Category: Events

Every year, our CSMCH-IASH Fellows present their work to the Centre’s research community. This year, it was the turn of Kristoff Kerl (Koln) to discuss some of his work-in-progress on Western countercultures in the 1960s and 1970s. Rory Scothorne sends this report – and you can follow the link below to hear Kristoff discuss his work in a short interview with the Centre director, Emile Chabal.

On Tuesday evening, students packed out a basement room to explore the radical, mind-expanding possibilities of sex, music and psychoactive substances. Kristoff Kerl’s talk on “Ecstasy and Cultural Revolution” never risked turning into an impromptu rave, but it did offer some valuable insights into the ambiguous “politics of ecstasy” which suffused the western countercultures of the 1960s and ‘70s.

“Ecstasy” here means not the eponymous drug – not popularised until subsequent decades – so much as a type of experience, in mind and body, which countercultural theorists believed could overcome the neurosis, repression and violence of modern life. Kerl focused on West Germany, but the counterculture he described was spread across the western world, from a focal point in Berlin to London, Berkeley, Paris and even – albeit much more muted here – Edinburgh.

The various strands that made up this diverse and complex drift against an equally vague cultural and social order shared a conviction that a particularly insidious form of social power was exercised through culture, and had to be challenged there too. This included areas that had been hitherto less politicised, such as bodily and sensory experience. For theorists like Sven Reichardt, Peter Bruckner and Raymond Martin, counterculture meant the pursuit of authenticity and liberation against the “alienation of the senses” and “sensorial deformation” that resulted from repressive structures like the bourgeois family, the state and the workplace, and were reinforced through much of mainstream culture. Overcoming this could be achieved, individually and collectively, through various experiences of “ecstasy,” which was portrayed as a kind of psychic weak spot in the walls of alienated life, attained via things like sex, dancing, confrontations with the police, yoga and psychedelic substances.

Historically, psychedelics – along with other, more established mind-altering substances like alcohol – have been viewed by some radicals as a means of reinforcing the status quo, enabling temporary escape rather than emancipation. The new counterculture of the ‘sixties, however, saw ecstatic experience as a means of self-improvement, enabling the reshaping of the self by making and reflecting upon new, horizon-expanding experiences.

It was also framed as an ingredient of collective action: “have a joint, transform your hatred into energy,” as one slogan put it. Yet the old concerns remained – theorists like Bruckner argued that there was also an “ecstasy of affirmation” or “ecstasy of philistines”, whereby drugs facilitated a retreat into strictly delimited scenes that failed to challenge the wider social order. Ecstasy had, therefore, to be somewhat deliberate and political if it was to produce radical change.

“Ecstasy” is therefore politically ambiguous, and Kerl demonstrated similar concerns in its application to pop music, sexuality and transnational networks. The music producer and festival organiser Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser was also a prominent countercultural theorist, and argued that pop music risked producing an order-affirming ecstasy if it didn’t break down the barriers between performers and listeners – something that could be achieved through rhythms that “let the masses go crazy,” elaborate light shows and the heightened sensory experience enabled by psychedelics.

Psychedelics were also seen as a means of heightening sexual experiences and reducing inhibitions, allowing people to discover their authentic selves. But this radicalism was hollowed out by the often highly heteronormative and patriarchal views of its advocates: acid-evangelist Timothy Leary, for instance, saw homosexuality as a perversion to be cured by LSD.

Psychedelics also played a role in the formation of new transnational countercultural networks, with Berlin becoming an international capital of ecstasy thanks to the greater availability of substances and the localised networks that grew around them. Kerl’s account of the international “hippy trail” – travelled and promoted by figures like Allen Ginsberg – stressed the role of orientalist caricatures. Counterculturals believed that the experience of psychedelic ecstasy was heightened by the innate authenticity of places that had been reimagined from afar. In fact, such far-flung experiences often happened in places frequented by westerners, allowing expat communities of ecstasy to form at sufficient distance to preserve the exoticism of foreign cultures through closer contact.

