Tom Gann
There can be no meaningful political writing without a prior politics. The capitalist state claims a monopoly on legitimate political knowledge, which is communicated by certain active individuals – through institutions like universities or the media – to passive consumer-voters. We conceived New Socialist, in 2017, as a challenge to that monopoly, and a contribution to Corbynism’s politics of knowledge that would draw out the movement’s collective intelligence. Tom Blackburn’s concept of ‘Corbynism from below’ guided both the political strategy we advocated and our vision for New Socialist.
During the Corbyn years, we received countless promising pitches, often from people who had not written in public before. This was the effect of a very rapid politicisation, and a consequent flowering of thought and reflection that could never be captured within traditional institutions. It came from people who were, as Brecht observed, ‘discontented with conditions, who have an immense practical interest in learning’. This flowering also involved a displacement of the figure of the traditional intellectual.
Any serious emancipatory politics must aim to break down the distinction between leaders and led. Within the production of knowledge, this means breaking down the distinction between writers and readers. The major task of editing was organisational – bringing contributions and ideas together – and pedagogical: encouraging and helping inexperienced writers to draw out what they already knew.
The tasks of political thought, and of New Socialist, are constituted on the one hand by the Palestinian resistance, as well as groups that confront our lack of political freedom and on the other by the need to understand the conditions of our disempowerment
But the organising of a publication, or even the wider organising of popular intelligence, of which New Socialist was only a part, can’t do everything. The patient expansion of popular capacities was predicated on an institutionally fragile Corbynism. On the one hand, a necessarily slow, creative politics; on the other, the cohered capacity for rapid, destructive action from the state. Perhaps we never stood a chance.
The defeat of Corbynism was the defeat of a democratic rationality in politics. It was the defeat of the notion that ideas could matter; that, as well as politics affecting us, we could affect politics and gain a measure of control over our lives. We now get fewer pitches, and a higher proportion from writers or academics. There is a clearer delineation between writers and readers. As Brecht also noted: ‘There are people who consider learning to be worthless because there is no prospect for them to utilise what they learn.’ Why would people take an interest in political ideas now?
Israel’s genocide of Palestinians and Palestinian resistance have generated new political struggles and new tasks in Britain. Since 7 October 2023, almost all our most-read pieces have concerned Palestine, including very long, theoretically involved ones. There is a risk, though, of reverting to an obfuscatory political rationality. John Berger wrote that, faced with images of imperialist violence, we must ‘confront our own lack of political freedom’ and ‘act accordingly’. By publishing reasoned arguments as if they matter politically, are we avoiding this confrontation?
However, Berger also cautioned against ‘taking refuge in helplessness’. Currently, the tasks of political thought, and of New Socialist, are constituted on the one hand by the Palestinian resistance, as well as groups that confront our lack of political freedom, such as Just Stop Oil, and on the other by the need to understand the conditions of our disempowerment, in order to change them.
Josie Sparrow
I joined New Socialist around six years ago, at the beginning of what was, though we didn’t know it then, the final year of Corbynism. I will not chant the litany of events that have brought us from that place of optimism to where we are today; we know it well. The old ground is well-trodden; the mud is thick and churned. To retrace our steps now would be to risk getting stuck in the mire, forever looking backwards, uselessly wondering what other routes we might have taken. But the experience of navigating this shifting terrain has been instructive.
What it has taught me, most of all, is that what we are trying to do with New Socialist is, under current conditions, both necessary and impossible. Indeed, it is necessary because it is impossible (and vice versa). Maintaining New Socialist – on our own terms, and against all the odds – is, for me, a way of defending what remains of autonomous left production. It is an attempt to resist the market dependency that determines so much contemporary left activity.
It’s a strange irony that the new media of the right is serenely independent of market demands. GB News is widely known to be loss making; its sister publication UnHerd likewise. I am sure that their owner, Paul Marshall, would like them to be profitable, but he doesn’t need them to be. What’s important is that they exist. This approach enables the right to shape the political and cultural landscape – and the results are plain to see.
What we are trying to do with New Socialist is, under current conditions, both necessary and impossible
Meanwhile, most independent left publications struggle even to cover their running costs. The very few that succeed do so by imitating the forms of a mainstream whose contours are determined by the right: clickbait, ‘breaking news’, a reliance on charismatic individuals. Innovation – in style or in substance – is not part of the method. Competition and market share is the name of the game. The result, if we are not careful, will be a monovocal left: one or two ‘big hitters’ producing an endless hamster-wheel churn of politically conformist content that might affirm its consumers, but rarely challenges.
I do not want New Socialist to make a profit. I do not want us to dominate, or to be the only voice. But I would like us, and other publications, to be able to continue, and to be able to do more; and I would like to be fairly recompensed for my work. It’s a hard, unglamorous truth, but all the commitment – or all the pageviews – in the world won’t pay my rent or fill my stomach. It would be sad indeed if an inattention to the material conditions of production condemned us to a left media that is less plural, and therefore more timid, and more stupefying, than that of the right.
