Mr. Hitchens in 1969.

I just found this picture of a young Trot firebrand. Here's the relevant details from the blog of the hated Peter Hitchens:

"At some point in my teens a large part of the population of Britain went mad, me included. It was as if they had put something in the water which affected everyone between the age of about 15 and 29. Of course, it wasn’t really everyone, just a privileged layer of which I was a part. I can remember a lot of it all too clearly. I have done what I can to track down and destroy any photographic proof –but my clever colleague Nikki Sutherland has managed to find a picture of me from 1969 which I didn’t even know existed, and which has a story behind it that I’ll tell some other time. 


Funnily enough it seemed to me to be a pleasant time, if not a happy one. I enjoyed a lot of it, from the point of view of pure self-indulgence. I did pretty much what I wanted, though the great pity is that most of what I wanted wasn’t really worth having and many of the things I did led to actual harm, for me and others."

SOURCE: Nikki Sutherland/MailOnline

Why I respect Peter Hitchens.

Adversarial politics

Believe it or not, there are honourable conservative voices out there. By 'honourable', I really mean those few figures with integrity. You don't have to agree with someone to respect their point of view. This is easy to forget in a political discourse lacking worthy opponents of the Left.

The fulminating columnist Peter Hitchens is one such case of the honourable rightist. The particular strain of conservatism, to which he adheres, may be summarised as traditional, cultural or socio-moral conservatism. His targets include the Westminster consensus, not only the Labour Party, but the Conservative Party as well. He sees the country threatened from a left-wing cultural putsch against the vestiges of an organic social order. Yet it's clear that he is no friend of the current flavour of right-wing politics.

On an ABC panel with Dan Savage and Germaine Greer, Hitchens was asked what he thinks of Tony Abbott. He immediately laid into the Australian Prime Minister deeming him a 'fake conservative' for his neoliberal economic agenda, pseudo-moralism, and connections with Rupert Murdoch. He has dismissed UKIP as a 'dad's army party', unlike many of his associates in the right-wing press, seeing the party only as a means of annihilating the Conservative Party.

"I also yearn for a truly radical party," he once confessed to the BBC. In the same segment, Hitchens made clear what he really opposes: namely, the centre-ground of the Third Way and 'compassionate' Conservatism. He sees both forces as two sides of the same coin (and he's not wrong) routinely flipped every four or five years. In short, he wants to abolish the fakery of personality politics and return to adversarial politics.

When it comes to the economy Peter Hitchens has said that he is for a robustly social democratic model, which would include a safety-net and universal health-care. It would include what he describes as strong employment rights and social housing. He opposes the right to buy scheme which has wiped out so many council houses and inflated the housing market. On top of this, Hitchens has routinely criticised privatisation and the legacy of Thatcherism.

Years ago on Question Time, Peter Hitchens savaged Iain Duncan Smith and called for the renationalisation of the railways. It's not the only case either. "I think there was a case for nationalising coal, made in the 1920s and accepted by many people for non-dogmatic reasons," he wrote in his column in October 2012. "I have always believed that the electric power grid should be nationalised. I think it should be renationalised  as a prelude to an enormous programme of nuclear power station building, without which we face an appalling energy crisis within 20 years."

In a Chat Politics interview Peter Hitchens was asked whether or not he thought it would be possible to build a right-wing alternative to the Conservative Party. He responded "Who says it'll be right-wing?" Of course, this kind of response is symptomatic of the very view he takes of the prime oscillation of UK politics between Labour and Conservative. He often eschews the label of 'right-wing' for himself, preferring the title of Burkean conservative. It's evident that he sees the left-to-right spectrum as a defunct measure of politics and yet he never strays away from bashing what he calls 'the Left'.

"The left's real interests are moral, cultural, sexual and social," he insists in one of his columns. "They lead to a powerful state. This not because they actively set out to achieve one." Not surprisingly, the way he frames left-wing politics really comes from the position he takes on cultural and socio-moral issues. "It is because the left's ideas – by their nature – undermine conscience, self-restraint, deferred gratification, lifelong marriage and strong, indivisible families headed by authoritative fathers."

