Tom Gann

George Gently, I reckon. I have vague dream that one day I can write a sharp little book on "Our Friends in the North", one chapter of which would be on how George Gently (scripted too by Flannery) extends, refines and is even more critical of the cops than in "Our Friends in the North"- but that sentimentality and the conventions of the police procedural are the vehicle for this. Gently is interesting, of course, because he's a cop against all cops, this is an unbearable contradiction, and it is resolved often agonisingly by Gently as a character, but sentimentally on the level of narrative. Gently's agony too is quite fascinating because it is mostly (the murder of his wife is a factor, though) nothing to do with deep interiority, it's just a response to an unbearable situation- how would one be a cop if one wasn't a bastard. I find the interior agony of cops in the police procedural, especially when held to be a token of genius (Cracker, ugh) immensely frustrating, and, albeit for different reasons, Gently escapes this like Poirot, though both are melancholics.

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The deputy leadership election is strange, it felt like, before Corbyn, that it was in some ways more important for Labour's future than the leadership, the thinking being, Burnham or at a stretch Cooper would be elected leader on a pretty dreary platform, and be responsible for policy direction and being the face of the party while the deputy (presumably Watson or Creasy) would attempt to reinvigorate Labour as a grassroots, campaigning organisation. However, Corbyn's general direction provides a much more plausible and wider basis to Labour existing as a campaigning organisation and relating to other social movement struggles, though as it stands this is not fleshed out, so the idea the deputy leader's role is to reinvigorate the party (especially as Corbyn has done this to a remarkable degree) has rather fallen by the wayside.
Angela Eagle is almost definitely the most left candidate- she has lots of union nominations (though it's only very recently union nominations are a sign of being left), is backed by a fair few of the more left MPs, Ken Livingstone (etc). She's also said she'd work happily with Corbyn. She didn't vote against the welfare bill, though.

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It depends, of course, what is meant by Bennism. The cuddly, left "national treasure" from the late 1990s, was not good, and contributed to a backward looking politics, a nostalgia for the tendency towards the enlightened, progressively patriotic patriotic radicalism of dissident sections of the ruling class, this tendency has, on occasions, been useful but has to be subordinate to working class militancy. This tendency, which was important from, at least the French Revolution, possibly ended with Benn. Benn in the early 80s was an important and often symbolic part of what was a very deep and often inspirational "world of labour", but less significant than Militant in local government, union struggles, the proto-intersectional cultural politics of the GLC and the feminist politics of everyday life of the '80s. Where Bennism in retrospect is incredibly important is Benn in the 1970s, the Benn of the AES, John Medhurst's "That Option No Longer Exists" is very good on this moment. I've said this before but Benn's relation to what, if they were Italian, we'd identify as very deep autonomist currents in the British labour movement, is genuinely fascinating and offers huge potential resources for today. Here, unlike Benn the national treasure, Benn was technology obsessed and offered a genuinely left reckoning with modernity.
If Bennism means that Benn, then Bennism was very, very good and is a key part of our resources on the left in Britain.

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Yes, but not because it relates to the past but because of what its lack of a future or an idea of production means for its relation to the past. This is quite a glib sketch, but I think it holds, in the Theses Benjamin argues, that the past would only be citable, in all its moments, for a redeemed humanity, retromania, and here its beginnings in the end of history discourse are pretty clear, basically treats the past as fully citable, humanity is redeemed by 1989, by the (apparent) becoming total of capitalism. However, the price for the full citability of the past in a situation where we are not truly redeemed is that it becomes entirely flat, quantifiable, trivial and to be repeated or recreated directly- also in the theses Benjamin quotes, Flaubert, "Few can guess how sad one had to be to resurrect Carthage"- and this is the melancholy side. Moreover, retromania blocks both the future but also the future of the past, the object of retromania is always static, as Benjamin says, the melancholy that seeks to resurrect an epoch requires removing, "everything he knows about the future course of history." Retromania is produced by a combination of naive post-1989 utopianism and melancholy- what both share is that there is no future, no production.
Brecht says, of aesthetically reactionary commissars, "production makes them uncomfortable. You never know where you are with production; production is the unforseeable. You never know what's going to come out", one aspect of production is that the unexpected that might come out might be a new relationship to the past, or a previously lost or despised fragment of the past being disinterred: production has a retroactive force, it has its own orientation towards the past, but one that is constituted by wanting to create something new. To take two examples of a radical aesthetic coupled with radical politics, Stereolab (who are not retromaniacs, this is important) and Courbet or Manet, both in confronting new experiences and worrying over them, trying to make sense of them and, particularly in Courbet or Stereolab's case attempting to think through a radical form emerging from a radical political content, marginalised parts of the past are dredged up, the importance of 17th century Spanish painting for Courbet or Manet, or Courbet's absolutely perfect and rigorous functional transformation of history painting in "A Burial...", in Stereolab various parts of popular music excluded by the traditional canon, are retrieved, but these are not retrieved in their totality, its always certain aspects that are useful to making sense of and producing now, the past is not the flat past of Retromania's utopia-melancholy, but a past charged with the time of the now.