Angela Bartie (Edinburgh) offered a short comment, which was read in her absence by Centre director Emile Chabal. Angela noted Edinburgh’s own role in the currents of transnational counterculture. Amongst other things, she pointed to the small rhino’s head sculpture on the Informatics Building that commemorates the old site of Paperback Books, established in 1959 by the American Jim Haynes, who became a key participant in international countercultural networks.

Reflecting on Haynes’ involvement in founding Suck – Europe’s first “sexpaper” – and the Wet Dream Film Festivals in 1970-71, Bartie considered the heavily gendered politics of counterculture that Kerl had also mentioned. In its celebration of sexual “ecstasy”, how far did countercultures incorporate perspectives which challenged the male gaze rather than reinforcing it? Bartie noted the testimony of Sheila Rowbotham, whose memoir stresses the immense pressure on women in the 1960s to “liberate” themselves into a (hetero)sexuality that was still defined by and for men. Bartie’s comment reinforced Kerl’s own suggestion that the countercultures of the 60s and 70s were defined by highly contradictory tendencies – ones which could incorporate alternative cultures into existing power structures even while attempting to challenge them.

Understanding that complex process of incorporation – which Kerl mostly just hinted at – would mean a longer view, and I would have liked to hear more about his sense of the broader historical context. Is there a longer tradition of the “politics of ecstasy”, going back through Walter Benjamin’s experiments with – and writing on – Hashish, into the lifeworlds and politics of interwar surrealism, and deeper still into the intoxications of Baudelaire and Dumas? How does this carry forwards, too, into the chemically-fuelled intersection between rave culture and “DIY politics” of the late 1980s and ‘90s? Answering these questions would be a much bigger project, but Kerl’s work provides a stimulating basis for further exploration.

Rory Scothorne is a PhD student in History. His research interests lie broadly in the history of social movements, the development and contestation of the public sphere in the twentieth century, and the political thought of the radical left. His thesis focuses on the relationship between the radical left and Scottish nationalism from 1968 to 1992. He is a CSMCH steering committee member.

A seminar on revolution would be incomplete without some consideration of the Russian Revolution, one of the great world-historical events of the twentieth century. Fortunately, we were able to persuade Sarah Badcock (Nottingham) to come and talk to us about her “kaleidoscopic” perspectives on 1917. She gave a wonderful panorama of the Russian Revolutions in the plural. Anita Klingler was there to hear it.

Sarah began her talk by stating what it was she would be arguing against, namely the notion, still widespread, that revolutions ‘belong’ in capital cities and that all that spreads beyond the urban centres are ripples. Instead, she wanted to put forward the idea that an opposite dynamic is often at play, wherein the elites’ decisions and actions are shaped and determined by what is happening in the provincial hinterland. To this end, she said she would be examining structures of power and powerlessness during the Russian Revolutions of 1917, looking at people on the margins of society, and examining the case study of the food crisis. Her ultimate aim, she said, was to show why regional studies matter and what they can add to our understanding of history.

As Sarah was primarily concerned with examining Russia’s revolutions from a provincial perspective, she first reminded her audience of the complexities of the term ‘peasant’. Far from denoting just one particular life experience, ‘peasant’ could apply to a multitude of different people living away from Russia’s urban centres, doing many different kinds of work, and could even include the identities of ‘worker’ and/or ‘soldier’ simultaneously.

The term ‘peasant’ therefore is an abstract generalisation and rather a blunt tool, while more specific regional studies can help us understand more individual experiences. Furthermore, Sarah made sure to draw the audience’s attention to the vast geography of the Russian landmass, which, though described as one national whole, is so varied that regional approaches may be a very useful way of explaining and understanding historical processes away from the urban centres of power.

Looking at the year 1917 and the local committees established all over the country once the Provisional Government had come to power in Petrograd, Sarah elucidated how it was the elected representatives who were accountable to the people and who were feeding back the people’s demands to the Provisional Government, while the Provisional Government – nominally the centre of power – often found itself unable to implement its decision, for example on land use, in the provinces. Power was thus not a one-way process: without appropriate means of implementing central decrees, local communities were empowered vis-à-vis the Provisional Government and often ignored or rejected their decisions.