As a former Trotskyite, Peter Hitchens remains within the bootprint of twentieth century leftism, bemoaning the cultural revolution of the 1960s, yearning for a revival of the traditions and social norms it killed. He's wrong on almost all cultural and social issues, but he's right that the problem, for people like him, isn't just the Left - it's Thatcherism too. Fortunately, it is too late to turn back the clock on the progress achieved in our attitudes to sexuality, gender and race. The malaise of the reactionary press is really down to this harsh reality.

Hipster Awareness.

I have to be honest. I had no idea what a 'Hipster' was four or five years ago. I was soon alerted to their existence by the Dickhead song of 2010 and since then I have been pretty conscious of Hipsterdom, or at least what we think it is. Ever since I have seen them everywhere and everyone has a disdainful remark to make regarding them. It's worth looking into the history of subcultures to really situate the hipster. Adam Curtis churned out an interesting article on his blog in time for the Mayoral election of 2012. He focused on Norman Mailer, who had been an early proponent and self-described 'Hipster' in the 1950s and 60s. He deemed it a culture of outsiders first pioneered by Black Americans in response to racial oppression, they were the original outsiders, only to overtaken by 'white negroes' as the outsider culture was co-opted. Curtis refers us to this section of Mailer's writing:

"In such places as Greenwich Village a menage-a-trois was completed - the bohemian and the 'juvenile delinquent' came face to face with the Negro, and the hipster was a fact in American life. If marijuana was the wedding ring, the child was the language of Hip for its argot gave expression to abstract states of feeling which all could share, at least all who were Hip. And in the wedding of the white and the black it was the Negro who brought the cultural dowry. 

So there was a new breed of adventurers, urban adventurers who drifted out at night looking for action with a black man's code to fit their facts. The hipster had absorbed the existentialist synapses of the Negro, and for practical purposes could be considered a white Negro." 

This seems a far cry from the blokes in Shoreditch somehow. You might want to read Rob Horning's piece if you want something more up to scratch. One suspects the Hipster has come a long way since then, and yet Curtis goes on to tell us:

Mailer also pointed out that this new breed of "psychic outlaw" could be equally a candidate for the most reactionary or the most radical of political movements. And in the film there is a fascinating scene where Mailer takes on the trades unions on one of the avenues in New York. He tells them that in the past they were a heroic movement - but that now they have become a repressive, stultifying force in society - in particular in the way they are refusing to allow blacks and hispanics to move up society. It is an odd moment because as you watch you realise that it was elements of this rebellious individualism that both Thatcher and Reagan would later harness. And that possibly, if the left had got hold of it earlier, then the history of the West might have been very different.

Last year I found another video from Mike Rugnetta on YouTube about Hipsterdom. What provokes hatred against the Hipsters is that they don't disavow what every other subculture do, e.g. that their scene is made up of performance Hipsters wear things for irony whereas Punks and Goths and even wannabe gangsters claim a certain dress code, slang, music and mindset to be authentic to their scene. Actually sticking drawing pins through your flesh or leaving the sticker on your cap is about as 'authentic' as Hipsters are in buying over-sized glasses and growing funny beards. Rugnetta suggests it's a matter of cultural capital, and people feel the flippant appropriation of features of fashions undermines the value of the trend. But that still seems incoherent. The reasons to undertake a certain action are inseparable from it to some extent, but not substantial enough to change the content of the action and its significance. The reasons people smoke are not significant enough to change smoking and its consequences.

To the Immoderate and the Abstemious.

