Class Struggle and the Common

For most people reading this, chances are you sell your labour power in return for a wage or a salary. Your work history has typically seen you relocate more or less daily to a place designed specifically for work. When you arrive you find the equipment, the organisation, the things you have to do are mostly arranged for you. As a typical worker you are a cog, a component fitting into a slot (or slots) within a wider division of labour. The employer, business, capital is central to making this happen. They have the authority and command to shape things, to boss you about.

In Marxism, this axis of command is central to capitalist exploitation. The selling of labour power for a certain period of time tacitly (and legally) confers capital the right to instruct the motions of these labouring bodies. This facilitates the creation of surplus labour as the first step to the realisation of surplus value and therefore profit. Labour as a collective of living, feeling human beings smarts, seethes, and resists under this state of affairs. Being compelled to do things under an authority whose recognition is purchased on pain of economic compulsion does not lead to the most cooperative of relationships, and the simmering tension and resentment bedeviling every workplace are the surface phenomena speaking of the antagonisms grinding beneath.

So much for "classical" exploitation. Does the shifting composition of capital from surplus value rooted in material commodity production to a growing dependence on immaterial labour change the terms of the class struggle? Traditionally, Marxists have understood this as the irreconcilable tension between the cooperative, social character of production (in a workplace) versus the private appropriation of the wealth generated. For Hardt and Negri, the switch to immaterial production changes the form surplus extraction assumes. Exploitation is less a mechanism hidden by the wage relation and more a visible process that looks like rent. How?

Immaterial labour produces social relations. The production of knowledge, information, services and subjectivities is a property common to all industrial societies, though it has only recently become a vector of major capital accumulation. Prior to that this social infrastructure, or the common, was indirectly and obliquely a source of value. Women's labour in the home, for instance, was/is immaterial in the sense it reproduced the household materially and socially for another round of exploitation and surplus extraction. She performed physical labour on domestic chores and mobilised affective/emotional labour to care and nurture her partner (Talcott Parsons famously likened the family to a warm bath for the bread-winning dad) and raise/socialise the next generation of workers. Capital isn't directly involved here, save in the supply of commodities that make modern domestic labour possible. In immaterial labour, the skills generations of women have performed in the home are increasingly prized at work: these are the capacities capital increasingly demands. To put it another way,  capital is a social relation bringing together living labour to work on fixed/constant capital (machines, tools) to make stuff to generate that all important surplus value. In immaterial labour, the properties formerly congealed in fixed capital has now sedimented into living, variable, cognitive labour. Or, beyond some basic orientation, business do not train programmers and IT specialists, nor instructors or professional service providers. These are employed because they are ready made, and what capital needs to exploit the networks thrown up by the common are people with that traditionally feminine attribute - social skills.

On the face of things this appears to benefit capital and weaken labour even further. It individuates workers as they're taken on on the basis of what unique skills, knowledge and, sometimes, subjectivity they bring to the table. In such a confrontation there is no contest, the individual worker cannot hope to stand against the weight of capital. Theoretically, capital can more or less impose its terms, and certainly does so when it comes to "unskilled" immaterial labour. However, it's not capital vs an individual. It's capital simultaneously taking on millions of individuals. The relation may be more individuated than the traditional wage relation, but capital is dependent on them to draw on knowledge, information and subject production competencies - what Hardt and Negri call biopolitical production - that is outside of capital. From being the organiser of production, the balance of power is objectively shifting. Capital is increasingly dependent on the organisation of (social) production by others. Or to present the issue in even starker terms, capital is proving itself surplus to the requirements of social production and is therefore assuming ever more parasitical, rentier forms.

Hardt and Negri describe this as 'one becoming two'. The antagonistic interdependence of capital and labour is fraying. The latter is growing autonomous and going off to do its own thing, which presents capital disciplinary and valorisation problems, especially if a sector is unattractive to work in. As labour is the core constituent of the common and the common talks to itself, is coalescing through networks and starting to represent a powerful, generalised intellect, how long can these parasitic relations last? When will Uber drivers call time on the very visible deductions made from their fares and replace the app with a cooperative effort? Is the time coming when Silicon Valley can no longer ponce off ad revenues generated from other people's content? And so on. This does not spell the end of capitalism, but it does represent a problem and a contradiction where a rupture in the system could tear the whole thing open.

