In the Western world, conspiracy theories have proliferated in the twenty-first century for many reasons. At the societal or macro-level, austerity and a massive wealth gap have created enormous uncertainty and insecurity for much of the world’s population. As Mark Blyth and Eric Lonergan argue in their recent book Angrynomics, this has led to the resurgence of populist forms of politics based on anger and fear of the other – a paranoid outlook born not so much of the conviction that my tribe or group is right, so much as the belief that everybody else is wrong. In the media sphere, meanwhile, the displacement of reporting by public relations content, the rise of clickbait churnalism and fake news, and the tendency for news to devolve into cheerleading for partisan political narratives (as argued recently in Matt Taibbi’s book Hate, Inc.), might have undermined public trust in mainstream journalism. No wonder that so many people are suspicious of official narratives and institutions and the ‘Blue Church thinking’ (as they say on the Intellectual Dark Web) of the mainstream, liberal consensus.
 
The recent pandemic has been a boom time for the paranoid style of politics. Well-known crazy man David Icke emerged as the most prominent conspiracist over recent months. Icke’s interviews during the pandemic with the former derivatives broker and super-grifter Brian Rose were watched by millions on Rose’s London Real platform. Now, if you were to be charitable, you could say that Icke makes a few reasonable points in his talks and writings. He often talks, for example, about the need to transcend the politics of left and right and to challenge the ‘postage stamp consensus’ constructed by the mainstream media – the exclusion of any fundamental challenge to dominant ideology. Socialists could agree with all that. But Icke has also forged a career making wild and unsubstantiated claims about the existence of twelve-foot reptilian overlords, the New World Order, and so on. And to take just one example from his recent pontifications about the pandemic, Icke confidently stated in his first interview with Rose that Covid-19 was a hoax and that the virus had not been isolated, which is simply incorrect: Covid-19 has been isolated and genetically sequenced by scientists in South Korea.
 
Another irrational voice during the pandemic period has been the Australian Max Igan, who made a series of walk-and-talk videos during lockdown, mostly posted on YouTube (and when he was eventually de-platformed by YouTube, Bitchute). In his talks Igan expounded his opinions in a blokeish, parasocial style (“folks” is Igan’s favourite term of address for his audience). Like Icke, Igan talks about Covid-19 as a “plandemic” implemented in the service of total social control by a neo-Bolshevik (sometimes neo-Fascist) elite, with the connivance of Bill Gates and George Soros (although he recently reminded his listeners, during a recent conversation with the anti-semitic ‘investigative journalist’ Harry Vox, that he has some good friends who are Jews). It’s loopy stuff, supported by nothing more than occasional allusions to other online conspiracists and Breitbart news stories.
 
Icke, Igan and their ilk see politics as a Manichean struggle between the forces of Good and Evil (or Light and Darkness) and they are forever telling us that humanity is on the brink of annihilation – the underlying refrain of all reactionary politics. Salvation, for these figures, lies in the masses ‘waking up’ from their sleep. But Covid-19 has also brought to prominence some figures at the soft end of the conspiracy spectrum. This group includes the veteran British curmudgeon Vernon Coleman, a former GP and nationalist who believes that the lockdown was implemented to keep food prices high by shadowy groups who want to implement a world government. Also in the UK there is the potato-faced self-help author Carl Vernon, who mocks those who observe the lockdown guidance as “sheep” and sees wearing a facemask to prevent Covid-19 transmission – a well-supported scientific recommendation – as a form of “social engineering”. And then there the more careful and rational conspiracists like the American James Corbett who, like some of the figures mentioned above, questions the scientific rationale for the so-called lockdown and expresses concerns about the potential of Covid-19 to be exploited by the security state, while eschewing the wilder, patently irrational claims of the likes of Icke and Igan. But even Corbett is in thrall to the conspiracists’ master narrative that global events are being directed by ‘globalists’ intent on world government – despite fairly strong evidence that the contemporary global picture is increasingly fracturing into smaller and smaller nation states. Finally, while female YouTubers like Amazing Polly prove that conspiracy theory is not just a boys’ game, conspiracy theorists are predominantly white men, usually on the right wing of politics (although there are plenty of liberal conspiracy theories, too – Russiagate would be a pre-eminent recent example).
 
It’s important to say at this point that the tout court rejection of all conspiracy theories is just as wrong-headed as the wide-eyed belief in Jewish plots for world domination and other irrational theories. We do, after all, live in a world shaped by the plotting of the capitalist class which often operates in Machiavellian ways (as well as plain stupid ways – for cock-ups are at least as common as conspiracies). Some conspiracy theories are rational and even well-substantiated; in fact, they are not ‘theories’ at all. One could, for example, make an extensive list of factually established, state-sanctioned false flag operations: Gleiwitz, Northwoods, the Gulf of Tonkin and Gladio, to mention just a few high-profile cases. And it is a matter of record that governments have conducted secret experiments on their populations (the Tuskegee study from 1932-1972), fixed autopsies to cover up state violence (Attica Prison Riot in 1971), covertly sold arms (Irangate from 1985-87), lied about the threat posed by enemy states (Iraq’s ‘weapons of mass destruction’ in 2003), and so on. In light of all this, those who proudly proclaim that they do not ‘believe’ in conspiracies are simply parading their ignorance about history and the modus operandi of businesses and the security state. The mainstream media, politicians, and factions within the so-called ‘deep state’ often engage in lies, deceptions and cover-ups in order to protect ruling interests.
 
It follows from all this that we should keep our minds open about at least some of the topics often laughed off by politicians or mainstream journalists as ‘conspiracy theories’. Given what we know about the various actors involved in his case, it would seem eminently rational, for example, to speculate that Jeffrey Epstein didn’t commit suicide last year. And I definitely don’t think that those promoting conspiracy theories should be banned from the major media platforms, as some of them have been. In fact, even some of the online Covid conspiracists raise some pretty valid points alongside their torrents of irrational and anti-scientific assertion. For example, the crisis will surely be used by national ruling classes to ramp up the surveillance of their populations. And we absolutely should be asking very critical questions about the extensive and unaccountable power of global philanthropists like Bill Gates, who seems to exert enormous influence in areas such as science and the media. The capitalists are of course exploiting the current crisis to the greatest extent possible, but the evidence is that they are making hay while the sun shines. There is no evidence that they have deliberately orchestrated the entire pandemic for purposes of social control or world government.
 
Indeed, socialists approach these issues scientifically and we would advocate a rational solution to the conspiracies of our rulers. Indeed, even if some of the most outlandish and irrational conspiracy theories about Covid-19 really were true – if, say, the so-called ‘elites’ really were intent on eradicating humanity, or culling the global population back to one billion people, or instituting a world government, as some of the figures described above have suggested – the only way to prevent such fiendish, undemocratic schemes would be to create a democratic society without rulers. And that, of course, would amount to the very thing that most of the irrational, mostly right-wing conspiracy theorists mentioned above detest: socialism.