Although my own inclination is abstemious it cannot be denied that the hostility to popular recreation is bourgeois. It isn’t my place to sneer at the decision of vast swathes of my fellow citizens to go out after work on a Friday night and get hammered. It’s certainly the case that the working-class needs an outlet in a system which increasingly is not to their benefit. Alcohol is the one constant in working-class life that has outlived many governments and political orders. It was once the social lubricant that accompanied quite a variety of recreations, from blood-sports to fairs. It has retained its close association with football, which the pub holds onto as the central gathering where the beautiful game can be watched. You pay for the atmosphere and not just a drink, so it's not really public space but private space which appears public. It was once the case that the pub and the music hall were the hangout of only working-class men, women were excluded from pubs for a long time.

The elites had their own drinking arenas, rituals and standards. The pub was a space where the bourgeois standards of sobriety would not be adopted. It is possible that the public house is a declining phenomenon, it is clear that pubs are closing all across the country. Some are being bought by oligopolies that can afford to cross-subsidise in an effort to prop them up. Around 300 pubs closed between September 2011 and March 2012. This is nothing new, but it does dull the weekend for many people in this country. There isn't much to say about the politics of alcohol, if there is such a thing, we might be able to take down a few worthwhile observations. It has been noted that the level of inequality correlates with high rates of drug and alcohol dependency. This would be because of the amount of deprivation which comes with living in a crookedly unequal society. There is also nothing new in alcoholism, or the plague of "binge drinking" that seems ineradicable on this dreary little island. Clearly there is a lot of sorrow to drown in Britain.

In retirement Churchill once remarked as he stared into the fireplace "I know why logs spit. I know what it is to be consumed." Today Churchill would be labelled a functioning alcoholic in his constant attempts to fill his inner abyss with a near endless river of brandy, wine and whisky. He shared vodka with Stalin and compared his first meeting with Roosevelt to the uncorking of that first bottle of champagne. Goebbels opted to depict Churchill as a depraved drunkard who loved war mainly because it was quite true. As for people who know how to drink for fun, Karl Marx knew all too well as Liebknecht recollected: "Now we had had enough of our 'beer trip' for the time being and in order to cool our heated blood, we started on a double march, until Edgar Bauer stumbled over a heap of paving stones. Hurrah, an idea! And in memory of mad students' pranks he picked up a stone and Crash! Clatter! A gas lantern went flying into splinters. Madness is contagious - Marx and I did not stay far behind, and we broke four or five street lamps." 

If we're talking about the drinking culture of America it might seem apt to single out the Irish who fled famine at home for a better life. The cultural whole of America has been constituted the near-constant flow of immigrants into its great cities. So it's fair to say that the Irish aren't the only people of drinkers to settle in the US. There was the great swathes of Germans, a people whose influence on American culture is often overlooked. Benjamin Franklin had worried that the German immigrants of his day weren't taking up American customs. It was the German-Americans who organised the kindergartens, supported the Republican Party in its bid to abolish slavery as well as stood for votes for women. Many American breweries were established by Germans. This united beer with radical politics in a way which had been out of reach for the American strain of puritanical radicalism - a most English of imports - with its combined support for abolitionism and temperance. As it was with creationism the marriage between prohibition and radicalism wasn't meant to be.

Then after the Civil War and the emergence of the Ku Klux Klan the temperance cause became a plank in the platform of the racist terrorist organisation. The anti-Catholic nativism to defend a white America of Anglo-Saxon and Celtic peoples converged with prohibitionism. The Klansmen were violent defenders of prohibition once it was established in 1919. The repeal of the Volstead act and the end of prohibition came in 1933 with the Roosevelt administration. In the Great Depression with millions unemployed and impoverished the US government may have decided to get the people out of the streets and into the bars. The counter-culture then took up the sword of the German settlers in a bid to maintain a varied quality of alcohol in the new world. As the late Alexander Cockburn noted "The back lot brewers who began Sierra Nevada beer in Chico, California, who ultimately beat back Budweiser's efforts to destroy them and thus sealed the victory of the microbrews, came out of the Sixties' alternative culture."

Culturale Hedonia!

