I am not a communist. Literally. Though God knows I have been called one for demanding a tea break when working in Florida. I half-pretended to be one when I worked for Marxism Today, the magazine of the Communist party of Great Britain, but I never joined. Which was lucky really, because when the business manager forgot to pay the electricity bills and everyone got sent home, they didn’t get paid as they were in the party, but I did.
But I loved it when the activist Ash Sarkar yelled at that puffer fish who presents Good Morning Britain: “I’m literally a communist, you idiot.” Sarkar is a great thing, as is fun communism. Where can I sign up? In the past, you see, I have had issues with communism. Cults, authority, centralisation – never mind gulags, secret police, rape, the imprisonment of intellectuals and mass killlings. There are two sorts of folk: those who want a programme of what to do and those of us who are incapable of following instructions, whether they come from Ikea or the cadre of Corbyn. We just don’t have it in us. We want a revolution we can dance to, not an allen key of self-righteousness.
I love Marx. Unlike most of his acolytes he could write; his words vibrate on the page. Just when you think you know about how the world is swirling, he says: “If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist.” In the words of Bob Dylan: “Don’t follow leaders/watch the parking meters.”
All kinds of unlikely people have declared themselves communists. When I worked at Marxism Today, posh old ladies would come in to dust the bust of Lenin in the basement. At that point, we all loved Gramsci and Red Bologna, where the Italian Communist party held power: the fun kind of communism, not the “tankie” Stalinist kind. Bologna struggled, as theorist Franco Berardi told us, because workers were pitted against what he called “precarious, underpaid young proletarians”. Ring any bells? They did not believe that any party could lead to communism. They wanted to rebuild society with no limitations; they were the Autonomia activists. This idea of cities breathing fire, of socialism in one country: all this was exciting, and like today’s young self-declared communists who fetishise automation as the ultimate liberation. “It’s about the desire to see the coercive structures of state dismantled, while also having fun,” says Sarkar.
But the glossing-over of what communism is, of who it killed, and seeing that as a moral equivalence with the deaths caused by capitalism, is idiotic ahistoricism. The idea of talking about communism with no centralised state is just that: an idea. The refusal of parts of the left to criticise Putin, or see the misery of Cuban peasants, Chinese workers, or those starving in Venezuela is sickening. The really great stuff being discussed by young leftists is not communism, it is anarcho-syndicalism – participatory local democracy. Corbyn is an unlikely step on the way to these localised utopias. For if there is any group of people that doesn’t allow freethinking, it is some of his followers, who see any microaggression against the great leader as punishable by death. Or worse if you are on Twitter.
If you want to be a proper communist you need to understand ideology, and this is currently a big failing. Your case has to connect to freedom. Still the right lays claim to this. Freedom for the many, not the few, yes … but each of us has also to be free. When communism connotes liberty, I will sign up. But as long as it is associated only with obedience, I literally won’t be buying the T-shirt.This fun kind of communism is a lovely commodity indeed. All I see is people saying: “Get with the project or you are persona non grata.” Same as it ever was. Comrades: at least read your own history.
Pottery for sanity is all very well. But show me the money
The mass overprescribing of antidepressants (one-in-six adults in England used them last year) is hardly news. It has a number of causes: cuts to GP services; minimal mental health provision; severely limited access to any kind of talking therapy beyond CBT and epidemics of depression and anxiety. You can be prescribed antidepressants by hurried doctors for anything from acute and extremely worrying symptoms to exam anxiety or menopausal insomnia.
The new health secretary, Matt Hancock, want new cures. Of course he does. He wants GPs to prescribe social activities: arts clubs, gardening, pottery. All these things are good. Everyone knows exercise and company is good. Part of being depressed, though, is often not being able to do what we know is good for us. “Social prescribing”, or setting up patients with these activities, is not a bad idea, but his offer of £4.5m for these schemes is chicken feed. It’s less than the cost of Boris Johnson’s second home.
We have a severe mental health crisis in the UK, and severely rundown mental health provision. Every day, I see very ill people walking around or sleeping on the streets. Every day, I hear of extremely ill teenagers with self-harm problems, eating disorders and suicidal thoughts; adults who are addicts and extremely lonely. We can argue over what is causing this degree of suffering; the fact is, it is there in front of our eyes. The medications work for some, and not for others.
So we urgently need to fund the alternatives properly and seriously, instead of endlessly talking about mental health issues in a more “open” way but stripping all services to the bone. This is the real crisis of the NHS. This new health secretary has to put more money where his mouth is.
How I maintain my strong anti-work ethic
I am apped out. Sorry, but most of them are bossy little widgets that I can totally live without. The news that scientists have developed an algorithm to work out the perfect amount of caffeine you need to perk up leaves me as cold as a frappe. Surely I can decide this for myself? No – it is apparently 200mg or something and they are working on an app to tell you this. “If you could come to work, drink caffeine and have your mental acuity improved by 40% for four hours, wouldn’t you like that?” No – quite honestly, I wouldn’t.
