"Gentrification From Below"

According to C.W. Nevius’ article in The San Francisco Chronicle this Saturday gentrification is no longer a dirty word. Unlike the giant planned redevelopment projects of the 1980s in which enormous glass eggs were laid by multinationals in American downtowns, the changing nature of some of San Francisco’s poorest neighborhoods is apparently a new kind of gentrification, something to be celebrated. The wholesale displacement of the urban poor is excusable, in other words, if its done tastefully and with an ironic wink.

So after decades of under-investment, tax revolts, racism and neglect the final tragedy is that poor inner city neighborhoods in places like San Francisco are being buried beneath a slow, sticky tsunami of organic Kale, moustache wax and ukuleles. In “preserving the feel of unique neighborhoods” (to quote the article) gentrifies are turning poverty into exquisite ambience. Nevius’ example is the Dogpatch neighborhood in San Francisco, a previously industrial working-class enclave that now boasts fashionable restaurants, cheese shops, a French butcher shop and a store that sells custom messenger bags. He quotes an artist and long time-resident who is in raptures about the changes in her neighborhood writing, “don’t try and tell her that upscaling of the neighborhood is a bad thing.” Well of course not! Unlike other long-time residents of Dogpatch, she is clearly rich enough and artistic enough to eat fifteen dollar hunks of Brie.

According to Nevius gentrification is taking place “from below” in San Francisco. Below what, exactly? If this really was gentrification from below it wouldn’t be gentrification at all… just… well… people moving house. If it was actually taking place from below the gentrifiers would be even poorer that inner city residents it is displacing. The reality is that the burbling twiterati, the narcissistic art dealers and the over-educated baristas that live in neighborhoods that are, in Nevius’ words “uber hot” come, for the most part, from backgrounds that are just as rich, just as white and just as impeccably educated and entitled as the 1980s “fat cats promoting ugly skyscrapers.” They are just younger and hotter.

A few days ago I visited Temescal Alley in North Oakland. Temescal Alley is nothing short of a gated community for hipsters (with an actual gate!) situated in a largely impoverished African American part of the Bay. Described at the time by the SF Chronicle as a “mini-utopian commune”, if this street was a public school in the 1950s it would have been de-segregated by the Supreme Court. I struck up a conversation with a stranger wearing a lurid bright blue shirt pattered with yellow cartoon canaries sporting a preposterous razor sharp moustache. He was sketching a gaunt woman’s face in a spiral ring notebook – it was 3pm on a Monday afternoon. He said, “this street is great, its like a shopping mall… but for real people!” Reality, it turns out, is different to what I imagined. Contrary to Nevius’ claims this is far from “gentrification from below” and wearing a stupid hat does not make class difference magically disappear.

In short, I would argue that not only is gentrification a dirty word, but that it is not dirty enough! Its hard to tell which is worse the spectacular set-piece redevelopments of the 1980s or the more subtle artsy process we are seeing today with its paper-thin veneer of respectability. To quote the Philosopher Slavoj Zizek – they are both worse.

Discovery of "the unemployed"

Paul Graham (From 'Beyond Caring')

Last summer the Whitechapel Art Gallery hosted an exhibition of works by the British photographer Paul Graham. While Graham’s career has been eclectic to say the least, what stood out for me were a series of pictures called ‘Beyond Caring’ taken in crowded British social security offices between 1984 and 1986. The subjects were pallid and desperate, gathered in hallways and waiting rooms designed for a much lower volume of traffic. Some of this remarkable collection can be seen here.

It was around the same time that, while doing research, I came across a funding request submitted to the Greater London Council from a community arts group that deliberately played-up the group’s commitment to equality of opportunity. Written in 1986, the year that Graham finished working on ‘Beyond Caring’, it contained the following quote:

“The workers aim… to encourage maximum use of their facilities by working-class people: white, black, Bengali, Somali, and Chinese and… to work with the most disadvantaged sections of the community, namely women and the unemployed.”

The inclusion of “the unemployed” in lists of different identity categories such as the above was something that came up a few times among the equality of opportunity stuff I found in the archives. There were a few occasions, for example, when the community arts groups I was studying would emphasize their commitment to hiring workers who were local, black, female or unemployed.

