Introduction

We have set out two proto-ideological projects that seek to reinvigorate socialist political ideology. Each has conceptual arrangements that help make sense of the world and establish arguments as to why and how socialism remains an active and valued way of thinking about politics. These chapters have been mainly descriptive: apprehending the shape of each political ideology as it lives in PSM. This chapter seeks to focus on the nature of ideological construction in more detail and in the midst of live political contention. As we have argued, proto-ideologies are upstarts: combative insurgent traditions that wish to elbow into public spaces not only in relation to their ideological foes but also their fellow traveller traditions. It is the latter that we shall focus on. The main reason for this is that it is in the midst of debates for the meaning of socialism that the most intense political contention resides. If, say, a spokesperson for the Institute of Economic Affairs announces that rising unemployment is a necessary effect of market competition, then it is of no great interest to explore how any socialist tradition might challenge this. It would be neither surprising nor intriguing to see voices of opposition from any socialist position.

What is more interesting and instructive is the contention between DMN and Identitarian Socialism. As socialist proto-ideologies, both necessarily have to deploy similar political devices in their contentions, even if their meaning and their intentionality – the purpose to which those devices are put – are dissimilar. Both seek to establish an ascendance in relation to the meaning of socialism, which makes them rivalrous. And, in exploring the interactions between the two, we can see how much of the morphology set out in the previous two chapters is activated to generate affective and aesthetic tools which, as we have argued, are especially central to a protoideological project.

Weaponry

Aesthetic and affect

We will explore two bones of contention: Brexit and COVID-19. In each case, these two proto-ideologies articulate substantially different and antagonistic views. These views were clearly based in each proto-ideology’s own distinct concepts. Before we move on to do this, we need to return to the aesthetic and affective components of our model as set out in Chapter 3 in order to detail how they will be deployed.

DMN is a strong candidate for a proto-ideology. It has generated a considerable archive of commentary on a range of political issues. It has done so in a way that is anchored around a set of core concepts. It also contains within it a political purpose or advocacy and a sense of difference contestation in relation to other ideological traditions.

DMN is a proto-ideology that fundamentally seeks to retain a Marxist political tradition and adapt it to a recent past and present that, it claims, has been disrobed of the deadening effects of liberal and social-democratic managerialism. Its leitmotif is a recrudescence of politics as a historical venue for confrontation and progress. It puts class at the centre of this return of the political. Articulating a certain narrative about democracy and the nationstate, DMN sketches a vision of struggle based in organised mass agency and the possibility of new political parties. Its analytical lens might be described as realistic in the sense that political theory uses that term: cautious about political moralisation, cognisant of political incommensurability, and aware of the unique political resources offered by state sovereignty.

DMN is generated through a core set of writers, websites, and campaigns. Although each author might contest their collation here as co-authors of an ideological tradition, mutatis mutandis, there is regular cross-referencing and shared reaction/position taking. Writers share online publication venues which themselves cross-endorse each writer. Spiked, the podcast Bungacast, the blogs and news sites The Full Brexit, Northern Star, Compact, Damage, and the publisher Zero Books serve as the core platform for DMN.

Core concepts

Democracy

DMN’s most fundamental core concept is democracy. Democracy is that good in itself that founds discussions about the merits of all political phenomena that revolve around it. It is Archimedean. This is a normative foundation which establishes a mode of assessment for a wide range of political phenomena. It is decontested in that it either trumps other political values or it articulates those values as best realised through democratic procedures. Of course, democracy is arguably a core normative concept for many ideological traditions. But DMN deploys this term in ways that allow it to bind together its own unique constellation of core concepts. Democracy is central to DMN for two reasons, one immanent and the other more relational.

This final section of the book is a bit like the final bits of a textile art piece. The creative impulse is spent, the form is there, and now you need to sew it together, tidy up all the loose ends, weave them in, and finish it off. I have to admit this is my least favourite part of any project. I might not create so much artistic textiles these days, but I finished a jumper recently and for some reason chose stripes, which meant there were a lot of ends to weave in. My next project is a jumper worked from the neck down purely so there will be less to finish off. My intention here is to reflect on the value of taking space to consider my ontological perspective and how it has shaped my research, and bring together threads of how qualitative research, and particularly embodied and creative qualitative research, can border onto therapy, education, art, and science. The kind of research I have illustrated in this book has many positives; it captures and generates rich data and gives voice to those who are less often heard or who cannot easily express their stories in words alone. It allows us to find and express the rhythms inherent in our bodies, the bodies of our participants, and the world around us. It gives depth and richness when used alongside conventional research methods, and provides opportunities for engagement and dissemination that can have more impact with those outside of academia or our home discipline. However, this type of research can be challenging to negotiate, as techniques that intentionally open up the researcher and participant to the emotional content of stories mean that there is also the potential for risk, and to inadvertently wander over a boundary into uncharted territory.

