Mike Davis - the real McCoy

One of the great figures of the American New Left, Mike Davis, has died.  He was 76 and had been fighting with laryngeal cancer for several years.  

I first encountered Davis's work when I read his monumental and brilliant history of Los Angeles, City of Quartz, as a graduate student at Sussex.  I was already interested (but characteristically under-read) in the growing field of Marxist urbanism and geography - featuring writers such as Neil Smith, David Harvey and Edward Soja.   Davis was less a theorist than a historian, but it was always clear that he was steeped in the Marxist tradition, and also that he matched Marx and Engels's marvellous mix of intellectual penetration and omnivorous erudition.   City of Quartz is a history which the novelist James Ellroy and the film-maker Michael Mann would find conducive - a stylish, unblinking exposure of the dark seamy side of the City of Angels, where the American dream is subtended by boosterism, hyper-capitalism, immigration, a notoriously corrupt police force and environmental degradation on an epic scale.   Yet Davis clearly loved Los Angeles, and was endlessly curious about how it worked, its industrial zones as much as its faux Latin suburbs.   If Mann - hardly a leftwing filmmaker - can make thrillers which are also visual paeans to LA's nightscapes, its highways, container farms, warehouses - films like Heat and Collateral - these elements of the megalopolis's anatomy, its skeleton, musculature and innards, also fascinated Davis.

What I didn't know at the time was that City of Quartz was the work of a writer already creating a torrent of essays and books which joyfully, contentiously ignored scholarly boundaries and caused trouble everywhere.    Written in a deliciously mordant, pithy, ruthless noir prose, Davis was on course to become not only the greatest chronicler of the American working class (Prisoners of the American Dream), but also a radical scholar of disaster - Ecology of Fear and Late Victorian Holocausts stand out.    He anticipated global health catastrophe (The Monster Enters), and wrote a brilliant study of the car-bomb (Buda's Wagon).   Even more, Davis was always conscious of the poisoned nexus between capitalism and the environment: he skewered 'green capitalism' before it even had a name.   And he could write the most scathing polemic - 'The Case for Letting Malibu Burn', a chapter of Ecology of Fear, argued that municipal fire safety budgets would be better spent on protecting poor inner-city districts than on preparing to rescue the pampered idiots who had built themselves ugly mansions in remote hillside fire-zones. 

Davis was not only an original scholar but also could absorb, summarize and render accessible the discourses and ideas of disciplines far from his own.   For me, the stand-out here might be 'Cosmic Dancers on History's Stage?  The Permanent Revolution in the Earth Sciences', an extraordinary article surveying, condensing and extrapolating from recent scholarship in earth science.   Most striking in this essay was its explanation of 'coherent catastrophism' - the theory that the planet's geological, biological and maybe even human history has evolved in a complex rhythm shaped in part by elements external to the system - principally, asteroid or comet hits.    

Davis was an activist and union organiser long before he became a scholar, and his work was always firmly grounded in the political realities of the American left.   Although he held academic positions, he also was a MacArthur grant winner, which allowed him a freedom of manoeuvre in intellectual and research terms.   But Davis was a tough driven man, who would always have made his own way.    More than most left scholars, he retained a strong sense of the necessary relationship between putatively 'radical' scholarship, and the nitty-gritty street-fighting world of organisation, campaigning and protest.   A figure of the 'New Left', he never lost touch with the 'old left' of his parents' generation, and he always realised that the academy and the street sit in a dynamic relationship, where the latter is most often in the van.   Here he is, on being called an 'old school socialist':

First, socialism — the belief that the earth belongs to labor — is my moral being. In fact, it is my religion, the values that anchor the commitments that define my life.

Second, “old school” implies putting in work year after year for the good cause. In academia one runs across people who call themselves Marxists and go to lots of conferences but hardly ever march on a picket line, go to a union meeting, throw a brick or simply help wash the dishes after a benefit. What’s even worse, they deign to teach us the “real Marx” but lack the old Moor’s fundamental respect for individual working people and his readiness to become a poor outlaw on their behalf.

