from shamans to surrealists. The art that inspires me seeks to agitate, disturb, disrupt, derange, to knock people out of their common senses and help them to recognize the capacity for change within themselves and their surroundings.
That's what punk did for me when i was a kid. and it still does. I would never have become either an artist or a revolutionary without it.
I think we contribute best to revolution by being most distinctively ourselves, by showing always that it is possible to break from the herd, the past, our own inertia and fears, from everything that stalls us and holds us back. That is why for me, and I think most of us here, the question of style and form are hugely important.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't work together, of course. It is possible to be free together.
There is a crying need for artists to speak out now about what is happening in ireland. We need to explore ways to do that together urgently.
Part of our job though, as any revolutionary gangsta rapper Stateside knows, is to polemicise against obstacles to revolutionary change contained within the left itself. Revolution in the revolution, as it used to be put.
We must be able to do that without becoming bitter and nihilistic and 'crossing over to the other side' Johnny Rotten style.
A figure I take inspiration from in all this is the late German poet Erich Fried, who I recommend you link to here Erich Fried