Part of what Acid Corbynism is about is finding ways of exploring what it would mean in cultural and political terms to really act like you’re conscious of that. On a philosophical level, I’m part of a tradition which is very sceptical of the whole liberal, European view of the self. If you accept that the bourgeois, individual subject is a myth, the European tradition is to be a revolutionary and the Buddhist tradition says you should give up all your possessions and live in a monastery. They’re quite different but there’s a whole terrain in between to explore. I don’t think we would so hubristic as to think we could be that point of conversion but we would want to create a space where people explore those kinds of ideas.
Before Blair, especially in the Nye Bevan/Tony Benn tradition there was always a sense that our enemy wasn’t just the Tories, but a whole culture and whole cultural hierarchy, and anything that was opposed to that we should be sympathetic to. In the 1960s and 1970s, for the first time you have a generation not growing up worrying about how to feed their children. The consequence of that are people start to ask, why given they no longer have to experience scarcity, why they have to continue to experience any degree of exploitation. [...]
Every political project will implicitly have an ideal human in mind. Thatcher wanted to create entrepreneurial, hard working individuals. Without imposing a template, we would want to develop humans who would find it easy to collaborate with others in a creative way in as many contexts as possible, without paranoia and fear. Someone who’s comfortable with their own complexity and the complexity of the society they live in.
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