In 1986, the year I was born, unemployment was still well over three million and had been since 1983. The growth and persistence of structural unemployment from the 1970s put a lot of pressure on orthodox British leftwingers who were dismissive of “the unemployed”, arguing, even in the 1970s, that divorced from the means of production they had no potential for serious political subversion. There was certainly a strand of British cultural Marxism that in the 1970s and 80s made a stand for the political incorporation of unemployed men and women. In 1981 the sociologist Paul Gilroy was forced to argue that, “We must also reject the ancient heresy of economistic Marxism which states stipulates that the relations of commodity production alone determine class relations… [despite] Capitalism’s tendency to generate surplus population structurally excluded from productive employment by revolutions in the labour process.” Ideas that seem alien, or at least self-evident, to the left of today. Even sometimes within the institutions of the left, it seemed that the unemployed would face a forms discrimination and isolation that went beyond the mere experience of poverty.

My point is, that while the data I have to hand is extremely limited, I wonder if you could argue that for a brief period the experience of persistent and structural unemployment affecting usually geographically concentrated sections of the country in the 1980s produced among “the unemployed” a new identity category – something more, as it were, than the sum of its different experiences. No more, or less fluid and dynamic an identity category than racial, sexual or gendered categories I wonder, if this moment had lasted, whether “the unemployed” could have emerged as a distinct corporate group to make claims to access and resources. Its amazing, after all, how racially and sexually diverse the waiting rooms are in Graham’s pictures. Could being unemployed have been just as emotionally formative, and just as outside of one’s control, as being black, say, or being gay? With the ranks of the structurally unemployed grows and increasingly draws into its ranks young white middle class men and women with previously secure trajectories it will be interesting to see whether in the next few years of austerity unemployment is rediscovered as a category of identity.

Among the Mormons

(Above: The beautiful Provo, Utah.)

When I arrived in America for the first time two years ago I remember feeling a jolt of weirdness every time I walked outside. Everything from the numbered streets to the green dollar bills felt like expensive props for a vast play whose set I’d stumbled onto. I used to count off the jaunty state mottos on license plates and imagine what life was like in say, Vermont or Florida. Unfortunately, after more than two years in the states this feeling of weirdness is beginning to wear off. Like a junkie I am now having look further and further afield for cultural thrills. Soon I will have to work for the porn industry or spend two months with the Westboro Baptist Church to rekindle any spark of weirdness. For now, however, I found that I can still scratch the itch by spending ten days over Christmas with a Mormon community in Utah, thanks to an invitation from my friend T.

In brief Mormons believe that in 1820 somewhere in the pioneer fringes of upstate New York a teenager named Joseph Smith was greeted by a vision of Jesus who told him the location of a new biblical testament written in an ancient language on an assortment of golden plates buried underground. Smith allegedly found the plates and translated them from ‘reformed Egyptian’ into English. The plates were apparently written by one of the last survivors of a lost tribe of Israel who somehow found their way to America. Before being exterminated by a dark skinned breakaway tribal group (presumed to be native Americans) described as the morally corrupt inversion of the Israelites sometime in the early ADs, the tribe managed to jot down for future generations the fact that they had been visited by Christ (presumably somewhere in upstate New York) who appeared to them after his second resurrection. Due to various unforeseen sit-com-esque events (one of which involves them being hidden in a top hat) Smith was never able to show the plates to a significant number of impartial observers (eventually he buried the plates forever following the command of an anxious angel who visited him in his sleep). Nevertheless the religion became an overnight success, recruiting tens of thousands in its first few decades, many from Europe and the British Empire. The believers drifted from state to state, forced into itinerancy by repeated expulsions and minor pogroms until they settled by the Dead-Sea-esque salt lake in Utah and set about building a promised land out of temples and strip malls.

Marginalized by the left for the obvious reasons and distrusted by mainstream Christianity Mormonism is something of a cultural anomaly. A cult that is too large, too friendly and too institutionalized to pass off as an irrelevant cultural sideshow. Kind of like Scientology’s more popular and down-to-earth cousin. The church has in recent years drawn flack for its eccentric practices which range from the sinister to the absurd. The belief that the souls of the dead can still be saved is a sweet idea up until the church started retro-actively baptizing holocaust victims (including Anne Frank) in the 1990s. Believers are required to wear “temple garments”, a special and uncomfortable looking kind of underwear, the donning of which is necessary for entrance to a Mormon temple. Mormons refuse to touch alcohol, coffee or tobacco and in their more cultish moments church members refer to fellow believers as “brother” or “sister” (as in “Brother Wetherell got in trouble in the mid 1990s for baptizing dead Jews.”) Perhaps most remarkable is the fact that every Mormon after finishing high school undergoes a two-year overseas mission during which they are forbidden all but the most perfunctory contact with the outside world. During this time they are paired with another church member who has to stay by their side at almost all times - presumably to reduce the net number of masturbation opportunities. Mormons in Utah prepare for this mission for two months in a sinister looking barbed wire compound at the foot of the mountains. T was unclear when I asked whether the barbed wire existed to keep outsiders out or insiders in. For this reason Utah is peppered with daunting looking outdoor travel shops and with people fluent in obscure languages (T speaks perfect Norwegian his twin brother speaks Serbian).

