Idiot Joy Showland

The Labour Party’s leadership election, slowly and greasily phlegmed up into being over the past month, is supposed to present us with a political choice. Jeremy Corbyn and Owen Smith – in other words, two sets of personalities, two ranges of competencies, even, if you squint, two sociopolitical classes. And overriding everything is the great question, shouted at the selectorate from every angle, of power versus principle: purity of purpose against hard-nosed political machinations, a party leader who seems to have abandoned any hope of actually winning elections or one determined to do whatever’s needed to get back into government. The question shouldn’t be rejected entirely; it’s something that the left has faced before. The Bolsheviks for instance, in the immediate aftermath of the October Revolution, worked under the principle that other revolutionary parties should be represented in an All-Russian Constituent Assembly; eventually, they had to sacrifice that principle for the power to make gains elsewhere. In less urgent and desperate times, like 1917, this was a question we had some time to ponder. Now, it should be the least of our concerns.

It’s not just that the terms don’t fully make sense, although they really don’t. As the party’s chorus of Cassandras keeps insisting, Labour is in an incredibly weak position – to take power at the next election would require a surge in support unprecedented in modern British political history, something utterly outside the boundaries of convention. So why do they think that going to the polls with a conventional leader, espousing now-conventional policies, would produce that result? How is someone like Owen Smith, a piece of forgettable biological generica, someone whose main tactic appears to be pretending to have so few distinguishing characteristics that the only possible polemic against him would be a mean-spirited attack on the essential impotence and idiocy of humanity as such, supposed to do it? If Corbyn’s leadership has been incompetent, how much more incompetent are the Parliamentary rebels who can’t even defeat him within their own party? If the worry is that a right-wing media will never accept Corbyn, hasn’t a half-decade of embarrassing bacon sandwich-eating shots shown that no successor is likely to fare any better? In a time when political certainties have all melted into the stale fog, when loony minority propositions like leaving the European Union can suddenly surge to victory, when any monster can apparently wrench itself out of the imagination and into reality, when the quiet and dignified prude on the Clapham omnibus is now sweating omnicidal rage from every pore as the bus cooks in the July heat and small riots pop off like firecrackers in scattered corners of the city, why is centrist pabulum still thought to be what the great British public are desperately crying out for?

But what’s being presented is not, despite appearances, a tactical question. It’s not even a political choice. The battle isn’t between the left and the centre, and it’s certainly not between Corbyn and Smith; it’s a choice between politics in general and something else, between the possibility of politics as a terrain for contention and its collapse into the mere administration of class society as it slowly declines. Jeremy Corbyn, for better or worse, might be the last leader whose politics are still actually political. His defeat would be the victory of the monster, an enormous nightmare-creature with its sanitised face of bland focus-group triangulation turned towards us, while far away at its distant arse-end there’s the wailing of a resurgent fascism. The fact that my politics are substantially different to Corbyn’s, or that I happen to think his old-Labour Keynesianism, lightly inflected with universal basic modishness, is actually less likely to be put into practice in the current climate than the kind of ludic revolutionary hyperbole I’d prefer – it’s immaterial. Now is not the time. Emancipatory politics of any shade, from the mildest reformism to Bataille’s becoming other or else ceasing to be, can only have a language in which to communicate themselves while there’s still a field of politics separate from management. Without that, they’ll slip back into theology. The concerned types of the soft left, the ones who don’t even really disagree with Corbyn’s politics but have decided that he’s too compromised and too toxic and a unifying candidate needs to be found, would condemn their own projects and mine for the sake of removing one crotchety old man and in the vain hope of winning one general election. The real choice has been with us for a while. Corbynism or barbarism.

And we are already in barbarism; the catastrophe isn’t incoming, it’s already here. ‘The world,’ Derrida wrote, ‘is going very badly.’ That was in 1993; since then it’s continued to go very badly, and for long millennia beforehand it was going very badly too. Occasionally people like to point out that some things have improved, that people are living longer than they were a century ago, that there’s less lead in our drinking water, that fewer people are mauled by bears, as if this were anything other than the slow wearing-out of a giant machine for producing corpses. The world, the field for our powerlessness, the thing foreign to us into which we are thrown, the thing that elsewhere I’ve called the dead world, is always going very badly. The moment it starts to go well will be the moment we are no longer alienated from objective existence; at that point there will be no vast crushing indifferent entity to give that name to. Until then, the world and the end of the world will continue to be exactly the same thing.

Barbarism is everywhere. The Prime Minister recently announced in Parliament that she would be willing to use Britain’s nuclear deterrent, and Owen Smith, speaking on a cheerful ITV breakfast show, repeated the same line: he would fire the missiles, because ‘if you are serious about defence and serious about having a nuclear deterrent then you have to be prepared to do that.’ Atomic weapons aren’t just some ominous future threat of devastation; they enforce the immanent mass destructibility of human life. The fact that our governing classes will proudly announce their intention to kill millions of people in a nuclear war, all for no reason, the fact that they’re structurally required to make that announcement, is what allows for everything else: slow death by austerity, migrants drowning on the Mediterranean, the demotion of vast sectors of the world’s population to the status of surplus flesh, to be fed occasionally, without forgetting that it’s a terrible drain on public finances. None of this is political, before long it’ll just be common sense, a final enclosure of the name of the commons.

I’m writing this too late. The nominations are closed, and so are the voter registrations; if I wanted to encourage you to sign up as Labour party supporters like I haven’t and vote for Jeremy Corbyn like I won’t, I wouldn’t be able to. That’s not really what I want to do. Electoral boosterism is always faintly sickening – the sense of a circus suddenly turning on its audience, the clowns in their painted rictuses teetering on a narrow political proscenium, staring into the cowed darkness and barking now you make us laugh. There’s not that much between your old friends you never speak to taking to Facebook with the cheery demand that whoever you vote for you just get out there and vote like hell, and – to take a random example – Will Self last year, breaking however many decades of principled anarcho-floccinaucinihilipilification to beg us all to go and vote for, of all people, Ed Miliband. In any case Corbyn’s re-election as Labour leader seems pretty much assured, but this is a Baudrillardian age, of volatilisation and disappearance. Whatever it is that comes next, the good or the barbaric, will only have use for electoral engagement as a minor prop. Still, there’s no finality, and the nihilist void of pure management is a form among others; it too can fade. Something is about to vanish before our eyes. The question, between two evaporating sides, is what. The terms of combat are this: will Corbyn’s leadership be the last fluttering breath of politics, or is its choke the water coming out the lungs in the unsteady birth of something new?