What is Safe? Cultural Citizenship, Visual Culture and Risk

Questions of cultural citizenship and risk have become central to contemporary sociological debates. This paper seeks to relate these concerns to a discussion of ecological citizenship and questions of visual and commercial culture. In the first section, I argue that ecological citizenship needs to avoid a moralistic rejection of the pleasures of contemporary visual and consumer culture. Such a possibility I argue has become evident in recent debates on the risk society. However, I argue despite Beck's realisation that questions of risk become defined through contemporary media his analysis remains overly distant from more everyday understandings. In order to address this question, I seek to demonstrate how an interpretative understanding of visual culture (in this case the 1995 film Safe) might help us develop more complex understandings of the competing cultures of risk and citizenship.Cultural Citizenship, Ecological Citizenship, Power, Privatisation, Representation, Risk, Visual Culture

Education and the alterity of democracy

The idea of a democratic education in the English context has lost a considerable amount of ground since the 1960s. Here I argue that such is the dominance of neoliberal understandings of education over the Right and much of the social democratic Left that new thinking is required. I begin by considering the view that we have now become so post-democratic that people no longer wish to be free. It is in this context that we may talk about the alterity of democracy. I explore different ideas about how we might seek to link education to ideas of the commons, thereby connecting the idea of education to more participatory notions of citizenship. All of these ideas need to be revived in the context of a state that increasingly controls schools from the center and the dominant rationality of the market

The socialist blues? Citizenship, class and civil society

This article seeks to explore the relationship between the British labour movement, the Left and the Labour party. It does so through the intellectual prism of debates around citizenship and civil society. In this respect, I seek to recover a critical politics around questions of class from the New Left who were always critical of more mainstream ideas of citizenship. However, I also point to the limitations of those who have argued that meaningful forms of citizenship can no longer be connected to political parties and only occurs outside of state organizations. Political parties continue to need intellectual narratives to legitimate their role in society and to connect with the broader civil order.The Labour Party in this respect has seemingly broken with ‘New Labour’ and is searching for a new narrative. The rise of an intellectual grouping around ‘Blue Labour’ has made considerable headway recently and I seek to take a critical view of some of their ideas and ethical frameworks. Here I argue that changing class formations and a more pluralistic society potentially ask difficult questions of those who seek to revive the labour movement in troubled times

Critical theory in the Anthropocene: Marcuse, Marxism and ecology

The politics of the Anthropocene has been widely debated within recent sociological theory. This article seeks to argue that Marxism, critical theory and especially the work of Herbert Marcuse has a great deal to contribute to these debates. Here I seek to link together the recent revival of interest in the idea of the commons by the alter-globalisation movement and Marxist social theory in an attempt to challenge some of the dominant assumptions in respect of the nature/culture division and the neoliberal dominance of mainstream politics. The more critical politics of the commons would suggest both a radical politics fit for the twenty-first century and a way of understanding the environmental crisis located within critical understandings of the histories of capitalism and social movements. This is suggestive of a civilisation based politics focused on questions of emancipation informed by political economy, a critique of the dominant consumer society and culture rather than questions of deconstruction. In the final section, I seek to explore how Marcuse’s concerns remain linked to contemporary global ethical movements for change

Raymond Williams and the possibilities of ‘committed’ late Marxism

After the end of the Cold War Marxist thought entered into a long crisis from which it is only just beginning to emerge. After 1989 it was no longer clear, apart from a few revolutionary outposts, what a commitment to Marxism meant. Not surprisingly a generation of intellectuals who had previously called themselves Marxists either abandoned a relationship to revolutionary ideals or very quickly affixed a prefix to make Post-Marxism. Marxism was charged with being intrinsically authoritarian, statist and hierarchical in the way it sought to manage the economy and wider society. These features remain a powerful strain within Marxism: many groups on the revolutionary Left survive as hierarchical organisations wedded to ideas from a more insurrectionary political period. Yet there remain alternative configurations of Marxism capable of reinventing themselves in the context of the present. A widely read collection of essays, quickly issued by Verso after the fall of the Berlin Wall, featured Jurgen Habermas. One of the European Left’s leading intellectuals, Habermas argued that socialists need to give up ideas of overthrowing the system and focus instead upon moral and cultural concerns. Socialism became less about questions of ownership and control and more concerned with the redistribution of power through democratic means, as Left debate sought to reinvent social democracy for the emergent global age. The old model of socialism stood accused of seeking to capture state power, leading to the eventual subordination of civil society. However Raymond Williams, and the New Left more generally, had long been critical of the kinds of Leninist transformation that Habermas depicted. Williams had his own ambivalences around the term Marxist, but generally seemed to feel that it articulated a complex tradition of thought that had been significant in the formation of the New Left. However, unlike many others who remained connected to Marxism, Williams was engaged in a careful exercise in re-thinking what this legacy might come to mean in the future