Standing in the middle of Temple Square in Salt Lake City, amid the straight-faced neoclassical church buildings, watching a different newly wed couple every ten minutes trickle from the Mormon Temple down the gully between the ‘Zions Bank’ skyscraper and the Latter Day Saints History Museum its impossible not to be struck by the material consequences of these beliefs. The golden plates probably never existed, but what do exist are millions and millions of Mormons, in a vertical corridor from Alberta to Tuscon running their own banks, their own vast gated communities, their own universities and high schools, sending tens out of thousands of teenagers every year to remote corners of the world to manufacture yet more Mormons. Mormons govern states, run for president, make music and play basketball. The towns in Utah Valley, a continuous urban corridor which stretches south of Salt Lake City pushed up against the mountains, are all more than 80% Mormon. The towns, Orem, Nephi, Palymra sound like the answers to a particularly difficult biblical crossword puzzle. In Orem, my home for the week, there seemed to be a church every couple of blocks.

T’s local Church was clean and perky and smelt slightly of bleach and baby oil. It looked like it had just been assembled from an Ikea flatpack. Vague childhood memories of school plays and children’s birthday parties in institutional village halls came back to me as we went there for a Christmas Eve breakfast. Like in every household in Utah the church rooms were lined with straight-faced oil paintings of a pallid glowing Jesus and non-ironic sentences about the importance of family cross stitched in enormous font. I couldn’t remember the last time I had seen three or even four generations of people sharing the same food at tables roughly segregated by age. More remarkable was the fact that everyone within a ten block radius was there. As we walked to the church every house we passed was disgorging generation after generation of people, many of them feeling the need to squeeze into cars the size of master bedrooms to make the three block trip. Luckily the church had ample parking.

At one point during the breakfast a perfectly normal-looking woman my age came over and started chatting to us, recognizing her T asked her how she was doing. She smiled, pointed to her stomach and whispered “number three is on its way!” Later, T told me that most Mormons in their mid-twenties were married. It is usually expected that couples meet during their time at Brigham Young University putting students under a tremendous amount of pressure to pair up before school finishes. I imagined many terrified mid-afternoon second or third dates spent trying to decide over hot chocolate whether or not your partner’s quirks would get annoying after fifty or so years. Single Mormons even have their own separate congregations designed to speed up the process.

As an outsider to the community, drinking instant coffee and clumsily ordering beers, I was instantly recognizable. For T’s less cosmopolitan family members I was a source of fascination. At one point T’s older brother snuck into my bedroom and started asking me questions about alcohol – what was being drunk like? What did it feel like to be hung over? Had I ever smoked weed? He talked about his own faith and about his proclivity for science blogs and the extent to which the two contradicted. Another of T’s brothers, a 36 year-old gay guy who had long left the community for pretty obvious reasons talked to me at length and with a sweet intensity about his relationship to the church. I was pleased to find myself an object of curiosity rather than a potential convert. Indeed, even the more conservative members of the church I met seemed shy and a little apologetic about their faith. At one point on Christmas Day one of T's sisters-in-law (who T assured me was "very socially conservative") gave me a knowing look and said "this all must just be so strange for you."

(The Latter Day Saints Conference Centre completed in 2000 seats 21,000)

I found it difficult at times to reconcile the relative normality of T and his family members with the bizarre excesses of the Mormon Church. Apologetically and a little reluctantly T and two of his brothers took me to the Mormon ‘Conference Center’ in Salt Lake City (above). Built just a few years ago this enormous austere building is liberally dotted with portraits of Jesus hanging out with Native Americans (“Mormon realism”, T called it). The tour-guide pegged me as a potential convert after T and his brothers told him they were all church members apart from me. His pitch was at times a little underwhelming, veering from “we are the true followers of Jesus Christ” to “we have more than ten thousand parking spaces in our basement.” He spent most of the tour standing uncomfortably close to me and mixing theological points with impressive construction facts. In the Church History Museum next door, myself and T were hounded by two elderly employees who, given the slightest second of feigned interest, talked in a rapid-fire monotone about sinister looking objects from the Church’s past (“numismatists have said these are some of the ugliest coins in America, but we think they’re great!”). Needless to say and lovely though they all were, it would take more than ample parking, hideous coins and Mormon realism to make me give up coffee and pre-marital sex. I returned to Berkeley unconverted.