However, Sarah was quick to point out that this empowerment was also imperfect and excluded certain marginalised groups along the lines of ethnicity, gender, as well as along a rural-urban divide, and, given the revolutionary context, access to weapons. Young, urban, ethnically Russian, armed males were the ones most empowered in this process.

Nevertheless, within the diffuse space and time of revolutions, marginalised groups were able to stake their claim to power. As an example, Sarah cited the case of the ‘soldiers’ wives’, who, when their husbands had been drafted into war, were granted an allowance from the state. By 1917, however, this allowance was no longer sufficient to meet the needs of daily life and the wives coalesced into an unmistakable collective voice, pressuring local governments all over Russia. Writing petitions in a noticeably empowered language, the ‘soldiers’ wives’ worked effectively outside the structures of power, but also within them. In Kazan province, the Soviet became concerned enough about public order to eventually meet the women’s demands. Power, therefore, did not only lie with the Provisional Government in Petrograd, but also with those who lived and took action in the provinces.

Another example Sarah gave was that of the food crisis. The efficient distribution of food across the vast Russian space was a defining challenge for Lenin’s new Bolshevik government. While some regions produced a surplus of food, sustenance was needed particularly in the cities as well as for the army. But surplus regions were unwilling to sell their surpluses to the state at below-market prices, thus exhibiting their power to defy the authorities. The central state failed to define the discourse surrounding food distribution and found itself unable, yet again, to implement its policies in the provinces.

Sarah added that it was most certainly not the case that local people simply failed to understand the official decrees and language of the revolution, but rather that they consciously chose to defy it and take power themselves to act as they saw fit. When Lenin, after asking his generals in October 1917 about the state of the army, learned that men were deserting in their thousands, Sarah argued, these individual decisions, taken on a mass scale, shaped Lenin’s ability, or rather inability, to negotiate favourable terms at Brest-Litovsk.

Thus, Sarah concluded that political elites often had their scope of action defined by the actions of ordinary, often provincial, people. Regional studies, which Sarah identified as a fresh and exciting field of research with plenty of potential for future work, can help us uncover these actions which had a forceful potential to upset traditional power structures.

In her short comment, Anna Lively (Edinburgh) acknowledged how regional approaches help complicate out understanding of the Russian Revolution, or indeed revolutions. She raised several historiographical points, asking whether the current ‘regional turn’ will lead to new narratives of the Russian revolutions. Furthermore, she wondered how we might reconcile regional studies, and the specific insights to be gained from them, with the increasing move towards global as well as transnational histories of this revolutionary period. She also contemplated the challenges of working with silences, for example of women, in the historical record.

Lastly, Anna encouraged Sarah and the audience to consider the problems with the notion of just one Revolution; the chronology of the Russian revolutions; as well as to what extent the involvement of many different ethnicities and several national independence movements complicate the notion of a ‘Russian’ revolution.

In the wide-ranging concluding Q&A session, audience members raised issues from the importance of transport links across the vast Russian spaces, to the influence of the Church, to the role of other religious groups, national movements, education and more.

Anita Klingler is a PhD student in History. Her research interests lie broadly in twentieth century European history, political and colonial violence, and coming to terms with a violent past. Her thesis compares attitudes towards political violence in interwar Britain and Germany. She is a CSMCH steering committee member.

Although our seminar series mostly plays host to visiting speakers, we do sometimes give a platform to our own colleagues. Last week, we were lucky to hear a talk by Julie Gibbings (Edinburgh), our newly appointed historian of the indigenous Americas. She told us more about her fascinating work on the Guatemalan Revolution of 1944. Marina Moya Moreno was in the audience and sends this report. You can also listen again to Julie’s talk via the Audiomack link or on the CSMCH podcast. 

Julie started her talk with a contextualization of the 1944 Guatemalan Revolution that inaugurated the so-called ‘Ten Years of Spring’ before being brutally terminated in 1954 by a CIA-supported coup. She also explained how the idea of the 1944 revolution is still present in Guatemala. Even if it does not carry the same meaning as it did seventy years ago, it has become a symbol of justice and democracy. As she showed in her slides, these links to the revolution are still visible in demonstrations and public commemorations.