Finally, plain “socialist” expresses identification with the broad movement and the dream rather than with a particular program or camp. I have strong, if idiosyncratic, opinions on all the traditional issues — for example, the necessity of an organization of organizers (call it Leninism, if you want) but also the evils of bureaucracy and permanent leaderships (call it anarchism if you wish) — but I try to remind myself that such positions need to be constantly reassessed and calibrated to the conjuncture. One is always negotiating the slippery dialectic between individual reason, which must be intransigently self-critical, and the fact that one needs to be part of a movement or a radical collective in order, as Sartre put it, to “be in history.” Moral dilemmas and hard choices come with the turf and they cannot be evaded with “correct lines.”

Mike Davis was one of the greatest exemplars of the scholar-agitator of recent times.   His death is a huge loss; his work remains a resource to be treasured. 

Conor   

Here is some material by and about Davis:

Obituaries

The Nation  Mike Davis: 1946–2022

The Los Angeles Times    

Arellano: Mike Davis’ final email to me reminded me to write, not mourn

Tariq Ali, for Verso Books

Mike Davis (1946 –2022): Enemy of the State

A brilliant radical reporter with a novelist’s eye and ain

Micah Uetricht, at Jacobin

Mike Davis Showed Us What “Old-School Socialism” Looked Like

Badiou on Ukraine - a prophet without honour in his own time

Just as the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, in February, I had planned to blog about the possibility of war.   I failed to do so - a position of intellectual caution, alas.   Writing or speaking in any way critically of Western policy on Ukraine and Russia has proven, unsurprisingly, not to be the best avenue to the quiet or contemplative life.

An exemplar to the contrary, but ahead of his time, was Alain Badiou, the veteran French philosopher and unrepentant Maoist.    Here is an article he wrote in 2014 - at the time of the coup (usually known as the Maidan rebellion) which brought Zelensky's predecessor to power in that country.    It's well worth revisiting now, as we live with wall-to-wall liberal militancy and mouth-frothing 'I told you so'-ism.   

More on this topic soon -

Conor

"A present defaults – unless the crowd declares itself": Alain Badiou on Ukraine, Egypt and finitude

Thinking the Revolution - A review of Richard Bourke and Niamh Gallagher's The Political Thought of the Irish Revolution

 Ireland, in spite or even because of its claim to a great literary culture, is not a country much associated with intellectuals.   Two of the country's greatest writers, Jonathan Swift and Edmund Burke, can justly be called anti-intellectual intellectuals, with their scabrous and ferociously negative portrayals of 'projectors' (Swift) and the revolutionary cabals of the philosophes (Burke).  In the annals of intellectuals dealing in politics, one thinks of O'Connell's brilliant but cruel evisceration of Thomas Davis.   The great cultural revival of the late 19th century was built on the work of scholars, antiquarians, critics, archaeologists, but it is Yeats and Synge whom we now remember.   

It was the signal achievement in more recent times of the late and sadly lamented Seamus Deane to assert the equality - at the very least in his own work - of scholarship and critique with literary activity and expression.    A significant poet and the author of one very fine novel, Deane nevertheless poured the primary energy of his career into scholarship and criticism of the highest order.   Unlike many of his peers, Deane was never afraid to consider Irish literature as a zone not only of aesthetic representation or experience, but of intellectual and even ideological exploration and activism.    He was, therefore, our premier historian of ideas.   

Richard Bourke, a one-time student of Deane's at UCD, has in the course of his career picked up the baton and forced the issue of intellectual history into that amorphous zone, 'Irish Studies', with a rigour and seriousness still rare among his contemporaries.    His most recent book, an anthology entitled The Political Thought of the Irish Revolution, published in an illustrious Cambridge series, and edited with Niamh Gallagher, not only pushes the matter further still, but extends it to pedagogical ends and to a wide readership.   Here the reader will find between the same covers a wide variety of Irish political writing and thinking, of the left and of the right, in defence of the Union, and in condemnation of it.

I review this rich and fascinating collection in the current Dublin Review of Books.   My thanks, as ever, go to Maurice Earls for making this review possible.