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I reckon so, the thing is it's only £3 and no effort. I think the argument that it's a mistake to invest huge amounts of time or money (if one has it) in Labour is absolutely right, but this isn't what paying your three quid would entail, there's no real issue around opportunity cost.
The two other questions I think are, firstly, would a Corbyn victory be good for the left that doesn't view political work as consisting in ensuring there's a Labour government or that the Labour party has an appropriate character (that is the left that's potentially useful and effective) and I think it would (I'm writing my Corbyn hot-take on this at the moment). The second question is whether Labour is so morally deplorable that even giving them £3 is a disgrace, I have good comrades who think something along these lines, but I don't agree, I think one can make a fairly crudely utilitarian calculation that the pain one is inflicting on the real scumbags in Labour is great enough (Peter John will sob like a baby should Corbyn win) to justify that.
Obviously, (and of course you know this), registering and voting for Corbyn doesn't make other political work redundant, but it's probably worth it.

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It should be clear from Greece that even an assertion of national-popular sovereignty against neoliberal capitalism (let alone moves towards socialist transformation) are incompatible with Euro membership, and quite possibly EU membership.Equally, it should be clear from the crisis in the Mediterranean (and not just there) that moves towards an even minimally humane immigration policy (let alone a truly just one, which would entail a dismantling of borders) are difficult, to say the very least, within the EU. Nevertheless, there's a pretty elementary confusion in the sadly voguish left-euroscepticism and this confusion, for example with someone like Owen Jones, is the result of a desperation to find "left" reasons to agree with an imagined working class "common sense" (and this means left-euroscepticism often slips into a Little Englander or even xenophobic discourse grounded in a confused and ill-defined workerism). The confusion, put simply, concerns what today is preventing moves against neoliberal capitalism and moves towards a more humane immigration policy, and if anyone thinks it's the EU rather than the present government, well... What the EU is preventing the UK doing is further cutting (very limited) social and environmental protections and absolutely shafting EU migrant workers, the renegotiation will probably see these undermined a little but they won't totally go. So, whilst I have no doubt a serious socialist project in the UK would require leaving the EU, leaving now, under present conditions, or under the probably slightly worse conditions of 2016-7, means worse conditions for Greek, Polish and Spanish migrant worker friends of mine and no opening up of socialist horizons.

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On Syriza, it depends what you mean by "doomed", you wouldn't believe the backlog of Syriza questions I've got, I'm building up to answering them one day.

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I think about 20 of the nominations he got were for him as leader rather than those wanting to "broaden the debate" or see the left defeated (Laughs...). Added to that, many of the 48 who voted against the welfare bill are likely to be supportive if he's elected, and there will be pressure on centrist MPs to accept the result.
In terms of the vote, I still don't think he'll win, he'll get the most first preferences, definitely, but given how few second preferences he'll get (though there might be a few from Kendall supporters, in the spirit of 1981) and a few voting for one candidate won't give a second preference, he'll need around 45% of first preference votes, and given the politics of Labour members (they won't be totally drowned out by new members and registered supporters), I don't think he'll quite get it, though it's not impossible.