Take your Desires for Reality.

In the mid 1960s Herbert Marcuse had reached a conclusion about capitalist society which went against the position he took in Eros and Civilization. He had reached back to utopian socialism for an alternative to the models of bourgeois capitalism and Soviet communism. In the work of Charles Fourier he had hoped to find a way of unlocking the instincts of human beings as part of the transition to a post-capitalist society. It was Fourier's view that capitalism compounds sexual repression in society with exploitation, driving down wages generating poverty. It's a fine system for the few, but it's disastrous for the many. The repression of sexuality is what led to perversions, if the passions were unleashed then we would be able to create a harmonious society. Fourier wanted to build a utopia with love and sex as the primary mechanisms of this new order. This is the origin of the leftist penchant for sexual liberation and the opposition to repressive norms.


Of course, there are various different variations on this cause. Fourier dreamed of a utopian society based on a primary unit, a communal block known as a phalanx in which as many as 1,800 people could live together. It would be a community built on solidarity without any of the repressive taboos of capitalist society. There would be complete sexual freedom and people would be able to change partners frequently. Radical stuff in the 18th Century. The family would be done away with as the phalanx would take its place as the centre of loyalty and affection. Fourier thought that entire countries could be organised in this way with these set up as councils where all participate in decisions. The phalanxes would form chains of councils across nations and coordinate through cooperation grand civil projects with volunteer armies. This was the material base of a vision that came with a metaphysical superstructure, a new religious order where priests advised congregants on sex.

At the heart of this utopian vision was the idea of Love, in which sex is just one aspect, the priests who would manage the dynamics of Love would 'cure' you of your unhappiness in the midst of rejection. We can see how this vision may have tapped into the hedonistic utopianism of the 1960s. All the different impulses of human beings require a diversity of roles suited to the variety of human nature, even potential murderers will be welcome and be put to work as butchers to work-off their own homicidal urges. Of course, Charles Fourier was written-off as a lunatic in his day. He conceived of a theory of history comprised of 32 stages, each ordained by God, beginning in savagery before passing through civilisation to socialism and Harmony. The advent of Harmony would herald an age of 70,000 years which would end in savagery as humanity approached the end of times. Civilisation could be shortened to bring on socialism much earlier and Harmony could then be extended in its duration.

Live without Dead Time.

As you might expect Fourier was an opponent of the authoritarianism and moral righteousness he detected in the Jacobins. He had little faith in governments and preferred a grass-roots oriented approach to socialism. Change was to be achieved from the ground-up and not from the top-down. After first entertaining the tenets of utopian socialism Marcuse had become pessimistic by 1964 when he wrote One-Dimensional Man. As part of his thesis Marcuse rethought the revolutionary project of socialism. The proletariat could not be relied upon to overthrow capitalism in Marcuse's view. The tensions were mounting to the point that the black under-class would be a better revolutionary agent. The capitalist system had no real focus on the manipulation of their desires at the time. The same goes for the exploited workers of the Third World. Then there are the student radicals of the West who have the power to see beyond false consciousness. We can see how both works related to the 1960s zeitgeist.

In the authentic socialist society women and men could live without fear and without being compelled to spend their lives in alienated performances. Marcuse thought that this element had been lost in the 20th Century with the advent of the Soviet Union. The Soviet project of socialism in one country necessitated Stalinism due to the material conditions of Russian society. The New Left sought to carve out a new project to do away with the old conventions that bound women to men as well as crushed gays and ethnic minorities. To some extent this was the beginning of identity politics and the post-materialist Left. But the line was drawn from the imperial adventure in Vietnam to economic exploitation at home in America. The early 1970s were an optimistic time for the American Left and there were a lot of radical ideas around. The commune movement sprung up as part of a utopian attempt to build an alternative model for society devoid of hierarchy, authority and power. It was a retreat in part from what the participants saw as the failure of the student movement.

