Anthony Barnett on the News International Affair

“Cameron, Osborne and the Murdochs together embraced a relationship of mutual benefit irrespective of the interests of the British public and democracy … the Murdochs knew what went on in the News of the World and approved of and supported the cover up and the pay-offs.

Therefore the Prime Minister and Chancellor entered into an agreement with the bosses of a criminal organisation.”

This is an article that repays close attention.

Common Sense – Introduction

‘A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.’ Tom Paine

Something is happening that does not yet have a name. In Europe and North America the citizens of democracies have taken to the streets and disrupted the orderly circulation of ideas, images and goods. They have seized public spaces and re-imagined them as sites of liberation and free speech between equals. Either these occupations and assemblies will come to be seen as pale imitations of the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, imitations that never seriously threatened the powers of the world. Or we are between the breaking waves of a revolutionary tide. The first description is of a piece with a future of depression and war. If the second is true, then many of us are about to secure a more complete freedom. This much is clear: what we decide to do this year will determine how the occupations and assemblies of last year are remembered.

A governing order can only survive if its needs and demands pass as the conclusions of an uncontroversial common sense. For a generation expertise and authoritative speech assured us that everything was under control. We could leave the management of the economy to others. Change was the outcome of forces far beyond our comprehension. Humans were powerless before the majesty of markets and the march of technology. There was no need to worry about the vast wealth and luxury enjoyed by a few. Progress was being made. We could devote ourselves to our private competitions and concerns, surrounded on all sides by the mystery of finance.

These claims no longer convince. The common sense that set the horizon of the practical, that ordered and constrained our lives, now stands revealed as a tangle of fantasies. The established order in the West no longer appears as an historical necessity or fact of nature. It has habit to defend it and some well-practised techniques for manipulating sentiment. But the governing order’s most powerful protection is our reluctance to explore what underpins the day-to-day of what we think and do.

Many of us have experienced life as a series of defeats. These defeats were supposed to be just, a fair reflection of our industry and character. An incessant commercial noise told us that we got what we wanted and deserved. Yet now the distribution of rewards and honours seems like the outcome of a wildly successful fraud. The wealth of a few was secured at the expense of the many. After long years of being daunted we are starting to think that things do not have to be as they are. We made our lives inside a necessity that was artificial. But still we hesitate. So much has been lost and can never be recovered. We shrink from admitting how wrong we were, how thoroughly deceived, the titanic waste of time it all was. Part of us still wants to settle back into the old, dispiriting certainties.

In the confusion those who benefited from the old dispensation are busy grabbing what they can. They control the state still, and much of the speech that is effectually public. They tell us they are fit to decide, even as they pick through the ruins of their previous decisions. They tell us that they know what they are doing, even as they stumble from mishap to self-serving mishap. They talk of morality while they blame the poor and the dejected for a crisis caused by their colleagues and friends. There is something desperate about the performance. Some of the audience are drifting away. Others are even starting to heckle. What was once persuasive starts to seem too obviously improvised, a series of contrivances and menacing non sequiturs.

But our politicians and their partners in the systems of credit, communication and production seem to think they can now rule without reason, and make the world pliant through the repetition of obvious untruths. It is possible they are right. They have remained faithful to the doctrines that brought disaster in 2007-8. Their policies are as witless now as they were then. Yet they remain in place. When circumstances demand it, they rail against popular enemies. They impersonate our fury at outrages they do nothing to prevent. They may yet get away with this latest production.

And here is something strange. The vast scale of the mismanagement protects its authors from blame. By the time the crisis broke, almost everyone who spoke with any expectation of being heard was mouthing the common nonsense. The figures recognised and magnified by the media were committed to broadly the same policies. The dealers in opinion busied themselves with permissible controversies elsewhere. The argument over the economy was, they agreed, over. Those installed in consequential positions owe their current eminence to their former willingness to believe, or at least to say, things that now sound demented. They have every reason to avoid discussing the substance of what has happened, of what they allowed to happen.