The Tory Conundrum

We are clear that there should be no further extension of the EU’s power over the UK without the British people’s consent. We will ensure that by law no future government can hand over areas of power to the EU or join the Euro without a referendum of the British people.

Conservative Manifesto: 2010 (pp. 113)

The absence of a credible plan to deal with our record budget deficit, the largest of any major economy, is creating uncertainly over Britain’s credit rating and interest rates… Urgent action is needed if we are to avoid the higher borrowing costs that would inevitably follow a credit rating downgrade. So we will cut wasteful spending.

The Conservative Manifesto 2010 (pp. 7)

In return for the treaty that they want - to sort out the problems of the eurozone - I want to make sure we get a good deal for Britain, I will be doing my best for Britain.

David Cameron – 9 December 2011

We should listen to the advice of Fitch, the credit rating agency, which this week reconfirmed our triple A credit rating status. I also think we should listen to the OECD, which is here today giving a presentation on the British economy and which strongly supports our deficit reduction plans.

David Cameron – Prime Ministers Questions March 16 2011

Something doesn’t add up.

David Cameron’s veto last week along with the ongoing Eurozone crisis has prompted a primordial ripple of Euroscepticism through the British right. In Monday’s Commons debate on the veto backbench Tories clambered over each other to congratulate the Prime Minister for standing up to European fiscal regulations, in many cases wielding letters from breathless constituents. (David Rutley told the Cameron that he would like “to pass on the hugs, best wishes and kisses from people in Macclesfield who are very grateful for the stance the Prime Minister took last week.” Shortly afterwards, in a surreal twist, Peter Bone, the Tory MP for Wellingborough passed on on an “important message” to the Prime Minister from his wife that read, “The efforts of the Prime Minister on Thursday night gave me great pleasure. Yours ever, Mrs Bone.") What I don’t understand is how this chauvinist eurosceticism squares with one of the major rhetorical justifications for the vicious deficit-reducing public spending cuts. Namely that enormous international economic forces – credit rating agencies, the IMF, the OECD – have left them with no alternative. Tory MPs will one moment be speaking in a language of international economic governmentality, and the next in a language of isolationist patriotism.

A note on theory (not to be taken seriously)

Habermas

I have just read the first thirty of pages of The Legitimation Crisis by Jurgen Habermas. By the first four pages it became depressingly clear that the afternoon I had set aside to read this 140 page book would not be enough time to finish it. By the twentieth page I realized that it would, in fact, require less intellectual energy, and less time to invent a time machine, go back to the 1970s and kill Habermas before he wrote the book, than it would to finish even the first two chapters. In fact it would take much less time. After disposing of Habermas’ corpse I would return to the beginning of this afternoon and spend it doing something other than reading The Legitimation Crisis. Bliss.

At Oxford theory was avoided like the plague (and Oxford, founded a few hundred years before the Black Death, would know). Aside from a skeletal methodologies class which attempted to orientate students towards classes on manuscript training and away from Foucault much of the faculty seemed convinced that theory was a distraction from the archives – a kind of intellectual Call of Duty 2 that consumed the time of otherwise promising undergraduates. In American grad schools, though, its all the rage. Indeed, many American grad students and professors openly delight in the sheer difficulty of the books they read. I remember being set Giorgio Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz, an awkward brambly bundle of rhetorical excess and paradoxical wordplay by a prominent intellectual history professor at Harvard. Before setting the book he rubbed his hands together and gleefully warned us to “brace yourselves, for a literature of a sometimes terrifying level of abstraction!” In a recent review of a biography of Habermas the same professor, using the same lexicon of terror, wrote that his writings “are pitched at such air-gasping heights of difficulty and place such merciless demands upon the reader as to turn away all but the most fearless.” Yikes.

As far as I can tell, books like The Legitimation Crisis serve two purposes in the humanities:

Firstly they give us all something to talk about. Theory in the Benedict Anderson sense (and here I’m falling back on theory to talk about theory!) is the print culture that creates an intellectual imagined community for the humanities. If we all only read the documents and secondary works pertaining to our increasingly miniscule crumb of expertise then we would have nothing to talk about over lunch. With theory, historians of medieval Macedonia, scholars of sexuality in late Stephen King novels and modernist architecture critics can talk to one another in a language of Foucault, Bourdieu and Butler. That is the charitable explanation anyway.