The communal ideal was of nature, which they saw as a self-stabilising eco-system. It continues to serve as an effective means of organisation on the Left, but it fails to provide a positive vision. It was one of the biggest migrations in American history with over 500,000 participants. There were no alliances and no politics inside the communes, but there were sessions in which the communards would express themselves. This was meant to be the source of stability in the community, a sort of feedback system for the organism of many who act as one. In a set up without any factions allowed soon the strong bullied the weak. All of the communes failed, most lasting less than 3 years. Power could not be abolished and the self-organised system removed any obstacles to the domineering personalities of a few. So new hierarchies sprung up out of the egalitarian model, patriarchical power returned without any leashes at all. This is where Feminism emerged as a reaction to the catastrophic failures of the commune movement.

Enjoy without Chains.

The communal model spread to Europe, where the same failures were even more realised. The avant garde artist Otto Mühl set up the Friedrichshof commune as a kind of anti-society. The central aspect of this is a war against monogamy, he sought to replace fidelity with promiscuity in the extreme. This is where the tendencies towards sexual liberation going back as far as Fourier seemed to converge with the commune movement. The communards were forbidden to have sex with the same partner more than once a week and yet each were obligated to have sex five times a day. Fourier had developed a card-indexing system that would have facilitated casual sex for his communards - it would've been handy in Vienna! The commune outlasted its American precursors as it lingered for nearly 20 years when Mühl was thrown in jail for sex offences against children. A hierarchy had sprung up where the most attractive extricated themselves from the ugly herd, while Mühl laid claim to the virginity of the young members.

The commune had descended into the abusive exercise of power through desire. It was an extreme failure that came out of the one of the leftist modes of a politicization of sex as identified in Nina Power's book - it mistakenly took sex to be innately emancipatory and egalitarian. Desire isn't fair at all, inequality, hierarchy and anxiety are more normal than not. Certainly not all members of the commune were desirable and desire became literally tyrannical. There were other attempts at a sexual critique of bourgeois morality among the radicals. The Weather Underground had sessions where members were required to have sex with comrades they were not attracted to. Boyfriends were expected to watch other men sleep with their girlfriends. There was to be no more romance, only a destitution of the subjective and the sexual. This was the darker side of sexual liberation, the underbelly of the counter-cultural revolution of '68 which has been victorious in the destruction of stuffy conventions and rigid traditions.

As Badiou points out, one of the ways that a revolutionary movement can fail is to be defeated in its own victory in that it only takes over the old mantle of the enemy it vanquished. The utopian hedonism of the 1960s did fail in its youthful triumph over the old, it now constitutes the prevailing culture and there is barely anything left to rail against. The irony is that after this great liberation we find any lack of desire impermissible and intolerable. And yet we may live in a time of greater impotence and frigidity than we like to admit. The real problem seems to be love rather than lust. We can screw around as much as we want but the real difficulty is in long-lasting relationships. This is really what is behind the emergence of dating sites. The conservatives have no answer here, but to reinstate the old superstructure and hope that we enjoy cheating on the partners we pretend to love. There doesn't seem to be a clear answer here. Perhaps the best we can hope for is that the Japanese invention of love colleges will catch on in the West.

The Marriage of Reason and Nightmare.

The marriage of reason and nightmare that has dominated the 20th Century has given birth to an ever more ambiguous world. Across the communications landscape move the spectres of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy. Thermo-nuclear weapons systems and soft-drink commercials coexist in an overlit realm ruled by advertising and pseudo-events, science and pornography. Over our lives preside the great twin leitmotifs of the 20th century - sex and paranoia.

Increasingly, our concepts of past, present and future are being forced to revise themselves. Just as the past, in social and psychological terms, became a casualty of Hiroshima and the nuclear age, so in its turn the future is ceasing to exist, devoured by the all-voracious present. We have annexed the future into the present, as merely one of those manifold alternatives open to us. Options multiply around us, and we live in an almost infantile world where any demand, any possibility, whether for life-styles, travel, sexual roles and identities, can be satisfied instantly.

