Telling stories, precariously…
By: Paul Mason
Tags: Politics

Telling stories, precariously…

Stuff I was trying to do in 2017

January: The three most important things a journalist can do are to gather news, investigate and bear witness. I went to Washington DC to do #3, on 20 January 2017. Here’s my report on J20…

February: I travelled to New Caledonia to finish the research on my play Divine Chaos of Starry Things, about Louise Michel and the other communard women deported there in 1873, and their interaction with the indigenous Kanak people. I learned a lot about the Kanaks’ folklore and their relationship to nature, some of which is in the play, and also that even sympathetic historians and archivists have difficulty processing the actions of people who’ve experienced revolutions, often imputing madness or fabrication to actions and stories that could have been logical and real. Here’s the short film I made…

March: We began rehearsals for Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere. It was intense — not only because getting off-book is harder than it looks but because when the BBC is broadcasting your play, and your play attacks Donald Trump, the script becomes something of a battlefield…

Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere played for fourperformances, admission free, at the Maria, Young Vic Theatre. But its transmission on BBC TWO was delayed twice because of the BBC’s election rules, TX-ing on 22 July.

Lara Sawhala and Paul Mason in Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere. Photo: David Sandison

April: Divine Chaos of Starry Things opened at the White Bear Theatre. It’s the story of a complex individual in a situation few people are familiar with; I am a man writing about women, a white European writing about indigenous people — and using a traditional theatre format i.e. naturalism, which a lot of my contemporaries no longer respect. So it provoked mixed reactions. But the theatre was full every night and was even invaded at one point by a socialist choir who took over the curtain call to sing one of Louise Michel’s songs. Above all, the reaction of the actors gave me confidence to go on what I was trying to achieve: to write complex, real working class characters and defy the continual demand for didactic exposition and simple endings.

Robyn Hoedemaker, Lisa Moorish and Ottilie Mackintosh in Divine Chaos of Starry Things Photo: Richard Davenport

David Rawlins in Divine Chaos of Starry Things Photo: Richard Davenport

May: Theresa May called the election. I spent most of the month writing and broadcasting calling for two things: a Labour government and a Progressive Alliance tactic to deliver it. When Theresa May went AWOL for nearly a week — as we now know, she was on the verge of cracking up — I was the only journalist who broke the polite silence to ask where she was. When the Tory front bench indulged in dog whistle racism against Diane Abbot I called it out live on TV. In case you think this kind of thing makes you popular in the liberal, centrist circles where everyone is friends with people on the other side, or doesn’t really care about the outcome of elections, it doesn’t.

June: We could have won. You could feel Tory support crumbling. Labour’s right wing and its pathetic bureaucracy have to take the blame for failing to secure a majority. Some of its MPs were too busy preparing leadership challenges. Others, as we will probably see, would rather have any other government than one committed to dismantling neoliberalism and ending wars of intervention.

Amid the recriminations, I was invited to the conference of Progress, the Blairite wing of Labour. I tried to etablish areas of agreement but there weren’t many:

July/August: I began the writing stage for next book and ducked out of public commitments for a while during my mother’s terminal illness.

September: The world was only now starting to digest the gravity of the new situation. A Corbyn government is possible; a hard Brexit is impossible; the right wing establishment eviscerated Trump’s administration of Fourth Turning crazies and Mueller was closing in. These were the themes that began to dominate the discussions I was having, including at the New York Times Athens Democracy Forum, at Sinn Fein’s summer school in Cork, where I was invited to discuss Postcapitalism, and at Labour Party Conference. In Brighton, Momentum’s political education arm, The World Transformed, staged a stunning, vibrant four day event and one of the highlights for me was this discussion of neoliberalism, recorded by TYT.

October: The month opened with another attempt to report and bear witness — this time during the independence referendum in Catalonia. It stuns me that the modern, post-Stalinist left is so deaf to the progressive potential of national struggles when waged by primarily urban, young and cosmopolitan minded people against a semi-fascist elite as in Madrid. I wrote this for the Guardian, and took this photo, which sums up the state of bourgeois politics in 2017…

2 October student demonstration in favour of Catalan independence in Barcelona

Another stand-out moment was getting to address the assembled leaders of European social democracy in Brussels. It’s taken radical social democracy something like a decade since 2008 to get to the point where it can be said on a mainstream platform that neoliberalism is broken, not mendable, and has to be replaced by a new model to deliver environmental and social justice.

November: I attended an intense two-day seminar on my book Postcapitalism organised by Jena University, in which I learned to easily recognise the German phrase “Paul Mason says X but he is entirely incorrect”. In Berlin, courtesy of the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, I reprised some of the themes of Postcapitalism for a policymaking and activist audience from the SPD.

Meanwhile Culture in the Era of Global System Failure was the third piece of theatre-based work I did this year — a public boardgame, produced together with theatre-maker Sam Williams at the Volksbuhene in Berlin. The whole thing is recorded here, but basically we tried to simulate the way a competitive breakup of a multilateral system would work, and how that might then affect the international markets and cultural styles that have grown up around art, theatre and cinema in the neoliberal era.

Paul Mason and Sam Williams, Der Rote Salon, Volksbuhene, Berlin. Photo: David Baltzer

December: I spent the month running up to Christmas in Sydney, Australia, trying to complete a first draft of my upcoming book Clear Bright Future. I am looking forward to 2018 as a year struggle and resistance, in which all you can do is go on uncovering the stories that matter and telling them, and in which the radical humanism of Karl Marx will cut through all the bullshit thrown around during the 200th anniversary of his birth. As for the specifics, follow me on Twitter…

Finally: Through it all I’ve produced 50+ weekly columns plus reviews and features at the Guardian. The most frequent topic was the Trump and the international right wing populist movement (12x) then 11 columns on Labour and social justice policies, 11 on the travails of the UK elite and Brexit, six each on social democracy in the EU and UK defence policy, 2x on China, 2x on historical events and numerous one-offs.