Writing.

Here’s a handy, centralised list of all the things I’ve published “elsewhere online”—most recent first.

You can also:

• browse the ‘theory’ tag on my blog to see articles I’ve posted here;

• follow me on Twitter, if you want to know when new work appears online, here or elsewhere; and, if you like,

• support my work on Patreon to receive extra bits that aren’t available elsewhere, plus the satisfaction of knowing you’ve helped me to survive!
  

There Is No One Weird Trick.
New Socialist, Oct 2021

“To think ecologically is to think across scales: micro and macro, the one and the many, the system and the self, the instantaneous and the durational. To recognise and practice the interrelation of theory and action. To follow Daniel Bensaïd’s mole, who “does not withdraw to hibernate, but in order to drill a tunnel… does not disappear, [but] merely becomes invisible.” We forget at our peril the lesson of the mole, whose slow deep efforts below ground creates the conditions of possibility for the moments of emergence to and through the surface. The mole reminds us that each of us has something to contribute to the struggle, whether or not we fit into the dominant (and macho) paradigms of Parliamentary lobbying or spectacular direct action.”

Serve the People? Some questions on tenants’ union consciousness.
New Socialist, Dec 2020

Co-written with Tom Gann, this critical reflection on a discussion event featuring a number of tenants’ organisers caused a moderate amount of controversy when published—hence my selection of accompanying image.

“Drawing people into an organisation on the basis that the organisation is powerful and the decisive victory is just around the corner risks disillusionment and disengagement when the great event doesn’t come. It also risks tactical mistakes based on an overestimation strength, and an unwillingness among members to do the slower, more cunning, less dramatic work of building capacities to change existing conditions. Organisational growth is certainly desirable as a means of increasing collective capacity to act, but its centring, by any means, and at the expense of the necessary care and attention, is potentially extremely dangerous.”

Popular Feminisms
New Socialist, Aug 2020

“The difficulty with constructing a popular feminism is that feminism isn’t, and never has been, only one thing. How could it be? Women’s lives—their experiences, identities, challenges and desires—are multiple, and inflected by numerous different circumstances. The feminist wager is that enough of these experiences (particularly of oppression) are common across all women that bonds of solidarity become possible. The feminist problem is that what counts as an experience of oppression is, like so much else, hegemonically defined by those with the most power, to the detriment of those women whose lives and selves, for various reasons, do not fit the hegemonic mould.”

Mutual Aid, Incorporated.
New Socialist, April 2020

“Without a doubt, the state should be doing so much more than it is. There are forms of suffering that mutual aid should not have to try and alleviate; there are basic needs that we should not have to meet; there are forms of oppression that the people do not yet have the power to overcome. There is a risk that the practice of mutual aid can, at the most practical level, operate in a way that is indistinguishable from charity or volunteerism. There is a risk that, in doing what the state will not, we launder its reputation, we stop it having to confront and deal with the suffering that it produces. We must never allow the practice of mutual aid to lessen our demands for justice or to normalise the huge gaps in state provision as it currently exists. Rather, by practicing unconditional love and kindness with and for one another, we can sharpen our demands. We can realise what might be possible—those little seeds, those glimpses of a better world—and we can fight for it, together.”

False Promises.
New Socialist, Feb 2020

A response to a marketing email from the Keir Starmer for Labour Leader campaign.

“…the very notion of possibility requires that we imagine what is impossible, and aim for it. To think beyond actually-existing power, to think towards that dream-horizon where things might happen, things might change. If the structure of politics makes our demands, our hopes, our lives impossible, the answer is not—can never be—to amend those hopes, to shrink ourselves down into a size and shape that the present system can accommodate. That Starmer knows how to inhabit this structure, that he is at ease in this system that was made for people just like him, may seem a comfort to those of us who feel beaten-down and desolate over what happened in December. Imagine, an experienced hand at the tiller, guiding us expertly through the storm. But this promised panacea, this elixir, is poisonous. To smoothly and uncritically inhabit a system is to perpetuate it; and it is the system that’s at fault, the system that must be challenged.”