As everybody knows, the horrible police killing of George Floyd on 25 May in Minneapolis, Minnesota, is merely the latest in a long series of brutal attacks on people of colour in the US. The resulting (and ongoing) protests, rioting and looting are all entirely understandable reactions to the longstanding cruelties of racial capitalism, even if they contain relatively little potential for large-scale social change. The horrific violence directed against even peaceful protestors by the police and nationalist extremists, meanwhile, has rightly revolted many people. The police response has no doubt been spurred on by Trump’s seemingly tough ‘law and order’ response towards the protestors, although it is also a legacy of the militarization of the police that took place under Barack Obama and which was showcased during the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014.
 
The Black Lives Matter movement, which has sprung back to life on a staggering scale recently, is a righteous cause. In much of the world, black lives really do not matter – or at least are usually valued less highly than white lives. This is not just the case in the US, where young black men are disproportionately killed by the police and subjected to various kinds of non-physical violence, including unemployment and imprisonment. Here in the UK, too, the state’s track record of racialised violence is also appalling and throughout much of the world, darker-skinned people are oppressed in a variety of ways – it is mainly black- and brown-skinned people, after all, that are the victims of US and Western imperialist violence in the Middle East and other parts of the world. At the same time, in the US and elsewhere, racism – whether in the form of apartheid and other legalised apparatuses or less overt forms of social inequality – has proved to be a highly effective apparatus of social control, allowing the ruling classes to divide and control their domestic workers.
 
From this point of view, the Black Lives Matter movement is a civilising force. A positive aspect of the worldwide protests is that they been, at least so far as I can see, largely spontaneous – not in the sense that they came out of nowhere (after all, they are a response not simply to the killing of one black man but to generations of chattel slavery and segregation), but in the sense that they have arisen relatively free from leftist co-option; it’s notable, for instance, that most the placards carried by demonstrators have been home-made. The protests surely also played a part in the firing of police officer Derek Chauvin, along with three of his colleagues, and to Chauvin being charged with murder. These protests have also brought together people of all ‘races’ to an unprecedented degree.
 
On the other hand, no clear working-class perspective has emerged out of the protests, even in the US. Here in the UK the situation is even more confusing, as many of the mainly young BLM demonstrators emphasize the importance of ‘being heard’ on the ‘issue’ of racism, but are less clear about who they want to be heard by and to what end. And there is little sense among British protestors of any coherent political understanding of racism beyond superficial ethical appeals to ‘good’ and ‘bad’ behaviour or vague calls for justice. Moreover, whatever radical ambitions some members of the Black Lives Matter organisation may harbour, the movement has been applauded or at least covered respectfully by huge swaths of the media and academic world. Many otherwise hard-nosed capitalist politicians, too, have pledged their allegiance to Black Lives Matter or engaged in a spot of socially-distanced knee-taking. CEOs and most of the world’s biggest corporations are also woking up to the power of the BLM brand; after all, what better than a few images of young people holding up homemade signs to give your social media profiles a bit of raw reality and multicultural edge? Of course, such co-option is no fault of the protestors or the BLM organisation itself; but it does show how easy it is for the ruling class to recuperate movements that primarily operate on the terrain of identity politics.
 
One of the most amusing elements of the now raging culture war over BLM is the conservative journalists’ and pundits’ claim that the Black Lives Matter organisation is ‘Marxist’. Now it may be true that some of its founders claim to be Marxists. A co-founder of BLM, Patrice Cullors, for example, has told journalists that she and her comrades are “trained Marxists”. But claiming to be a Marxist and actually being one are rather different things. In reality, BLM is a reformist organisation seeking ‘justice’ for black (and ultimately, as they say, all) people within the capitalist system. It does not stand for socialism. There is no indication on the BLM website, for example, that the organisation seeks the overthrow of capitalism or the ruling class – the raison d’être of any Marxist organisation and the only way that the majority of black people will be freed from misery under capitalism. And while its activism may lead to some small changes to the policing or judicial systems, some of its demands, such as the defunding of the police would not seem to be practical or even desirable while the capitalist system – itself a system of slavery – remains in place.
 
Strictly speaking, racism is simply the belief that races exist – a belief to which not only conservatives, but also many liberals and leftists subscribe (even if the latter occasionally refer to race as a ‘social construction’). We need to overcome the very concept of race, a pseudo-scientific notion that arose at the same time as racist practices, providing a justification for the slave trade in the early years of capitalism. This is only likely to be achieved if people of all skin colours come together to abolish the system itself.

This is an expanded version of an article first published in The Socialist Standard and Star and Crescent

Perhaps I’m not the best person to be writing this article. Self-isolating at home for the last few weeks, my media consumption has mainly revolved around my three-year-old son’s favourite TV animations. But in between episodes of Paw Patrol and Peppa Pig, I’ve been watching the Covid-19 news narrative unfold. Media revenues have generally plummeted as advertisers withdraw their spends and even the big digital players like Facebook and Twitter have seen big falls in profits. But news is in demand as never before from a locked-down (or, in the case of Britain, semi-locked-down) public. The audience for television news, especially on BBC, has skyrocketed. And while their print circulations have been in long-term decline, the big newspapers have also strongly influenced public debate about the pandemic, providing many of the stories we access through social media.

Journalists have been using the word 'unprecedented' to describe the present situation. But this pandemic is not some 'black swan' event; there have been similar viral pandemics before and scientists had been warning that something like the present emergency was going to happen. What is new is the scale of the political and cultural reaction to the virus: in the modern era, there has never been a global lockdown of healthy populations and this has helped to make Covid-19 the biggest media story in history.

Much of the mainstream coverage of this emergency has been informative and I don’t agree with the view, popular in online alternative media, that journalists have simply been fuelling panic or fear about the coronavirus. In Britain, at least, politicians and media were blasé about its potential threat for far too long at the beginning at the year, although there is certainly some room for debate about how much 'overreaction' there might have been to Covid-19 since then. Experts are not unanimous on this question and there are obviously going to be fierce debates in future about the relevance of the pandemic measures that have been implemented; perhaps in a year's time we will have good enough data to judge whether the total number of excess deaths caused by this coronavirus really justified global lockdown.

But this is a genuine crisis, if only because the countries the virus is impacting have mostly been very badly prepared for it: having placed profits before people, they completely failed to invest in the scientific research and healthcare equipment needed to cope with a widely foreseen pandemic. In 2017, for example, the British government rejected a recommendation for all frontline NHS staff to be given protective equipment during a flu epidemic on the grounds that it would be too costly. For the most part, mainstream media have acknowledged the scale of the resulting problem. Yet there’s much to criticise in the media coverage of the emergency. After all, a media system owned and directed by the exploiting class is bound to discuss Covid-19 in ways that reflect capitalist interests and ideologies. Here are just a few of those ways.

Fighting Talk

Over recent weeks, the media have introduced us to several neologisms, such as 'social distancing' and 'contact-tracing' (which cynics might say is just a less alarming word for 'surveillance'). But the media have also used some more familiar discursive techniques. For example, many media and political discussions of this crisis have been wrapped in the language of patriotism and war. Trump called Covid-19 the “invisible enemy” and across the major media outlets, journalists have routinely talked of the ‘fight’ or ‘battle’ against the virus. “WAR ON CORONA” went the headline of Scotland’s Sunday Mail on 15th March. Other British papers have praised the ‘Dunkirk spirit’ of the population. Of course, war metaphors are always popular among politicians and journalists seeking dramatic effect, especially when the state perceives a threat to its authority (British newspapers were full of them during the 2011 riots). Boris Johnson's talk about “beating” the enemy virus helped him to project his strength and ‘leadership’ skills at a time when even other members of his class were questioning his abilities.
 