Raymond Williams and the politics of the Commons: the performative quality of the intellectual

Much of the sociological work on intellectuals is mostly concerned with the structural role they play within society. In this respect, Raymond Williams is best understood in Gramscian (1988) terms as an organic intellectual connected to the labour movement and the working-class, seeking to criticise the dominating features of contemporary capitalism. Williams is widely seen as a post-war intellectual connected to the New Left and organised labour. Indeed Williams’s (1981) own account of intellectuals is mostly concerned with exploring the structurally conditioned class-based society disallows critical study. More recently sociological work has concentrated on the reasons behind the relative decline of intellectuals due to the dominance of think tanks, consumerism and the increasingly instrumental narrow specialisms (Furedi 2004, Misztal 2012). There is then perhaps a nostalgia for the ‘big intellectuals’ of the past who were capable of producing intellectual narratives beyond the more modest aims of contemporary knowledge producers (Bauman 1992). Whatever the contemporary insights of this view, there are limitations to the sociologically-informed, structural account of intellectual cultural production. Jeffrey Alexander (2016) has recently argued that the sociology of intellectuals needs to take a more performative turn. Instead of viewing intellectuals purely in terms of structural class relationships we need to understand their ability to produce dramatic and compelling narratives. In other words, when considering intellectuals we need to understand their ability to create exciting stories and compelling performances. Especially significant in this respect are heroic narratives and the stories of good versus evil. In other words, the performative effect of ideas is in making an impact upon society. As a Durkheimian sociologist Alexander (2016:348) is interested in how intellectuals produce ideas of the sacred and profane through the production of binary categories more generally. However Alexander (2003:228) also argues that investigating the ways in which moral categories become constructed through codes and narratives is especially important in the current setting. For example, the work by Marxist intellectuals in the past reproduced binary categories they claimed would eventually lead to the salvation of humanity. Here Alexander (2003:228) is suggesting we need to respect the power of the stories produced by intellectuals, but at the same time be cautious of their ‘totalizing conceit’. In other words, we need to recognise the reductive nature of many of these stories. Here I want to argue that Alexander’s work on intellectuals offers new possibilities for the study of intellectuals like Raymond Williams, but is sometimes (although not always) a problematic guide to the complexity of Marxist writing. As Baert and Morgan (2017:5) argue, an emphasis upon performativity can overwhelm the need to make connections between dramatised and more structural accounts. In this respect, I shall argue that beyond the performative dimensions of Williams’s writing there remain good reasons to return to his work not only within our shared neoliberal times, but in the context of the rise of radical social movements against austerity seeking to defend the commons

Raymond Williams and the possibilities of ‘committed’ late Marxism

After the end of the Cold War Marxist thought entered into a long crisis from which it is only just beginning to emerge. After 1989 it was no longer clear, apart from a few revolutionary outposts, what a commitment to Marxism meant. Not surprisingly a generation of intellectuals who had previously called themselves Marxists either abandoned a relationship to revolutionary ideals or very quickly affixed a prefix to make Post-Marxism. Marxism was charged with being intrinsically authoritarian, statist and hierarchical in the way it sought to manage the economy and wider society. These features remain a powerful strain within Marxism: many groups on the revolutionary Left survive as hierarchical organisations wedded to ideas from a more insurrectionary political period. Yet there remain alternative configurations of Marxism capable of reinventing themselves in the context of the present. A widely read collection of essays, quickly issued by Verso after the fall of the Berlin Wall, featured Jurgen Habermas. One of the European Left’s leading intellectuals, Habermas argued that socialists need to give up ideas of overthrowing the system and focus instead upon moral and cultural concerns. Socialism became less about questions of ownership and control and more concerned with the redistribution of power through democratic means, as Left debate sought to reinvent social democracy for the emergent global age. The old model of socialism stood accused of seeking to capture state power, leading to the eventual subordination of civil society. However Raymond Williams, and the New Left more generally, had long been critical of the kinds of Leninist transformation that Habermas depicted. Williams had his own ambivalences around the term Marxist, but generally seemed to feel that it articulated a complex tradition of thought that had been significant in the formation of the New Left. However, unlike many others who remained connected to Marxism, Williams was engaged in a careful exercise in re-thinking what this legacy might come to mean in the future

Orwell as Public Intellectual: Anarchism, Communism and the New Left

This article seeks to recover the importance of George Orwell as a critical public intellectual. Orwell remains a controversial figure for both The New Left and Anarchists during the post-war period. Here I seek to recover the complexity of Orwell’s writing which ranged across a number of political traditions including anarchism, liberalism and democratic socialism against some of the charges made by prominent members of the New Left. Especially critical at this juncture were a number of anarchist writers who were more receptive to Orwell’s influence. In the concluding section I seek to argue that Orwell while not an anarchist remains an important figure for those concerned about the growing authoritarianism of the twenty-first century