







Postcapitalism Paul Mason

chosen by Caroline Lucas

Nobody would doubt that Britain is going through a political crisis, but the crisis is not only political. Britain is a divided country, with communities ravaged by years of crushing austerity and marginalisation. Those who voted to leave the EU were not one homogenous group, but a clear pattern emerging from the vote on 23 June is of a rising-up of people who have felt cut off from a political and economic system that has continued to fail them.

Paul Mason’s Postcapitalism (Penguin) has given me inspiration in these dark times. His vision of a more equal and more empowered world is one that many will share, and his description of how to achieve it chimes with my belief that only through systemic change can we deliver a fair economy that serves people well in the long term.

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Specifically, I’m taken with Mason’s call for a universal basic income to tackle insecurity and potentially rebalance the power between worker and employer. It’s striking that this policy – long on the fringes of debate – has recently seen backing from senior figures in the Labour party, the SNP and mainstream thinktanks.

Mason shows how we can attack the creaking system by setting up and joining credit unions, creating new local currencies in our communities and by urging politicians to implement regulation in parliament. That combination, of acting locally to rebuild economic security while keeping pressure on lawmakers, is crucial to any future social change – and is more relevant now than ever.

Amid the chaos, and with the UK economy on the brink, it’s sometimes hard to imagine that another way of doing things really is possible. But it’s crucial that we do more than simply fight against further austerity – we need a vision for a way forward, too. If we’re serious about the alienation exposed by the referendum then we need measures to redistribute power as well as wealth, and we need them now.

Thinking big is never easy, but, as Mason puts it so well: “It is absurd that we are capable of witnessing a 40,000-year-old system of gender oppression begin to dissolve before our eyes yet still see the abolition of a 200-year-old economic system as an unrealistic utopia.” It’s now down to progressives to rise to the challenge laid down by the referendum. Let us empower people to take control: of our economy, of our democracy and of our future.

Revolt on the Right by Robert Ford and Matt Goodwin

chosen by James Meek

Facebook Twitter Pinterest James Meek. Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian

Victory for the campaign to leave the EU was the result of an informal alliance between three groups of voters who had little in common except a destination, like three strangers sharing a taxi. Or, in this case, two strangers and the driver. One group saw the EU as a project to impose an alien socialist regime on Britain. The second saw it as a project to impose an alien globalised capitalism on Britain. The third was the least well understood in advance of the vote and generally less well-off than the others, responding to low wages; low pensions; unaffordable housing; mill, mine, factory and fishery closures; unemployment; Britain’s diminished military might; the challenging of traditional masculine values. It focused the blame for its defeats and disappointments on the EU and immigration, which were seen, shaped through clever storytelling by the tabloids, as a single enemy to be smitten.

Writers such as Owen Jones and Lynsey Hanley have written superbly, from the inside, on what happened to Britain’s working class after the post-war social compact began to break down in the 1970s and 80s. Their books are informative and good reads. But for those who want to add a narrower, more directly pertinent and data-rich source to their understanding of what happened in Brexit and the last general election, I recommend Robert Ford and Matthew Goodwin’s Revolt on the Right (Routledge), which charts the rise of Ukip in depressed post-industrial communities in the north of England and the Midlands. They correctly forecast that “left-behind” white voters would remain a political force in England after last year’s election. And how.

Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

chosen by Elif Shafak

Arendt’s criticism of the nation state and her remarks on the flimsiness of historical memory are deeply relevant now

Some writers you read because they tell you what you want to hear; some you read even though they tell you what you are not ready to hear. Hannah Arendt belongs to the latter group. A German-born Jewish political theorist who escaped Europe to the US during the Holocaust, her critical intelligence and calm wisdom are sorely needed today. After the horrific terror attacks by Islamic State in Istanbul airport, I thought about her. I have no doubt that, had Arendt been alive, she would have offered a powerful study on the dual nature of fanaticism and terrorism. She would also, I imagine, examine the fate of the refugees, the disintegration of the EU as a common ideal, the rise of anti-politics and the uncertainties across Europe and in post-Brexit UK. She is the perfect companion to depressed minds and bruised souls in their quest for hope and understanding.