For the rest of us, however, this war talk is quite unhelpful. For one thing, it might have distorted public perceptions of the crisis. In one of their online broadcasts in March, Novara media showed footage of an elderly Londoner (a woman clearly in the ‘high risk’ category) declaring that she would not stay at home to curb the spread of infection because that would be “giving in to the virus” – as though Covid-19 were a group of jihadists hell-bent on destroying ‘our way of life’! It has also been suggested by the chief executive of the organisation Suicide Crisis that describing the crisis as a war is potentially distressing to people with mental health conditions, who might feel ashamed that they're not tough enough to cope. And from a more macro-political angle, presenting this emergency as a ‘war’ conditions the public to accept the tougher new policing and digital surveillance measures being put in place by governments across the world and which many people fear will continue after the lockdown has ended. You don't have to be a 'conspiracy theorist' to have concerns about this - you only have to look at what is already happening in China.

Finally, militarist language tends to channel working-class dissatisfaction with capitalism into admiration for the nation state. Before the first ‘Clap for our Carers’ event which swept across Britain on 26th March (and which then became a weekly occurrence), Leo McKinstry of the right-wing Express came over all Churchillian, asking readers to “salute our NHS heroes in this their finest hour”. And after the event, the front page of the left-leaning Mirror newspaper was given over to photographs of smiling NHS workers being publicly applauded. “Your country LOVES you”, gushed the newspaper, along with “NATION SALUTES VIRUS HEROES”. Not to be outdone, the BBC’s Breakfast programme started a daily Hero Half Hour segment, in which viewers were invited to share praise for key workers “on the frontline”.

But there’s something fishy about this newfound love for often low-paid workers and as for NHS ‘heroism’, perhaps we should recall Albert Camus’ novel The Plague, whose central protagonist, a doctor called Bernard Rieux, states that his work “is not about heroism”, but about doing what’s necessary in an absurd situation. In fact, ‘Clap for our Carers’ has been a well-camouflaged propaganda campaign. It has certainly tapped into positive public feelings of solidarity with hard-pressed healthcare workers who are saving lives under difficult circumstances; however, those circumstances are due in no small measure to healthcare cuts imposed by successive governments, including the present one.

The media’s militarist and nationalist framing of the event has tended to obscure such facts, deflecting any criticism of the state with the feelgood patriotism of 'we’re all in this together' - indeed, the appeal of the campaign is libidinal as much as rhetorical. 'Clap for our Carers' works in a similar way to the insidious Help for Heroes campaign: if you criticise it, you'll quickly be accused of disrespecting 'our brave boys and girls'. It also works as a kind of anti-strike propaganda, allowing any future complaints, protests or industrial action taken by key workers (such as the Amazon strikes that have occurred in various countries) to be reframed as acts of intransigence against the national interest. How can you think of protesting when there's a war on?

China Crisis

Britain's tabloid newspapers have a global reputation for sensationalism and racism and they haven't disappointed during this emergency. Back in January, for example, the right-wing Daily Mail and other mainstream media sources published lurid images of a Chinese woman eating a bat in what some claimed was a Wuhan restaurant, although the pictures turned out to have been taken in 2016 in a restaurant in Palau and were therefore not connected with the recent outbreak. But that didn't matter. The ‘fake news’ story went viral, no doubt because it appealed to racist Western stereotypes of exotic orientals with bizarre habits.

It’s hard to prove that the media affects attitudes or behaviours in the real world, but it seems likely that the anti-Chinese messaging of the tabloids has contributed to the present climate of xenophobic hostility towards East Asian people. This has led to harassment and sometimes brutal physical assaults. On the 3rd March a Singaporean student was left needing facial reconstructive surgery after being attacked in London. And on 14th March an Asian-American family, including a two-year-old girl, were stabbed in a retail outlet in Texas by a man who apparently feared that the victims were infectious. Being the cynics that they are, politicians such as Johnson and Trump, who has referred to Covid-19 as the “Chinese virus”, might be hoping to benefit from this popular anti-Chinese sentiment, as they try to sidestep responsibility for their failures in handling the outbreak by shifting the blame onto China – even to the point of asking for ‘reparations’. 'The Chinese' have become a useful scapegoat.

In parts of the left-leaning media, meanwhile, the China card has been played in a very different, but equally questionable way. During an interview on the Kremlin-supporting Russia Today television news channel, Stalin enthusiasts George Galloway and Ranjeet Brar heaped praise on the efficient and organised Chinese response to the outbreak. This is reasonable up to a point. After all, a case could be made that China marshalled its immense state apparatus to deal with the coronavirus outbreak more effectively than many other countries and it seems to have kept its death toll low.

Then again, we surely ought to be suspicious of health-related statistics reported by the Chinese state. And Galloway and Brar conveniently forgot that the Chinese government had initially tried to suppress the warnings of medical professionals about the spread of the virus. It should also be added that just as tabloid stories about the virus have generated widespread anti-Asian sentiment in the West, misinformation about the virus and its origins has also fuelled xenophobia and racism within China. This has been experienced particularly by black immigrants in China, who have been evicted by their landlords, barred from entering restaurants, and so on. One Chinese official, Zhao Lijian, has even tried to spread the rumour that the US army brought the virus to Wuhan last year.

None of this has stopped left-wing ‘anti-imperialist’ publications from praising the glorious People’s Republic. The People's Dispatch even published an article with the title ‘How Chinese Socialism is Defeating the Coronavirus Outbreak’. I can only recommend that the authors of this piece actually visit China to witness its obscene wealth gap, rural poverty and hyper-exploited workers. China's rulers may pay lip service to Marx and communism, but they actively persecute and 'disappear' Marxist activists and university students. So no, China isn't socialist, it's a state-capitalist authoritarian nightmare and this left-wing cheering for China is as disturbing as the right-wing Sinophobia.

Corona Communism

Some very odd ideas about socialism have also been aired in more mainstream media. On 20th March, in the right-wing Telegraph, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard urged that ‘Boris must embrace socialism immediately to save the liberal free market’. But this only shows the capitalist press's confusion about the meaning of socialism - or perhaps its ideological opportunism (as Paul Mattick once noted, Marxism is the last refuge of the bourgeoisie). For Evans-Pritchard, socialism means the state taking over control of the economy from private industry. Ironically, he shares this understanding of socialism as state control with much of the political left, not to mention parts of the Internet-based conspiracy community. For example, one of the more imaginative members of the conspiracy milieu, Max Igan, is currently arguing that the Covid lockdown is a socialist-communist plot organized by modern-day Bolsheviks to harvest the organs of the population! (Assuming we all come out of this with our kidneys in situ, it'll be interesting to see how Igan walks back his macabre predictions).