Conor

The Primacy of Politics

Adorno - The Repeal of the Bourgeois Era

 

Pro domo nostra 

When during the last war–which like all others, seems peaceful in comparison to its successor–the symphony orchestras of many countries had their vociferous mouths stopped, Stravinsky wrote the Histoire du Soldat for a sparse, shock-maimed chamber ensemble. It turned out to be his best score, the only con­vincing surrealist manifesto, its convulsive, dreamlike compulsion imparting to music an inkling of negative truth. The pre-condition of the piece was poverty: it dismantled official culture so drastically because, denied access to the latter's material goods, it also escaped the ostentation that is inimical to culture. There is here a pointer for intellectual production after the present war, which has left behind in Europe a measure of destruction undreamt of by even the voids in that music. Progress and barbarism are today so matted together in mass culture that only barbaric asceticism towards the latter, and towards progress in technical means, could restore an unbarbaric condition. No work of art, no thought, has a chance of survival, unless it bear within it repudiation of false riches and high-class production, of colour films and television, millionaire's magazines and Toscanini. The older media, not designed for mass-production, take on a new timeliness: that of exemption and of improvisation. They alone could outflank the united front of trusts and technology. In a world where books have long lost all likeness to books, the real book can no longer be one. If the invention of the printing press inaugurated the bourgeois era, the time is at hand for its repeal by the mimeograph, the only fitting, the unobtrusive means of dissemination.

Adorno, Snow White and the Witch - The Critique of Optimism

 

Oyer the hills - More perfectly than any other fairy-tale, Snow­ White expresses melancholy. The pure image of this mood is the queen looking out into the snow through her window and wishing for her daughter, after the lifelessly living beauty of the flakes, the black mourning of the window-frame, the stab of bleeding; and then dying in childbirth. The happy end takes away nothing of this. As the granting of her wish is death, so the saving remains illusion. For deeper knowledge cannot believe that she was awak­ened who lies as if asleep in the glass coffin. Is not the poisoned bite of apple which the journey shakes from her throat, rather than a means of murder, the rest of her unlived, banished life, from which only now she truly recovers, since she is lured by no more false messengers? And how inadequate happiness sounds: "Snow-White felt kindly towards him and went with him." How it is revoked by the wicked triumph over wickedness. So, when we are hoping for rescue, a voice tells us that hope is in vain, yet it is powerless hope alone that allows us to draw a single breath. All contemplation can do no more than patiently trace the ambiguity of melancholy in ever new configurations. Truth is inseparable from the illusory belief that from the figures of the unreal one day, in spite of all, real deliverance will come.

Thinking with Adorno about Giorgia Meloni on the cusp of power in Italy - 'In Fascism, the nightmare of childhood has come true'

The bad comrade.

In a real sense, I ought to be able to deduce Fascism from the memories of my childhood. As a conqueror dis­patches envoys to the remotest provinces, Fascism had sent its advance guard there long before it marched in: my schoolfellows. If the bourgeois class has from time immemorial nurtured the dream of a brutal national community, of oppression of all by all; children already equipped with Christian names like Horst and Jurgen and surnames like Bergenroth, Bojunga and Eckhardt en­acted the dream before the adults were historically ripe for its realization. I felt with such excessive clarity the force of the horror towards which they were straining, that all subsequent happiness seemed revocable, borrowed. The outbreak of the Third Reich did, it is true, surprise my political judgement, but not my unconscious fear. So closely had all the motifs of permanent catastrophe brushed me, so deeply were the warning signs of the German awakening burned into me, that I recognized them all in the features of Hitler's dictatorship: and it often seemed to my foolish terror as if the total State had been invented expressly against me, to inflict on me after all those things from which, in my childhood, its primeval form, I had been temporarily dispensed. The five patriots who set upon a single schoolfellow, thrashed him and, when he complained to the teacher, defamed him a traitor to the class - are they not the same as those who tortured prisoners to refute claims by foreigners that prisoners were tortured? They whose hallooing knew no end when the top boy blundered - did they not stand grinning and sheepish round the Jewish detainee, poking fun at his maladroit attempt to hang himself? They who could not put together a correct sentence but found all of mine too long - did they not abolish German literature and replace it by their 'writ' [Schrifttum]? Some covered their chests with mysterious insignia and wanted, far from the sea, to become naval officers when the navy had long ceased to exist: they proclaimed themselves detachment and unit leaders, legitimists of the illegitimate. The crabbed intelligent ones who had as little success in class as the gifted amateur constructor without connec­tions had under liberalism; who therefore, to please their parents, busied themselves with fret-saw work or even, for their own plea­ sure, spun out intricate designs in coloured inks at their drawing boards on long afternoons, helped the Third Reich to its cruel efficiency, and are being cheated once again. Those, however, who were always truculently at loggerheads with the teachers, inter­rupting the lessons, nevertheless sat down, from the day, indeed the very hour of their matriculation, with the same teachers, at the same table and the same beer, in male confederacy, vassals by vocation, rebels who, crashing their fists on the table, already sig­nalled their worship for their masters. They needed only to misspromotion to the next class to overtake those who had left their class, and take revenge on them. Now that they, officials and re­cruits, have stepped visibly out of my dream and dispossessed me of my past life and my language, I no longer need to dream of them. In Fascism the nightmare of childhood has come true. 