In addition, I feel that the balance between fiction and reality has changed significantly in the past decades. Increasingly their roles are reversed. We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind - mass-merchandizing, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the pre-empting of any original response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. It is now less and less necessary for the writer to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent the reality.

In the past we have always assumed that the external world around us has represented reality, however confusing or uncertain, and that the inner world of our minds, its dreams, hopes, ambitions, represented the realm of fantasy and the imagination. These roles, it seems to me, have been reversed. The most prudent and effective method of dealing with the world around us is to assume that it is a complete fiction - conversely, the one small node of reality left to us is inside our own heads. Freud's classic distinction between the latent and manifest content of the dream, between the apparent and the real, now needs to be applied to the external world of so-called reality.

Given these transformations, what is the main task facing the writer? Can he, any longer, make use of the techniques and perspectives of the traditional 19th century novel, with its linear narrative, its measured chronology, its consular characters grandly inhabiting their domains within an ample time and space? Is his subject matter the sources of character and personality sunk deep in the past, the unhurried inspection of roots, the examination of the most subtle nuances of social behaviour and personal relationships? Has the writer still the moral authority to invent a self-sufficient and self-enclosed world, to preside over his characters like an examiner, knowing all the questions in advance? Can he leave out anything he prefers not to understand, including his own motives, prejudices and psychopathology?

I feel myself that the writer's role, his authority and licence to act, have changed radically. I feel that, in a sense, the writer knows nothing any longer. He has no moral stance. He offers the reader the contents of his own head, a set of options and imaginative alternatives. His role is that of the scientist, whether on safari or in his laboratory, faced with an unknown terrain or subject. All he can do is to devise various hypotheses and test them against the facts.

Crash is such a book, an extreme metaphor for an extreme situation, a kit of desperate measures only for use in an extreme crisis. Crash, of course, is not concerned with an imaginary disaster, however imminent, but with a pandemic cataclysm that kills hundreds of thousands of people each year and injures millions. Do we see, in the car crash, a sinister portent of a nightmare marriage between sex and technology? Will modern technology provide us with hitherto undreamed-of means for tapping our own psychopathologies? Is this harnessing of our innate perversity conceivably of benefit to us? Is there some deviant logic unfolding more powerful than that provided by reason?

Throughout Crash I have used the car not only as a sexual image, but as a total metaphor for man's life in today's society. As such the novel has a political role quite apart from its sexual content, but I would still like to think that Crash is the first pornographic novel based on technology. In a sense, pornography is the most political form of fiction, dealing with how we use and exploit each other, in the most urgent and ruthless way. Needless to say, the ultimate role of Crash is cautionary, a warning against that brutal, erotic and overlit realm that beckons more and more persuasively to us from the margins of the technological landscape.

JG Ballard on Crash, 1995

Too Rare to Die, Too Weird to Live.

“We were two miles outside of Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold.” Thus begins the first line of the book which serves as the handshake, for most, with Hunter S Thompson, the masterpiece Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1972). It is 40 years after that book was written and 6 years after he decided to call it a day with a bullet to the head. The suicide in 2005 was inevitable.  Thompson had made no secret of his decision to commit suicide for years before he actually did.  The reasons were many and varied, but the main reasons were due to his failing health, his idealisation of youth and his resolute refusal to grow old gracefully. The funeral had been planned years before and Thompson’s old friend Johnny Depp was responsible for the funding of the ceremony – the good doctor’s remains were fired out of a cannon at his compound in Colorado.

