Remaking History

As we try to oppose the right-wing colonisation of history, we can seek inspiration from a concept originally popularised by the Marxist writer Walter Benjamin. His notion of ‘revolutionary nostalgia’ was based on the idea that we can create a radical present only by understanding it as the accumulation of earlier revolutionary times. The imperative for finding solace in the past was clear for Benjamin, writing as he was during the dark days of Nazism. Benjamin argued that the present always has scope for re-making — a moment of constant revolutionary possibility (Jetztzeit, or ‘now time’) — and that the only way to mobilise collective action is to look at images from history. For Benjamin, the task of the revolutionary historian was to interrogate the past by identifying fragments discarded by bourgeois historians, who understood history only as a natural continuum.

In this reinterpretation, history ceases to be a smooth celebration of the oppressors’ victories. Instead, Benjamin showed that the past — with the clues it offers for class emancipation — was inextricably intertwined with forging the revolutionary present in our collective imagination. History in this reading becomes a radical instrument, no longer something given and void of political potential. As the philosopher Susan Buck-Morss once wrote, summarising Benjamin’s ideas, ‘revolutionary motivation was thus created by looking backward’.

Central to Benjamin’s reinterpretation of the relationship between the past and the present is his idea of the dialectical image, in which ideas from history combine with our present reality to form new ‘constellations’ of revolutionary ideas. Buck-Morss summarises this notion as follows: even as the past constantly recedes, the present acts ‘as a lodestar for the assembly of its fragments’. The task is therefore to constantly excavate moments in history that offer clues for creating a revolutionary present.

What would such a process look like in the context of the British left? For several decades after the Second World War, the Left built and defended institutions: universal healthcare, free education, public spaces. The Left must reach back in time to demonstrate that proof of the socialist future is contained in celebrating such achievements. We should reject the disavowal, so often made by those on the ‘progressive’ left, of the past as a time of backwardness. As F. Murray Abraham puts it in Season 2 of The White Lotus: ‘They used to respect the old. Now, we’re just reminders of an offensive past everybody wants to forget.’

In countering such attitudes, we must champion the universal basic services of previous eras: the National Health Service, childcare provision, free university tuition. We know that these are achievable again, precisely because they have been achieved already, both in Britain and around the world. To fund a revival of such policies in Britain today — guaranteeing social care, social housing, free meals for children and the elderly — would require little more than, for example, a tax on private savings, much of which is simply funnelled into the stock market. In concrete terms, as economists at University College London have recently demonstrated, all this would require is reducing the personal allowance threshold to £4,300 per year. In such a way, basic privileges won by the socialist movements of the twentieth century could fairly easily be reinstituted.

Peterloo to Punk

When people express a yearning for the past, they are expressing dissatisfaction with the present. The British left has recently assumed — mistakenly — that this is merely a dog whistle for opposition to immigration, to racial and social diversity, even to feminism. This assumption is often correct. But a yearning for the past can also be about other things that cannot be reduced to reactionary instincts: it is, or can be, about a desire for safety, for reassurance, for community, all of which have been eroded by decades of neoliberal atomisation.

History, as understood through our collective memory, is a reservoir from which political projects of all denominations can draw inspiration. Indeed, successful political projects must of necessity draw on the past. As Antonio Gramsci wrote from his prison cell in Mussolini’s Italy, a philosophy of praxis — a project capable of challenging capital’s hegemony — must take as its starting point the common sense of the people it seeks to mobilise.

Common sense in the English vernacular is, of course, another term that has long been colonised by conservatives. But for Gramsci, thinking and writing in Italian, ‘common sense’ had no such bias. Rather, it represented something fragmentary and inchoate: the often incoherent and contradictory social knowledge of a group that builds up over time. For Gramsci, common sense is the knowledge of the world that we take for granted and through which we filter and understand new events.