It is not surprising that we are tempted to go along with all this. The truth is unfamiliar and unsettling after all this time. To the extent that the architects of the current shambles can continue to secure general acceptance of the descriptions that suit them, we pay a price for an improved understanding. We can reject these descriptions only if we are willing to turn away from the performances of public life, to do without their reflected prestige, to suffer distress.

Nonconformity in thought, a billion adverts tell us, is dynamic and fun. A billion adverts lie.  The pursuit of truth in defiance of widely accepted errors is a kind of self-harm. If those whose opinion must be taken into account say one thing, it is painful for us to believe another. And there is more to it, even than this. We have made ourselves out of claims that are unsafe. To call things by their proper names makes a revolution in us, before it changes anything else. If we are to be free, we must change, and to change is to kill some part of ourselves. It is no wonder that we hesitate.

In what follows I describe the common sense that kept most of us from the guts of administration. I show a little of what these commonsensical claims did to us. And I set out what we can learn from the last year, how what we did then can be adapted to make a new common sense in the years ahead. For it is common sense that determines the limits of political action and its proper objectives. If we do not devise a common sense of our own then others will concoct one for us. We have the means to hand. They are not complicated, though you will not hear them much discussed in the ordinary channels of communication.

The language used here is as clear as its author can make it. Cleverer writers could have offered something plainer and more pleasant. Much cleverer writers are currently busy defending what exists, for money. They can craft appeals to what we are, to what three decades have made us. They can offer all the sickly pleasures of conformity, the thrill of being inside. Most temptingly, they have in their gift the swindling realism that tells us that we don’t matter.

What I write is bound to strike many readers as unrealistic. For it is written in the belief that we each have some useful fraction of a world-changing power within us, whether we make use of it or not. But before you stop reading, consider how strange so much recently respectable speech now sounds, and grant the argument here a little of the time you lavished on your deceivers. If we act together what we suffer will be the brief pain of transition. If we remain wedded to the old words and phrases and the inactivity they justify, our discontent can only deepen into distress.

Do we describe the world or change it? The question is a mistake. A true description widely shared is itself a change in the world. But can we bear to hear the world described, when true description forces us to change? That is a question each of us must answer for ourselves. Perhaps we will hold on to what is familiar, even if it is a kind of self-willed slavery. But perhaps we will be equal to our age, able to see what is in front of our eyes, to describe what we see, and to act in the light of a free understanding.

‘It doesn’t matter what I think, or what I do. The powers will do what they please regardless.’ There, right there, is the governing mistake of the common sense we have outgrown.

What we choose now matters.

*

You can buy the full text of Common Sense on Kindle from New Left Project, openDemocracy and my own imprint. You can buy it in other formats from Smashwords.

Common Sense – now available on all kinds of formats

 

The text of Common Sense can now be bought over at the Smashwords website.

Amazon’s strenuous tax avoidance and the company’s attempts to establish a monopoly position in the e-book market have always sat uneasily with the book’s argument. The fact that it was only available on Kindle caused a certain amount of irritation.

So, if you want to read the thing, you don’t have to go via Amazon now.

What is Subversion?

Here’s something interesting.

Britain’s internal security service, MI5, includes ‘the Anglo-Saxon model of capitalism’ is on its ‘list of potential targets to be safeguarded against subversion. We are told this by Bernard Porter, the distinguished historian. He can’t tell us how he knows that, because he found out in a discussion held under Chatham House rules.

So a politician who calls for Scandinavian-style social democracy qualifies as a subversive. And a book that advocates industrial democracy and financial sector reform, like this one, qualifies as a subversive document.

To put it another way, it is subversive to reject the consensus embraced by the three main political parties. To put it yet another way, if the Labour party adopted economic policies that would serve the interests of the majority, they would become legitimate targets for counter-subversion.

Just so you know.

Substantial Enlightenment

There are few concepts more muddled and misunderstood than that of Enlightenment. And this should hardly surprise us. For as we edge towards the question of Enlightenment, we inch towards the possibility of liberation – a possibility almost as unsettling to ourselves as it is unwelcome to those who benefit from our continued obedience. We expend enormous energy and effort to persuade ourselves that Enlightenment is compatible with what we are, that it implies no transformation, no risk, no danger. A vast industry is on hand, to tell us this story we are so avid to hear, over and over.