If Teddy Was My Boss - Adorno on workplace gossip

Coming clean - To find out whether a person means us well there is one almost infallible criterion: how he passes on unkind or hostile remarks about us. Usually such reports are superfluous, nothing but pretexts to help ill-will on its way without taking responsibility, indeed in the name of good. Just as all acquaintances feel an inclin­ation to say something disparaging about everyone from time to time, probably in part because they baulk at the greyness of ac­quaintanceship, so at the same time each is sensitive to the views of all others, and secretly wishes to be loved even where he does not himself love: no less indiscriminate and general than the alien­ation between people is the longing to breach it. In this climate the passer-on flourishes, never short of damaging material and ever secure in the knowledge that those who wish to be liked by every­one are always avidly on the lookout for evidence of the contrary. One ought to transmit denigratory remarks only when they relate directly and transparently to shared decisions, to the assessment of people on whom one has to rely, for example in working with them. The more disinterested the report, the murkier the interest, the warped desire, to cause pain. It is relatively harmless if the teller simply wants to set the two parties against each other while showing off his own qualities. More frequently he comes forward as the appointed mouthpiece of public opinion, and by his very dispassionate objectivity lets the victim feel the whole power of anony­mity to which he must bow. The lie is manifest in the unnecessary concern for the honour of the injured party ignorant of his injury, for everything being above board, for inner cleanliness; as soon as these values are asserted by the Gregers Werles1 of our contorted world the contortion is increased. By dint of moral zeal, the well­ meaning become destroyers.

Adorno - Representation of the intellectuals

 

Vice-President 

Advice to intellectuals: let no-one represent you. The fungibility of all services and people, and the resultant belief that everyone must be able to do everything, prove, in the existing order, fetters. The egalitarian ideal of interchangeability is a fraud when not backed by the principle of revocability and responsibility to the rank and file. The most powerful person is he who is able to do least himself and burden others most with the things for which he lends his name and pockets the credit. This seems like collec­tivism, yet amounts only to a feeling of superiority, of exemption from work by the power to control others. In material production, admittedly, interchangeability has an objective basis. The quanti­fication of work processes tends to diminish the difference between the duties of managing director and petrol-pump attendant. It is a wretched ideology which postulates that more intelligence, ex­perience, even training is needed to run a trust under present conditions than to read a pressure-gauge. But while this ideology is obstinately upheld in material production, the intellect is subjected to its opposite. The is the doctrine, now gone to the dogs, of the universitas literarum, of the equality of all in the republic of scholarship, which not only employs everybody as overseers of everybody, but is supposed to qualify everybody to do everybody else's work equally well. Interchangeability subjects ideas to the same procedure as exchange imposes on things. The incommensurable is eliminated. But while the first task of thought is to criticize the all-embracing commensurability that stems from exchange relationships, this commensurability constitutes the intellectual relations of production which turn against the forces of production. In the material realm interchangeability is what is already possible, and non-interchangeability the pretext for preventing it; in theory, which ought properly to see through this kind of quid pro quo, interchangeability serves to allow the mechanism to propagate itself even where its objective antithesis is to be found. Non-interchangeability alone could arrest the incorporation of mind into the ranks of employment. The demand, presented as obvious, that every intellectual achievement should be performable by every qualified member of an organization, make the most blinkered academic technician the measure of intellect: where is this very man to find the ability to criticize his own technification?

