Labour, Social Security and Triangulation

Dan Hodges wrote earlier that Labour should shut up about benefits. I couldn't agree more, though I expect it is for very different reasons. Dan is of the old amoral Blairite school that thinks cutting deeply into the social security budget will pave the road to electoral victory with gold. If Labour are going to talk welfare, then it can never be in terms other than sticking it to the indolent. Never mind the pain and anxiety it would cause. Never mind heaping up misery for the working poor, the unemployed and the disabled. Never mind the myths they stoke. Presumably them voters who want to see the boot put into largely imaginary dole wallahs would reward "tough-talking" Labour and come streaming over. Yet this utterly cynical view has one major flaw. It ignores the fact that Labour faces a Conservative Party only happy to dig deeper to undermine what remains of the welfare state, and will grub around in the dirt for any votes to be had.

Prompting Dan's "advice" was today's big announcement from Rachel Reeves that Labour has found a new excuse to sanction JSA recipients. Under the proposed rules, applicants will be expected to undertake basic literacy and numeracy tests. Those who fail will then be expected to take courses in Maths and English. And if they refuse, it's party time for that layer of DWP workers who get off on humiliating the undeserving poor.

Compared to the Tories wanting to strip out support for workers under the age of 25, regardless of need, Rachel's policy announcement is small beer. Indeed, I'm forced to agree with Dan again that this is minor detail, not headline news. The frustrating thing is it's not as though Labour hasn't got a distinctive social security policy already. Pushing the living wage - and perhaps advocating it as the minimum if Osborne persists calling for £7/hour - capping rents, abolishing the bedroom tax. This is good stuff, enough to warm the stony hearts of Labour cynics and hacks alike. Wearing a Hodges hat, the only problem with them is no one gets a kicking. But that's okay. If you like your compassion with a hard edge, there is Labour's job guarantee - an "offer" to take up a state-provided (minimum wage) job under pain of sanctions after a period on the dole. The principle is sound, in my opinion - the likely implementation less so. Nevertheless this policy is more positive than anything the Tories can offer and has the potential to change dominant perceptions of unemployment. I can guarantee it, if Labour win and introduce the policy there will be a lot of unemployed folk wanting to know why they cannot access those jobs right away instead of languishing on the dole for up to two years. So come on, instead of being "firm" Labour should be pushing its distinctive rights/responsibilities social security agenda and put some flesh on them bones. Technicalities around sanctions regimes is so much time wasting.

Another thing needs remembering as well. As a proper cynic, Dan might want to reflect on how many votes Labour would lose if it follows his advice. The next election is in 2015. What worked in 1997 won't work again. The Labour activists, the edge the party has over the Tories and LibDems will not be motivated to campaign if policy is little more than Tory-lite. The so-called working class vote - the people Dan wants Labour to hurt are counted among its ranks - can always vote for a viable anti-politics alternative or stay at home. And those elements of the middle class that are as Labour as any old miners' estate, they too might find more pressing things to do than casting a ballot for a party that wants to hammer welfare. Core voters of the historic alliance at the heart of Labourism live in swing seats too. If they stay at home in protest or because the party does not inspire them enough, well, we know what the outcome will be. So yes, Labour needs to shut up about welfare and start talking positively about social security. And it would also do well to close its ears to the siren voices of 17 years ago.

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Capitalism and Nature

It's not customary for me to do a reply to a reply, but Boffy made a couple of comments on this piece looking at the progressive creds of the Greens that begged replies requiring more elaboration than the character count comments boxes allow for.

Boffy's first point replied to my observation that, "Wealth and power insulates the owners of capital from the consequences of climate change to a degree. As human beings their long-term interest lies in a post-capitalist future. But, in a society such as ours, while people own capital, in a very real sense capital owns people and they are compelled by the dynamics of accumulation to follow their short-term interests as investors." He noted that capital can act in the interests of capital-in-general on occasion, and cited examples of Wedgwood's campaigning for limits on working hours. The NHS is another example of an institution that benefits both those who use it and capital-in-general through the provision of services that allows living labour to, well, live longer.

