Challenges for critical journalism

I have been silent for a while, but not asleep. The silence has been for complicated reasons, a little bit due to health distractions, but also other writing commitments as well as bureaucratic entanglements associated with approaching 80 years! But these are not the main reasons, which are to do with meaningful "journalism" in a rapidly moving global scenario.

I subscribe to The Guardian in the UK—which could be described as a sibling to The Daily Star and Prothom Alo—seeking truth from a liberal, inclusive and socially progressive perspective. But the challenge for such a daily is how to offer informed insight and reflective commentary when the picture might have changed significantly between composition and publication. I have witnessed this problem with well-established Guardian writers, struggling to avoid banality but stating the obvious for any mildly informed and concerned reader, with their efforts easily dismissed as "yesterday's news." One way to cope with this trap is to "stand back" from immediate events and offer long-range speculation—from "on high," as it were. But these pieces are themselves quickly undermined by pomposity and hollowness, and mostly no different from conversations around evening meals in homes across the country. So they become arid too, and indeed open to ridicule.

Personally, nearing 80, I have not witnessed such a period of paralysis among the chattering classes. They simply cannot find a way to write anything interesting in a period of extreme volatility and threat to the lives and livelihoods of so many people across the world. In the UK, we demonstrate against genocide in Gaza among a bemused local population inured to the repeated news of atrocities as if our demonstrations are themselves out of date, and yet perceived by the UK state to be sufficiently dangerous as to ban more of the participating organisations. The bombing of Iran or Ukraine resembles a disaster movie on TV, explosions lighting up the night sky almost as a piece of art, followed the next day by a photo montage of wreckage and fatality numbers.

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Frogs in the saucepan: A metaphor for our times

Aside from war upon us (in which I include the colonisation of the West Bank), there is other rapidly moving political news which also shares livelihood destruction in common: e.g. just last week, a Labour government sought to remove essential support to the disabled in the UK to keep bond yields down (i.e. interest rates on government debt); further cuts to overseas aid in both the UK and US to satisfy nationalistic populism and boost defence spending; crackdowns on immigrants, even if they are long-standing, tax-paying, and providing essential public services; an acceptance of uber inequality revealed through unwillingness to tax wealth gained through wage suppression, pervasive rent-seeking through quasi-monopolies, corruption and financial manipulation; arbitrary sacking of research staff within medicine and science (i.e. not just the "woke" humanities and social sciences) in the US, leaving professional career staff and their families without health insurance cover, without livelihoods, and with crucial knowledge lost; the recently Venice-married Bezos also celebrating his one millionth warehouse robot—displacing more labour; and news of an equity company acquiring a small estate with a country house in Dorset, England, evicting long-standing tenants in the estate village and closing public pathways for "health and safety" reasons.

Any of us can pile on versions of the gloom. But can we write sensibly about it? A common thread in this gloom is, naturally, uncertainty and insecurity, and we should definitely think about both their origins and consequences. Origins clearly require a political economy analysis which combines the technological displacement of labour (not necessarily a bad thing) with increasing concentration of profits and/or economic rents in fewer hands and classes—a socially alienating path of economic progression. So let us focus on how to combat what Yanis Varoufakis refers to as Technofeudalism (2024) or, in a recent piece for The Guardian, "feudo-capitalism," which is clearly a route to destruction for all of us and our descendants who have not managed to migrate to Mars along with Elon Musk and his descendants. (It puzzles me why no one pays attention these days to Rosa Luxemburg's underconsumption thesis. Who will buy the cars if robots displace the labour manufacturing them?)

When asked recently on a UK TV discussion show, titled Peston, about how to deal with the threats of AI, Geoff Hinton, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, replied in one word, "Socialism!" Anna Coote of the New Economics Foundation in the UK has been promoting the argument that labour, or paid work, is not the necessary or sufficient precondition of well-being—in contrast to the Labour Party's obsession with dignity through labour. There are many other routes to dignity via "social contribution," as noted by Guy Standing's recording of unpaid, or unvalorised, care work, which of course is mainly done by women. George Monbiot, a contributing writer to The Guardian, and separately James Ferguson, famously known for his book The Anti-Politics Machine, promote the notion of a citizen's income which separates the principle of income from work to enable all citizens to enjoy the fruits of a nation's resources (e.g. minerals, oil, forestry, hydro power, political stability) instead of just the few. So, there is another discourse out there. Let's hear it.

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Two cats in the yard

The consequences of this era of mass insecurity are people having to work harder for less, often several different jobs in a day or week, without weekly or regular leisure, to make ends meet. Part of the socioeconomic condition of ordinary folk is not having the time to reflect and think of how they are oppressed and alienated by feudo-capitalism, even though they feel it. Their horizons are necessarily short. They are therefore structurally politically apathetic, and they are also highly vulnerable to snake oil—easy millenarian solutions and populism, which usually entails scapegoats and othering. Recall Jews in 1930s post-Weimar Germany, or immigrants in Farage's UK or Trump's America. The present widespread success of such populism pulls in the whole political discourse—for example, a scared governing Labour Party in the UK being heavily tempted to adopt Farage's Reform Party stance. These are the consequences of feudo-capitalism and it can only be confronted by a progressive regime using the power of the state to separate the narrow class of rent-seekers from their rents to redistribute as citizens' incomes—as a right, not state charity—as the way to manage contemporary forms of capitalism and avoid the mass psychology arising from insecurity, which is the fallout from unprincipled capitalism that now serves the few, not the many, and threatens us all.

For me, that is how we should be writing about present conjunctural crises dominated at present by demagogic nationalism and racial othering, dominated by the metaphor of the commercial deal and real estate mentality. And not just writing for the chattering few but communicating such analysis to the many; journalists not just gathering information for their writing careers but promulgating too. My recent silence is over. The Western social crisis deepens. No retirement for me!

Dr Geof Wood is a development anthropologist and author of several books and numerous journal articles, with a regional focus on South Asia. He is also emeritus professor of international development at the University of Bath, UK.

Views expressed in this article are the author's own.

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