Notes on: Sivavnadan, A. (1990). All that Melts Into Air is Solid. Communities of Resistance… Writings on Black Struggles for Socialism. Verso: London. (Also in Race and Class 31 (3) 1990). [I took notes from this in 1990 and found it inspiring in my own critique of CCCS and the Gramscians -- see Harris D. 1992 From Class Struggle to the Politics of Pleasure...London: Routledge. I found the notes in the filing cabinet in 2024] 'New Times is a fraud, a counterfeit, a humbug. It palms off Thatcherite values as socialist… Makes consumption itself the stuff of politics… New Times is a mirror image of Thatcherism passing for socialism' (19). It is flawed because it is founded in the drive to form a programme, and anti-Thatcher coalition but there is no proper account of the appeal of Thatcherism so it has smuggled in Tory visions and policies and tried to recast them. It does not explain why people put up with Thatcherism nor has it teased out the roots in the changes of the production process relevant to rethink socialism and Marxism. Instead, it has reworked Marxism from  options found in the current Communist Party — Stalinism and Eurocommunism. If the latter is to triumph, who is the new constituency? The new philosophy has emerged from 'theoretical practitioners' who were concerned to examine and reinterpret texts [in an academic context I insist, with its own constraints]  which led them to develop new interpretations to fit the modern consumerist world. Other theories rejected including economic determinism which led to an overemphasis on culture and cultural politics which had become fragmented separated to produce 'social blocs'. These were still seen as capable of unity. There were however new social forces rather than class, informed 'by politics of the person'. Class was reintroduced through the 'politics of difference' but later. The flexibility of the analysis is really down to its opportunism and pluralism — the only constant is identity. Marxism Today [MT]was the locus for the new groups free from class and the Labour Party. The CP is not a suitable place especially after it had been condemned. Instead the Labour Party was to be infiltrated, using terms like 'New Marxists' and 'hegemonise' (23). Economic determinism was abandoned and this meant that any economic analysis had to be abandoned and this in turn produced in the knowledge of the scale or the importance of changes in the new technology where 'capital was now emancipated from labour' (24). Technical changes were mere excuses for apostasy for the New left. The economy was finally dealt with in a special October 1988 issue of MT through the notion of post-Fordism. This was okay as a description of diversity, differentiation and decentralisation, but not as an explanation of it. There is again an overemphasis on the cultural and the ideological, a reversal of economic determinism. This can be seen especially in Hall's 'Brave New World' piece in that issue — economic changes are produced only through information technology, flexible labour, targeted audiences and segments, globalisation, spatial dimensions. Social and cultural history has been fragmented and leads to the emergence of new individualist consumption based forms. The economic and the social or cultural are now only 'associated', and this is illustrated in detail through various histories. Hall is so keen to avoid determinism that he ignores significant links and how the mass labour of the Third World is crucial as well (27) [Murray's article in the same issue is slightly better but Hall ignores it] The whole theory is triggered by economic changes beneath the surface. Economic determinism seems absent from the 60s cultural revolutions and theoretical innovations like semiotics which are so crucial for Hall. There is still structure involving base and superstructure but this time without the working class — so capital has emancipated itself from labour in effect. The productive forces have led to changes in the relations of production, labour loses its economic clout and its political clout too. But the battle is still really about ownership and control even if that is relegated to the margins or the periphery, and that is why it is demonstrated mostly on the political and ideological level rather than the economic and political level. Thatcherism saw the possibilities and attacks on Labour as the only block on the new economic order the New Marxists ignored social and economic changes, they were limited by their politics of position and their concern for alliances with the Labour Party and the new semiskilled workers rather than class constituencies, forming a new social bloc from those on the periphery. They saw the fight as at the level of images in politics, especially the image of modernity in Thatcherism, but none of this appeals to Labour's traditional constituents. This ideological shift was smothered in Hall's work but came out in his snide attacks on the old left and their racist politics. Are the new social groups classless? Do they fight only at the level of symbolic majorities? If images are crucial, whose are they? Thatcher's only now seem to be offered to the peripherals. Can