Following this introduction, Julie argued for the need to reconceptualise the Guatemalan revolution after the end of the civil war in 1996. Traditionally, the revolution has been framed by the dynamics and geopolitics of the Cold War. This analysis, however, leaves out the key point of land ownership, one of the main focuses of her research, which seems to be absent in most of the literature.

In her talk, Julie identified different elements playing an important role in the reappraisal of the Guatemalan revolution and adding layers of complexity to the process, like a sense of historic justice over dispossessed lands from Guatemalans, the national claims over expropriated lands in the 1950s from German and German Guatemalans. Finally, she made reference to the role of intimate politics and the intricacy of family relationships, loyalties and rumours, and how these can help us understand the meaning of revolution for Guatemalans at that time.

In Guatemala, similar to what happened in other places within Latin America, a populist dictator had come to power after the depression on the eve of the Second World War, and had found support from fascist groups in the process. Interracial relationships and marriages were common in Guatemala and praised by the state, as German Guatemalans were considered la raza mejorada (the improved race).

Even though such policies were marginalised after the US declared war on Germany (and with it, most of Central America), the racial tensions and complexities did not disappear from society. Social and personal dynamics in plantations demonstrated the result of these cultural understandings. For instance, some employers would pay German workers extra for impregnating Guatemalans, this being a practice that was considered to ‘improve the race’. Even within families or closed communities, racial differences carried a strong symbolic meaning in terms of social status.

Julie used the personal story of Hugo Droege to walk the audience through these tensions within Guatemalan society in the middle decades of the twentieth century. After the First World War, a number of German citizens found in Guatemala a new land of opportunity. Hugo Droege was one of them. He migrated to Guatemala, where he ran the plantation of San Vicente and married Dorotea Winter Tot, who herself was mixed race.

In 1936, following a common practice at the time, he left Guatemala and his family to find a German wife back in Europe. He returned to Guatemala with his new wife, with whom he started a new family, and displaced Dorotea to a small house in a different plantation. The story of Hugo Droege was not a particularly unique one, but it interacted in important ways with a broader historical context.

As Julie made clear, the international situation played a significant role in Guatemalan politics, especially when the country declared war on Germany. The government published lists of German businesses and assets, and established constitutional limits and guarantees for Germans appearing on that list. This increased existing tensions, not only for Germans, who could face expropriation and deportation, but also, and especially for, mixed races families. Shortly after, the state nationalised German properties across twelve departments in Guatemala, which was justified as a public need.

This gave rise to significant expectations within certain parts of society, but also to a deeper social and political rupture. As World War Two drew to a close, university professors and students, as well as the middle classes more generally, used the language of antifascism as a way to articulate their protests against the government. This ultimately led to the 1944 revolution. However, the advent of a new regime could not immediately solve the complex picture of competing nationalisms, intimate politics and racial tensions that were deeply embedded in Guatemalan society.

In the last part of her talk, Julie emphasised the importance of plantation politics through two key aspects: inheritance politics and plantations as political entities. The Decree 900, a land reform law passed in 1952, was meant to redistribute unused lands of great size to local peasants. This was again a source of tension particularly for mixed race families, with descendants of Germans claiming the right to the property of their parents.

Not only were familial politics at play in land reform, but also the politics of inheritance and social status. For instance, when it was clear that Hugo would not be able to recover his plantation, he took a job as an administrator at a different one, and ended up being sold a part of it for a knockdown price, as the owner preferred that situation than the land being given to a peasant.

At the same time, Julie emphasised the role of plantations as important hotbeds of labour activism, which were affected by racial tensions, family disputes and cultural differences. At times, plantations were used as political entities, with employers coercing their workers against voting, or forcing them to vote in their own interest.

Julie concluded her talk by reflecting on two dichotomous narratives that have prevailed in Guatemalan imagery about the revolution: the first blaming Guatemala for the abandonment of their loyal German immigrants, driving the country towards modernity, and the second still regarding the revolution as a period of hope and social justice, still invoked in the present. These two narratives remain unresolved, especially given the collapse of the country into a genocidal civil war after 1954.

Julie’s talk was followed by a comment by Julia McClure (Glasgow), who reflected on the intersections of gender, race and status in this process, and how they conditioned the politics of reproduction and the politics of land reproduction in the Guatemalan revolution.