Of course, it's obvious that capital can act in the interests of capital-in-general, and that these might on occasion coincide with the "universal" interest. Businesses currently active in the green energy and energy efficiencies market, by pursuing their self-interest, also carry as a germ the interests of wider capital. After all, it does need a planet. The problem is that presently capital-in-general is not pursuing a green course. Global investment in renewables (which, of course, are not all carbon neutral sources) fell to $254bn last year, from $288.9bn in 2012 and $317.9bn in 2011. Meanwhile, investment in fossil fuels stood in excess of $600bn in 2012 (source). The invisible hand is clapped over capital's eyes. Add to that the fracking gold rush, tar sands and North Pole oil we have a clear case of capital getting pulled along by its short-term interests. The state in its capacity of the manager of capital's common affairs could intervene, as it has in Germany (though not without its problems) but it too has to look out for the fortunes of "its" individual capitals. The UK is home to two big oil concerns. It has a financial interest in the taxes they return, the people they employ and the various UK pension funds invested in them. Only a successful mass movement, a technological breakthrough or an unmitigated, unambiguous climate change disaster in capital's heartlands could shift its monomaniacal pursuit of fossil fuels.

Boffy's second point referred to the second antagonism of capital, that exists alongside the ultimate irreconcilability of capital and labour. I wrote "Capitalism is despoiling the environment. We as human beings, as thinking animals, are as part of that biosphere as any other organism. The extreme weather, the droughts, the water and food shortages, all these nightmares stalk our future as capitalism interferes with and imperils our ability to reproduce ourselves as a species. Capitalism therefore is hacking away at its roots, at the human bodies that make its existence possible." Boffy responded by suggesting this typified a 'balance of nature' approach, that the environment is a static entity we humans should guard at our peril; and that capitalism is quite capable of improving the environment too.

Well, no. The environment, like social systems, is a dynamic, shifting entity. And it goes without saying that we're talking environments here. Humans grew out of natural evolutionary processes and, inadvertently, attained a (blind) mastery over its subsequent development as a species. And yes, this bit of Engels does stand up to modern anthropological evidence. We are as much social as we are labouring animals. In fact, they're both sides of our "species being". To survive humans have had to labour and cooperate with each other to eke out an existence, and as human communities evolved into permanent settlements and then class-based civilisations, there has been a tendency over time to harness greater quantities of natural wealth to human need by actively changing the environment. The relationship we have with the natural world is always mediated by a particular mode of production. What you might call "natural necessity" - the extent to which human communities are dependent on the vagaries of the environment - diminishes as our capacity to transform our surroundings and make it productive grows. The development of granaries, for example, meant civilisations wouldn't necessarily meet disaster in the event of a drought. This only became possible at a certain point in our history when we had developed the requisite social knowledge gained from hard experience. Long-term storage became less of a necessity as more land was ploughed up, and trading relationships established with regions enjoying a different climate.

As the technology in our possession at any point in our history varies, and because our "metabolic" relationship with the environment is always structured by the character of our organisation of production, the natural world has had variable "carrying capacities". The six billion or so human beings alive now are made possible by the application of modern agricultural techniques, shelter and heating. For most of us, who now live in towns and cities, our relationship to nature is very heavily mediated by a web of social relations. Very few people in Britain have a direct productive relationship with crops and animal husbandry. A vanishingly tiny amount still rely on the food they grow or raise to survive "off-grid". The overwhelming majority of us are dependent on food produced and sold for profit on the market. In feudal times, the tying of the peasants to the land and the complete lack of any social dynamic pointing to greater food productivity meant an economy barely capable of of supporting a tenth of the population of the present day UK. Go back further still before the discovery of agriculture and at the mercy of natural necessity, the Earth's human carrying capacity was measured in the hundreds, if not the tens of thousand.