We must read Arendt whenever and wherever fear shapes public space and there is a rise in xenophobia, nationalism and tribalism. Her criticism of the nation state, her sharp warning against “thoughtlessness” – or what she regarded as the non-thinking self – and her acute remarks on the flimsiness of historical memory are deeply relevant in the present moment. So too is her analysis of economic growth, which she saw as a dangerously accelerating momentum that could one day turn into a curse.

Today, as we are trying to make sense of political and economic ambiguities, I would wholeheartedly recommend Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (Yale) by the brilliant scholar Elisabeth Young-Bruehl. How could Arendt have been witness to the worst in humanity and not lose her humour, her bright vision, her amor mundi? She once said, “Even in the darkest times, we have the right to expect some illumination.” That illumination comes from her books.

Rubicon by Tom Holland

chosen by David Runciman

Rubicon reminds us that civil wars in ancient Rome resulted in slaughter and famine – we should count our blessings

The week before the Brexit vote I decided to start rereading Tom Holland’s Rubicon (Abacus), his excellent popular history of the dying years of the Roman republic. I thought it would be bracing to spend some time in a world where the twists and turns of popular politics really could spell carnage. The mess we are now in has faint echoes of the death throes of the republic: personal vendettas that spill over into political chaos; populists who pander to the crowd and then don’t know how to silence it; foolhardy gambles and buyer’s remorse. But in truth, our politics is very different: the stakes are so much lower. We reach for Roman analogies – “Et tu, Gove?” – but we don’t really mean them. Civil wars in ancient Rome resulted in slaughter followed by famine. Politicians who fell out of favour could find their tongues nailed to the door of the senate. I suppose we should count our blessings.

If there is comfort to be had in reading about a time when bad political choices meant death and ruin, there is also a serious warning in Rubicon. Some commentators who fear the worst of contemporary democracy talk about the risk of a descent into fascism. This seems unlikely: even Donald Trump is not really much of a fascist, and nor is Nigel Farage. What they are is Caesarists. Caesarism traditionally means the rise of the charismatic strongman, who uses military force to circumvent the constitutional order. Julius Caesar, of course, was the original. In modern democracies, Caesarism comes in a variety of forms: its hallmarks are appeals to the people over the constitution, the promise of decisive action against the ditherers and a limited regard for the truth. It is harder to spot than fascism because all democracy has an element of Caesarism in it, just as all Caesarism contains an element of democracy. And some of the great heroes of democracy have been Caesarists, at least to their enemies: Lincoln, Gladstone, Lloyd George. But it still poses a threat, because Casearism means the end of democratic patience and its replacement with popular impatience. Our current rabble-rousing politicians may not have private armies; they may not even have very much by way of charisma. But there is a real and growing popular impatience with democratic politics. Reading Rubicon reminded me that things can keep going in a fractious and impatient state for a long time; but when they go wrong, they go wrong quite quickly.

From Vienna to Managua by Marie Langer

chosen by Susie Orbach

Susie Orbach. Photograph by Linda Nylind for the Guardian

A book that has moved me and stays with me in times of political turbulence is Marie Langer’s From Vienna to Managua (Free Association). A Viennese analyst, Langer moved to Spain in the 1930s, during the civil war, to work with the International Brigades in their fight against fascism. In 1942, she moved to Argentina and established psychoanalysis there, extending its reach to working-class women in Buenos Aires. A particular focus was bringing a psychoanalytic ear to problems of infertility. She combined a Marxist understanding with psychoanalysis to address the emotional ills of the patients she encountered.

Langer was driven to engage publicly as well as with her patients. As Latin America was riven by civil war, she put together the Internationalist Team of Mental Health Workers who went to Nicaragua to help the efforts of those who were fighting the Somoza dictatorship. When the regime fell, the Internationalist Team devoted itself to the rebuilding of civil society, training local psychoanalysts to promote mental health from the ground up. She addressed the phenomenon of frozen grief – the monumental mourning that society and individuals needed to go through but found so hard. In this sense she was presaging the widespread acceptance of the effects of trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder. For inspiration, read her and her brilliant biographer, Nancy Caro Hollander.