Marina Moya Moreno is a PhD student in History, working on the analysis of representations and memorialisation of the Spanish transition. Her research focuses on analysing the changes in the definitions of different narratives and portrayals of this period found within Spanish society. She is a CSMCH steering committee member. 

This week, we teamed up with the Connecting Memories Research Initiative in the School of Literature, Languages and Culture to bring Jay Winter (Yale) to Edinburgh. Almost a hundred people came to hear one of the world’s leading experts on the history of memory talk about war and silence. You can read Anita Klingler’s report on the talk below. You can also listen again via Audiomack or on the CSMCH podcast channel (just search for ‘CSMCH Edinburgh’ in your favourite podcast app).  

Jay began his talk by emphasising that, although there has been a “memory boom” within the historical profession, the term still has not been adequately analysed. Furthermore, he also posited that his central claim – namely, that “language frames memory” – required further analysis. Memory, as Jay reminded the audience, comes in many forms, among them visual, auditory, textual, or intertextual.

The main focus of the talk, however, was on just one domain of, specifically, auditory memory, namely silence. Jay proposed that the link between silence and the psychological injury resulting from the First World War, generally referred to as shell shock, must be examined more closely. He stated his conclusion early on, which was that there was a significant discrepancy between the official estimates of the numbers of shell-shocked British soldiers, and the real numbers of men who suffered this psychological injury.

In this context, it is also crucial to note that the First World War did of course not end on 11 November 1918, but continued on, in various guises of revolution and civil war, and with extreme levels of violence, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe. Jay spoke of a resulting “civilianisation” of war in those areas, again raising the numbers of people directly affected by the psychological damage of war.

While shell shock had many different symptoms – among them stupor, paralysis, trembling, and nervous collapse – one of its manifestations was silence. Jay identified three different types of silence:

1. 1. Firstly, the silence of those who cannot speak, either because the war left them mute, or, more significantly, because they did not think anyone would listen to what they had to say.
   2. Secondly, Jay listed the silence of those who choose not to speak, either due to gender codes which forbid, especially, men to speak about certain physical and even more so psychological injuries, or due to a general reluctance to relive the past; or to cover up the past for personal or political reasons.
   3. The third silence was the silence of groups, or collective silence, which occurs when a group agrees to not speak about certain subjects either in public or in private. Importantly, Jay stressed that silence was not the same as forgetting; just because a memory was silent, did not mean that it was not present.

Jay then went on to identify a number of different social constructions of silence, as well as domains of silence. He traced the construction of silences from their creation in a social space, via the price paid by those who transgress these social rules, to the way that, once the silence is broken, the taboo subject becomes a matter of discussion and debate, and, usually, the subject’s taboo status does not last long. As an example, he pointed towards Spain’s ongoing struggles to come to terms with the crimes of its Francoist past.

As the domains of silence, the places where silence exists and what it looks like, Jay listed four key areas. These were:

• • liturgical silence, accounting for certain topics, such as the presence of evil in the world, which believers know not to ask about;
  • political silence, which denies political crimes or errors;
  • essentialist silence, which Jay used to describe the idea, that only those who lived through an experience can adequately describe or speak about it;
  • and lastly, familial silence, an unspoken agreement never to speak of certain family conflicts.

Each of these silences relates to war in particular ways, posing questions such as: How are the cruelties of war possible if God is good? How should a state or society treat war criminals? Can only soldiers understand war? And most significantly for this paper, how did the things left unsaid by shell-shocked soldiers affect their families, especially their wives and children, who often had to suffer under the violence meted out by their silent, traumatised but undiagnosed, husband or father?

In analogy to J.L. Austin’s notion of performative speech acts, Jay characterised silence as a performative non-speech act, the silent performance of the terror endured during the war. He suggested that, while official estimates put the percentage of shell-shocked British soldiers in the First World War at 2%, the real figure was closer to 20-40%. To arrive at this estimate, he compared the official estimates of shell shock at the Battle of Gallipoli with official estimates from other battles, for example the battle of Monte Cassino in 1944, which he considered similar in intensity of fighting but where numbers of shell shock diagnoses were notably higher.