Of course, the state has indeed taken over aspects of private industry with dizzying speed in recent months, with the nationalisation of the hospitals in Ireland and the suspension of the rail franchise system in the UK, to give just two examples. Genuine socialism, however, means a world without classes, commodities, money and borders. What we have been seeing over recent weeks is not socialism, but the capitalist state putting in place measures to cover a proportion of workers' wages, bail out businesses and keep key services running. The state is simply doing what it must in order to head off any ‘social unrest’ that might arise during the epidemic and to ensure that the wheels of production can grind back into motion afterwards. To a limited extent, governments have been “putting their arms around workers” - but only so that they can get their hands back around our necks when normal business resumes.

Another, particularly daft media myth has been that the virus is a social leveller. This idea gained some traction in the major media when, on 25th March, the British public learned that the virus had pulled off its most audacious stunt so far, shamelessly infecting the first in line to the throne, Prince Charles. In the Express, Dr Hilary Jones was quoted as saying that the virus “is a great leveller” that will be “just as virulent for politicians and celebrities and the monarchy as it will the homeless and destitute”. A few days later, Clare Foges of The Times waxed lyrical on the theme, writing: “Coronavirus: the great leveller. Infecting princes and prime ministers, making hermits of most, hushing the concrete council estate and the millionaires' leafy square”.

Fortunately, not many people seem to have been fooled by this sort of twaddle. Sceptics on social media have argued that Prince Charles, who had shown only minor symptoms of C-19, had ‘jumped the queue’, having been given a coronavirus test despite NHS guidance that only hospitalised patients could receive one. The public has also given short shrift to celebrities claiming to be ‘just like us’ when faced with the threat of the virus. Wonder Woman actress Gal Gadot’s attempt to prove that “we’re all in this together” by leading a star-studded singalong to John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ was widely ridiculed on social media. And megastar Madonna, the world's wealthiest female musician, was mocked for an Instagram video in which she called Covid-19 “the great equaliser” while sitting in a petal-filled bathtub.
 
Far from thrusting us towards socialism or uniting the celebs with the plebs, the corona emergency has brought the savagely class divided nature of our world into sharp focus. It is true that anybody can catch the virus and this is surely one reason why the capitalist class is taking it very seriously. But this has been a tale of two pandemics. On the one side, the super-rich have headed for their disaster bunkers in private jets; on the other, workers on temporary or insecure contracts have faced destitution (by early April in Britain there had been one million new registrations for Universal Credit), while the most vulnerable groups in society, such as refugees, homeless people, those with pre-existing conditions, or the many low-paid key workers who cannot simply ‘stay at home’, are widely exposed to the virus.

Of course, the mainstream media cannot cover up these grotesque social inequalities completely. In April it was widely reported that the world's richest man - Amazon founder and boss Jeff Bezos - had added $24 billion to his wealth since the start of the year, owing to the growth in demand for online shopping. At the same time, workers in Amazon-owned Whole Foods Stores in the US were given a t-shirt emblazoned with the word 'Hero' on it, which I'm sure more than made up for being in a public-facing job without union protection or face masks. Perhaps they could wrap their t-shirts around their mouths.

Their Media and Ours
 
Despite all of these myths and mystifications, the mainstream media are not entirely bad and they cannot simply ignore the widespread public awareness of the government's incompetence. That's why tough questions have sometimes been asked of the government. For example, on 26th March the editor of The Lancet, Richard Horton, appeared on the BBC's Question Time discussion panel, condemning Britain's unreadiness for the pandemic as a “scandal”. Throughout April, much of the British media castigated the British government’s inability to guarantee adequate testing and protective equipment for NHS workers. A BBC Panorama investigation (27 April) has detailed the British government's failures and The Sunday Times (19 April) has also put the boot in, perhaps suggesting that Rupert Murdoch is distancing himself from the Tories.

But the general perspective of the mainstream media has been narrow and anti-working class. There have been plenty of stories about people flouting the social distancing rules, but none questioning how the profit system has hampered the medical response to the crisis. It has been primarily through the social media that working-class people have found solidarity via community information and support groups. And only socialist publications such as The Socialist Standard have been cutting through the nationalist claptrap and geopolitical blame games of the politicians and mainstream media to expose the underlying problem: the global capitalist system, which exists to protect profits rather than human life.

Ten years ago, I found myself the recipient of several angry emails, all sent to my work email address. My crime had been to write a letter to a student newspaper in which I criticised a student's proposal to make it compulsory for university staff to wear a red poppy. The details of this affair aren't relevant here and my opinions about the red poppy are easy to find elsewhere on this blog (in summary: no communist or socialist should have anything to do with the thing). Presumably unaware of the irony, one outraged nationalist emailed me to say that the Second World War was justified, since it guaranteed "the freedoms that we enjoy today", and also wrote to my line manager recommending that I be disciplined for asserting otherwise. For many on the right, this is what free speech really means: freedom of speech for me and for the people who agree with me.

But some - perhaps an increasing number - of those on the left of politics are also eager to no-platform or 'cancel' their real or supposed ideological opponents. Weaker manifestations of cancel culture include ostracism, blanking, ghosting and gossip-mongering - the tactics of an online left that often seems hellbent on plumbing the depths of infantilism, narcissism and moralism. Sometimes leftists go even further, attacking the validity of free expression itself and seeking to curtail it. In the wokest corners of the web today, appeals to the principle of free discourse are often mockingly parsed as 'muh freeze peach' and the essential foundation of radical political debate - being able to write or say what you think in dialogue with (or opposition to) others - is more and more ridiculed as the outdated obsession of centrist squares, out-of-touch boomers, or, to use the argot, 'literal fascists'.

Left-wing suspicion of free speech is nothing new. To cite a classic example, Herbert Marcuse's essay on 'Repressive Tolerance' (1965) attempted to justify the denial of freedom of speech and organisation to "groups and movements which promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race or religion" Such groups and movements are still with us, of course, and they should be countered at every turn. But I would argue that for socialists, it doesn't make sense to suppress repellent social and political views - something Marcuse himself recognised would be “undemocratic” (albeit, in his view, a necessary step towards achieving a more genuine democracy). In general terms, expressions of prejudice and hatred should be permitted, not because there exists some ideal 'free market of ideas', but because it is only by discussing and debating them that their vile nature can be exposed. As John Milton famously put it in his Areopagitica, "Let [Truth] and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter? Her confuting is the best and surest suppressing".
​
I understand the appeal of cancel culture. After all, many of the most prominent free speech advocates in today's public sphere are unpleasant conservatives such as Toby Young, who seems to pop up every five minutes on a British television channel to complain that you can't say anything these days. But we should not embrace cancel culture just because right wingers oppose it. For one thing, free speech, as Thomas Scanlon argued long ago, is a good in itself, regardless of any consequences its exercise might have: this is because freedom of expression - including the freedom to hear others' speech and make judgements about it - is important to us as rational, autonomous persons who can and should be able to make up our own minds about particular issues.

Moreover, it's not clear that cancelling even works very well. The conservative and alt-right wingnuts and hatemongers who complain the loudest about being no-platformed - I'm thinking here of Young, Katie Hopkins and Tommy Robinson - are actually well-connected and powerful operators who, when cancelled, usually have little difficulty in finding alternative outlets for their opinions. Depriving such characters of their platforms is therefore generally counter-productive: all too often, it only allows them (and their deluded working-class supporters) to posture as the victims of a left-wing PC purge before trotting off to their next lucrative media gig. Cancellation does not starve these toxic edgelords of the oxygen of publicity; quite the opposite, in fact.