Thus the economy effects the levelling process that then calls after itself in anger "Stop thief!" In the age of the individual's liquidation, the question of individuality must be raised anew. While the individual, like all individualistic processes of production, has fallen behind the state of technology and become historically obsolete, he becomes the custodian of truth, as the condemned against the victor. For the individual alone preserves, in however distorted a form, a trace of that which legitimizes all technification, and yet to which the latter blinds itself. Because unbridled progress exhibits no immediate identity with that of mankind, its antithesis can give true progress shelter. A pencil and rubber are of more use to thought than a battalion of assistants. Those who neither give themselves up wholly to the individualism of intellectual production nor are prepared to pitch themselves headlong into the collectivism of egalitarian interchangeability, with its inherent contempt for man, must fall back on free collaboration and solidarity, with shared responsibility. Anything else sells off the intellect to forms of business and therefore finally to the latter's interests.

The Erosion of Solidarity by Damaged Life - Adorno

 Cat out of the bag 

Even solidarity, the most honourable mode of conduct of socialism, is sick. Solidarity was once intended to make the talk of brotherhood real, by lifting it out of generality, where it was an ideology, and reserving it for the particular, the Party, as the sole representative in an antagonistic world of generality. It was manifested by groups of people who together put their lives at stake, counting their own concerns as less important in face of a tangible possibility, so that, without being possessed by an abstract idea, but also without individual hope, they were ready to sacrifice themselves for each other.

The prerequisites for this waiving of self-preservation were knowledge and freedom of decision: if they are lacking, blind particular interest immediately reasserts itself. In the course of time, however, solidarity has turned into confidence that the Party has a thousand eyes, into enrolment in workers' battalions – long since promoted into uniform – as the stronger side, into swimming with the tide of history. Any temporary secur­ity gained in this way is paid for by permanent fear, by toadying, manoeuvring and ventriloquism: the strength that might have been used to test the enemy's weakness is wasted in anticipating the whims of one's own leaders, who inspire more inner trembling than the old enemy; for one knows dimly, that in the end the leaders on both sides will come to terms on the backs of those yoked beneath them. A reflection of this is discernible between individuals. Anyone who, by the stereotypes operative today, is categorized in advance as progressive, without having signed the imaginary declaration that seems to unite the true believers – who recognize each other by something imponderable in gesture and language, a kind of bluffly obedient resignation, as by a password – will repeatedly have the same experience. The orthodox, but also the deviationists all too like them, approach him expecting solidarity. They appeal ex­plicitly and implicitly to the progressive pact. But the moment he looks for the slightest proof of the same solidarity from them, or mere sympathy for his own share of the social product of suffering, they give him the cold shoulder, which in the age of restored Pon­tiffs is all that remains of materialism and atheism.

These organi­zation men want the honest intellectual to expose himself for them, but as soon as they only remotely fear having to expose themselves, they see him as the capitalist, and the same honesty on which they were speculating, as ridiculous sentimentality and stupidity. Soli­darity is polarized into the desperate loyalty of those who have no way back, and virtual blackmail practised on those who want nothing to do with gaolers, nor to fall foul of thieves.

Teddy slices and dices the nice little things in life

 

How nice of you, Doctor 

There is nothing innocuous left. The little pleasures, expressions of life that seemed exempt from the responsibility of thought, not only have an element of defiant silliness, of callous refusal to see, but directly serve their diametrical opposite. Even the blossoming tree lies the moment its bloom is seen without the shadow of terror; even the innocent 'How lovely!' becomes an excuse for an existence outrageously unlovely, and there is no longer beauty or consolation except in the gaze falling on horror, withstanding it, and in unalleviated consciousness of negativity holding fast to the possibility of what is better. Mistrust is called for in face of all spontaneity, impetuosity, all letting oneself go, for it implies pliancy towards the superior might of the existent. The malignant deeper meaning of ease, once confined to the toasts of conviviality, has long since spread to more appealing impulses.

The chance conversation in the train, when, to avoid dispute, one consents to a few statements that one knows ultimately to implicate murder, is already a betrayal; no thought is immune against com­munication, and to utter it in the wrong place and in wrong agree­ment is enough to undermine its truth. Every visit to the cinema leaves me, against all my vigilance, stupider and worse. Sociability itself connives at injustice by pretending that in this chill world we can still talk to each other, and the casual, amiable remark contributes to perpetuating silence, in that the concessions made to the interlocutor debase him once more in the person of speaker. The evil principle that was always latent in affability unfurls its full bestiality in the egalitarian spirit. Condescension, and thinking oneself no better, are the same. To adapt to the weakness of the oppressed is to affirm in it the pre-condition of power, and to develop in oneself the coarseness, insensibility and violence needed to exert domination. If, in the latest phase, the condescending gesture has been dropped and only the adaptation remains visible, this perfect screening of power only allows the class-relationship it denies to triumph more implacably. For the intellectual, inviolable isolation is now the only way of showing some measure of solidarity. All collaboration, all the human worth of social mixing and par­ticipation, merely masks a tacit acceptance of inhumanity. It is the sufferings of men that should be shared: the smallest step towards their pleasures is one towards the hardening of their pains.