The Likes of Us by Michael Collins

chosen by David Kynaston

Since the small hours of 24 June, my thoughts have kept turning back to 2004. Partly because that summer’s Euros saw the coming of the Age of Rooney, an English footballing era now almost certainly ended by the stout-hearted Icelanders. More because that was when the first impact was about to be felt of the Labour government’s grotesque miscalculation about the numbers arriving from the New Europe. And above all because that was when I first read Michael Collins’s then newly published The Likes of Us: A Biography of the White Working Class (Granta).

Predating by seven years Owen Jones’s better-known Chavs, it is an intimate study of a class that was already starting to be demonised by some as racist, xenophobic and ignorant. Focusing mainly on Southwark and its south London environs, Collins painstakingly but vividly gives us the case for the defence. Specifically, he considers two fundamental developments.

The first was the physical destruction (“comprehensive redevelopment”) of the area, demolishing many slums, but also almost as many houses and shops that could have been saved. The loss of community was almost total, while the new built environment was all too often brutal, inhuman and alienating.

The other development was large-scale immigration from the mid-1950s. When Enoch Powell in 1968 warned about “rivers of blood”, increasingly destabilised white working-class Londoners backed him almost unreservedly. Collins sees this as an understandable reaction. Over the years, the Southwark working class had tolerated a manageable number of strangers in their midst – but now they found themselves at the sharp end in terms of employment, school and housing implications.

Of course, last month’s working-class explosion of anger and frustration came largely from outside London, and Collins’s account does not embrace the way in which, since the 1980s, large swaths of ravaged, de-industrialised England have virtually been ignored by London. It remains, though, an indispensable slice of contemporary history.

Reason in Revolt by Fred Copeman

chosen by Paul Mason

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Paul Mason. Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian

Only one event in Britain’s economic history parallels Brexit, and that is the moment in September 1931 when Britain left the gold standard. The cause was austerity, and a government’s inability to make it stick. The effect was the breakup of the global order. The trigger was the Royal Naval mutiny at Invergordon. The instigator was Fred Copeman.

A workhouse boy, and, as his MI5 file put it “a bully and a general bad character”, Copeman was among the crowd of sailors at the Scottish port who decided to protest against a 25% pay cut by going on strike. As the men argued about whether to stay ashore or march on Glasgow, Copeman – with no political experience – found himself thrust to the top of a ladder to speak. He said: “We are sailors, not soldiers, and our strength is in the fleet itself. Whatever we do, everybody must be in it. There must be no question of splitting one section from another. The marines must enter this fight with us at the beginning.”

They returned to their ships and took control, paralysing the Atlantic fleet, which had been assembled for manoeuvres. Within days, the National Government – a Labour/Tory coalition – was forced to reverse austerity and break sterling’s link to gold.

Copeman’s memoir Reason in Revolt, published in 1948, is written in the prose of a Suffolk workhouse boy educated by the navy, the Communist party and a year of infantry combat alongside radicals from almost everywhere on earth. Long out of print, his account of the 1930s moves from naval unrest, via the hunger marches and riots that greeted the Depression, to Spain where he eventually commanded the British battalion of the international brigades, and on to Moscow. It was here that, on the eve of the war, Copeman witnessed the brutality and inequality of Soviet rule and, on return, promptly quit the Communist party.

His account of blundering into the second day of the battle of Jarama in 1937, in command of six Russian-built machine guns for which there was no ammunition, condenses the misery and elation of warfare into a few pages. Through Copeman’s eyes we see what happens when history gets suddenly cranked up to full speed, plunging non-political people into decisive political events. Unfortunately, Brexit may be just one episode in a rerun of global chaos.