So, Enlightenment is pasteurised. It becomes a matter of correct opinions about a narrowly defined set of subjects – most notably religion, superstition and the political sublime. We are enlightened if we don’t believe in God, if we are properly sceptical about the claims of alternative medicine, and if we steer clear of conspiracy theories. We have managed to misunderstand Enlightenment in ways that would have delighted and excited the Marquis de Sade. Enlightenment, in the ordinary, everyday sense, is the name we give to a certain kind of incuriosity and deference to authority.

Enlightenment properly understood concerns itself with the tension between truth and other kinds of power. To describe things as they are is what Enlightenment is. And true description currently carries with it the risk of alienation and defeat. Therefore the central task of those committed to Enlightenment is the creation of a society where accurate description does not threaten the established order, because the established order is subject to a permanent regime of general inquiry. Truth becomes tolerable to power, because power no longer rests on untruth. Truth is no longer a threat to our own wellbeing, as it is in the current order of fantasy, deceit and self-delusion. Enlightenment is a project of transformation – of the self as public actor, and of the public world.

At present, we organize our lives around myths – myths about the nature of finance and capital, political agency, the sufficiency of the media in their current form, myths about the complexity of administration and popular incompetence. For relief we celebrate our freedom from myth. And we react with fury when it is suggested that perhaps atheism and Enlightenment are not identical, that the conspiracy theorist is often better informed than we are, that science is still caught in the coils of secret and illegitimate power.

Enlightenment is only possible if we are able to debate matters openly as reasoning beings, without risk of retaliation, and with some reasonable expectation of being heard. When did you last see a debate conducted on such terms? When did you last participate in such a debate? We are still very far from being enlightened, in any substantial sense, since government still depends on the dissemination of untrue claims. A notion of Enlightenment that does not recognise this, that does not situate itself as a critique of the existing political settlement is, very precisely, a symptom of the illness that it claims to cure. Wittering on about the villainies of a non-existent God is not Enlightenment. Insofar as it bills itself as Enlightenment, it is a lie. And, as such, it is the enemy of Enlightenment.

This is what I have argued in two books. In the first I focused on the question of an enlightened identity, what it means for an individual to be enlightened. In the second I asked how we might make our public realm safe for Enlightenment, how we might achieve an enlightened public sphere. I only hope that a public desirous of freedom arrives and finds them. Those that flourish in the world as it is are in no hurry to make these books better known. For that I can hardly complain, since I have set out to describe a programme of reform that is also, by necessity, an assault on secret privilege.

The Threat to Reason was published in 2007. The Return of the Public is published in paperback in May of this year.

Learning from Bradford West

George Galloway’s victory in Bradford West is a major political upset. In the 2010 General Election, Galloway’s party Respect received 1,245 votes (3.1% of the total cast). In 2012 Respect received 18,341 votes (55.9% of the total).

Respect won over many Labour voters but the collapse of the other major parties was, if anything, even more dramatic. The Conservatives went from 12,638 in 2010 to 2,746 in 2012, the Liberal Democrats from 4,732 to 1,505.

If this was a protest, it was a protest against the entire political establishment, rather than against the governing Coalition.

In this it has something in common with the occupations and assemblies of last year. All over the country people met and started to work out a response to the financial and economic crisis in ways that rejected the mainstream political consensus. It is time now to turn that energy towards the governing institutions.We need a new political common sense, and it is up to us to create it.

Assembly and deliberation, focused on electoral politics, are how we make our elected representatives act in our interests.

If they refuse to do so, then the Bradford West result shows that we can replace them.

In the current environment there are no safe seats in the country. Respect’s victory teaches us that it is possible to change voting behaviour radically, if we organize and develop a coherent platform that appeals to people’s interests.

We have until the next election to turn every constituency in the country into an assembly. That is the lesson of Bradford West.

*

If you are interested in turning the occupation and assemblies movement into an instrument for transforming national politics, you might like to read Common Sense: Occupation, Assembly, and the Future of Liberty. It’s only available on Kindle at the moment.