The second explanation is a little darker. Theory, and by this I mean really really hard theory, is the humanities equivalent of calculus - a language that is completely impenetrable to all those who have put in the hours necessary to decode it. Sentences like (and I, of course, quote ‘The Legitimation Crisis’), “Such forcefully integrated action systems are, of course, in need of an ideological justification to conceal the asymmetrical distribution of chances for the legitimate satisfaction of needs (that is, repression of needs)” are essentially equations that can only be solved by a trained cadre of experts. Note the offhand use the words “of course” in the middle of that sentence – a small verbal nod that says “this is grown up stuff and if you can’t understand it then either go back to college or fuck off.” Theory makes the humanities seem objectively hard. Its one of our best-kept secrets. Anyone can read a jauntily written history of, say, the Armenian genocide. Not everyone can read and understand Habermas, and those that can (and I’m not sure yet if I can include myself among them) feel like by doing so they have just run a three-minute mile. At the end of the day, then, Bourdieu is pretty much right. He is right to see the academic world as a discursively produced field in which surplus cultural capital inflicts hideous symbolic violence. And if you don’t understand that last sentence, then you may as well just fuck off.

Factory life: an introduction

(Above: You can just make out the red strap holding up P's platform/bedroom. Photo thanks to Harry Kenard)

A few months ago, following my unscheduled return to the UK at the request of the Department of Homeland Security, I moved into an abandoned factory-cum-squat in East London. It was a moment of madness that I haven’t yet regretted.

Once a thriving sweet factory the building is now a dilapidated brick monolith with a dusty courtyard more often than not scattered with past and future components of the building itself. Each of the floors are partitioned by rotting plywood into dozens of small padlocked studios which, over the years, have been scribbled on, painted, postered, wallpapered and repainted again. Inside, depending on the time of day you can find a bar, a live music venue, a café, a dance studio, a child development centre, a mosque and a bi-annual transvestite sex club. The rooms are rented out at extraordinary low rates strictly for commercial or business purposes, leaving the 100 or so of us that live in these studios prone to sudden eviction by the council.

I share a vast high-ceilinged room on the top floor with two other people, P a lovely 28 year old artist/professional man of leisure, whose ironic wit and almost pathological serenity was a strong inducement to move into the space, and Mel, a loquacious northerner. Usually P will come home at about 11 in the morning, in the throes of an ashen-faced comedown, often with a single vegetable in a shopping bag which he will then forget to cook. Usually M and myself will already be awake and engaged in a fiery political row, sparked by my idiotic frustration at her inability to tolerate the local Bangladeshi community or our differing views on short term deficit reduction. M’s “room” is a small loft-like enclave in the ceiling accessed by a rocky splintered ladder, while P lives on a platform above the couch, built by himself and held up by a climbing rope. His plans to “turn it into a spaceship” are perennially interrupted by cycles of drinking and coming down. I live in a small windowless plywood cubicle at ground level which is just big enough for a double bed and a desk.

The many benefits of living in the factory are occasionally offset by the lack of showers, hot water or cooking equipment beyond a small camping hob perilously attached to a sinister looking gas canister. The toilets are a good few minutes walk through the plywood maze, a walk which more often or not involves passive crack smoking from the drug den five doors down. While showers have recently been installed they are operated by tokens, which are purchased for a pound from a toothless Polish janitor. Usually he can only spare three or four a fortnight. Last month I read the famous Young Foundation study of poverty in the East End in the 1950s – ‘Race Kinship and Class.’ There was something disheartening about realizing that deprived war-time working class communities in Tower Hamlets enjoyed access to far more conveniences than I do. What would Michael Young make, I wonder, of the factory?

Its certainly the case that my own factory lifestyle is part of a broader trend across London. Indeed, many of the relics of England’s industrial decline, the warehouses and factories that have been stripped bare by a generation of offshoring and de-skilling, have been colonized by transient communities of artists and hipsters, all looking for new ways to invest their surplus social capital. Hackney Wick, tucked away in the awkward no-fly-zone between the Blackwall Tunnel and the Olympic stadium is the is the current home of the majority of these strange new proletarians. Wander through Hackney Wick at 7pm and you’ll notice the familiar pattern of early evening residential activity: lost looking pizza delivery men, bored pedestrians with Tesco bags and the distant throb of Radio 1, all within a horizon of dilapidated barrack-like warehouses, bisected by ten-foot tall chain link fences with no discernable entrance.