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I mean to write properly on Corbyn, including on this, but sketching things out quickly, I think he can, although I suspect he won't. Obviously one part of the recent carping about infiltrators is to free certain MPs from their obligations to respect the leader elected by the membership and whilst I can't see them directly trying to overthrow him immediately (although given their recent mixture of whining and lack of political nous an act of such stupidity wouldn't totally shock me now), I can see a large group making trouble of the grindingly disruptive sort as well as a few (but not many) defections.
Corbyn will have some advantages, firstly, most obviously, that he's won, and this will bring a fair part of the PLP, even begrudgingly behind him. Secondly, that there isn't going to be an obvious anti-Corbyn figure to organise around (if Corbyn wins, Burnham, Cooper and Kendall will all have been unambiguously defeated, and neither Cooper, or above all, Burnham are coming out of this leadership campaign enhanced, Chuka Umunna has rather lost himself, Dan Jarvis might be a press talked up nuisance in a couple of years, but not yet). Thirdly, if he wins quite a number of those who joined or registered will start to get engaged in local parties (this enthusiasm may be short-lived, however) so with a bit of the right pressure, I can see the majority of the PLP sulkily knuckling under for a while and being little more annoying than they were with Ed Miliband.
This brings us though to the exerting of pressure and I fear Corbyn's notions of democracy and his being wedded to a fairly conformist Labourism might undo him. What he needs to do on being elected is to find mechanisms to work round MPs by both centralising power in himself and finding ways to empower those who voted for him against MPs, and in so doing engage and keep engaged those who joined or registered to vote for him. However, it seems that he wants a (unity) shadow cabinet elected by the PLP, which re-empower MPs and it's worth noting "unity" governments (or cabinets) are usually the way they dilute a popular figure from the left reducing them to a figurehead. This is quite rough, I'm going to do a proper thing on Corbyn next week, but this feels like the terrain at least of an answer, and where the limitations of Corbynism might show themselves very strongly, sadly.

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Maybe now I'd say the reprinted "Politics & Letters", especially if you've a fair understanding of British political history and wider cultural life to make sense of the references. Otherwise, I might start with one of the essay collections, or if you're interested in but critical of Orwell, his Orwell book. The choice of essay collections depends a lot on your interests, I started with "Politics of Modernism" because that was what I was most interested in at the time, "Resources of Hope" is very good as a general collection, some (but not all) of the essays in "Culture & Materialism" are very good from a more theoretical standpoint, but sometimes, on their own, without application to literature or society, certain of his theoretical positions can seem slightly banal or obvious.
I'd probably try one of them before the big books "Culture & Society", "The Long Revolution", or "The Country and the City."
If you're just looking for one essay, "Culture is Ordinary" is programmatically vital and both humane and polemically sharp. http://artsites.ucsc.edu/faculty/Gustafson/FILM%20162.W10/readings/Williams.Ordinary.pdf

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Enfield seem interesting at least. http://www.theguardian.com/cities/series/the-enfield-experiment and Islington are introducing a few decent policies around housing, I don't think with either we're talking about good, but certainly less bad than Southwark. I don't know anyway near as much about this as I should and I've no idea even with these less horrendous (policy wise) councils what the experience is, for example, of a vulnerably housed woman of colour at the housing office- Southwark's horrible here.
Islington and Enfield certainly aren't attempting a confrontation with central government, they're trying to work round problems and whilst I think councils should have set illegal budgets (acting together, one council doing this would have been picked off), the Enfield and Islington stuff reflects badly on Southwark precisely because of how moderate and non-confrontational they've been.
I really need to research this more, both on a policy level and on the level of people's everyday interactions with councils.

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Thanks that's very kind. The two pieces I've written that I thought were probably most successful were the Occupied Times piece on Gentrification & Culture in Southwark http://theoccupiedtimes.org/?p=13162 and the thing I wrote on Zero-Hours contracts, "Capital" & organising: http://www.thenorthstar.info/?p=10629 A lot of other things I've written I've got a lot of reservations about now, but they held up quite well and people involved in the struggles these pieces detail have said they found them useful and/or interesting,
which is nice. These were probably the things I learnt most from writing too.
In terms of what's in the works, I've got two things in the pipeline which could be good, both feel like they're nearly there but need a little bit more thought and work to tighten them up and make absolutely clear what's at stake: A review of "White City Black City", a tidied up version of a talk I gave on the destruction of council housing, surplus populations, and militant care. Then I'm going to do my book proposal.