Hence natural limits, what the environment can sustain is always socially conditioned. But just as capitalism has so far proven the most successful mode of production in terms of the numbers of humans it can support, that doesn't mean its transformation of the environment is entirely beneficial. Capital has taken natural wealth and transformed it. But the waste - the pollution, the discards, that has nowhere else to go but back into the environment. Historically these issues have been relatively localised. Poisoned rivers, filthy air, hazardous materials, these have tended to damage ecosystems on local scales. This can and has impacted on human health and blighted certain regions throughout capitalist industrialisation. But these can be cleaned up and restored, albeit at often great cost. The problem now, however, is that climate change as a result of almost three centuries burning of fossil fuels has thrown vast quantities of carbon into the atmosphere. The Earth is now warming in a way that is out of kilter with its natural cycles of warm and cool periods. As the oceans heat, storms become more likely. As the ice caps melt, sea levels rise. As the temperature goes up, droughts get more common. The directionless, chaotic character of capitalism is changing the environment unintentionally, and changing it for the worse. Climate change can only but affect the carrying capacity of the natural world in regard to us and the other species we share the planet with. Capitalism might come up with ways of mitigating its impact, such as the proliferation of vertical farms or replacing submerged land with floating cities. It all depends whether the markets are there.

Among other things, capitalism is a frustrating mode of production. It has brought us to the threshold of a permanent golden age for our species, where not only can the individual needs of each and everyone of us be met by existing technology but also gives us the potential to live truly good lives according to our inclinations. It has allowed us to develop scientific technique to such an extent that we can develop detailed knowledge about the natural world and the human societies that inhabit it. And capitalism has enabled us to identify a creeping disaster that could imperil the lives of billions. Yet the rudderless character of capitalism, short of devastation and/or massive pressure from below means its stuck. Until that happens, we're stuck too.

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Whatever Happened to Stoke BNP?

Three local comrades are sat in a McDonald's. In come eight men who, before occupying their seats directly behind them, each buy a Happy Meal. So who were these oddballs? They were the eight remaining members of Stoke-on-Trent's British National Party. Yes, remember them? It was only a few short years ago that the party - along with Stoke City FC and Robbie Williams - were counted among the city's three biggest claims to fame. Over the last decade, it had picked up nine councillors. It came within a whisker of taking the elected mayoralty. They were barely off the front page of the local rag, and Nazi Nick himself dubbed Stoke "the jewel in the BNP's crown". And now it is reduced to eating brightly packaged food for the under-10s. How did this happen?

When Brons and Griffin were packed off to Brussels in 2009, I'm sure they weren't the only ones who'd thought the BNP had hit the big time. A discredited Labour government was stumbling toward a heavy election defeat, and the Tories were in the full flush of hug-a-huskyism. Then, as now, the press and broadcast media was rammed with anti-immigrant scaremongering. Yet the fascists' hopes for 2010 were thwarted. Their parliamentary candidacies went nowhere and they suffered severe reverses in the local authority contests held on the same day. They were checked because, on the whole, the general election is the one that "matters". People file to the polling booths to cast a ballot for the government of their choice, not to protest. So yes, everywhere the BNP stood their candidates recorded modest increases but on the whole, their support stuck to the parties they knew. Unfortunately for the BNP, their toe-tip advance was prelude to a total rout.

UKIP disproportionately benefit from Tory disenchantment. The BNP drank the anti-politics run off from Labour. But here there is a significant difference. UKIP is drawing on dozens of small scale splits from the Conservative Party proper - a councillor here, an association chair there. UKIP's story is part of the historic decomposition of Conservatism. The BNP on the other hand did not thrive the same way. In the main, they spoke to and temporarily won over the most backward sections of working class people. The lumpen and semi-lumpenised, those anxious about Asians Muslims, those who feared being out-competed for jobs and social housing. And, not to be underestimated, a layer of normal Labour voters for whom the BNP were the protest equivalent of the nuclear option. For their part the BNP blunted their racist edge and donned cheap suits. UKIP is sustained by an organic crisis of Toryism. The BNP a certain dropping off of the Labour vote.

This left the BNP particularly vulnerable to the political winds. With the Tories in and Labour out of power, what's the point in protesting against the opposition?* The rug was torn from underneath the BNP, politics had undergone its periodic polar reversal. Hence in the by-elections following May 2010, and at the 2011 local elections the BNP's (anti-Tory) vote returned back to Labour.