Borders

The first border of qualitative research I considered is the one shared with therapeutic approaches designed to allow people to process their emotions and experiences. While researchers may receive training on methods, it is not common for them to receive the same kind of training and support on how to deal with people and their stories that therapists do. Researchers often choose to study emotional or difficult areas such as sexual or physical violence, mental health, poverty, or exclusion because of their own lived experiences.

The ethnographic tradition

In a major statement on criminological theories and approaches, Decker and Pyrooz (2013: 274) declare that ‘no substantive area in criminology is as closely tied to a methodology as gangs are to ethnography’, highlighting the emergence and persistence of the ethnographic study of gangs (Puffer, 1912; Thrasher, 1927; Whyte, 1943; Cohen, 1955; Miller, 1958; Cloward and Ohlin, 1960; Yablonsky, 1962; Short and Strodtbeck, 1965; Moore, 1978, 1991; Hagedorn, 1988; Vigil,1988; Decker and van Winkle, 1996). The early scholars exploring gangs and ethnography examined how race and ethnicity factored into the establishment of gangs, and also how migration, socioeconomic dynamics and an urban environment impacted on the way they organized and functioned. Insights into the interplay of such factors provided valuable understandings of other linked elements, such as marginalization, cultural background, societal organization and class, and the salience of these factors. Decker and Pyrooz (2013: 275) cite two examples: Lewis’ (1912) early ethnographic study of gangs documented how social exclusion produced by ethnic bias and economic discrimination led to further marginalization of new immigrant youths; and Puffer’s (1912) study on the treatment of gangs in Boston explored the challenges of integration of new immigrant groups, highlighting concepts of migration and discrimination.

The role of culture, cultural diversity, discrimination, and conflict in defining gang beliefs and values has been another key theme in early ethnographic studies. Both Thrasher’s (1927) and Whyte’s (1943) research in this area attested to the importance of culture. In The Gang: A Study of 1,313 Gangs in Chicago, Thrasher found Chicago gangs developing in areas that had seen huge shifts in their ethnic composition, resulting in unprecedented ethnic and racial diversity and social mobility, as well a loss of structure in neighbourhoods. Whyte’s work focused more on social exclusion and cultural isolation, specifically looking at how this affected socialization patterns and practices among Italian ‘corner boys’. Cultural and ethnic diversity means following values and practices that are often in conflict with mainstream society, which naturally leads to antagonism and a sense of alienation. In essence, ethnic culture can cause isolation from the mainstream. As Whyte discovered in his fieldwork, this isolation from the mainstream translates to not being able to access opportunities and institutions that assist in integration and assimilation, leading to further marginalization despite living in mainstream society.

In a celebrated essay published in 1958, cultural critic Raymond Williams argued that ‘culture is ordinary’, by which he meant that it comprises both common meanings and special processes of discovery and creative effort (Williams, 1958). Over 60 years later, former Labour MP and Chair of the House of Commons Public Administration Select Committee, Tony Wright, alluded to Williams’ essay in arguing that in a similar way democratic politics is ordinary, most conspicuously practised in the context of everyday life and common meanings (Wright, 2012). Administrative justice is ordinary justice, rooted in the everyday relationships of citizen and state and summoned in aid when those relationships break down. If its therapy is to be transformative, it must be social rather than resolutely individualistic, aimed at providing balm to wounds that are political, in the sense that they derive from the shared experience of the citizen body and entail healing that transcends the individual case. The justice inherent in public administration is the justice inherent in the common good. To realize that form of social justice, its background assumptions and ways of proceeding must be responsive to social need in ways that go beyond individual or legal justice. Administrative justice is, in other words, something more than ‘administrative justice’.