The stereotypical image of Hunter S. Thompson is not actually one of Thompson himself; most think of his alter ego, the drug crazed, babbling lunatic Raoul Duke. This is the persona in which Thompson was able to write such insane tales of unbelievable excess such as the aforementioned Fear and Loathing. But Thompson himself was less of a caricature, and more of a thoughtful, darkly angry crusader against all that he saw was wrong with America. His targets included the decadence of the 70’s, pro football, and his arch nemesis Richard Milhous Nixon.  Nixon personified everything that Thompson thought had gone awry with the United States, for he was the gutless war-monger who bombed Indochina into the stone-age for nothing more than political capital and when the students at Kent State came out in protest Thompson connived to have them slain by the National Guard. Years before Woodward and Bernstein blow open the Watergate scandal, Thompson was already decrying Nixon as a crook, a blowhard and the bastard who would plunge America into a decadent, depraved parody of every truth and principle on which it was founded, as indeed he did.

But it is for Gonzo that Thompson is so fondly remembered. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Gonzo journalism, here’s a quick primer to save you the trouble of checking Wikipedia. Gonzo journalism is the antithesis of “fly on the wall” journalism, being more “fly in the ointment” in its style. It approaches any given subject material from a subjective viewpoint, exacerbating details to a ridiculous proportion in an attempt to give a more sympathetic view of the material in question. It was invented and pioneered by Thompson in his article The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent And Depraved, in which he described his own experience of the Derby rather than in the traditional sports-writer style – he covered the crowd and not the derby. He did this purely because of a looming deadline and he had no time to write up his notes. The resulting article is by turns grotesque, informative and utterly hilarious, and gives a far more accurate portrayal of Kentucky horseracing than would have otherwise been shown by a traditional writer. Gonzo grew from there, and is now aped by innumerable writers across the world (one of these writers being a particularly persistent perpetrator of this style). 

The aforementioned Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas is undoubtedly his most famous work,  a monolith of excess and depravity seared across America's most grotesque altar to consumption and vice. It is the starting point for most into the world of Hunter S. Thompson, and is also his funeral eulogy for the spirit of the 60's. The nihilistic search for a thrill that Thompson (masquerading as Raoul Duke) and his unnamed Samoan attorney (a comic exaggeration of Thompson's real life friend and confidant Oscar Acosta) undertake in Nevada is born out of a sadness that the hippy spirit of the decade before did not bring about universal peace and love, but instead opened up America to the "grim meathook realities" of what absolute freedom really meant. The famously Herculean consumption of narcotics undertaken in the book is also inspired by the death of the  60's, a sly comment on how the spiritualistic nature of drugs as preached by Timothy Leary descended into the hedonistic need for a chemical buzz that fuelled the 70's, and as it remains to this day. The book came as a howled requiem for the Beat Movement, the generosity and revolutionary zeal of writers such as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg replaced with a scowling, dark commentary on how the world failed to live up to the promise of the Hippy Dream, and wistfully looking back on how pathetic and futile the whole movement had been.

We must remember him as a man with one face looking back at John F Kennedy, the closest a politician could get to an everyman, and looking towards George McGovern with his other face as he asks for three margaritas and six beers for lunch. There are few ways to summarise the man's viewpoint without giving way to his own words, as he was more eloquent than we can ever be: "There are times, however, and this is one of them, when even being right feels wrong. What do you say, for instance, about a generation that has been taught that rain is poison and sex is death? If making love might be fatal and if a cool spring breeze on any summer afternoon can turn a crystal blue lake into a puddle of black poison right in front of your eyes, there is not much left except TV and relentless masturbation. It's a strange world. Some people get rich and others eat shit and die."

Written by JT White and Josh Ferguson, December 6th 2011, for the Heythrop student newspaper the Lion originally.

The Politics of Euroscepticism.

The strange history of Euroscepticism in Britain goes back decades, it was ironically the Conservatives who were much more keen on European integration and the Labour Party were opposed to the project insofar as it could potentially hold-back socialism. In fact, the labour movement was opposed to economic integration out of a staunch protectionist attitude towards British industry and a general fear of foreign competition. In this respect Bob Crow is a throw-back to a bygone politics. The opposition to integration within the Conservative Party first took the form of a campaign (which was led by the Earl of Sandwich) to prevent Britain from entering the Common Market in the early 1960s. It was based on a superstitious nationalism which elevated the British above the "frogs and huns" of the continent. So we find that the opposition to European integration included Michael Foot and Enoch Powell, it united the opposing elements of the Left and the Right.