Political tectonics precipitated the BNP's fall. More often than not, when other (second order) elections are held on the same day as a general, candidates standing for the main parties do better than in "off" years. General elections push turnouts up, and those accustomed to only voting every four or five years tend to vote for their preferred party of government in secondary contests. This can sink smaller parties, and the BNP proved no different. Bloodied and smarting from hitting an electoral brick wall the BNP's rotten internals spilled out in messy leadership challenges, expulsions, splits, and scandals. The discipline of success caved like a soggy souffle as factional battles had free rein. Many fash simply gave up and the softer, gullible layer quietly "forgot" to renew their subs. Of course, being an open member of the BNP has its personal costs too. Is that a price worth paying when your party's going nowhere, when it hasn't won a single council seat or chalked up any success at all since its 2009 high point? The majority of the BNP's membership thought "no".

The BNP in Stoke built up its position by faithfully applying the "suits, not boots" strategy. It put out rasping, ranting racist fare but also posed as community champions, as the authentic voice of white working class Stokies "let down" by Labour councillors who couldn't be bothered to knock on doors even at election time. If there was a gap in council services, the BNP's activism would plug the gap. Hence former leading figure Steve "Bin Bag" Batkin regularly knocked around his ward litter picking, helping with small household repairs and offering ornithology tips. Alby and Ellie Walker, the former fascist "power couple" kept a handle on their Abbey Hulton fiefdom by substituting themselves for the City Council's meals on wheels. Them leaflets through the door might have the BNP down as goose-stepping holocaust-denying morons, but they were handy with the flatpack furniture.

Stoke BNP began careening in early 2009, before the European elections. A small scale split involved the party's branch secretary, Craig Pond and his henchman Terry Cope. Pond (who by coincidence, features in this week's Weekly Worker) fell out with the local BNP because both were, how shall we say, a bit "unreconstructed". That and, bizarrely, as a fascist interested in nuts and bolts policies Pond was frustrated that the party was only interested in general propaganda. His politics were best characterised by racism and library opening times. It was a crack, but as the BNP were still on the up it didn't appear to matter. The election came and went and in preparation for 2010, the local party picked Alby Walker - its council group leader - to contest the Stoke Central seat, where six of the BNP's nine councillors had their wards. However, as Griffin and his lieutenants believed this was the BNP's best bet of getting into Parliament, he unilaterally imposed himself on Barking, which was hitherto Richard Barnbrook's (remember him?) fiefdom. Griffin's lackey in the West Midlands, Simon Darby did the same in Stoke and Alby was turfed out. And so, hours after Griffin launched the BNP's 2010 campaign in Stoke Alby announced his resignation and decision to contest Stoke Central too. While that was the real reason, Walker's "good reason" was his discovery that the BNP were a bit racist. Yes, he really did say that.

The election challenges came to nought, and the BNP lost four seats in the simultaneous council elections. It wasn't long before Ellie Walker also packed it in and made the leap from the fascist far right to the leftish (short-lived) Community Voice party. And come 2011 the national swing to Labour put paid to the remainder. Michael Coleman, Stoke BNP's "brains" since got a little bit of notoriety for saying racist things on the internet, but as an organisation they're broken. Coleman's "normal bloke" image hasn't been enough to prevent the jewel in the crown from disintegrating like a sherbet lemon. Even dear old Bin Bag has reportedly given up fascist politics and is now, apparently, a reformed character. In the two Stoke by-elections since 2011 the BNP have come nowhere, the mantle of anti-politics having passed firmly not to UKIP (as elsewhere) but the ragtag-and-bobtail City Independent group. So, while there are local dynamics pushing the BNP down these have not been decisive factors in their decline. National politics have done for them.