This method led him to conclude that between 4-8 million British soldiers suffered from shell shock as a result of the First World War. If the average family size was assumed at three, he continued, this would bring the number of people affected by shell shock, either directly or via a family member, to 12-24 million people.

Jay was passionate about the impact that this discrepancy had, and continues to have, on those men affected, their families, and British society more generally. It was militarily opportune for the British Army during the First World War not to admit to higher numbers of shell shock, as this would have had an adverse effect on recruitment; this tendency, Jay implied, continues today. His thesis was that Britain had never recovered from the First World War, and that the collective silence about the real damage done by it continued to affect people today, the descendants of World War I veterans, as well as the families of current active service members.

Jay also explored several moving literary examples of silences becoming manifest in the writings of Ted Hughes and Anna Akhmatova. He ended his talk by indicating some of the goals he hopes that his research will achieve, including meaningful change regarding how psychological damage is dealt with in the armed forces.

The talk was followed by a brief comment by the founder of the Connecting Memories research initiative, Paul Leworthy, and a stimulating, wide-ranging question and answer session with the audience.

Anita Klingler is a PhD student in History. Her research interests lie broadly in twentieth century European history, political and colonial violence, and coming to terms with a violent past. Her thesis compares attitudes towards political violence in interwar Britain and Germany.

In this week’s seminar, we looked at one of the most paradigmatic countries of revolution: France. We hosted Julia Nicholls (King’s College London) who presented part of her excellent new book on the development of the French revolutionary tradition after the Paris Commune of 1871. Calum Aikman sends this report – and you can listen again to Julia’s talk via the Audiomack link below or on the CSMCH podcast channel.

It is impossible to consider modern France without ruminating on the impact that ‘the Revolution’ has had on the nation’s fortunes. Historians have long considered it to be the dominant theme, the leitmotif through which the recent past can be understood – so much so that the word itself has taken on an almost omnipresent significance, and is used to refer not just to the famous events of 1789 and the following decade, but to all those insurrections that erupted in imitation throughout the nineteenth century.

But what did being a ‘revolutionary’ mean at a time when Revolution – in any shape or form – no longer seemed feasible? It is this question that Julia sought to answer in her paper, by concentrating on the decade following the collapse of the Paris Commune, the last of the great ‘revolutionary’ episodes, in 1871.

She began by arguing that conventional historiography frequently portrays late-nineteenth century revolutionaries as caught on the horns of a dilemma – they were, it is said, either compelled to struggle onwards in pursuit of an imagined future, at a time when their prospects were dim, or risk becoming trapped by the fervent need to worship the past.

Julia thinks this is an unproductive false dichotomy: many revolutionary activists were actually willing to critically reassess their tradition, and did so in a way that disentangled the Revolution as an idea from its specifically French context. At the same time, however, they remained conscious of the pervasive influence the Revolution still had in late nineteenth-century France. This resulted in an apparent paradox, for although the revolutionaries continued to embrace the legacy bequeathed by the Revolution, some were also sceptical of the claims that were made in its name.

So how did this manifest itself in practice? Instead of paying endless homage to the revolutionary tradition or futilely chasing their utopian visions, Julia claimed that the revolutionaries became fixated on trying to shape the character of the new Third Republic. Having been led by supporters of the monarchy in the immediate aftermath of the Paris Commune, from the late 1870s the Republic was in the hands of a moderate republican government.

Although egalitarian in sentiment, the refusal of the republicans to support the Commune had prompted accusations from the radical left that their apparently progressive bona fides amounted to ‘opportunism’, and Julia argued that once in power the government courted popularity among different electoral groups by seeking to tame the Revolution and make it ‘respectable’ – extolling its historical virtues on behalf of the liberal bourgeoisie, while simultaneously reassuring both conservatives and reactionary Catholics that it had ceased to present any kind of danger.

