Paul Mason’s thought-provoking ideas on Humanism, small
acts of resistance and the future of society; a talk in Vienna with a post-script on the clear and present danger of the Jew-hate in the UK
Far Left and the Labour Party and what the author and radical activist thinks should now be done.
In his new book A Clear Bright Future, published in German
translation by Suhrkamp, Paul Mason wants to bring back the values of the Enlightenment,
reason and rationality with the human being at the centre of his preoccupation.
Contrary to Claude Levy Strauss who believed that the ideas of the
Enlightenment led to the Holocaust, Mason believes, as expressed in the English
subtitle of his book that they lead to the defence of the human being. The
German editor who must have read the book carefully realized that Mason is
defending a philosophy that is centred on the human being but not as an
individual but as humanity in general. Therefore, Suhrkamp changed the German subtitle
to read: “in defence of Humanism”. It seems that German Suhrkamp editors are
greater sticklers for accuracy than their English counterparts when it comes to
describing on the tin what’s inside it.
Mason’s defence is not or not primarily of the human being as
an individual but as a species-being (Gattungswesen), Karl Marx’ term for
humanity in larger social groups and classes or humanity as a whole. As Slavoj Žižek
likes to remind us: A Marxist is a person who loves humanity but hates people.
Paul Mason lacks Žižek’s biting wit and self-deprecating sense of humour. He
makes up for this by an apparently sincere and engaging passion for his ideas
and an interest in connecting with his audience.
With the philosophical stance, which he propagates in his
book, Mason sticks his neck out. Arguing for Humanism a bold approach that runs
contrary to current trends in philosophy and academia. In Viennese-born philosopher
Sir Karl Popper’s framework, Mason puts out bold hypotheses which are open to
corroboration and refutation, as opposed to postmodernist double-speak. For
that he deserves respect.
The primary enemy Mason identifies is the one and only form
of liberalism he ever mentions: Neoliberalism. This, in his view, has destroyed
and continues to destroy the lives of people in the lower classes in the West,
so that today they are in a desperate state. He has adopted a definition of
Neoliberalism as the advancement of the market into all areas of the economy as
well as in all our social and private lives.
Mason dismisses the EU summarily as an enterprise that was
made into a Neoliberal institution by Margaret Thatcher. For him, as for the
rest of the UK radical left, she is the late wicked witch of the English south.
The German social market economy (Soziale Marktwirtschaft) and its ordo-liberal
tradition and similar ideas implemented in Northern European EU countries do
not warrant a closer look as far as Mason is concerned.
A consequence of Mason’s Humanism is that it puts Humanity
above the environment. So, he struggles somewhat to include current fashionable
environmental ideas and I suspect he would not be against environmental
engineering solutions to climate change problems. A second problem for
potential leftist converts to the Humanist cause is that all Humanism’s key
thinkers are men.
A further unusual aspect of Mason’s worldview is his support
for the Catalan (nationalist) uprising and the Scottish drive for independence.
Nationalism does not usually sit well with the left. And what today is a socialist-led nation might tomorrow become neoliberal or even Alt+right state. Here Mason
doesn’t think like many in the continental European left who remember bitter
experiences with the rise of nationalism.
For Mason the market is a giant black box algorithm that
humanity in the Western World has handed over control to, and dragged the rest
of the world mostly kicking and screaming along with it. This has led to
disaster for the lower classes in the Western World.
Mason also strongly criticises the current Chinese
government’s approach in a chapter called Reject the Thoughts of Xi Jin Ping.
So, we won’t hold our breath while waiting for him to speak at a Confucius
Institute in our neighbourhood anytime soon.
Mason is both nostalgic for the lived solidarity among the
mining community of Leigh in Lancashire where he grew up in the 1960s. He sees
an example of the ethics of virtue advocated by Aristoteles. He holds a deeply-felt grudge against Margaret Thatcher who in his view destroyed these
communities and much that was good about the England of the 1950s and 60s. He
speaks movingly about the experiences of his father in this regard.
Mason believes that the Western world is dominated today by
western neoliberalism and that neoliberalism is in such crisis, so hollowed
out, that not a major violent revolution, but small acts of resistance against
Neoliberalism’s purely performative incorporation of progressive ideas will
bring it to collapse.