Could the BNP ever come back though? You should never say never in politics. If the Tories get back in in 2015 it's unlikely. Their fortunes are better served by having Labour in power. Yet the dynamics on the ground are likely to be much different. UKIP are trying to corner the anti-politics vote, and might do well under Labour too. But they cannot feed off Labour in the same way they do the Tories. It will be a bottom feeding operation, picking up disenchanted and alienated votes as the BNP did last decade. With broadly similar messages to UKIP, a now-fragmented far right, and possible electoral competition from the far left in the shape of TUSC and Left Unity with any luck they'll remain a political relic - and a warning to Labour to never neglect its core areas again.


* An understanding lost on TUSC, but not the working class voters they claim to be the vanguard of.

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Zero 7 - Destiny

Yes, I'm lazy. Incredibly so. And to mark my sloth here's a down tempo number from 2006. It's not trance, so there's a chance some of you regulars might like it :)

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Why Do People Buy Twitter Followers?

Why do some people buy Twitter followers? Readers may recall one Oliver James, an unknown sometime blogger who crashed into the top 100 tweeting bloggers' list of 2013. His peculiar distinction was to have more Twitter followers than obvious household names like James Delingpole and Ellie Mae O'Hagan. Something smelled fishy and as I'd recently cleaned out the fridge, it couldn't be that. Ex-blogger Matt Wardman did a bit of digging and found the following. Brother James went from 13,294 followers on 8th September to 19,139 four days later. After they had fallen back to 15,129 a month later they mysteriously bounced up to 20,586 on 20th October. These are growth figures you'd expect of Justin Bieber, not an obscure Labour supporter like me. Doing a bit of digging of my own I tucked into the pile of followers and sure enough, a few hundred real people down I struck the bedrock of zombie Twitter accounts. These are identities that, curiously, tended to be set up around the same time (July 2012), and had been abandoned after tweeting three or four times. Either Oliver exudes cyber pheromones that work the zombies up into a follow frenzy, or he's been buying followers. Hence why I decided to pull him from the general and the indie list.

For most people, buying Twitter followers is as pointless as purchasing Facebook friends. What's the point in tweeting if your thousands of followers are but slivers of empty data? No one's going to read it. To begin the outlines of an answer, Twitter has to be placed in the cultural moment. Twitter is the social media platform par excellence for the narcissistic self. Your Twitter account is the ultimate selfie - the number of followers one accumulates read as a crude measure of your "fame" and/or amount of social/cultural capital you possess. For instance, sticking with Our Justin, his celebrity and 46 million or so followers very roughly correlate. Likewise, the Bieber-esque Bolshevist Owen Jones with his 161,000 followers more or less represents his prominence in our curious commentariat subculture. Yes, follower counts can be easily gamed simply by following thousands in the hope that follow backs see you rake in similar numbers. That's why, darling, follower/followed ratios are a better measure of "authentic" Twitter fame (mine's 8.3, in case you were wondering).

Hence Twitter followers signify something. They signify a capacity of a tweeter's words to fall onto thousands and millions of feeds, which in turn will be picked up by thousands and millions of eyes. Follower counts mark one's place in a hierarchical social universe constructed subjectively by each and every tweeter which goes beyond the usual measures of taste, of whether one likes someone or not. It stands to reason then that the top 100 lists I do every year map out a section of the social space I engage with as a tweeting politics blogger. These posts prove popular by the standards of this blog because many tens of thousands live their social media in the same space and are interested where they and/or their favourite writers/hate figures, friends and rivals figure in the unspoken, unmapped pecking order.

Outside of Twitter this doesn't mean a great deal, really. Followers are just numbers on a website. They won't help you pay the bills. It's not going to give you your dream job. Is doing well on Twitter just a case of illusory influence?

More important than the Twitter counts is the "quality" of the people following you. You have 2,000 followers from the four corners of the globe? Nice one, pleased for you. Yet if you have 200 in tow, and they're disproportionately big political hitters, top commentators and bloggers, well, the better chance there is of converting the "capital" represented by your followers into something more tangible. A retweet from Polly Toynbee or Boris Johnson might lead to more followers, and/or greater numbers checking your writing out - assuming you have a blog appended to your Twitter account. Or, even better, you'll have movers and shakers reading your work. Some might ask if you can do some bits and bobs for the New Statesman or Comment is Free. And if you're really unlucky you could be approached by The Huffington Post.