The poetry of street-level bureaucracy

It is rarely that the word ‘Ombudsman’ appears in a published volume of poetry. Yet it does so in a poem by Irish poet Dennis O’Driscoll in his 2012 collection, Dear Life. O’Driscoll, apart from a career as one of contemporary Ireland’s most celebrated poets and the distinction of compiling a collection of acclaimed interviews with his friend Seamus Heaney, spent almost 40 years as an official in Ireland’s Revenue and Customs service. The bureaucratic provenance of aspects of his work is playfully betrayed by titles such as ‘Head Office’, ‘Best Practice’ and ‘Paper Trail’, even when the subject-matter is not ostensibly that of his own desk and office. In ‘Revenue and Customs’, we hear how at the end of a working day the computer files are backed up, the water cooler left to its own devices and the open-plan office abandoned for the night.

The world of everyday citizen grievance is remote from the concerns of high politics and public policy, an apparently unfortunate manifestation of a ‘culture of complaint’ marked by personal disaffection, self-interest and collective alienation. The work of those whose professional lives, as street-level bureaucrats, case reviewers, mediators, tribunal members and ombudsman (‘ombud’) staff, are consumed in responding to such grievances in turn appears a necessary but largely unrewarding enterprise. Hermetically sealed from mainstream political thought, the contemporary ‘grievance culture’, occasionally interrogated for ‘lessons learned’ and ‘market surveillance’ purposes, is largely relegated to the awkward margins of polite conversation. When it percolates into political consciousness, it is likely to be in the context of rarefied debate about the constitutional implications of judicial review or the tragic drama of set-piece public inquiry, far removed from the ordinary and the quotidian.

The everyday ways of responding more routinely to citizen grievance, what might be called ‘administrative justice’ (as opposed to ‘administrative law’), are nevertheless a constantly moving target, subject to periodic adjustment and organizational tinkering. Law Commission reports, White Papers and select committee inquiries accumulate; processes for making official decisions and providing redress are constantly in flux. Yet despite national and regional variation, with notably more striking innovation in the devolved nations of the UK than in England, options for reform rarely escape the constraints of a legalistic form of consumerism. At best, citizen grievance assumes an instrumental purpose much like that of a disaffected focus group, to be managed more efficiently; at worst, it is perceived as largely irrelevant to democratic politics. Periodic change, halting and incremental, is technocratic and hygienic, the preferred recipe ‘more of the same’. When the UK Administrative Justice and Tribunals Council was abolished in 2013, together with its ambition of holistic oversight, its demise was greeted with little more than a muffled murmur of political dissent.

This book offers an alternative perspective drawn from the ordinary culture of ‘the street’, not the extraordinary ambience of judicial review in the High Court or of public inquiry. It claims for citizen grievance a measure of value that, far from being solely instrumental, is inherent to its place at the interface between street and state.

In the context of citizen grievance, the postliberal invocation of responsive legality is not without precedent in the literature of public administration, albeit expressed in rather different form. The interwar years in Britain were notably receptive to strains of political thought drawn from the traditions of philosophical Idealism, political pluralism, civic humanism and political pragmatism. In particular, those, such as William Robson and Laski, associated with the functionalist style of public law theory at the London School of Economics, drew on aspects of these traditions of thought in developing ideas about the relationship between citizen and state, and about the way in which the state should respond to citizen grievance. Despite the endurance of such approaches into the postwar period, their failure to take root, especially during the 1980s, became especially pronounced, as new forms of legalism and managerialism came to dominate an increasingly neoliberal discourse. In particular, the originally generous aspirations for administrative tribunals and public ombud institutions were attenuated, giving way to acquiescence in restricted forms of legality that defeated the more ambitious aspirations of earlier reformers. Responsive legality was not so much tried and found wanting, but rather not really tried.

Public administration and ‘the welfare of society’

In the field of public administration, the shockwaves felt in Britain by the renewed stirrings of the interventionist state during the First World War accentuated the ‘problem of bureaucracy’ and elicited the startled reactions of those who feared in the ‘new despotism’ the emergence of a constitutional crisis. Dicey’s advocacy of the rule of law and individual liberty represented a strong bulwark against the encroachments of collectivism and legislative innovation. Among those who undertook, from a very different perspective, to think through in some depth an alternative response was Robson, whose Justice and Administrative Law (Robson, 1928) remains a foundational text of the ‘functionalist’ style of public law theory (Loughlin, 1992, 2005). In his insistence on the importance of the common good, the general welfare and the rule of reason, Robson is representative of sustained attempts to find in such concepts a rival to the dominant strain of legalism in liberal thought, especially in its encounter with public administration in practice.