And what about the less elevated targets of cancel culture? Cancellation can be devastating for the less well-connected. It is becoming quite commonplace for ordinary people who offend against dominant public opinion on issues such as trans rights or Brexit to suffer reputational damage or to lose work and income. And there is little doubt that such personal and financial ruination is often intended by the cancellers. Indeed, the hostile environment created by cancellation aligns perfectly with the individualist, aggressive, competitive dynamics of contemporary capitalism - the ‘abyss of failed sociality’ as Axel Honneth has so cheerily put it - and the social sadism and 'humilitainment' that now mars large parts of mainstream media culture.

On social media, cancel culture often involves the vicious policing of speech, pile-ons and denials-of-service for the most minor of offences against political orthodoxy by relatively powerless individuals. As Kristina Harrison has put it, cancel culture, in its dismissal of nuance and dissent, tends to elevate "not debate and politics but moral absolutism, authoritarianism and hysteria, the tools of the witch-hunter". Like the witch-hunter, the canceller moves readily between criticising the ambiguous behaviours or statements of her targets to making essentialist assertions about them, so that public figures or social media influencers who make misguided, ambiguous or problematic remarks about, say, racial or trans issues automatically become racists or transphobes. This point was made well by the late Mark Fisher in his critique of left-wing call-out culture, 'Exiting the Vampire's Castle'. Veteran BreadTuber Natalie Wynn (a.k.a. Contrapoints), herself a prominent cancellee, makes the same and many other points in her far-reaching critique of the same.

And it should go without saying that Karl Marx himself would not have been impressed by no-platforming and cancel culture, although some leftists seem to be confused about this. A meme I saw recently on Facebook consists of a four-panel cartoon depicting alt-lite rent-a-gob Milo Yiannopoulos moaning to Karl Marx about violations of his freedom of speech. In the final panel of the sketch, Marx silently picks up Milo and throws him over a clifftop. It's a fun image, to be sure; but it's also misleading. In reality, Marx fiercely defended freedom of speech. In 'On the Free­dom of the Press' (1842), for example, Marx, with his usual sarcasm, ventriloquised the Prussian press censors of his day, mocking their hypocrisy: “Freedom of the press is a fine thing. But there are also bad per­sons, who mis­use speech to tell lies and the brain to plot. Speech and thought would be fine things if only there were no bad per­sons to mis­use them!” In fact, Marx opposed censorship throughout his life. And anybody suspecting Marx of capitulating to liberalism in this regard should think again. As Eric Heinze argues, Marx defended free speech not as a bourgeois right, but as something more fundamental: a foundational philosophical praxis that makes possible the very discussion of rights.

Today, we socialists make up a tiny minority of the population and we have very little political and social clout. To change this situation, we need to be able to explain to other members of the working class what socialism is and why everybody will benefit from it. Sometimes this seems like an impossible task: even in relatively 'open', liberal societies, the major media organizations, as well as all the other institutions of capitalism, are overwhelmingly ranged against us and communist ideas are vilified, marginalised and misrepresented in both right- and left-wing media. But we must make use of whatever relatively democratic spaces and opportunities do exist to shout about socialism. To attempt to deny free speech to our opponents simply on the grounds that they hold repellent or false views, meanwhile, would be unprincipled and counter-productive; ultimately, it would only make it even easier than it already is for those in power to silence us.

Not very long ago, one of the main criticisms levelled at media coverage of ecology was that there was too little of it. Just a decade ago, an academic study of British television news complained that between 2004 and 2006 there had been ‘only 31 stories about climate change on the BBC and ITV [news] bulletins: an average of only 1 story (per channel) every three weeks’ (Lewis and Boyce, in Boyce and Lewis 2009, p. 12). But more recent statistics show that news media coverage of climate-related news is increasing dramatically. In 2019, man-made climate change is no longer a neglected topic.

​Nor can its scientific basis be quite as easily denied as it once was. For many years, Fox News has told its American viewers that man-made climate change is a ruse devised by liberal elites to raise taxes or destroy American productivity, and fossil fuel industry front groups like Global Climate Coalition have lobbied government and media organisations to cast doubt on the evidence for global warming (Beder 2002: 29; Hansen 2011: 12-13). In Britain, Spiked – a magazine partly funded by the Charles Koch Foundation – has ridiculed environmentalists as middle-class moralisers (well OK, there is some truth in that) and as recently as 2007 Channel 4 broadcast the television documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle, despite complaints from scientists and criticism from the media regulator Ofcom.

In recent years, however, the enviro-sceptics have lost some of their cultural credibility. The denial machine certainly hasn’t stopped, but its professional operators may be finding it harder to move through the gears. Public concern about ecological issues has surged (Dembicki 2019) and mainstream media organisations have updated their reporting practices. In 2018, for example, the BBC told its journalists that they were no longer required to interview global warming sceptics in the interests of ‘balance’ when reporting on climate stories. And a recent article about climate change denial in the US online magazine Vice points out that ‘Even with Trump in Office, the Climate Denial Movement is Quietly Falling Apart’ (Dembicki 2019), as deniers lose funding and succumb to infighting.

At the same time, climate change awareness is taking on increasingly seductive forms. Based on a short talk I gave in London recently, this entry offers some brief critical reflections on some recent changes in the style and content of popular environmental media, focusing on three currently fashionable or 'cool' instances of green media: film and television ‘enviro-tainment’; the cultural phenomenon that is Greta Thunberg; and the media communications of Extinction Rebellion.

The Rise of Enviro-tainment

Since the turn of the millennium, film and television documentaries have increasingly combined the analysis of climate science with emotive modes of address and celebrity appeal. In Franny Armstrong’s crowdfunded drama-documentary The Age of Stupid (2009), for example, actor Pete Postlethwaite plays The Archivist, a man living in post-apocalypse conditions in 2055 who looks back ruefully at the catastrophic environmental behaviours and decisions of the early twenty-first century. Surviving in a world ravaged by fire and flood, The Archivist asks why human beings didn’t act to prevent catastrophe, pulling from his library six documentaries about various aspects of climate madness from fifty years previous.

Another seminal example of enviro-tainment was Al Gore’s surprisingly popular lecture-documentary An Inconvenient Truth (2006). Gore’s subdued lament for melting glaciers and shrinking sea ice evokes a strong sense of loss for a disappearing global habitat. An Inconvenient Truth set the scene for the 2016 Netflix documentary Before the Flood, in which film star Leonardo DiCaprio interviews climate activists from around the world and advocates carbon taxes as a solution to the environmental crisis. He also conducts an outdoor interview with Barack Obama. The film was well received by liberal commentators. Even before the film had been released, Time magazine’s Candy Lang invited her readers to coo over an official White House photograph of the DiCaprio-Obama encounter, or, as she described it, a “very excellent photo of President Barack Obama, charming leader of the free world and ultimate cool dad and Leonardo DiCaprio, delightful actor, bear-fighting environmentalist deep in a riveting conversation”.