Most people who want to make their way in Commentaria will not be in that position. And even if you are followed by "celebrity" tweeters, chances are they'll miss your output as they focus on the doings of their nearest friends, or answering the scores of replies that come in every hour. How does one make a splash? One way of doing it is becoming so big that one cannot help but notice you. If Twitter followers are a crude measure of social capital, and capture in a very rough way one's standing in a particular subculture, if you can build a five-figure following future growth becomes almost self-sustaining. Political people notice that someone has a big following, reason they're worth a follow on that basis and duly do so. This is especially so when politics folk tend to follow others with the same views - one can, whether they wish to or not, present as a "player" in that specific context. Accumulation is then self-sustaining and before you know it, hundreds of people might be retweeting your comments, witticisms, graph or photo. And if one goes truly viral, it might get the attention of someone looking for a hip, young gunslinger to fill a slot in their paper's blog, or whatever.

When you buy Twitter followers, it's not about fooling yourself that you're popular. It's about the social milieu you wish to make a splash in and aim your activity at. It's a strategy that inflates your apparent importance, acts as an attractor to others, and can help - theoretically - establish you as a somebody without a campaigning record, a ream of original writing, or insightful tweeting behind you. When someone buys thousands of zombie followers, what they're trying to buy is standing.

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Benefits Street

We Brits love our two minute hates, and going by the bile trickling down Twitter this evening Channel 4's Benefits Street has cornered that market. So a few points.

This programme, despite its obvious opportunism, was conceived and produced by metropolitan elite-types. And metropolitan I, of course, mean London. In typical path-to-hell fashion perhaps the filmmakers genuinely believe they're helping the people involved in this show. There's an element of the working class exotic about it, a whiff of the northern Other (despite Birmingham not being 'the north'). It smacks of nice well spoken metro types swooping down and helping the good people of Benefits Street to help themselves.

A second factor worth considering is the political economy of celebrity itself. Reality shows, newspapers, gossip rags, fan forums, they all have an insatiable appetite for new Z-listers that can tour its circuit for a few months, or a couple of years. Celebrity has long been dissociated from talent. Will we see White Dee in the jungle? Who will do Big Brother next year? Which resident will be first to have their sex life splashed in a Sunday paper? I doubt the producers set down in their planning meeting with this in mind, but all reality TV plugs into this circuit of fleeting fame.

Lastly, Benefits Street says something interesting about the distance travelled by Channel 4. Up until the last decade C4 was always the daring channel. It broke the mold with The Word, Big Breakfast, Brookside and, of course, Big Brother. It competed with BBC2 as the go-to place for alternative comedy in the 80s and 90s, and was - for a time - hated more by the Daily Mail than dear old Auntie. It had a winning formula of churning out programming that was challenging but in some way controversial. Sex usually did the trick and as the press worked themselves up into a hypocritical lather, the audiences - crucially the young(ish), hip, taste-making audiences - tuned in. Now the reverse is true. Like The Mail it realises that the way to reach the millions who wouldn't normally touch reality TV product is to produce something so distasteful, something that confirms every single benefit myth pumped out by the press. To get the numbers in C4 deliberately went out of their way to offend an audience. And it worked. How many outraged lefties watched tonight's episode? How many acres and column inches of free publicity has this show in parts normally resistant to reality telly?

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Richard Dawkins on Retiring Essentialism

As someone who exists in the real world, I'm always interested in the annual "big question" event organised by edge.org, the online home for clever folk who keep it real by talking about the real. This year, the question posed by this forum of what the Graun likes to call the "world's most brilliant minds" was "which scientific idea would you retire, and why?" Interesting. You can read Ian McEwan's polemic against arrogance, Azra Raza on the use of mouse models in science, and Stewart Brand on the linear no-threshold radiation dose hypothesis. By all means, take a look. It's interesting. But also in there is your friend and mine, Richard Dawkins. The scientific idea he'd like to see confined to the wheely bin of ideas is ... essentialism.