It is hard, watching Louisiana cops teargas black protesters, and Syrian refugees herded behind razor wire, to believe the current levels of disorder and brutality in the world will simply die back down to normality. More likely there will be cathartic events of the kind Copeman’s generation lived through.

On 24 June Marine Le Pen, leader of the French far right, gloated in the European parliament “look how beautiful history is”. She meant the breakup of global systems and the rise of racist populism. Copeman’s generation didn’t ask for the job of restoring the global order and suppressing fascism, but they had to do it. All they had to draw on were the same basic principles of human decency that guide Copeman. He writes: “I have always had a rather extreme attitude to this question of sharing the riches of the world, and have found it hard to accept a principle which lets some live lavishly while others starve.”

Noughts & Crosses by Malorie Blackman

chosen by Shami Chakrabarti

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Shami Chakrabarti. Photograph: Antonio Zazueta Olmos

“I used to comfort myself with the belief that it was only certain individuals and their peculiar notions that spoilt things for the rest of us. But how many individuals does it take before it’s not the individuals who are prejudiced but society itself?”

So writes Malorie Blackman in Noughts & Crosses (Doubleday Children’s). Recent months have been almost dystopian, revealing a neglected, divided kingdom along lines of wealth, geography and generation. Political and financial elites are watching their holiday homes (if not their principal residences) burning down with far greater cost to their poorer neighbours. The fire-starters have no plan for reconstruction and our media has not served us well. “The news lies all the time. They tell us what they think we would want to hear.”

Blackman is one of our greatest contemporary British writers and her modern classic is capable of inspiring many more generations of “young adult” readers of all ages. Dystopian fiction has often provided the most searing critiques of “real” life, politics and society, and the first book in Blackman’s epic series is no exception.

While it is an unashamedly political novel, its message of hope comes from the central love story between two characters on opposite sides of the racial divide. The secret to Blackman’s book, and our collective futures, perhaps lies in remembering the value of sacrifice and solidarity.

Inventing the Future by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams

chosen by Zoe Williams

I was wondering why, after a lifetime of being on the losing side of politics, Brexit felt like such a spectacular failure. I’ve realised that it was not to do with the inevitability of a downturn, the coming smallness, the cynicism of the right and their casual baiting of the beasts of racism that they will struggle to control; it was the fact that the left had abdicated. The voice of progressive optimism, the belief that people could pool their dazzling minds in the creation of a better future – that voice was simply absent. Even if that had existed on the Leave side, it would have been better than nothing.

In Inventing the Future (Verso), Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams take on the two key questions of the left, if I can characterise them broadly: why are we so bad at saying stuff, and do we have anything to say? Their diagnoses of the shortcomings of what they call “folk politics” are perceptive, clear, brutal, but respectful. Their prescription for the future can seem vertiginously sudden – you’ll need to either get on board with a basic citizen’s income, or form a better refutation than “it sounds expensive”, and fast. But critically, they identify our urgent task: to own modernity. “From early communist visions of technological progress, to Soviet space utopias, to the social democratic rhetoric of the ‘white heat of technology’, what set the left apart from the right was its unambiguous embrace of the future,” they write, and sometimes I hum that to the tune of “This Land Is Your Land”.

The British Dream: Successes and Failures of Post-war Immigration by David Goodhart

chosen by Julian Baggini

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Julian Baggini. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod for the Guardian

Anyone surprised by Brexit should read David Goodhart’s The British Dream: Successes and Failures of Post-war Immigration (Atlantic), through gritted teeth if necessary. Even if, like me, you don’t entirely agree with the his analysis, Goodhart highlights many truths that are hard for progressives to take, so hard that many on the left preferred to dismiss him as a reactionary apologist for racism rather than critically engaging with his argument.

What Goodhart got right was that a significant proportion of the population feel they have been not just ignored but despised by a cosmopolitan, multicultural, urban elite. The world of stable, homogeneous communities and steady, dignified jobs they once knew has gone. For them, immigration does not create new vibrant, diverse communities. Rather, it seems to displace their old ones.