For all the hype they attracted, these were all limited productions from a socialist perspective. An Inconvenient Truth was widely criticised, even by liberal critics, for being short on solutions. And Gore, no doubt keen to deflect accusations of political partisanship, positions the climate crisis as an issue lying ‘outside’ or beyond politics, in much the same way that Extinction Rebellion do today. The Age of Stupid is also a mixed bag. With its sci-fi premise and frantic pace, it reformats climate change awareness for a younger audience and rightly condemns the activities of the airline industry and fossil fuel corporations such as Shell. But it is less forthcoming about what action needs to be taken, focusing on condemnation rather than solutions. And as for Before the Flood, DiCaprio’s encounter with Obama fails to live up to its billing: DiCaprio gives the appearance of talking tough by adopting a sceptical expression and folding his arms determinedly; yet the meeting between the two men is inconclusive and Obama, true to form, offers little more than platitudes about his hopes for change. Needless to say, too, for all their star power and emotional appeal, none of these films identifies capitalism as the root cause of climate breakdown.
 
The Thunberg Moment

And then along came Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg. Thunberg is not the first young person to talk tough about environment in the assemblies of the ruling class. In 1992, the 12 year-old Severn Cullis-Suzuki addressed the Rio Earth Summit, speaking “in the name of all generations to come” about pollution and the erosion of species diversity. But Thunberg has garnered far more attention than her predecessor. One reason for this might be that she is white. Another, no doubt, is that she has been lucky in her enemies. Her conservative critics are an uncool coalition of the political right, including Spiked magazine’s contrarian Brendan O’Neill, the bullyboy Brexiteer Arron Banks, and of course the climate change Denier-in-Chief, Donald Trump. But for all the sarcasm and put-downs she has endured, Thunberg has been quite well supported among mainstream journalists. For example, many newspapers reported Thunberg’s address at Davos in January 2019 as an ‘impromptu speech’, despite video evidence of Thunberg rehearsing her talk on social media several days before her Davos appearance. Indeed, Thunberg’s emergence as the artless truth-teller of the social media age has been made possible by a great deal of sympathetic press and PR interventions.

In September 2019, Thunberg followed in DiCaprio’s footsteps by meeting the Cardinal of Cool, former US president Barack Obama. In a photograph of the meeting that Obama posted on his Instagram account, Obama adopts a relaxed stance in open neck and shirt sleeves, fist bumping Thunberg (with a potted plant in the background, for added enviro-credibility). "We’re a team", Obama apparently told the young Swede. Thunberg herself tweeted a more subdued black and white image of her meeting with Obama. The composition of this self-consciously ‘posed’ photograph is oddly sombre - funereal, even. Thunberg faces the camera, but her arms are folded and her eyes are downcast, in what could be read as a gesture of scepticism or even displeasure. Obama appears side-on with his hands folded in a self-effacing stance. He also seems lost in contemplation, his eyes fixed to the floor.

It’s a cool photograph. Monochrome photography, as critics including Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes have pointed out, has connotations of documentary authenticity and seriousness. Because of these connotations, black and white “has the potential for legitimation, giving archival aura to people and politics” (Grainge 1999, p. 385) and creating a sense of “epic factuality” (Grainge 1999, p. 386). Put more simply, the photograph invites us see Thunberg’s meeting with Obama as “historic”, the word the press used to describe Obama’s 2008 electoral victory. In fact, Obama replied to Thunberg’s tweet with a phrase borrowed from his initial presidential campaign: “Yes we can, Greta. I’m hopeful because of you and all the young people who are fighting to protect the planet.” In a later tweet, Obama gave a corporate endorsement of Thunberg who, he said, “embodies our vision at the @ObamaFoundation”.

To borrow a term from the American historian Daniel Boorstin, the Thunberg-Obama meeting could be regarded as a ‘pseudo-event’, a PR spectacle that gave a green makeover to a president who was not only one of the world’s bloodiest political leaders, but who had a dubious record on the environment. To be sure, Donald Trump’s dismissal of green issues is atrocious. But let’s not forget that it was Obama who was in power as the inhabitants of Flint, Michigan drank poisoned tap water, offshore drilling was expanded and new oil pipelines were approved. This is to say nothing of Obama’s part in the destruction of human life via his drone assassination programme. Obama’s appearances with DiCaprio and Thunberg were yet another example of the former president’s sham humanitarianism. Indeed, the rebranding of Obama as a climate hero is an impressive feat of greenwashing and the widely shared images of the Thunberg-Obama meeting are a triumph of what the cultural critic Jim McGuigan calls ‘cool capitalism’: the system’s co-option of critique, its recuperation of rebellion.
 
Extinction Rebellion

Extinction Rebellion have been very prominent in the media recently. Their spokespeople have appeared in television news and discussion programmes and they have installed themselves remarkably quickly in the public consciousness, albeit most recently because of their damaging and unpopular stunts on the London Underground network. Extinction Rebellion’s predictions of imminent civilizational collapse seem exaggerated. And there is little point in appealing to capitalists to fix the problems they themselves have caused. They have also established their brand through slick videos with high production values, fast-moving images of youthful crowds in urban settings and upbeat electronica soundtracks. XR's aesthetic repertoire resembles that of Invisible Children’s infamous Kony 2012 campaign, which aimed to engage public participation in securing the arrest of Ugandan guerrilla leader and all-round badman Joseph Kony. Their use of lurid banners, esoteric symbols and capitalized sans-serif fonts, as well as their encouragement for activists to engage emotionally with their cause, are all reminiscent of the Kony campaign. And just as the Kony 2012 campaigners described their cause as ‘one thing we can all agree on’, Extinction Rebellion, for the most part, talk of climate breakdown as an issue that lies ‘beyond’ politics.

XR – and much of the recent media discourse about the environment – seeks to motivate activists by promoting a sense of anxiety about the future and their videos often move between tearful predictions of climate catastrophe and upbeat scenes of determined activism. Their materials, like the films and photographs discussed above, are heavily infused with melodrama. As several theorists have argued, melodrama is characterised not just by emotional outpourings, but also by stark moral binaries of Good and Evil and a dialectic or movement between what the theorist Linda Williams calls “too late” and “just in time”. All three of these melodramatic frames are reflected in contemporary green media constructions of climate heroes (Obama/Thunberg) and villains (Trump), the exhortations to tears, panic and self-sacrifice, and the oscillation between gloomy imaginings of planetary destruction and manic activist urgency.

It’s not that there’s anything wrong with emotional responses, especially over subjects as momentous as climate change. But it does depend on what emotions we are talking about. It is not at all clear that panic and fear can help us to develop a clear understanding of the environmental crisis or enable effective political action to address it.

And if socialists are to wax emotional, it has to be for the right reasons. There is a mismatch between the intense emotions that activists are called upon to display by Extinction Rebellion and XR’s limited understanding of what needs to be done. It’s no good asking the very capitalist politicians responsible for climate change to make things better. And Extinction Rebellion’s focus on fossil fuels and biodiversity ignores many other important contributors to climate change, such as the immense contribution of the military machine to pollution. Moreover, human beings are themselves a part of nature, so if we’re serious about preventing environmental collapse we have to stop the wars in which human beings are dying, end hunger and starvation and stop the exploitation of human labour. In other words, the struggle to save the environment can’t be separated from the class struggle. That is why, for all its celebrity glitz, the new green media is a distraction from the main task at hand.