Hearing him speak, one detects an interesting parallel to Christian
evangelism. If you just do good deeds and come to church every Sunday you will
not be redeemed, progressive liberal!
Only if you accept Jesus into your life, or in Mason’s case
the Marxist-Humanist world view will you truly find forgiveness for your
Western liberal sins.
The clear bright future for mankind that Mason envisages is
were humanity, i.e. the Marxian species-being, takes control of the great-big-algorithm that is the market and all the great-big-algorithms which the age of
digitalization and Artificial Intelligence has brought and will yet bring.
Alienation is the consequence of working and if humanity
takes control of the algorithm rather than lets the algorithm take control of
it a clear bright future where machines do the work and human beings are kind
to each other, democratic and equal beckons.
How can we make the “clear bright future” come about? By individuals
and groups making use of their human agency and refusing the performative
nature of the neoliberal life through small daily acts of resistance. What
might these be? An example: treat your Starbucks barista like a human being
rather than as a machine when you buy your coffee there. I sure can live with
that, and suspect so can many bourgeois liberals.
Mason is an engaging speaker who seems keen on explaining
his ideas and sincerely connecting with his audience. He attacks theAlt+right
in America and is intelligent enough to not underestimate the intelligence of
its adherents and leaders. On two occasions in his speech, he mentions Jewish
themes. To emphasise the evil of the US Alt+right he mentions the shouts of the
Charlottesville protesters “Jews will not replace us”. When he comes to mention
the importance of small acts of resistance, he mentions the uprising of the
Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto. It was a heroic act of resistance whose end in the
death of those who directed and performed it was always the almost certain
outcome.
Following his talk, Mason is interviewed by Robert Misik.
Misik’s questions are answered by Mason with relatively long monologues.
Perhaps Misik is also not quite comfortable in English. His questions are, like
humanity described in the late great Douglas Adam’s Hitchhikers Guide to The
Galaxy, “mostly harmless” almost fawning. Probing they are not.
Paul Mason is welcomed as a friend and admiration for him
and the UK left by Misik is palpable. No probing questions here about his
support for Catalan and Scottish nationalism here. And why would the Corbynist
left to which Mason belongs support national self-determination in those
countries but call Jewish self-determination as expressed in the state of
Israel “a racist endeavour from the start of its creation”. This even though
the Zionist Po’alei Tzion Union were founding members of the Labour Party?
Robert Misik opens the floor for questions from the audience.
First, a lady who has some critical questions to ask him about the lack of
feminism and women in his ideas of Humanism makes a pertinent point.
Then I get my chance to gently break into the comradely atmosphere
of the event and exercise the critical faculties which my years as a student of
the social sciences at the London School of Economics has inculcated in me.
I have heard Paul Mason speak at the London School of
Economics a few weeks back, and he adapts his speaking style to who he thinks
his audience will be. At LSE, his talk contained the occasional “fuck” and “bullshit”
when describing people and ideas he did not like. A way of connecting to a
younger international audience, no doubt. In elegant Vienna with a more aged
audience none of that.
Here a from memory a summary of my question and Paul Mason’s
answer.
In early1945 while the Jews of Europe were murdered by the German and other Nazis in
Auschwitz, Treblinka Maidanek and other death camps as well as outside of these, George Orwell wrote about Antisemitism on the Left. In his essay Antisemitism in Great Britain, he highlights
that the people he speaks to deeply dislike Jews because of what they are
and do. They deny, however, that they are anti-Semitic. They say Hitler and the Nazi-party are
anti-Semitic and they are the enemy, we on the other dislike the Jews and believe that they do for good reasons. Orwell points out that he himself finds it
attractive to dislike the Jews and so has some empathy with that view but he
also realizes that it is a wrong view Orwell would like to know why it has such
a strong hold over people, even people like him who know it is untrue. Here a
link to his article.
The Labour Party has a “both-and” strategy with respect to
Jew-hate that is not dissimilar to the FPÖ’s in Austria: The Labour Party is
theoretically against racism including speech acts, threats and physical acts
of Jew-hate. In practice, however, almost every day prominent members of the Labour party and Corbyn-supporters inside and outside the Labour Party perform
a lot of Jew-hating acts. For instance, many women Labour Party Members of
Parliament who are Jewish and not Corbynist are constantly inundated with Jew-hating abuse by Corbyn supporters. Would Mason recommend that other European
Leftist parties that are currently in trouble like the German SPD and the
Austrian SPÖ also adopt this both-end strategy towards Jews?