 

The anti-Politics of the Market.

The specific tendency of right-wing opposition to the European Union goes back to the roots of think-tanks and Thatcherism in Britain. It was none other than Friedrich von Hayek who convinced Antony Fisher that the only way to bring about political change is to form think-tanks, which will propagate "second-hand ideas" and shape the discourse in doing so. Fisher went on to found the Institute of Economic Affairs and about 150 other think-tanks in his lifetime. For years Antony Fisher and Oliver Smedley had sought to undermine state-planning in Britain. Fisher and Smedley were convinced that the state-planning apparatus would lead Britain down the road to totalitarianism by its very nature. For them even the Milk Marketing Board and Egg Marketing Board were innately opposed to freedom. The Common Market was just a bigger state-system of economic planning, as Smedley and Fisher had introduced battery farming to Britain they were naturally sceptical of any government policy on agriculture.

The state-planning apparatus  had a scientific guise complete with a technocratic system, the ideals of classical liberalism looked out of date by comparison. The appeal of Hayek was that he had developed a technocratic theory of the market, so the old ideals were torn out of their original context and revamped for the modern age. So Adam Smith's invisible hand becomes a metaphor for a cybernetic flow of information exchange, whereby the abstract signals sent out by millions of people forms the price mechanism; and the key to order without central planning. It would be an automatic system of signalling which would be self-directed. This is the only alternative because it is not possible to hold all information in one central system. Major Smedley went further than just help found think-tanks and actually pioneered pirate radio in order to "liberate" information from state-control. The nostalgic look back on it now as the epitome of the cultural revolution which obliterated traditionalism in the 60s. In reality the first pirate radio-station was the beginning of the counter-revolution.

Smedley ran his radio-station with great success, but he was intolerant of competition and wanted a monopoly on his new venture. So when Reg Calvert popped up it was not unbelievable just how fast the situation deteriorated into violence. The rival station was raided by thugs-for-hire and Calvert was shot dead as he tried to confront Smedley, who went on to be acquitted of murder. Even though Reg Calvert represented the kind of individualist that the think-tanks, set up by Fisher, should have praised. The truth was Smedley represented the old aristocracy, which felt entitled to manage the system through the private sector. There was no room for people who genuinely wanted to act as free individuals regardless of the power-structure. To those with the upper-class sense of entitlement the doctrines of classical liberalism remain a useful tool in corroding the welfare state. As Adam Curtis has pointed out, the neoliberal aim was never to shake the established power-structure to its core and re-order it. Even for Hayek the state has its' role in a managerial capacity, to maintain a competitive order, which is not much different from economic planning in a sense. Of course, people like Antony Fisher and Oliver Smedley detest any kind of bureaucracy except when they are the managerial aristocracy.

It was in the midst of the economic stagnation of the 1970s that the "second-hand" ideas of the Institute of Economic Affairs were welcomed into mainstream politics, along with the doctrines of monetarism developed at the Chicago School of Economics by Milton Friedman. It was not until the 1980s that the welfare state was "rolled back" to make way for the market. It was then that the ideas of Hayek and Friedman supplanted Keynes as the economic orthodoxy. Thatcher blended these ideas with rational expectations and Goodhart's Law. The economy could not be managed by the state and there was no way to achieve full employment, so it was tossed aside as a goal that should even be considered. The post-war settlement of social democracy was torn apart bit by bit. The social planners had failed and so all other alternatives could be dismissed even as options in the new era of "popular capitalism". The promised dynamism of the free-market could be unlocked through the politics of 'commonsense' rather than ideology. The irony is that this is the ideology of the free-market, it becomes even more evident when the mission runs up against serious obstacles.