A Modest Proposal For Party Funding

After Cruddas’s fit of candour, state funding for political parties is back on the agenda. A senior conservative has supported it on Radio 4, on the grounds that it would remove the appearance of wrong-doing, or words to that effect.

If we are to use state funds to support political activity, I would suggest that we each have some say in how the money is spent. If we decide to spend £10 million supporting the parties, say, then give every voter the power at the ballot box to decide which organization should receive ‘their’ little bit of the money.

Anyone can set up a party or political communications body and can get it on the ballot in a constituency, if they meet a certain threshold of support – they put up candidate in the election, or they secure a given number of signatures, something like that. NGOs and pressure groups would be able to get additional funds for political campaigning, as would trade unions, and eccentrics with a bee in their bonnet about media reform.

There would be no need to put a cap on individual donations, or prevent large donations from the unions, incidentally.

At an election, you vote for a candidate and you also choose who is to get ‘your’ slice of the subsidy. You might want to vote for the candidate of one party and support another with your money. After all, you might vote for the party for all kinds of reasons. The direct allocation of subsidies allows you to send a message to other people about who you want to hear more from, and, perhaps, how you might vote, in an ideal world.

Let’s say I am a reluctant Labour voter who is keen to get rid of the Coalition. But I’ve noticed that there is a weird, deep complicity in British mainstream politics. I vote for Labour in my constituency, but I give ‘my’ bit of subsidy to the Greens. Or I am a reluctant Conservative who worries that the EU is undermining out traditional liberties. I vote Conservative, but give ‘my’ money to UKIP.

As a bonus, the BBC also have a handy metric for when they want to figure out what political balance is, which doesn’t rely on taking an average of the editorial lines of our glorious newspapers.

You could choose to hand the money back to the Treasury. One reason to visit the ballot box. Meanwhile, any money not allocated (because turnout is less than 100% of eligible voters) can be distributed on the basis of previous electoral performance.

You can see why this might not feature prominently in discussions of state funding for political parties. The established parties want to hand out all the money on the basis of votes cast in the previous election. That way electoral performance feeds through into steady national exposure, a sewing of the national agenda by a small number of parties, and their continued domination at the polls.

We need to become more aware of what we want, collectively, and we need to create a political culture that connects with reality and reflects our considered preferences. Direct allocation of state funding along these lines is something that sensible people of all stripes should support.

And yes, I know, we would end up in a situation where nasty types got some money. You do know that happens already, right?

Another Way to Publish

On Tuesday of this week, I published an e-pamphlet for Kindle, called Common Sense. Nothing terribly noteworthy about that.

People self-publish all the time.

This is the cover, by the way. The design is by Kieran McCann.

I mean, Common Sense is noteworthy, of course. At least, I think it is, otherwise I wouldn’t have spent months writing the damn thing. If you are interested in finding out a little more about why I wrote it, and what it says, there’s an interview with Guy Aitchison here on the New Left Project’s website. You can also read it over at openDemocracy.

Old Models and New

But now I want to talk about the medium rather than the message.

Normally, a publisher will secure exclusive rights to a work and then promote it through publicity and marketing.

But in this instance, three separate editions were published on the same day by three different organizations: Myriad Editions, New Left Project and openDemocracy.

(The keen-eyed among you will notice that these covers are different sizes. That’s because I don’t know what I am doing. You’ll also notice that the Myriad Editions one is much, much larger. That’s because I do.)

The Advantages of Coalitional Publishing

The text of each edition is identical. Each partner publisher is responsible for their cover design, and for the copy they use for their page on Amazon, for press releases, and so on. Each edition has its own product number and all revenues flow directly to the publisher of the particular edition. The revenues from sales are then split between the author and the publisher on an agreed split.

Each edition is promoted actively by the publisher responsible for it, who has a direct interest in generating revenues. And each publisher benefits from the activities of other publishers – as people become aware of a title and decide they want to buy it, they will gravitate towards the edition that benefits the organization they identify with most closely.