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Finally, and more deeply, and there's certainly a mix of argument here and sentiment, I think some of the anarchist anti-Labour arguments push into enormous condescension of posterity territory. For most of the last 100 years, millions of working class people have viewed Labour, for all its timidity, capitulations, failures and active horrors, as a vehicle for exerting collective class power to, at least, improve their and their comrades' lives. Now, this may have been a mistake, it may have been more valid in the past but no longer valid now, and I would argue Labour structurally cannot be the vehicle for anything beyond relatively timid tinkering with capitalism, and, against those who would want to reclaim Labour this is deep and structural, not a betrayal of some pure origin we must return to. Equally, not all working class militants identified their struggle and that of their comrades with Labour. However, I think these hopes and their investment in Labour deserve rather better than the moralistic or sneering way they are sometimes treated, as if these working class radicals were not themselves aware of Labour's limitations. This is why, I think, all my anger Labour is mixed with a still very profound identification with them.

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I mean all this in the most comradely spirit (contradictions within the people) and I've learnt a lot from anarchist and ultra-left comrades in the last couple of years but...

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Misery quite precisely encourages people to limit their horizons and put their faith in all kinds of war criminals, capitulators, cranks, opportunists, and assorted wankers, 5 years of this government have made Russell Brand the answer to the problems of the left for a lot of people who should know better; the 1992 defeat meant the same with Blair. A Labour-led government would also mean the buck passing of quite a lot of Labour councils, arguing that they are only imposing this misery because of central governments would have to stop, this help for organising, leading to more productive polarisation between government and collective action. Moreover, a Labour government removes, more generally, the wishful thinking argument that, if only we had a Labour government we would be in utopia so it's necessary to devote everything to Labour. One probably ends up here in something quite close to support Miliband (and the SNP) in the way the rope supports the hanging man. Either Labour and the SNP will do a better than expected job in government of confronting austerity or their contradictions will collapse them. I think we are at a point where the contradiction in Labour between representing and extending popular demands against disciplining, canalising, and breaking with these demands for a stable, well-managed capitalist economy is becoming acute and (electorally) can only be resolved slightly leftwards. Miliband's limitations and indecisions (but also successes) have come from his provisional (it can only be provisional) resolutions of this contradiction, largely in the face of the right of the party who want Labour to be merely the party of the forward-thinking, pro-European management of capitalism on terms given to it entirely by capital. I think there's a fair chance that if a (not acknowledged) agreement with the SNP is possible that people like Mandelson, Hunt and Umunna might try to collapse it- a very British, very, very shit coup- which would be it for Labour. Labour being the biggest party in seats or (or better and) votes would cut the rug from under this gang.

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Labour- not that it matters in Camberwell & Peckham- Harman had a 17,000 majority last time, but given the likely post-election absurdities Labour's total vote might be important.
The first thing to say is that voting has nothing to do with emancipation or, really, with politics proper, most of what determines how cruel the next administration will be happens (and has happened) outside the voting process in struggles that are sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit. Part of this includes what struggles mean for "common sense" in people's electoral choices, of course. With that out of the way, we can dispense, hopefully, with the rhetorically inflated, moralistic opposition between the claim failing to vote Labour means endorsing everything the Tories will do and the claim voting Labour represents an enthusiastic endorsement of everything horrible (and there's a lot) in Labour's manifesto. What voting in most of England amounts to is a Labour-led or Tory-led government less bad, and I think there's enough difference to make the very small effort (we're not talking here about investing huge amounts of time in Labour, which is another thing) to vote for that. The Green manifesto, for example, is better than Labour's in general but as voting is not a question of emancipation (and the Green manifesto is a long way from that), that's not important. That said, there clearly is a place for using elections for propaganda as Lisa McKenzie's been doing and as Nick Wrack has been to a degree in P & C over the Aylesbury- but this is different from voting.
A Tory-led government will intensify the catastrophe- if they win there won't be a welfare state in 2020, whereas if Labour win there will be something, albeit incredibly tattered. Again this isn't to endorse a £26,000 benefit cap rather than a £23,000 but that extra £3,000 means a lot to families with kids in London & the SE, appalling as it is as a policy.
As someone involved in grassroots struggles, including direct action casework, unlike some comrades I would count Labour doing at a stroke, in general, what takes huge effort to do for one or two people- say with ending the bedroom tax as a victory. However, this doesn't have the vital role in building collective power that militant community struggles do, but it's not like Labour will end capitalism and end the necessity of those struggles that could become emancipatory.
If a Labour government merely meant marginally better conditions (or at least not accelerated misery) for large numbers of people that would be enough to vote for them but continue militant struggles against them at the same time. However, there are other considerations about militant organising and what a Labour-led government would mean for that, and I think a Labour-led government would advance struggles rather than limit them. Misery generally doesn't help with organising that moves beyond desperate, reactive self-defence....

