Conjunctural analysis and the crisis of ideas

This is a framing statement for a new Soundings series on critical terms for left strategy

There seem to be few certainties in contemporary western politics, and the available resources for understanding the tumult of current events have time and again proved themselves to be inadequate. This is a time of crisis across the political spectrum. It may not - yet - be the end of the long period of neoliberalism in the Anglophone world, but in the Brexit vote and Labour Party civil war in the UK, the rise of left and right populisms in Europe, and the election of Donald Trump in the USA, we can see how the contradictions in neoliberal politics have caused a fracturing of both left and right - destabilising the long accepted 'centre ground' of formal politics.¹

The crisis is lived and felt through changing labour patterns, transformative communications technologies and the disruption of long held ways of life. Nowhere is this seen more clearly than through contemporary migrations, from country to city and across borders and continents. People are moving, demographics are changing and the lived experience of peoples are shifting. These changes produce contradictory responses. Even the utopians who thought digital technologies would usher in a golden age of democracy shudder at the way social media makes visible old hatreds and new prejudices. Gender, race, generation and sexuality are established battlegrounds in the contemporary culture wars happening on and off-line. Climate change is happening around us: we see it in each reading of the global temperature. We live in a feverish, restless world: politically, socially, environmentally.

The unfolding crisis is of course material, expressed in increasing inequality, worsening health, economic and environmental instability, and violence, both in dramatic outbursts on the street and strategically by states. But it is also a crisis of ideas - and one that is not unexpected. The loss of trust in traditional institutions as the keepers of collective wisdom, as those institutions have failed to reinvigorate themselves for the challenges of a changing world, has had consequences that have long been anticipated.

Thus, as Alan Finlayson has argued, in the EU referendum conspiracy theory met the trite utilitarianism of the establishment and won.² Conspiracy theories are of course nothing new; what is new is their extent and the depth of their penetration into our cultural and political lives. We see this when senior members of the Conservative Party disavow the role of the expertise on which the credibility of political parties has been based for decades, or when the Republican President's campaign videos reference far-right conspiracy theories about a global elite. When mistrust of 'the system' goes right to the very top, we are in unchartered territory. An intellectual crisis has become visceral, in the same way that the trends traced by charts of global temperatures were translated in Kuwait last summer into 54 degree heat.

This new series of articles, following on from Soundings Futures and The Kilburn Manifesto, will contribute to the task of making sense of contemporary politics by sharing a set of ideas that we have found essential to our own analysis of politics, including a specific approach to examining and understanding those ideas. Our aim is to give a theoretical and historical introduction to a number of key political ideas, and trace how they have emerged, but also to discuss their relation to political practice, grounding them in empirical examples. We also hope to emphasise pluralism, showing that subtle differences in the ways in which concepts are understood within different contexts and traditions can lead to very different interpretations of the best way to build a better society, but also that these are differences on which critical alliances must be built. We also see the series as an opportunity for writers to think core concepts of left politics anew for this changing world. It will provide a space of left debate for all who are interested in the political - those engaged in lived struggle as well as in the domains of formal politics. While the series was planned before Brexit and Trump, it...