The wrong life of intellectuals cannot be lived rightly - Teddy gets on the case

If bad boys should tempt you. – There is an amor intellectualis [Latin: abstract love] for the kitchen staff, the temptation for those who work theoretically or artistically, to relax the intellectual [geistigen] claim on oneself, to lower one’s niveau, to follow all manner of platitudes in the matter [Sache] and expression, which one had rejected as an alert appraiser. Since no categories, not even that of cultivation [Bildung: education], can be proscribed to intellectuals anymore, and a thousand demands of hustle and bustle endanger the concentration, the effort of producing something with a measure of integrity is so great, that scarcely anyone is still capable of it. The pressure of conformity, which burdens everyone who produces something, furthers lowers their demands on themselves. The center of intellectual [geistigen] self-discipline as such is understood to be disintegrating. The taboos which comprised the intellectual [geistigen] stature of a human being, often sedimented experiences and unarticulated recognitions, direct themselves continuously against one’s own impulses, which one learned to condemn, which however are so strong, that only an unquestioning and unquestionable juridics [Instanz] can halt them. What applies to the life of the instinctual drives, applies no less to the life of the mind: the painter and composer, who forbid themselves the use of this or that color combination or chord contrast as kitschy, the author who finds that a linguistic configuration gets on their nerves as banal or pedantic, react so forcefully because there are layers within them which are drawn by such. The rejection of the hegemonic overgrowth of culture presumes that one has participated enough in the latter to feel it in one’s fingertips, as it were, simultaneously drawing from this participation the forces to dismiss it. These forces, which make their appearance as such in individual resistance, are for that reason by no means of a merely individual sort. The intellectual conscience, in which they are integrated, has a social moment so much as the moral superego. It crystallizes in the conception [Vorstellung] of the right society and its citizens. If this conception is set aside – and who could still blindly subscribe to it – then the intellectual compulsion towards the bottom loses its inhibitions, and all the junk which the barbaric culture has left behind in the individuated [Individuum] comes into view: half-education, laxness, cloddish trustfulness, shoddiness. Mostly it is rationalized as humanity, as the wish to make oneself understandable to other human beings, as cosmopolitan responsibility. But the sacrifice of intellectual self-discipline is borne far too easily, to really believe that it is indeed one. This is drastically evident when observing intellectuals whose material situation has changed: as soon as they have convinced themselves even the slightest bit that they must earn a living by writing and nothing else, they send the same junk into the world, down to the last nuances, which in their lusher times they once denounced with the utmost ferocity. Entirely like formerly wealthy emigres, who can finally be as greedy in foreign lands as they always wanted to be at home, so do those who are impoverished in Spirit [Geiste] march enthusiastically into the hell, which is their heaven.

The Cheer of the Gratefully Oppressed - reacting to the death of Queen Elizabeth

Queen Elizabeth II has died.   She was 96, and held the British throne for over 70 years.    She witnessed prodigious change in her lifetime - as anyone of her age, rich or poor, upper or lower class, has done.    She has presided over messy family history - her alcoholic sister Margaret, her playboy husband, her mostly unattractive and lumpen children, from the horsey Anne to the non-sweating but potentially paedophiliac Andrew.  Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, to be sure, but the Windsors were not and are not the only unhappy family in the world.   Elizabeth is greatly admired for her adherence to her duty as monarch and as lynchpin of the UK  constitution.   And that is fair enough, but she is hardly the only person who has done her duty in her particular  station in life.   And most of those dutiful persons do not get the same ridiculous praise for doing their jobs competently.