Class struggle under these circumstances incorporates the configuration of class struggles past, and gives it a new twist. For Hardt and Negri, the basis of cognitive labour, the common, is "not only the earth we share but also the languages we create, the social practices we establish, the modes of sociality that define our relationships, and so forth. This form of the common does not lend itself to a logic of scarcity as does the first" (Commonwealth, 2009, p.139). The stuff of social production, the knowledges and relations are slippery because of their immaterial and reproducible character. They necessarily resist command because they cannot be contained. This failure of capture, the increasing autonomy of labour embedded in the common sees class struggle rewired as exodus, a refusal to be bound by the strictures of capitalist command. To emphasise and avoid false impressions, exodus does not mean retreat. Class war as practiced by socialised workers still takes the bosses on at the point of production. That guerrilla struggle is as live as it ever was. The skirmishes at the level of ideas, or class struggle in theory as Louis Althusser memorably defined philosophy, remains. The argy-bargy of struggle refracted through politics continues unabated. Exodus is the simultaneous attending to and strengthening of the common's incipient constitutive power. That is, if the common through social production is in the business of self-organising, communicating, creating its own subjectivities and making a world for itself, a core aspect of 21st century class struggle is to enhance this power. Revolutionary activity in the new millennium simultaneously creates new ways of life, proliferates networks, brings identity locations into common activity and develops institutions that spur the development of all.

Capital threatens the common in two ways. Just like the unsustainable relationship capitalism imperils the biosphere and the support systems that make human life and therefore it possible, there is an analogous relation to the common. For instance before this weekend's cowardly attack by Islamists, Barcelona had hit the news for its high profile "anti-tourist" protests. The city's landlords, thanks to the low cost and easy availability of Airbnb, were increasingly making their properties available to tourists. Higher profits for them, but the result is to price Barcelonians out of the residential rents market, forcing them from the city and thereby undermining the very culture that is such a huge tourist draw in the first place. We see something similar wherever gentrification occurs, or the profit takers try and muscle in on some hip fad coming from the streets - a process well described in Naomi Klein's No Logo. Social production begets more social production, but capital's attempts at capturing it runs the risk of turning it into dust.

Second, because economics has fused with biopolitical production, identity politics is less a distraction from "the class struggle" but more its contemporary form. The front line of the fight against capitalism is the production of the human soul. Capital is long-practiced in using gendered and racial hierarchies to undermine the collective power of workers, plus ça change, and it is always fighting to turn out human beings in its own image. However, these divisions don't exist solely because of capital's nefarious machinations - they are produced by the common too. Hardt and Negri argue that the family, the corporation, and the nation, all of which are located in whole or part in the common, distort and frustrate its potential. The interests of going beyond capital means a positive transcendence and abolition of identity locations (singularities) as carriers of inequality and symbolic violence, while the familial, chauvinist, status, and nationalist practices all work to fix identities in some way, limiting the potential of those caught up in them and frustrating the possibilities pregnant in the common to build a better society. Naturally, capital likewise seeks to articulate with these to preserve command even though accumulation is better served by the further development of the common.

Overcoming these issues raises the question of organisation and politics. What is to be done is an issue leftists return to time and again. What is clear for Hardt and Negri is the revolutionary party is out. As the properties of fixed capital are distributed among our growing legions of cognitive and socialised workers, the 'functions' of the revolutionary party are diffused among the politicising networks. Rather than the received conception of a vanguard of class conscious cadres providing leadership for the rest to follow, cadre building applies to the class as a whole. The power of the multitude lies in its being the living substance of the common, and increasingly their common lines of flight are putting them on a collision course with capital. Biopolitical production wrapped up in dense webs of communication brings people together, educates them, politicises them. For example, the incessant identity-related debates are no longer the concern of radical elites beavering away in academies but are now the property of millions of people, as the fall out from Charlottesville demonstrates. The aim then is to build up the capacity for self-organisation, forge new institutions that bring out the common interests of socialised workers without denying their difference. The image is of a self-activating, self-coordinating swarm that can simply overwhelm capital and the state in a process of creative destruction, of replacing one form of organising society with another.

The task for radicals and revolutionaries now is to grasp the general movement of things, to think and analyse, to grasp tendencies and directions of processes for ultimately that is where future political possibilities lie. And all the while this work has to be tied to building the capacities of the common, of making good its constituent, self-organising power. That's the object of the class struggle now, so the rupture with capitalism can be made good not in the far distant future but starting in the here and now.