In keeping with such notions, modern British common sense would include the history of empire, the NHS, rationing, Windrush, Enoch Powell, Thatcher, the poll tax riots, the Beatles, punk rock, Britpop, Brexit, the Grenfell tragedy, having an opinion on how to pronounce ‘scone’, and what you call a bread roll. The task of political leaders is to find diamonds in the rough of such disparate references, articulating a vision of the future using the social sediment of the past, and combining them into a coherent political project for the present.

Just as Margaret Thatcher was able to articulate an apparent resolution to the crises of the 1970s by combining animosity against racialised others, anti-socialism, and the morals of the market, so too are Farage and Reform attempting to link migration to the decline of community and public services.

But common-sense understandings of the past also contain the kernels of a radical political project. Stories such as those of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, the starving workers at Peterloo, the 1945 landslide, the striking miners of the ’80s, and the striking junior doctors in our own era can be woven together to invoke a tradition of resistance against unjust rulers. So too we might find in the anti-apartheid movement of the 1980s — and in protests against the illegal war in Iraq and in current movements opposing genocide in Palestine — evidence that British common sense can be channelled towards militant anti-racism.

Even the Second World War — now mobilised almost exclusively by a British right born a generation later — can be re-articulated not as a source of post-imperial nationalistic pride, but as a salient example of national anti-fascist solidarity, part of an enduring tradition that reaches from the Battle of Cable Street in 1936 to the bombed-out streets of 1940s London and the streets where last summer thousands gathered to counter far-right demonstrations.

As Gramsci tells us, our common-sense understandings of the past contain multitudes. They can be both regressive — as the Right well knows — and progressive. Our task must be to recover the radical elements of the past and articulate them in service of a transformative political project for the future.

Before and After Time

In an article in the last issue of Tribune, Hugh Corcoran made explicit use of revolutionary nostalgia to imagine what a socialist approach to communal eating would look like. Corcoran conjured a vision of a beautiful restaurant by drawing on the memory of a time before the rise of the soulless modern eatery:

I have imagined and I have built a room now.… To eat and drink and talk. It is a room built from our imaginations, a misremembering of the past. A memory of a time when conversation flowed and the friendless were taken into the company and the vices of drink and smoke were nothing but pleasures.… Our restaurant does not have a computer till, or an online booking system, a credit card payment system, interactive menus, or a social media presence. The food cooked is simple, and there is only wine or water to drink. It is a fantasy of course, just like those games we play with our children. But it is a fantasy which exists in that room and which portrays to us an idea of a different world.

This is the kind of radical reclaiming of nostalgia that we must call for: for recovering the best parts of a time before in aid of a remade time after. We want to live in a time before and after surveillance capitalism infiltrated our subjectivity, a time before and after landlords took all our money, a time before and after our food began poisoning us with microplastics.

Yes, there are injustices and contradictions in the past that must also be acknowledged, debated, and overcome. We refuse to ignore the misogyny, racism, homophobia, xenophobia, and class violence waged by the Right and by imperial Britain. But we jettison the memory of Britain’s socialist past at our peril.

In our post-neoliberal present, temporal assumptions have been inverted. The future is no longer the bright place it was once assumed to be. In recent times, the Left has fallen back onto its historic default of believing in the promise of technology. Witness proposals for a fully automated luxury communism (commendable though they may have been), which were fundamentally flawed by their inability to recognise the political power of nostalgia.

Far more unfortunate are the various forms of centrist nostalgia that have emerged in recent years, which have merely paid lip service to socialist and social democratic memory. Keir Starmer’s celebrations of the NHS and other state institutions constitute mobilisations, however half-hearted, of a watered-down socialist heritage. But because they have arrived alongside warnings that Labour must imminently impose austerity and cuts to public services, these rallying cries have been shown up to be hollow in the extreme.

There is another way — one that involves more authentically engaging with the historic achievements of socialism, in order to remind ourselves that our own present might be just as revolutionary. Ignoring this necessity will mean that the Right will continue to define what ‘common sense’ means and advance its own forms of reactionary nostalgia. What is needed to counter this formidable opposing tendency is — in the final instance — a vanguardism of the past.