Since the book was published, this analysis has become something of a commonplace. What most offended people, however, was Goodhart’s refusal to accept that the perceptions of this aggrieved class were not entirely based in ignorance, false information and prejudice. Goodhart argued that, for many people, immigration has not been a good thing, and that well-meaning urban liberals who can’t see this only make matters worse by labelling those who disagree as bigots.

The book should have provoked a serious debate in which progressives dared to countenance the extent to which opposition to immigration might be more reasonable than they usually suppose. This didn’t happen enough, in part, I think, because people assume that to grant this is to endorse an anti-immigration policy. But this doesn’t follow. Many of the problems caused by immigration are not inevitable. Rather, they are a consequence of failing to manage the integration of immigrants properly. Goodhart’s book came both too early to be taken seriously enough, and too late to stop the tide of discontent that reached its height on 23 June.

Beyond the Pleasure Principle by Sigmund Freud

chosen by Darian Leader

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The turbulence of our times is not simply the product of ill-starred foreign policy and an unchecked march of capital, but reflects in part the catastrophic forgetting of history that marks our new dark ages. Although culture tells us to remember, and the past is increasingly retained in the digital media that immerse us, there are even more powerful forces that negate human history. These are the forces that Sigmund Freud studied in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Penguin), published in 1920.

If life seems easier and less complicated for everyone if we follow the paths of least resistance, we are drawn back to a violence and pain that go beyond the boundaries of homeotstatic pleasure. According to Freud, we repeat as we forget those traumas we have been unable to process, and human life is divided between the work of Eros, which binds and builds, and that of Thanatos, which unbinds and destroys. Society is constructed around an imbrication of Eros and Thanatos, yet at certain moments the two come apart and the fragile architecture of what we have built collapses. The Brexit vote was, for many, almost symbolic of these two opposing trends: the effort to connect and unify, and the will to undo and subtract. For Freud, civilisation is never a given but involves an active endeavour to keep Eros and Thanatos synthesised rather than split apart.

This task is made all the more difficult by the fact that human subjectivity tends to assert itself in acts of refusal or disengagement. When Monty Python’s Brian tries to disperse a crowd by telling them “You’re all individuals”, one of them cries out “I’m not”. The act of self-exclusion is felt to confer identity. The series of resignations that followed Brexit was in one sense a perpetuation of this logic – each person voted themselves out – even if a deeper reason was no doubt the horror, for some, of having their wishes granted.

Freud’s text is perhaps more relevant than ever today, giving us tools to think through not only the vortex that Brexit opened up but the related questions of nationalism, violence, geopolitical disintegration and our hopes for the future.

Molloy by Samuel Beckett

chosen by Terry Eagleton

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Terry Eagleton. Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian

Samuel Beckett’s novel Molloy (Faber) is the work of a man who once said that his favourite word was “perhaps”. As with all of Beckett’s work, it trades in uncertainties and ambiguities, as memory collapses, the present is illegible and the future is plunged into obscurity. In one sense, this is a tragic situation, if one can use so grandiose a term of Beckett’s meticulously minimalist world. Yet doubt and instability can also be on the side of the political angels. This, after all, is a man who saw active service in the French resistance, and was later to be decorated by the French state for his bravery. If Beckett fought the Nazis by lying in ditches, rifle at the ready, he also did so by countering their lethal certainties with a world in which everything is makeshift and provisional. Ambiguous messages, missed encounters, thwarted hopes and endless waiting may be the stuff of his writing, but they were also the routine experiences of the French underground forces of which he was part.

It’s not that there’s no exactitude in his writing, rather that what we have is a scrupulous discrimination of finer and finer nuances of nothingness. A work such as Molloy is both precise and elusive, pedantic and impossible to pin down. So perhaps there’s something to be said for uncertainty after all. Nothing, ultimately, is more certain than death, which may be one reason why there’s no death in Beckett’s world, just an endless process of decay and disintegration. It’s natural to wish for some definitive closure or determinate conclusion. But what if the arrival of Godot turned out to be a complete catastrophe?