there be new ones, especially any which reconcile the old constituents? The new social movements based on race, sex, and gender are socialist and they need to restore their vision of 'genuine equality, the enlargement of self' to embrace the working class movement, but the problem is how to universalise them rather than leaving them parochial and developing a new sectarianism. There is a danger of partial adjustments to inequality within the overall structure. Similar problems arise with issue-based social forces like the Greens or the peace movements. The Greens especially ignore the centrality of capitalism in favour of criticising excessive consumption and are too focused on the affluent West rather than the necessary poverty of the Third World; they are too naïvely apologetic and so fail to connect the global and local. The peace movements focused on nuclear war in the West rather than the thousands of local conventional wars in the Third World (33). Connections can grow only if these movements are open to the larger issues. However the New Marxists do not analyse but rather romanticise, ignore the contradictions and elements hostile to socialism. They are also over tactical (34). They simply assert that these struggles over the personal must be imminently social too via concepts like 'society' (!]. The new politics of identity is spelled-out in Brunt in the MT 88 special. It leads to struggle everywhere in the mundane and routine '"political acts… [Which include deciding to]… Read, buy, refuse to buy…"' According to B Campbell. Power is also everywhere thanks to Foucault. Multiple power leads to multiple resistances especially after the emergence of the new secular religions like counselling [also Thatcherism in drag I thought in 1990]. These offer a kind of 'reverse discourse', an allegedly empowering discourse as in 'coming out' — this is liberation! It leaves no more constraints by objective structures especially no class conditioning. Instead '"all interests, including class ones are now culturally and ideological redefined"' [citing Hall]' there are new political struggles outside of official politics, '"a politics which is always positional"' [I have suggested this is a reproduction of the micro-politics of academic departments]. A personal politics leads to the nicer sides of consumption and choice and these activities are not just products of the culture industry [that was denied years ago]. Indeed, we must not cut ourselves off from '"the landscapes of popular pleasures "" [still Hall] (37). We actually should do the reverse but to minimise materialism and profit which involves the exclusion of 1/3 of the population from choice. We should be asking why is liberal democracy some long-term trend? Who shaped the landscape? Shouldn't socialism shape one instead of widening access to one? (37) [very good questions for CRT enthusiasts, I added in 2024]. Personalising the political has led to locating the enemy of women as men, blacks as whites and so on, and oppression as the prejudice plus power of individuals. This led to the disastrous purges of individuals by Left authorities, including McGoldrick by Brent [too long ago], all the excesses of RAT [a then popular aggressive radical antiracism training]. It also led to a backlash against the loony left which was an important ingredient in Thatcher's success, as even Hall agrees [in another article in the March 1988 MT], but his role in personalising politics also played a part. The personal emphasis also emphasised ethnic qualities rather than blackness, and other splits, individual issues rather than community or overemphasising blackness rather than political commitment, as when being black was somehow enough as a symbolic matter. Everyone else could be "right on"except white straight males in a slogan that said in effect "I am, therefore I resist" (39). That covered especially those middle-class blacks who got committed at the level of culture and discourse, reinterpreting and deconstructing them, changing the focus of the struggle to theoretical versions of practice, part of the larger flight of intellectuals from class: they found full justification in concepts of postFordism and the disintegration of the working class (40). The farewell to the working class led to the usurpations of new agents of social change, like a new "information class", but even this soon split into economic knowledge and political/cultural knowledge specialisms and the emergence of intelligentsia at last. This group believed it had a real influence on subjectivity and politics and it developed its own [micropolitics] war of position, talking of manoeuvre or overthrow, using Marxist ideas [well Gramscian ones] for its own purposes. However the focus on arcane rather than real issues has not ended unemployment and poverty even if the working class has disintegrated, and these are still underpinned by the power of the state which still sets limits to these apparently personal liberations. There are still coercive aspects and anyone soon bumps into them if they really offer a challenge, for example Mrs Thatcher abolished the libertarian Greater London Council and all its new blocs and forces, and  'their politics of position only helped them take it lying down" [I've used quotes rather than single quotes but I think this must be Sivandan] (43) — and the response was moral outrage and shock and a rock concert! Civil society is not an even terrain on which all can play. The poor know best the 'intersection of consent and coercion'. Politics should focus on them and be a 'lowest common denominator politics the idea of a universal identity must underpin specific impressions. 