People who are regular readers of openDemocracy won’t decide to buy something just because openDemocracy have published it. But if they decide to buy something, they will be more likely to buy it from openDemocracy than from a fly-by-night operation like Myriad Editions (that’s me, by the way. ME. Clever, eh?).

The economics of publishing online make this possible, just about. Amazon take 30% of the sale price, leaving 70% to split between the writer, originating publisher, and co-publishers. An organization publishing something at £2.50 can afford to give the author as much money as she or he would get from a printed paperback.

Now this model may not be appropriate across all genres. But it offers some striking advantages for current affairs and long form journalism. Everyone who engages with an audience and wants to raise some revenue can publish a no-frills edition of a text that they think is noteworthy – they may not agree with it, at all. But if they think it is worth engaging with they can register an edition.

They can have a discussion about it, a debate with the author, or post a response or review. If a title becomes widely known and read, then the participants at that site can buy what they want anyway and give some support to a site that they value. Virtue doesn’t cost anything – every edition has the same price.

It is a truism to say that the lines between writing, editing, agenting, publishing and selling are all blurring. This model recognizes the division of labour in publishing and seeks to ensure that each part of the process is kept viable:

1. Someone has to write the text. The author. In this case me.

2. Someone has to edit and proofread it. The originating publisher. In this case ME.

(A lot goes on at this stage, by the way. Editors inspire authors, they help them focus, they tell them to pull themselves together, and so on. And stage 2 often happens before stage 1.)

3. Someone has to make potential readers aware of it. The partner publisher. In this case ME, NLP and OD so far.

4. Someone has to collect the money. In this case Amazon.

This model helps people find out about things that are relevant to them, and it gives some money to those who are publishing to particular audiences already. It doesn’t rely on mass media coverage, with all that that implies, though it doesn’t rule it out. It allows a coalition of groups to publish in a way that is economically viable.

So far there are three editions of Common Sense out there. More can be licensed, on different digital platforms as well as on Kindle. It can be published in printed form, too, on an exclusive or non-exclusive basis. The more versions there are, the better each version will do.

Each edition acts as an endorsement of the book – someone is willing to be associated with it in a way that goes beyond a retailer’s willingness to put it in store. Each edition adds to the sense that something is noteworthy (that word again), and so on.

Common Sense is a worked example of how I think at least some online publishing could go. I couldn’t ask anyone else to take the time and effort to write something for what is an experiment in a young and uncertain market. I wanted to write Common Sense anyway, and I wanted to see what would happen if I worked with as many people as possible to raise awareness of the text and the ideas in it.

It’s an updating of Tom Paine’s Common Sense, by the way, and a response to the occupations and assemblies movement last year. It’s doing quite well.

Next Steps

If you run an online news and comment site, or you’re a publisher of some other kind and might be interested in licensing an edition of the pamphlet, then you probably need to look at a copy first.

You don’t have to buy one, of course. I can send you a .pdf to read. But it is £2.54.

(As you will know by now you have a choice of at least three editions – this one by Myriad Editions, this one by New Left Project, and this one by openDemocracy.)

You can reach me via the email address on the blog or via Twitter.

If you write about the media sector, drop me a line as above, if you want to find out more.

Cover for the Paperback of The Return of the Public

“Drawing on history and democratic theory, this book offers a powerful indictment of public exclusion. It is also original, breaking with standard corporatist approaches to reform. Well written, eloquent and very well worth reading.” James Curran, co-author of Power Without Responsibility

“His argument is marred by vast overstatements” John Lloyd, Financial Times

The British Legal System in Action

Judge Newdigate: What is Antichrist?

Boswell Middleton: He that practiseth and holdeth up those things which Jesus Christ witnesseth against is Antichrist.

Judge: What things are those?

B.M.: Such as are called of men masters, and go in long robes, and have the chief place in the assemblies, salutations in the market places, etc. Read to that in thy own conscience.

Judge: Thou are mad and talkest nonsense.

 

Examination of Boswell Middleton at York, 17 July 1654, in J. Besse, An Abstract of the Sufferings of the People called Quakers, i (1733), pp. 485-6, quoted in C. Hill, Antichrist in Seventeenth Century England (1971, 1990)