A Socialism equal to the world.
OpenDemocracy, Jan 2020

“The transactional logic of profit and loss has rendered possibility impossible. A politics grounded solely in the economic is a politics incapable of addressing this difficulty… Our relationships and affective lives—the ways we construct, express, and actualise ourselves and one another; the ways we feel—these too are sites of struggle.”

Light in the Darkness.
New Socialist, Dec 2019

Something I wrote on the eve of the 2019 UK General Election, about how we might become lights for one another.

“We strike the matches, and in the flames we see a vision of the world-to-come. The glow lights our way, and guides us towards one another, until there are so many of us that the light and the warmth cannot be snuffed out. Together, we refuse the darkness, we commit ourselves to life—to the warm glow, the radical cosiness of a world that embraces and affirms every body.”

To Each According to their Needs! On Labour’s Universal Basic Services Report. (co-authored with Tom Gann)
New Socialist, Sept 2019

“An open-ended policy that remains responsive to social needs as they shift and change requires that its administrators listen attentively to the ways in which those needs are stated and re-stated by popular movements. The relief of present suffering and the undoing of austerity are clear and urgent goals, and should not be understated. The restoration of what has been destroyed over the past decade is of critical importance, and should be central to any left politic within the UK. The ideas in this report move us towards that goal, but also suggest an opportunity to create a form of government that has the potential to be not just restorative, but transformative.”

There's More to Life than This! An argument for joy, against economism.
New Socialist, June 2019

“What if, instead of efficiency and productivity, we valued joy, slowness, interconnection? What if, when we say for the many, not the few, we think that ‘many’ on a global and a more-than-human scale? What would it mean, for example, to consider bees as world-creating workers, as world-historical actors?”

Against the New Vitalism.
New Socialist, Mar 2019

“The ‘new ground’ the vitalists claim is not new at all. It is, as we have seen, ground in which actually existing fascism is rooted—ground which is not unspoilt, but is itself a construct, an attempt to retcon some sort of pre-Enlightenment way of knowing out of Romantic and Idealist principles. Fascism has always re-appropriated the past in its attempt to colonise the future. The ‘Vitalist Manifesto’ is, sadly, just one among many of these colonising gestures.”

We Are Not Your Flock: Reading Angela Smith with Rancière.
New Socialist, Feb 2019

“Do you feel entitled to any degree of collective self-determination that expands beyond being framed as “a voter”? Well, then, you must be middle class, and thus out of touch with Real Proles, who know they they should be guided. Then there’s the question of expertise, which declares that working class people who want to act politically (which is to say, collectively, from below, ‘with and for others’) are clownish, childlike; this silly desire to have effects and consequences in a sense beyond technocratic individualism works to precisely mark them out as those who should be ruled, guided, governed. They’re too foolish to know that politics is a ‘job’ for ‘experts’, and that’s precisely why they should never be permitted to get anywhere near the sources of power.”

Review of ‘Fig Tree in Winter’ by Anne Graue.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Aug 2018

“The poems found in Fig Tree in Winter do not lay bare their roots, the traces of their source. Rather than present us with erasures, or even direct references, Graue pieces and stitches, a word here, an image there. As a result, the poems have a sort of self-sufficiency: they arise from but do not depend upon the original text. Graue’s process draws out and weaves together images and themes, which coalesce delicately with the hazy (un)logic of a lucid dream.”

Europe Endless: on unity, borders, and the risk of forgetting.
Medium, June 2016

“British —used here, as in popular discourse, as a cypher for English — identity is constructed, then, in the negative: it is the closed door, the battened-down hatches, the presence of absence. Our national anthem celebrates not landscape or people or values, but whichever rent-a-monarch happens to be occupying the throne; our de facto second anthem, Rule Britannia, tells us not what Britons are, but what they are not (“slaves”, apparently — a statement whose class and racial implications are as broad as they are vile, which is to say very).”