'Class, even as a metaphor, is still the measure of a socialist conscience' (44). But the New Marxists see 'the subject' as a category with its own history and moments — the 60s, feminism, new theoretical revolutions, which brings the politics of subjectivity to the fore, including 'international humanism'. Individualism is now at the core of the left's vision and it was even better than Mrs Thatcher's individualism. They have rejected the old Labour statism and replaced it with new intermediate collectivities 'including private companies and institutions', just like Heseltine. Choice helps us assert our differences and this is more important than Marxism on fulfilment in community life. The strategy arose from those with choices with additions for those less well-off and produced lunacies like '"individually based collectivism"' [quoting and directed at Leadbetter in MT 88]. Redistribution is barely mentioned. By contrast consumption is seen as something '"lyrical"' [Hall I think]. We all do it we use our purchases to "code" with goods. [Leading to a marvellous sceptical comment —] 'those who use cardboard boxes under Waterloo Bridge to signify that they are homeless' (47). The poor know who they are and they can cope without goods. Hall is merely using 'special pleading' [although Sivanandan does not trace this to academic politics]. Murray also argues that movements which take on the state through the market such as campaigns over pollution or consumer rights have a role and that markets respond better than the local state, assuming that 'the motive for market researchers and retailers was [not] profit' (48). The emphasis on the subjective also omits imperialism the Third World becomes only 'a site for popular culture and popular politics… "The famine movement"' [I think the last is a quote from Hall and Jacques in MT July 86], politics at second remove, 'altering the view of governments to alter the Third World', a movement organised by 'caring people — by popstars… Millionaire pop merchants, effecting a peaceful transition for the young and popular culture into popular politics' (48). Hall and Jacques claim that Band Aid was a new social movement, of course, dealing a blow to the '"ideology of selfishness — and thus one of the main ideological underpinnings of Thatcherism"', but Sivanandan says it obscured the real issues like the multinationals and how they create dependency and shifted from 'a discourse of Western imperialism to a discourse on Western humanism' (49). So the shift from economic determinism to cultural determinism is a shift 'from changing the world to changing the word'. It is 'socialism for disillusioned Marxist intellectuals who had waited around too long for the revolution — a socialism that holds up everything that is ephemeral and evanescent and passing is vital and worthwhile… Every shard  of the self is a social movement'. Or try this — 'an eat, drink and be merry socialism because tomorrow we can eat, drink and be merry again' (49 – 50). Capital of course fragments the self but now there is no class to bind us together again. Even the universal liberal bourgeois values like equality and justice are threatened by an unrestrained capital because all these stem ultimately from the tension between capital and labour. There is no tension or contradiction any more, no real bourgeois culture only petty bourgeois culture of accommodation to Capital. But values and a tradition of solidarity remain. There are still struggles in communities of resistance, in the new underclass, among the excluded. These are difficult to organise but they still come together over issues. There are still 'organic communities'. Broadwater Farm [protest] was one. The 1979 Southall demo shows another as did the aftermath of the death of Blair Peach. Self defence movements among black people leading to court cases and campaigns like the one in Newham (54). There has been a women's campaign against Israeli terror in the West Bank, support for refugees and Tamils, Kurds. These look like new Marxist extra- party groups but they do have grass roots and concrete bases. They are not navel gazing single issue. They are aware of the depth of struggle from local to state, real politics the struggle against capital. There is no time for personal politics. They gain them a reality from 'simple faith in human beings, morality in practice'. [I noted in 1990 and note now in 2024 that this last bit is appallingly idealistic and humanistic. And it raise the problems of activist analysis raised by Hammersley and others --people who are not activists do not read it and they suspect it of being overcomittted and thus too partisan to be trustworthy].