This Janus-faced strategy, which venerated Revolution but refrained from trying to actually re-establish it, unsurprisingly provoked radical activists such as the Marxist propagandist Gabriel Deville, who later claimed that the ‘public love and respect’ for the Revolution was merely ‘a trick of the eye’. Rather than respond with their own uncritical celebrations of the Revolution, however, the revolutionaries tried to ensure its relevance by placing it in a broader historical context. Many writers sought to trace the heritage of French revolutionary thought by drawing inspiration from events that occurred long before 1789, citing the inspiration of Spartacus and the popular hero Etienne Marcel among others. They also pursued their own alternative concept of Revolution, one which was based on ideas of wholesale social transformation rather than the parliamentary reformism of the republican government. Their ultimate aim, Julia said, was to provide an alternative, viable definition of what the Revolution could still be.

Julia expanded her ideas further by drawing attention to the example set by Louis Auguste Blanqui – at the time one of the leading intellectuals on the French revolutionary left. Blanqui’s work was influential, and became part of a shared discourse that involved many other political activists. But even he was affected by the environment that prevailed after 1871, as was demonstrated by his reconceptualisation of revolutionary politics during this period. In an influential text he wrote on standing armies, for instance, he drew inspiration not from the Revolution, but from the ‘grandeur’ of ancient Republics and America during the Civil War.

Nonetheless, Julia pointed out that the Commune did not unleash a fundamental change in Blanqui’s thought, but merely exacerbated a sceptical outlook that had existed long beforehand: as early as 1851, he wrote a toast to French exiles in London deploring those who revered the Revolution without any restraint, which he saw as leading to a ‘hail of bullets – and poverty always!’

Commenting on behalf of the CSMCH, Emile Chabal (Edinburgh) struck an emollient tone, expressing his sympathy towards the main thrust of the arguments presented in the paper. But he felt that the notion of ‘tradition’ could have been examined more closely. Perhaps what Julia highlighted was an example of an ‘invented tradition’, he mused, a conglomeration of myths and realities that were vying to outflank each other?

With that in mind, he went on to outline three points for further consideration: first, that there is perhaps a difference between the ‘tradition of Revolution’ and the ‘inspiration of Revolution’; second, that temporality is important, with revolutionaries often using the past to justify their view of the future; and, finally, that geographical distance can often preserve a tradition that has been either subverted or diluted in its homeland.

Calum Aikman is a PhD student in History. His research mostly focuses on twentieth-century British and Scottish politics, trade union history and the fortunes of the Labour Party in the post-war era. His thesis is on the political thought of the Labour Party’s ‘revisionist’ right wing in the 1970s. He is a CSMCH steering committee member.

Speaking before a packed audience, Paolo Gerbaudo (King’s College, London) delivered a lucid commentary on how online platforms have transformed political life beyond all recognition. Robbie Johnston sends us this report on another thought-provoking talk for the CSMCH. You can listen again to the talk via the Audiomack link below or on our podcast channel.

As social media has transformed the political landscape, its reverberations have been felt everywhere. Prominent analysts and commentators have been left bewildered at the ‘vulgarisation’ of public discourse, intense populist campaigns and the electoral earthquakes left in their wake. Paolo, whose book The Digital Party: Political Organisation and Online Democracy, was published last year, grounds these developments in a much-needed intellectual framework to make sense of this unfamiliar terrain, and properly examine the affinity between social media and populism.

Three key shifts have redefined politics as we know it. Firstly, the consumer roll-out and mass distribution of technology, enabling people to be more or less constantly ‘connected’. Secondly, populism must be seen in its proper context – the long economic stagnation in the shadow of 2008. The flatlining of wages, job insecurity, the enforcement of austerity, feudalistic levels of inequality, meagre prospects for the young and the hollowing out of comfortable middle class lifestyles have all contributed to an overwhelming sense of decline. The signs are all too visible. And, as the IMF have darkly hinted in recent weeks, further trouble may be on the way.

The third destabilising element is the way in which this discontent has been channelled through the political process. That is, the emergence of populist parties and movements, which have achieved remarkable success almost overnight. Political groupings with hugely differing ideological complexions, from Podemos in Spain to the Italian Five Star Movement, nonetheless articulate a similar sense of betrayal and rage at the elites and experts who govern their lives.