One might quibble whether it is correct to describe essentialism as a scientific idea, but then again it's something you can still find kicking its way through popular cultural artefacts and continues informing ostensible scientific study. Dawkins takes essentialism to task as a fundamental category error, of confusing the concept that describes and object with the object itself. Hence in his example, all rabbits have a certain "rabbitness" inscribed into their furry, hoppy natures. Each individual rabbit embodies the essence of rabbit as described by the concept 'rabbit'. In such conceptual terms it is at best supremely difficult and distorting, and at worse completely useless to think about the evolution of species in this way. When did rabbits become rabbits? At what point in the fossil record did evolution convey on them the essentialness of rabbitry? As Dawkins rightly notes, the question is as dumb as it is pointless.

Of course, in sociology and politics we've had our own battles with essentialism. In social science and philosophy, with the odd exception, essentialism has long been routed from theoretical discourse. The coincident impacts of feminism, anti-racism/post-colonialism, queer theory, Althusserian Marxism condensed with the rise of postmodernism and the deconstructive impulse of post-structuralist philosophy has dropkicked Plato's legacy out of the ring. For the first time since August Comte penned his Course in Positivist Philosophy there is an unspoken consensus in social theory at large. There are still fierce disputes between rival perspectives that will never go away, but there is a core acceptance in post-postmodern social science around a very broad definition of history founded on the materiality of social dynamics/processes. Unconsciously Marxist is stretching it a bit, but the acceptance of the contradictory interconnectedness of things has sneaked into the default common sense. The economist Joan Robinson once observed you couldn't read Capital without Hegel's nose popping out. Likewise, you open a work of social theory today and you'll find a few unremarked upon wisps of Marx's beard.

Dawkins has from time-to-time embroiled himself in controversy over careless remarks. One might almost call it trolling. For example, this spot of controversy came about after tweeting comments that are a little bit essentialist and shade into the Islamophoic. And, of course, you don't need me to remind you that there are plenty about who read the behaviour of Muslims off from the more problematic passages of the Qu'ran. Always it's particularly pernicious understandings of the category 'Islam' each and every Muslim is held to be an appendage of. Alongside his unguarded stereotyping, I noted here yonks ago his atheism, and that promulgated by the so-called "new atheism" is, philosophically speaking, idealist. This is what was said then:

On the one level Dawkins accepts Wittgenstein’s famous dictum that “the world is all that is the case” but for him this remains a contemplative position. This might be enough to see him through his studies of genetics but an abstract nod to a godless world is unsuited for understanding the sensuous and active world in which we live. We cannot grasp the pull of religious ideas without simultaneously being aware of the real, historical existence of the people who adhere to them. It is not enough to suggest religion speaks to universal human concerns. That cannot begin to explain why, for example, the Palestinian militant is more likely to adopt fundamentalist Islam than the Orthodox Judaism of the Israeli settler. But also mundane everyday life is, for the overwhelming majority, profoundly alienating. Those who sell their labour power for a wage or a salary give themselves over to a power outside themselves for a set period of time, which shoe-horns them into a circumscribed role, directs their pace of work and then denies them access to the full fruits of their labour. When society is subordinated to the demands of a blind alien power, when people are atomised, individuated and powerless, the belief we are but feathers buffeted by a divine wind can make more sense than salvation lying in our own self-activity as beings capable of consciously making history.

In other words, the critique of religion - if one is interested in such things - has to be approached as a social phenomena, as what good old Durkheim called a social fact. Unfortunately though Dawkins' contemplative position sets up an opposition, a rigid distinction between believers of whatever creed, and the godless. Being unbelieving is a matter of personal growth, of intellectual and mental maturity, of possessing reasonable and rational-critical faculties. One might observe that this idealist position lapses into essentialist thinking. It's not that all religious people are unintelligent, but clearly on some level they're all stupid, or so the assumption goes.

Regardless of what one thinks of Dawkins, whether one hangs on his every dot and comma or takes a more critical stance, his choice to dump essentialism is an interesting one as binning it means breaking with a component of his own philosophical atheism. Hopefully some fresh, more interesting thinking through of religion and atheism is just around the corner.

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