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within nation states with increasingly universalised legal codifications and increased circulation of people- trains allowing teams and fans to get around, later, of course, the ever accelerating & proliferating circulation of images- televised football.
The other point of Marxist-urbanism and football is football and city brands & gentrification more generally. Football clubs as economic actors- the role for example, of Spurs in the gentrification of Tottenham, but also as subject to economic forces- movements of clubs from more city centre locations to the edges of towns, also the way in which councils think this move might help gentrification but often doesn't- the area round Saints' ground is generally quite grim and there are a few half-started but stopped signs of gentrification. Also, football clubs as part of the city brand- Man Utd and particularly Newcastle within urban renaissance stuff, Barcelona would be the apotheosis of this and the selling of a labourless, "smart" city dedicated to culture and tourism, again as analogy, tiki-taka in its gnostic, technocrat non-contactness is rather telling.
Finally, paralleling Galeano- https://twitter.com/Tom_Gann/status/589348655410348033, again with analogies to a proletarian perspective, particularly perhaps one around enclosure and the necessity of maintaining a certain utopian chance which is always but never fully enclosed as the basis for excitement. Obviously high-level football always risks (capitalism destroys the basis of wealth) by its tendencies and logic destroying this and destroying itself, but can't (quite).
I'm not sure though if there's a totalising perspective possible, just avenues and fragments.

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Actually I find football one of the hardest (least interesting?) things to think Marxistly about. I think the main thing is that beginning from the standpoint of the proletariat (as Marxism should) is quite unclear in football- would that mean beginning with the players, or perhaps, the fans, who analogically function as proletarian with regard to football, and, of course, often are working class? Oddly, I think because the link between the proletarian standpoint, production and thought is murky to work through, certain perspectives are possibly legitimate to football that one should be very cautious of elsewhere: football probably does function as an allegory fairly often and psychonalytic perspectives are quite often rewarding (I'm thinking of some of the stuff on Straight off the Beach). The other problem with Marxism and football is that getting the appropriate tone right, if you're not Eduardo Galeano, is very difficult. I liked This is Deep Play a lot because it managed a sort of hard whimsy and negotiated how to take football seriously (very seriously indeed) whilst also acknowledging the ludicrousness of doing this without a tedious English jokey disavowal.
The only time I've tried to write anything about football was, at the height of the only 12 people understand "intersectionality" nonsense, I tried to write something on the proletariat's right to conceptuality looking at the levels of abstraction that accepted in talking about (and estranging football), quite a lot of it was about Steven Davis. It wasn't very good, but there's definitely an interesting avenue in terms of looking at Brecht on sport and interested (opposed both to disinterested and bored) knowledge as a model for emancipatory learning and conceptuality.
Maybe another avenue would be to look at the production of footballers for the advanced capitalist countries, particularly African players within a Third Worldist context- what kind of training processes are used, how are players moved and selected and what kind of racist judgements effect this, what the impacts of immigration policies, where is value extracted, how are black bodies thought, manipulated and exploited and how is all this complicated production process naturalised covered over by the constant racist (even if admiring) description of players as "beasts" or "monsters".
Allegorically, I think there are interesting links between techno-utopian fantasies of labourless production and the increased marginalisation of fans in favour of TV revenue (etc); dialectically opposed to this would be left-reactionary fantasies "against modern football". This opposition certainly makes clear a certain more general impasse on the left.
The cultural logic and history side as something both with qualified autonomy but always referring to the material base is important and interesting too. Again here league football becomes quite striking as an image of modernity (and part of modernity's self-understanding) of cities existing

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