Living in the factory raises a lot of questions. Specifically the following, which I want to tentatively answer during the remaining two or three months that I’ll be living here:

IS Is there any link between the radical Marxist East London squatting movement of the 1970s (more on this) and what’s going on in the factory? Or is this another form of apolitical stylized consumption?

2) What does it mean to be an artist living somewhere like the factory? Is this artist (or dare I use the North American term ‘hipster’) identity something new and radical which can be isolated and engaged with, or is it another expression of middle-class whiteness?

3) What's the future for the factory? Will it survive the recovery-driven wave of new property development in Poplar and what will it look like?

Learning economics

(Above: taken in a newsagent in Beijing Ariport in October 2008)

In a youth hostel in Moscow, sometime in September 2008, I used a few minutes of my carefully rationed internet access to log onto the BBC news website. In the kind of headline size normally reserved for terrorist atrocities or general elections was announced the collapse of two banks that I had never before heard of, Lehman Brothers and Meryl Lynch.

Over the next few weeks, as myself and two other friends traveled across Russia and China we saw the economic Armageddon unfolding in peeps and snatches. Stock market boards showing rows of LED minus arrows or glimpsed newsreel footage of guilty looking men in suits carrying small boxes of their possessions through skyscraper lobbies. Every day the BBC’s font got bigger and bigger, as Iceland’s became a failed state and banks were nationalized by the dozen. None of it seemed real. Unlike the hard news, the roadside bombs and hurricanes that had set the agenda over the previous decade, this was everywhere, invisible and extremely confusing.

What’s more, despite being well-educated people who, for our brief adult lives, had followed the news almost every day and who held assiduously formed opinions about how society should be structured, none of us had a clue what was going on. An entire alternative universe of finance and credit, of insurance and mortgages that had previously escaped our notice was burning to the ground, dragging the next ten years of political discourse into hitherto unknown territory and bringing us all back to square one. All of the issues we had traded opinions on, be it Iraq, ID cards, climate change or constitutional reform now had as much capital as your average Lehman Brothers CDO. We had a lot to learn.

And who can blame us? Since the publication of the Black-Scholes paper in 1973, which worked out a formula for trading derivatives, economics had undergone a shift towards abstraction and self-referentiality equivalent to the birth of modernism in literature. In fact John Lanchester has argued that the invention of credit default swaps in 1994 saw high finance take a turn for the post-modern, writing, “for anyone who studied literature in college in the past few decades, there is a weird familiarity about the current crisis: value, in the realm of finance capital, parallels the elusive nature of meaning in deconstructionism.” In other words the financial markets in recent years have only really been created and understood by Maths PhD graduates leaving everyone else, from protestors to politicians, feeling confused and alienated from the entire process.

Cut to 2010 and the new politics of deficit reduction and public spending cuts has energized the left in a way that the social issues of the past failed to do. Even the rough social edges of the coalition, the Victorian marriage incentives, Cameron’s inflammatory speech on immigration or the government’s staunch silence on climate change are rarely discussed. The student protests last December concentrated on the raw issue of funding rather than the culture shift towards ‘marketization’ in higher education. Its been a steep learning curve and I worry that, dizzy with our new-found rhetorical toys, we are forgetting difficult issues such as multiculturalism and gender politics. A senior Climate Camp organizer recently told me that the climate movement is “dying on its arse.”

Unfortunately many of us still can’t really describe with certainly what’s going on. We are still not comfortable enough about economics to make informed judges between the left and right wing economists who put forward radically different arguments for the scale and speed of short term deficit reduction. We are inclined towards the former because the Tories have been on the wrong side of every clear-cut social issue that we ever remember being on the table (with the possible exception of detention without trial). We don’t trust that a party which has been consistently calling for an ever-smaller state won’t pick an economic policy that is a means to that end. Furthermore, the academic economists who have spent the last ten years calling for globalized unregulated growth, intimidating into silence almost everyone on the left who lacked a degree in economics, are discredited by the crash, and can no longer monopolize the high-ground of common sense.

Perhaps the lesson of the last eight months is that the solidarity of the balance sheet always trumps the solidarity of identity politics. Our dizzying, turbulent and traumatizing process of fiscal politicization over the last six months affirms William Cobbett’s old adage that it is impossible to agitate a man with a full stomach.