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Left Twitter's response to socioeconomic fallout of continued lockdown is to suggest redistributional instruments (UBI, free broadband, Deaton's post-lockdown restructure) that, post-Corbyn, have no purchase in our neoliberal hegemony. What happened to pessimism of the intellect?
When Austerity 2.0 returns explicitly, when Covid ends, we'll obvs all unite to oppose it. But, given the massively unequal effects of Lockdown on the young, poor, the precariat, where are Left voices questioning more substantively this instrument of disaster capitalism *now*?
It is by no means a historical inevitability that the Left would come to a consensus decision that, in a pandemic, the barricades should be erected around the idea of equal healthcare rather than equal education, say, the latter being clearly undermined by prolonged Lockdown.
My reading of this consensus is that middle-class voices most prominent in forging it have least exposure to the problems (short- or long-term) of Lockdown, & are unconsciously driven to disengage from thinking about them, to avoid cognitive dissonance. Plus, we're all frazzled.
I concur with the unison note of Left despair at the sheer incompetency of this government. It IS astonishing how badly executed every policy has been. But this focus shouldnt distract us entirely from the way the *discourse* in which we are participating is also malfunctioning.
Political decisions are framed by wider discursive structures, & the ineptitude of government in navigating the Scylla and Charybdis of Covid corpse mountains & Lockdown dystopia hasnt been aided by culture war binarism on here etc. The Left must wise up to this: no-one else can.
To elaborate on what I mean by 'frazzled'. I think the Left, in the UK, particularly, is still suffering trauma from the end of the Corbyn hope. That tantalizing phantom pain of remembering being briefly close to historical agency, continues to disable our political imaginaries.
Is the UK Left's complicity with inevitabilism, proceduralism, & neurosis, & its unwillingness to confront the whole historical event of COVID, including longterm Lockdown damage, a symptom of trauma? Perhaps it's too painfully early to imagine ourselves agents in history again?
We'd rather defer to the essentialism of medical authority, right now, than engage with the exhausting task of testing suspiciously what has been deemed 'apolitical', because we're 'in the middle of a pandemic'. The trouble is, no-one else is going to do this work. It's up to us!
I say nobody else is going to do this work, but of course, in the absence of dialectical thinkers historicizing the current moment critically, there will be a bunch of people joining up the dots wrongheadedly, or in bad faith, i.e. 'conspiracy theorists'. It's pretty urgent, huh?
Crumbs, I'm gonna give up for this morning. I feel like I'm shouting into the void. If I shared a personal anecdote I'd be getting dozens of likes. What a time to be alive.
