August 9, 2005
Tom Nairn on twentieth century shifts in radicalism
In the course of an introduction to his essay on the recent G8 summit in Scotland, Tom Nairn makes interesting points about the formation of the 'club,' the historically recent emphasis on economics, and an unexpected forerunner of '68-style remaking of everyday life (Mussolini):
The oil crisis of 1973-75 was the immediate pretext for the foundation of the club, and similar factors have remained central to G8 ideology. But these were only part of a much bigger shift – that is, the elevation of economics into a new popular faith. It passed from being the necessary condition of socio-cultural development into something approaching the sufficient condition of all human welfare and hope. As philosophy, the old left-wing formula of ‘historical materialism’ may have been better known. But the right now took this over, to outdo it with the vengeance of the formerly repressed. A counter-radicalism of marketolatry soon relegated the older versions to museums or sects. As Andrew Bacevich points out in The New American Militarism, ‘radical’ came to mean Trotskyite mince reprocessed into neo-conservative sausages.
Situationist-style disreputables refused old and new rules alike, naturally; but such dissent served mainly to fortify the ‘realism’ of the mounting counter-revolution. Before long, ‘no alternative’ would be allowed to the latter’s common sense, which froze up political initiative (and hence democracy) in East and West alike. Thus the salience of economics was guaranteed – leading to 1989’s relatively quiet consecration of the Western gospel over its old competitors. The Internationale of market forces won out, bearing with it an ideology of ‘globalisation’, meaning not just one world, but the ball in the inevitable (and hence correct) hands. No other-worldly religion had ever enjoyed such fortune. So bourgeois historical materialism did more than buy out the Marxist competition. It underwent an apotheosis: the socio-economic ‘basis’ or structure became itself a commanding superstructure of ready-made ‘ideas’, far more intimidating than anything known in 1968 (let alone 1917, or in Mao Zedong’s takeover of 1949).
Situationists were right to fear that new technology played its part in this ascent. The powers of ‘mental production’ now extended the collective nervous system far beyond television, via the home computer and the internet, and an inescapable climate of advertising. Free-choice marketism prevailed; but so did new ways of forming and influencing choices, among candidates and policies as well as cornflakes. It became less inconceivable that imposed or infiltrated ‘spectacles’ could themselves create integral reality without propaganda, sermons or precepts from on high.
One prescient forerunner of such an all-absorbing spectacle-society was Mussolini. Two generations after his death, might not his vision be close to attainment? ‘It is faith which moves mountains,’ he said, ‘because it gives the illusion that mountains move. Illusion is, perhaps, the only reality in life.’ ‘Reality’, then, no longer counts: it is capable of being constantly remade to suit the presiding vision of things. In 1931 Mussolini told a gathering of doctors that ‘our way of eating, dressing, working and sleeping, the whole complex of our daily habits, must be reformed.’ Here was the ‘revolution of everyday life’, decades before it was due. At that period such remodelling remained fantasy, as Mussolini was to discover in 1944. But with the age of information technology, and the huge growth of public relations and publicity that accompanied it, doesn’t it have renewed plausibility, notably in the case of politicians who combine, as Tim Parks recently put it in the New York Review of Books, ‘a skilful use of rhetoric with a tendency to bully and then to seek approval for having bullied in a positive way’?