In his answer, Mason, who is familiar with George Orwell’s
essay, mentions three sources of Jew-hate in the Corbynist left in the Labour
Party. One is that the poor and downtrodden in the UK are suffering a lot of
oppression from the neo-liberal system. They do not, however, identify this as a
systemic problem. They want to identify the people who suppress them rather than
the system, among the international billionaire business elites and these
people are often Jewish. This, secondly, gives rise to a lot of conspiracy
theories; it is necessary but difficult to fight against these. Thirdly, within
the UK Labour Party, there is an age-old fight between Jewish Anti-Zionists on
the one hand and Jewish Zionists on the other. This has extended to large
swathes of the party exceeding in importance and in the tone of the debate its
actual proportions. Mason thinks that it is important that the British left not
be deflected by the Zionism debate. There are more important issues at stake.
He also wants to have a more active education about the Holocaust in the Labour
party taken groups of Labour Party members to Auschwitz and Maidanek. In his
remarks, Mason also says Corbyn is not an anti-Semite.
I only have the right to one question, which is fair, so I
cannot probe how sincere Mason is in his views. What does he mean by Anti-Semitism?
After all the Corbyn supporting Mayor of London Ken Livingstone said recently
“Hating all the Jews in Israel is not anti-Semitic”. It is, however, certainly
Jew-hate.
On the day Mason speaks in Vienna, there are numerous
reports in the news dealing with tweets and tape recordings expressing Jew-hate
by members of the Labour Party including National Executive Committee Members
like Mr. Willsman, the Labour Party candidate standing in the by-election in
Peterborough and member of the left and talk show host for Rupert Murdoch George
Galloway “there will be no Israeli flag on the Cup” Galloway triumphantly
writes in his hateful message alluding to Tottenham’s Jewish connections in
North London. The assertion that one can be virulently anti-Zionist without
veering into vile Jew-hate may work in theory but turns out to be untenable in
practice. Just read the comments by Corbyn supporters in the Independent and
Guardian on-line when these issues are part of an article in those papers.
Given that Labour Party this week became subject of an
official investigation by the statutory UK Equality and Human Rights Commission
Paul Mason’s sincerity maybe born of legal necessity rather than personal
conviction. Mason had mentioned earlier that he had recently worked in the
theatre. And as someone once said: “The most important quality in the theatre
is sincerity and if you can fake that you have really got it made”.
Nevertheless, Paul Mason appears sincere if incomplete in
his response and ready to discuss and engage.
I wanted to end my report on this hopeful note but
unfortunately for the international far left, but unfortunately I cannot.
A young Austrian man asks to speak and starts to sharply
question Mason. I am very surprised at your response, he says. Why do you
accept that there is Jew-hate in the left of the UK Labour Party? Are you not aware
that all this is trumped up charge by Blairites and agents of the Israeli government who want to stop Jeremy Corbyn? This has been proven by Al-Jazeera I
can show you the sources, the young man says.
Mason seems a bit uncomfortable but looks like he has heard
this before. Not wishing to lose a potential left-wing Humanist just because he
spouts conspiracy theories, Mason says that what the young man says may be true
but doesn’t change what he Mason said about the subject even if it were.
I, on the other hand, leave the event with the feeling that
the Jew-hating acts of the Labour Party left are spreading their poison
internationally. Someone once said: Primary Antisemitism is the anti-Semitism
that led to Auschwitz, secondary anti-Semitism is the anti-Semitism because of
Auschwitz. Similarly, the Jews who fight the vicious Jew-hate widespread in the
left are the cause of Jew hate (they are dubbed Blairite Jews, Trump-loving
Jews, colonialist slave trader Jews, etc.). It looks like the UK’s Labour Party’s
left and their allies’ poison of Jew-hate has now spread internationally. This
is not the time for dropping one’s guard to the Jew-hate of the Alt+right and
the Far Left.
Robert Misik (left) and Paul Mason
Small editorial changes were made on 5 June 2019 at 17:45 to my paraphrasing of Orwell's essay: Antisemitism in Great Britain.