Yes, the death of a British monarch occasions the most extraordinary volumes of cliché, platitudes, fawning, and po-faced bullshit.    Here in supposedly republican Ireland, we are not immune to this disease.  On the contrary, the airwaves are awash with the most repulsive forelock-tugging masquerading as serious 'commentary'.   Battalions of Irish journalists and politicians queue up to recount joyfully and breathlessly the moment when the Queen was so delightfully condescending as to lift an eyebrow or fart in their general direction.    The juice that has been squeezed out of the Queen's cúpla focail at her speech in Dublin Castle during her visit in 2011 is of so vast a volume as to precipitate greater sea-level rise than the coming collapse of the Greenland ice-cap.   Why do we fawn so?  Why do we fawn so in the Republic of Ireland, where we are not crown subjects?  Why do we so relish the opportunity to abase ourselves?  Why do we accede so gratefully in our own oppression, as Joyce scathingly but accurately put it?

The monarchy is the centrepiece of the constitution of the United Kingdom, certainly.    But it also has functioned as a most wonderfully effective ideological apparatus.   Marxist writers such as Gramsci and Althusser (the former a major influence on the latter) expended a lot of consideration thinking about why and how capitalist societies, characterised as they were and are by instability and gross inequality in wealth, political power  and cultural legitimacy, manage to cohere and to reproduce themselves, and to repel, quash, silence or marginalize radical or revolutionary ideas and sentiments.   Gramsci suggested that liberal democracies, through various institutions of both state and civil society, manage to produce and reproduce 'hegemony', or a kind of leadership at the level of ideas, morality and culture.  Back in the 1980s, when Mrs Thatcher's Conservative governments dominated British politics, thinkers such as Stuart Hall sought to understand the capacity of the Thatcherite programme to saturate British political discourse.   Thatcherism was so powerful and successful as to win even a very substantial working-class vote.   To a leftist like Hall, this was an exceptional instance of the poor voting directly contrary to their own interests.   Only an extraordinarily dense and textured web of ideological production could so convince the lower middle class and the working class of Britain that Mrs Thatcher's values and goals were isomorphic with their own - the very quintessence of hegemony.

In the 1970s, Althusser wrote his famous essay on 'Ideological State Apparatuses', to try to think a similar problematic.   Drawing on Freudian theory, Althusser argued that 'ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence'.  He also suggested that 'ideology has a material existence'.   What he meant was that humans experience the unfairness and inequity of the society in which they live as a series of contradictions which are not resolvable in rational terms.   Ideology - ideas and practices (hence the idea that ideology has a material existence) - offers apparent resolution of these contradictions on an imaginary level.   For Althusser, as for Gramsci, ideology is produced and reproduced all across everyday institutions of civil society - the most obvious such institutions would be education and the media.   But Althusser's stress on the materiality of ideology also allowed him to see ideology operating at the level of practice, an even more influential way of 'manufacturing consent' to society's structures than any propaganda or misinformation.   When a student sits in a seminar room or lecture hall, for example, she is learning not just the manifest information or material which her  lecturer puts before her.  She is also learning, by her very actions, how to sit and pay attention, how to remain silent and concentrate, how to defer to a supposed authority, and. by the time exams come around, how to reproduce that combination of information and consent as the 'right' exam answer.   

The monarchy, with its massive sense of tradition, its colourful spectacle, its rituals, its language and nomenclature, is such an apparatus in Britain but, because of the history of empire, with an extraordinary global reach.  The monarchy, no matter the dutifulness or decency or stolidity (or grotesqueness) of its actual members, has been and is a machinery by which inequity, class prejudice, unfairness are produced and reproduced in Britain.   The monarchy influences Britons not merely by explicit 'interpellation' (Althusser's term) or suggestion but by its very embodiment of unearned wealth, prestige, and elitism.  The monarchy, no matter how much reformed or modernised (or vulgarised) it  may be now and in times to come, is the antithesis of democracy and freedom.    The sooner it goes the better for all.

Some reading:

From Jacobin: 

The British Monarchy Has Woven Itself Into the Fabric of Capitalism

James Connolly: The British Monarchy Is an Affront to Democracy

The 'incomparable Tom Nairn', one of Britain's greatest critics of monarchy:

The Sociology of Grovelling

And from Jacobin again, a statement on the value and power of  republicanism: 

The Political Tradition of Republicanism Should Be a Touchstone for Democratic Socialists

Conor