This week, exhausted by the news, I dragged myself out of the house to a book fair, where I came across a new collection of utopian fiction by radical women.
Yes, dear reader. Laurie Penny is searching for comfort in this cruel, cruel world:
When basic survival seems like a stretch goal, caught as we are between the rich and the rising seas, hope feels like an unaffordable luxury. The precise words I used to the bookseller were: “Shut up and take my money.”
Currently touring the United States, after touring much of Europe and visiting Australia, Laurie is once again explaining how hard it is to be radically left-wing, to be Laurie Penny, and how exhausting she finds the news.
There has never been a more urgent time for utopian ideas, precisely because the concept of a better world has never felt further away… Utopias require that we do the difficult, necessary work of envisioning a better world. This is why imagination is the first, best weapon of radicals and progressives.
And being radical and progressive herself, and of course heroic, Laurie is doing that “difficult, necessary work” before our very eyes, at a venue near you, by railing against “late-capitalist patriarchy.”
From the anti-war movement to Occupy Wall Street to the reimagined Corbynite Labour party, everyone on the left are [sic] used to hearing… that we cannot point out what’s wrong with politics without instantly suggesting an alternative. This is nonsensical.
Expecting moral coherence and some concession to practicality is, says Laurie, “a great way of shutting down dissent.”
If you were being beaten up by a gang of armed thugs, you would be within your rights to demand that they stop doing so without listing alternative places they might land their blows – “not in my face” is enough. It is difficult to think clearly about a better world when you’re trying to protect your soft parts from heavy boots.
Because forcibly ‘occupying’ the entrance to St Paul’s Cathedral, as Laurie and her comrades did in 2011, and blathering about “revolution” and an unspecified “new world order” – and then being laughed at as self-flattering and pretentious – that’s exactly like “being beaten up by a gang of armed thugs.” During the commotion in question, Laurie explained that the failure to generate a coherent, remotely practical set of demands – any at all - was due to “attacks from a hostile press while surviving sub-zero temperatures in central London.” Needless to say, during the ‘occupation’ the temperature in central London was, while Autumnal, never close to sub-zero.