Fascism and Economic Anxiety

What's the liberal hot take on last weekend's white supremacist march in Charlottesville, North Virginia? According to Twitter, and never missing an opportunity to be smug, it definitely, definitely was not about "economic anxiety". Here are some typical examples. They think they're being clever funny ironic, of burnishing woke creds while caricaturing and mocking those annoying people who insist there is a relationship between what goes on in someone's life and their outlook on the world. This liberal heroism merely advertises their inability to think, and broadcasts their unwillingness to do so.

And what is more, they are entirely wrong. They are even wrong on their assumptions about what economic anxiety is. Here I want to look at economic anxiety in a narrow and an expanded sense, that is how economics 'stands alone' (which as a proposition is only possible in an analytical exercise like this, in the real world it cannot be separated from wider social processes and inequalities) and how it combines, in this case, with race/ethnicity and, crucially, gender as a way into explaining how white supremacists become the hate mongering shits they are.

What is less than useless is the position of liberal heroism. Here racists are racist because they're racist. People voted for Donald Trump because they're racist. Studies prove it. Racists marched in Charlottesville because they're racists. Racists hate on blacks and Jews because they're racist, and so on. There is no attempt at a social explanation here, rather they're reducing racism to a matter of choice, to personal morality. In so doing they manage to avoid facing up to the sorts of social conditions that manufacture fascists. Or to put it another way, while all fascists are awful human beings, they are congenitally uninterested in why not every awful human being is a fascist.

Let's begin with economic anxiety, narrowly conceived. Traditionally fascism has been regarded as a movement powered primarily by petit bourgeois and declassed elements (the unemployed, precariously employed, etc.). That isn't to say working class people never get involved, but in the "classical" cases as per Germany and Italy the other classes and class fragments were present in disproportionate numbers. It all makes a certain sense when you look at these as positions and relationships: these are de facto unstable and precarious. Effectively, they are individuals versus the weight of the economic world. If you are a business person, even a successful (small/medium) business person, your position is caught in a vice. The employee class, the proletarians, are the pains you can't do without and they so pester you with unreasonable demands like health and safety at work, time off and decent wages. And at any time big business threatens to squash you with the competitive advantages they can bring to bear. If you are not a business owner and are declassed thanks to unemployment or sporadic work, you are still thrown onto your own devices. Unemployment and precarious employment are social failings, but experiencing it and the social security institutions policing it put your situation on you. Some thrive on this, but others are filled with existential dread. Among this layer then, we tend to find a concern for order, a tendency toward nostalgia, a hankering for authoritarianism and hostility toward scapegoats deemed to threaten and/or undermine their received position and perceived privileges.

As we have seen before, there is an assumption that economic anxiety just equals working class people, which is demonstrably false. While plenty of (white) working class people voted for Trump, it was the wealthier layers who turned out in disproportionate numbers to back him. The persistence of this understanding, or rather misunderstanding of economic anxiety starts looking deliberate the more it is repeated. It's almost as if layers of official opinion formation cannot cope with the idea of fascists as their local plumber, hot dog man, or restaurant manager. It's easier to dehumanise fascists if you conceive them as poor and working class. The more social distance you can put between them and you, the better.

So much for the narrow economics, what about a more expansive approach to anxiety? As per recent arguments, we live in a society which has been totally subsumed by capital. Market relationships and market logics have penetrated all aspects of social life, and increasingly the business of capitalism is about taking from the common store of social knowledge (or 'the common'), repackaging it and selling it back to us. Here, labour in advanced capitalist societies is increasingly immaterial. At the behest of our employers, we are much more likely to produce knowledge, information, services, relationships and types of people (subjectivities). We also tend to do this in our own time as well. This blog post as an example of knowledge/information-sharing and (hopefully!) subjectivity formation, for instance. Capitalism is now in the business of producing people, which means the contradictions and conflicts between capital and labour have rippled beyond the workplace and fused with the politics of identity formation. Class and gender and race and other locations of so-called identity politics can only ever be separated analytically: in real life they combine and condition each.