​The British General Election draws near, the party propaganda machines are in full swing and the tranquillity of my winter evenings is increasingly punctured by the rapping and ringing of the clipboard-clutching ghouls who have wound their way to my front door. My favourite canvasser so far has been the wiry, wild-eyed Liberal Democrat who opened his spiel with a personalised greeting, raced through some questionable statistics and finished off with a desperate appeal for a tactical vote. If I mention to any these guys that I’m a socialist, their assumption is that I’ll be voting Labour. But in fact none of the capitalist gangs will be getting my vote.
 
Most decent folks are aware that the Conservatives are a party of entitled crooks and chancers that shamelessly defends the economic interests of the ruling class - a party for "selfish, grasping simpletons, who were born with some essential part of their soul missing", as the writer Charlie Brooker has put it. Unfortunately, however, many well-meaning working-class people are taken in by the promises of other political parties to represent a socialist, communist or human alternative. They don’t. And that is as true of Labour as it is of any other party. In fact, the Labour Party, supposedly under newly ‘radical’ leadership, is a capitalist party – one that itself is not above deceiving the electorate. Just look at this Labour Party video about 'the economy', with its villainous billionaire who refuses to invest his wealth (as if capitalism could continue if this happened) and salt-of-the-earth proles cheerfully circulating their own means of exchange by paying for goods and services in their local communities (for a full critique of the misunderstandings and myths in this video, see here). This is not just bogus economics, but facile moralism and it beggars belief that nobody taking part in this production stopped to call some of its assumptions into question. Perhaps some did; but I have seen Labourites happily sharing this video on social media.
 
​As argued by this text contributed to a left communist web site by a group of recovering Corbyholics, Corbyn and Labour do not represent a 'progressive' electoral option (I disagree with the article’s tout court rejection of voting and democracy, but that is not its main point). As the authors of the piece indicate, the Labour Party throughout its history has more than proven its dedication to the profit system, which requires the exploitation and often violent repression of the working class, as well as endless wars; in fact, Labour’s foreign policy has tended to be more brutal than that of the Conservatives. And as Adam Buick of my own party, the Socialist Party of Great Britain, points out, Labour cannot possibly bring about a society “for the many, not the few” (a phrase coined by well-known socialist firebrand Tony Blair), since capitalism, the system which Labour seeks to manage and continue, depends precisely on the exploitation of the “many” (workers) by the ‘few” (capitalist owners and controllers).
 
Along with his sidekick John McDonnell, Corbyn has widely been called ‘Marxist’ or a socialist by his supporters, as well by as his conservative opponents. What an insult to Marx and the socialist tradition of which he was part! For Marx, a socialist society would not be one organised 'for the many, not the few'. It would be a society that has entirely abolished such class division. Communism or socialism (the same thing, whatever the Leninists say) requires getting rid of the buying and selling system and creating a society of free access to goods and services. With the productive capabilities that exist today, there is enough for everybody to enjoy a life of abundance without undertaking any wage labour. Once a historically progressive force (for all its horrors), capitalism today is a system that generates totally unnecessary suffering for the majority of people and it is long overdue for abolition. It continues in large part because we, the working class, continue to give it legitimacy and because, whatever we might say to the contrary, we don’t really believe that there is an alternative to the market system.

BJ or JC for PM? Labour, Liberal, Tory, Green or Nationalist? Leave or Remain? These are the questions that will be debated ad nauseam around dinner tables and in media studios over the next few weeks. But the really important questions for working-class people are of quite a different order. Here are some of them. Do you really want to go on working almost every day of your life, just to generate profits for a tiny group of capitalists? Do you know that eight individuals now possess as much wealth as half of the world’s population? Do you appreciate how crazy that is? Do you want to live in a society more and more characterised by poverty, addiction and despair? In which children are constantly dying of hunger or being killed in wars - all completely unnecessarily? Do you want to see the natural environment trashed in the pursuit of profit?
 
It’s no good voting for a new set of leaders to manage the present planetary chaos in a slightly friendlier fashion. Even if they really wanted to, Labour could do nothing to solve the problems identified above, which are generated by the profit system itself and which in any case will have to be addressed on a global, not a national scale. Nor will a Labour government even make things just a little more tolerable, whatever the party may be promising. The last 'New' Labour government was arguably worse for ordinary people than the Conservative one it replaced, increasing wealth disparities at home and wreaking death and destruction overseas. Indeed, not only was the invasion of Iraq arguably the greatest crime against humanity of the twenty-first century, but Labour politicians continue to play their part in overseas wars. And let's not forget that the Labour government before that one, the 'Old' Labour of the 1970s, oversaw horrendous cuts in workers' pay and public spending. In its entire history, in fact, the Labour Party has attacked the working class and has never moved society one step closer to socialism.

As always, capitalism’s left-wingers are telling us that this election is different and that this time there is a chance to make a ‘real change’ and forge ‘a new type of politics’ by voting for Corbyn and company. But we've heard all this before. What is actually needed is for workers to come together to bring an end to the madness of the profit system. We should reject the Conservatives, the fake socialists of Labour and every other capitalist party – and use our strength in numbers to abolish capitalism once and for all. No leader required. But we don’t have forever to get the job done...

Maybe 300 people were at Guildhall Square in Portsmouth this lunchtime for the climate strike (that is not really a strike). There was a big youth presence, as you'd expect. It was also politically liberal, as you'd also expect. Aaron Bastani told us we need to "change our leaders" (to Labour ones, of course, since that worked so well last time). Extinction Rebellion folks gave their usual quasi-religious spiel. The Green Party flag flew high above the platform and assorted Trotskyists milled about in the crowd. And yet some speakers also talked more radically and asked the crowd to chant "system change not climate change" (although I am quite sure that none of these speakers was genuinely advocating ending capitalism). All in all, this was a confused cacophony of liberal and reformist voices; but at least it showed that a lot of people are aware of the problems facing the planet - even if they cannot currently clearly see the solution. I handed out a few Socialist Party leaflets (text below), but, for the time being, at least, the socialist message is a mere drop in the increasingly warm and plasticky ocean.

Rest well, David Berman. Thanks for keeping it real and for the sad elegance of your songs. All my favourite singers couldn't sing.

In his 2000 book Liquid Modernity, Zygmunt Bauman wrote that “dystopias are no longer written these days. The post-Fordist, ‘fluid modern’ world of freely choosing individuals does not worry about the sinister Big Brother who would punish those who stepped out of line”. You can understand where Bauman was coming from. After all, the years of the 1990s were relatively peaceable. For white Westerners like me, at any rate, this was the decade of the slacker and the alienated cubicle worker, a boring age of colourless icons, of John Major and Pete Sampras - the era of 'no surprises', as Radiohead put it. But the end of history has, well, ended and in the current post-9/11, post-crash, post-truth age of austerity and anger, it’s hardly surprising that dystopias of every type have made a return to Western screens, from teen dystopia franchises like The Hunger Games and Divergent to the recent television reworkings of Westworld and The Handmaid’s Tale. And we can now delight in watching the total eradication of democracy and freedom in an exciting variety of global settings via Netflix dramas such as Brazil’s 3%.