Crucially, they pioneered ground-breaking methods of online campaigning to capture and then mobilise supporters, catching the traditional parties off-guard. Prominent media pundits, initially dismissing them as unelectable upstarts, have seen their assumptions unravel. Populists have not only made electoral inroads across the globe; they set the very terms of the debate. ‘Populism,’ said Paolo, ‘is the new common sense.’

Progressives are caught between a sense of dismay at what they deem to be the coarsening of political discourse, and, on the other hand, a realisation of the potential liberating power of mass communication. In liberal commentaries, social media is typically assigned the blame for the collapse of consensus. It represents a place where ‘fake news’ is disseminated, racism is legitimised, and authoritarian movements are forged. In what has become an all-too familiar sequence of events, strongmen then take power.

Paolo said that if we truly want to understand the problem, we have to take a wider view. Firstly, it is first important to understand the sea change in the social composition of who is active online. Two decades ago, only about 10 per cent of the world population had access; that figure is now somewhere between 55 and 60 per cent. Plainly, this constitutes a shift from an elite to a mass medium. For Paolo, this partly explains some of the more hysterical liberal commentaries, which resemble a kind of moral panic at the thought of the uneducated mass storming the public sphere.

Beyond the headlines of ‘fake news’ and ‘post-truth’, there is more going on beneath the surface. Paolo thinks that, instead of viewing social media as the property of right-wing demagogues, it should be thought of as a vital resource to persuade people to embrace an egalitarian agenda. After all, the technology itself is neutral.

Moreover, the potential of mass-communication to build a mass-movement is self-evident; there are already countless examples on the left. Moreover, as Paolo reminded his audience, today is the first time that people are engaging in public writing on such a mass scale. People who you would not usually expect to have strong political convictions are now expressing their hopes and visions for the world. Moreover, there is enormous potential for a broader educational agenda, to spread knowledge and develop a framework in which to interpret political power.

The reality, of course, often falls short. Rather than producing meaningful action, social media can produce a more emotive and shallow form of political engagement. In particular, Paolo underlined the problem of the asymmetry of power. Online platforms promise interaction and that all voices matter. For much of the time, though, it results in a kind of ‘reactive’ democracy, whereby ‘power-users’ (e.g. famous leaders) post messages, which the mass responds to with likes and comments. Politics, in this way, risks becoming another form of casual entertainment.

Another key example of a trend towards this form of ‘reactive democracy’ is the way in which Podemos and the Five Star Movement’s online platforms have worked in practice. Paolo’s work has found that issues debated online and settled through internal referenda almost invariably follow the guidance of the parties’ charismatic leaders. For all the rhetorical allusions to ‘the people’, the dominance of the ‘hyperleader’ reflects the persistence of top-down organisational structures.

In a thoughtful commentary, Rory Scothorne (Edinburgh) focused on intellectuals’ own troubled relationship with populism. For the most part, intellectuals have traditionally preferred deliberative, thoughtful spaces to impulsive populism. Historically, this found expression in their ‘fear of the crowd.’ Today, though, they can hardly escape social media and, by extension, a populist state of mind.

More and more intellectuals feel they have to take to online platforms and so threaten to become locked in a cycle of addictive populism themselves. In his closing remarks, Rory suggested that the political party, allowing for a deliberative form of democratic participation, still provides the best means of effecting real and substantial change.

In a wide-ranging Q&A, an audience member echoed this pessimistic message. Do these technologies not ultimately serve as a great distraction from substantive politics? Are we, in the words of Neil Postman, amusing ourselves to death?

Paolo recognised that social media can reduce politics to another form of superficial entertainment; a spectator sport. However, he stressed that, for all its faults, political engagement on social media is unavoidable. It is a fact of life. Progressives must keep in mind its power to spread empowering messages, overcome a hostile media environment and actually influence events. But, in the end, there are no certainties. As Paolo has written elsewhere, ‘Only time will tell whether social media is a sphere for radical and vociferous, but democratically legitimate, expression, or a channel for authoritarianism’.

Robbie Johnston is a PhD student in History. His primary research interests lie in the twentieth-century politics of Scotland and Britain. He is currently working on a thesis which explores the development of Scottish Home Rule and Nationalism from the 1970s to the 1990s. He is a CSMCH steering committee member.