In Britain, dystopian drama - having had its heyday in the 1970s and 80s - has also returned to television screens in recent years, most notably in the form of Channel 4 offerings such as Black Mirror and Utopia. Russell T. Davies’s recent BBC television drama Years and Years has garnered largely favourable reviews from critics. The six-part story reflects the increasingly febrile character of British, indeed Western public life, constituting what Fredric Jameson has called a ‘critical dystopia’, that is, a warning about what will happen “if this goes on”. Here Jameson is drawing upon François Hartog’s claim that in our current moment “the future is perceived as a threat not a promise. The future is a time of disasters, and ones we have, moreover, brought upon ourselves”. More on that point later.
​
Years and Years follows the multiple misfortunes of the Manchester-based Lyons family. Paterfamilias Stephen (Rory Kinnear) loses a million pounds when the banks crash. His brother Daniel (Russell Tovey) fatally tries to help immigrant Viktor (Maxim Baldry) to escape from homophobic persecution. Stephen’s anarcho-warrior sister Edith (Jessica Hynes), meanwhile, is poisoned after exposure to a nuclear bomb detonated on Chinese territory by a lunatic US president. Restless daughter Bethany (Lydia West), apparently seeking to escape from her dysfunctional family, wants to be a post-human, integrating smart technology into her body at an alarming rate in a Black Mirror-style warning against the perils of unregulated biotech. And several minor characters seem to be in the grip of outlandish conspiracy theories.

The political climate is also going haywire. The Lyons are led not by donkeys, but an unscrupulous right-wing populist Prime Minister Vivienne Rook (Emma Thompson), who progresses from flouting the rules of civilised democratic discourse to setting up death camps for immigrants and other undesirables known euphemistically as ‘Erstwhiles’. Downwardly mobile and morally conflicted, Stephen finds himself working for the ruthless tech corporation that is running the camps and which in no way resembles Amazon. Indeed, in the age of Trump, of concentration camps from China to the US, of immigration crisis and right-wing resurgence, the contemporary resonance of all these storylines hardly needs to be stated. As a warning about the threat of fascism to liberal democracy, Davies’s drama stands in a tradition of fiction that includes Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, in which a fascist politician institutes a corporatist regime and introduces concentration camps in the US, and Stephen King's 1979 novel The Dead Zone, which portrays the rise of a Trump-like populist demagogue.

But all’s well that ends well. In the drama’s denouement, the concentration camps are infiltrated and exposed by Edith, who livestreams footage of one of the camps to the world. It is an ending that follows a time-honoured narrative convention, especially common in science fiction, by which state-corporate malfeasance is revealed to the population via the very same screens that had previously broadcast state propaganda and mindless entertainment. An ignorant, brainwashed population is suddenly woken from its slumber and its exposure to the truth is sufficient to save the day.

Of course, in the real world it is not at all obvious that supplying one more piece of ‘information’ is ever sufficient to bring about radical social change. In fact, this difficulty is raised in Years and Years when Edith is mocked in the middle of her livestreaming by a camp guard who tells her “Nobody will believe you”. The implications of this taunt are sidestepped by the drama: fortunately for Edith, it appears that those who watch her livestream do not question its veracity. But the guard’s challenge is worth taking seriously. In a media environment abounding in propaganda and ‘fake news’, is it even possible for us to recognise the truth, let alone act upon it?

Besides, if we have failed to get rid of capitalism, it is not simply because we don’t know what is really going on. Sure, there are conspiracies among the ruling class. And yes, the capitalist-controlled media do obscure the harsh realities of the world with bread and circuses and outright lies; as socialists, it is very important to expose these lies and to put forward an accurate view of world events where we can. But most of us already know a lot – too much, perhaps – about what is happening in the world. We are aware that the planet is on fire with war and terrorism, that children are starving, that much of the world lives in poverty, that the long-term habitability of the planet is hanging in the balance, and so on. Wikileaks revealed much about the atrocities committed in the name of Western ‘democracies’ and the surveillance of their populations. And many British people know that their ruling class has been materially supporting Saudi atrocities in the ongoing war in Yemen.

No, the problem is not so much that we lack facts, so much as we lack a framework for understanding them. As the philosopher Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi puts it, “the process of social subjectivation is not based on disclosing the secret; it is based on the process of interpretation”. At present, most people do not accept that the profit system is the cause of the horrors that surround them and they do not believe that abolishing the profit system offers the solution.

It certainly doesn’t appear that Davies believes this, either, despite the drama’s passing nod to a supposedly “socialist” Spain as a beacon of progressive politics. This becomes clear in the drama’s final episode, set in 2029, when the Lyons family matriarch Muriel (Anne Reid) delivers a dinner-table sermon about why the twenty-first century went to hell in a handcart (by this point, we know that things have gotten pretty bad, because the BBC has had its charter withdrawn). Muriel, who overcomes some of her bigoted attitudes during the course of the six episodes, is one of the drama’s most likeable characters and the positioning of her speech at the end of the drama gives it an authorial feel, as though this is Davies’s own ‘last word’ on our contemporary malaise. In her speech, Muriel recognises that right-wing politicians played their part in the social breakdown they have all lived through. She had been, she admits, too smug about the triumph of “the West” and had failed to see “all the clowns and monsters heading our way”. The allusion here to Trump, Johnson and the other rough beasts of our current political scene seems apt.

Less convincing is Muriel’s next assertion, namely, that “we” are also collectively responsible for everything bad that has happened. “Every single thing that’s gone wrong, it’s your fault”, Muriel tells her family. Warming to her theme, Muriel identifies consumer apathy as the root cause of the global democratic collapse. She complains that we bought £1 tee-shirts (“The tee-shirt that costs one pound – we can’t resist it”) but didn’t think of the economic consequences for “some little peasant in a field” who gets paid a pittance. She also blames “us” for creating unemployment by making use of automated checkouts in shops. “We built this world”, she testily concludes.

Muriel’s speech is a well-staged set piece and it’s easy to see why clips of it have been shared widely on social media, where it has been typically described as a political ‘truth drop’. But its explanation for why the twenty-first century West went to pot is moralistic and superficial, suggesting that Davies is more confident in detailing the symptoms of societal decline than he is in providing an accurate diagnosis of them. The horrors of our age – exploitation, poverty, bigotry and war – are not caused by ethical lapses in consumer behaviour and working-class people cannot be blamed for buying goods at affordable prices or for using convenient technology; so let's not chuck our iPhones into the bin just yet. In fact, neither production nor consumption can be carried on ethically within a profit system.

Muriel is right to say, however, that we are responsible for building our world, so our primary task must be to get rid of the ruling class that is currently keeping the planet's resources under lock and key. "Dystopias", Doug Henwood wrote a few years ago, "are for losers". Catastrophism of the kind indulged throughout most of Years and Years, is an appealing, but ultimately disabling perspective. Humanity has a shot at survival - but only if we can correctly identify the root cause of our problems and act decisively to remove it.
 
References

- Bauman, Z. (2000) Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press, p.61.
- Berardi, F. (2019) The Second Coming. Cambridge: Polity Press, p.100.
- Hartog, F. (2015) Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time, trans. S. Brown. New York: Columbia University Press, p.xviii.
- Jameson, F. (2005) Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London; New York: Verso, p. 198.