What has this got to do with our Charlottesville sad sacks? Quite a bit. One thing that strikes about last weekend, far right mobilisations and fascism generally is, well, where are the women? The alt-right and white nationalism are manly affairs. Very manly affairs. It glorifies fighting, militarism, weaponry, misogyny and the rest. It rails against anything that presents a danger to a mythologised, idealised and brittle hyper-masculinity, and here it conjoins with the racialism. The "threats" arrayed against whiteness can only be seen off by militant manliness, of white men protecting theirs and their bloodlines by having lots of children and aggressively seeing off competitors and deviants. Hence its fragility vis a vis male homosexuality (in particular). Its promise is a society in which everyone knows their place. All men are (white) men for whom there are enough jobs and enough women. It is an order that institutionalises white power and male privilege under some benevolent fascist administration that represses the deviants. It's a heaven for a few built on the hell of the many, of women, of "undesirable" races and ethnicities to be enslaved and wiped out, of sexual difference kept in the closet under pain of lethal force.

What kind of person is going to find views of this kind attractive? Presumably white men would in disproportionate numbers. And why might some of them (after all, not all white men ...)? Because of the lot young white men are facing, of a progressive dissolution of a privileged gender and racial locations. Let's bring it narrowly back to economics for a moment. Many scholars have written about the feminisation of labour markets. This doesn't just mean the progressive integration of more women into work, but also the spread of conditions one would previously associate with "traditional" women's employment (part time, low pay, short term) as well as the content of work. The immaterial labour that has always coexisted alongside the development of capitalism in the home, the affective caring work overwhelmingly undertaken by wives and mothers helped produce human beings with certain sets of capacities that left their children work ready, to a degree. Immaterial labour as an increasingly dominant arena of capital accumulation sees larger numbers of men drawn into affective, service-oriented cognitive labour, the sorts of labour that also produces social relations, networks, and human beings of certain types. Therefore, not only are younger men having to compete with women for jobs more regularly than their dads and grandads did, but they do so for jobs that fall short of the traditionally masculine manly man. There is a mismatch between this received masculinity, which finds itself expressed in whole and in part through a bewildering array of cultural artefacts, and the reality. Matthew Heimbach, the well known white supremacist interviewed in Vice's acclaimed Charlottesville documentary is a testament to this. Prior to his politics getting him the sack, he worked in child protection.

If that wasn't bad enough, women have expectations of being treated like human beings. The feminist movement has asserted women's autonomy. Millions no longer want to be the arm candy or the mothers gender ideology throws at women and men, and millions refuse the gender apartheid that underpins traditional male privilege and power. With greater freedoms, they might not only out-compete men at work but may also choose to be intimate with men who are not white. Therefore in the white patriarchal imaginary the liberated woman is a double threat - a threat to their economic well being and masculinist conceptions of work, and a sexual threat in her potential exodus from and abandonment of white men who feel entitled to her body. Hence, particularly in America, how the racist anxieties towards black men is bound up with a sexual anxiety, of their being hypersexual, better endowed, more manly than white men. A triptych of of gender, sexuality, and race on which the anxieties of alt-right, fascist America are represented.

Fascism is a promise to do away with these tensions. Instead of leaving white male privilege in contention, it reinforces it. Turning the clock back, rewinding the film, of repeating history is about stamping on uncertainty and, yes, anxiety (be it economic or otherwise). Women and minority ethnicities are to be put back in the box, the complex processes of struggle underpinning the feminisation of work substituted for conspiracy fairy tales of Jewish/communist/Jewish and communist manipulations, the fevered reification of masculinity with its celebration of militarism and war, and society locked into a rigid patterning of authority (overseen by a dictatorial patriarch) not only is a simple vision, but one that can only be achieved through the blood and fire of redemptive violence. Fascism is more than a dystopia attractive to a would-be elite, it's a weak apologia for criminality and wanton murder, of promising empowerment via the infliction of pain and suffering on one's enemies.

All this ineluctably leads to the conclusion that fascism has a great deal to do with economic anxiety refracted through class, gender, race and ethnicity. Understanding what fascism is, where it comes from, what it appeals to and crucially, who the fascists are and how they are made is not an idle exercise. It's the very basics of militant anti-fascism. Knowing what generates fascism allows for it to be pulled up by its roots, and that is inseparable from a wider programme of political change - a programme that addresses the antagonisms and conflicts pregnant with fascist possibilities by abolishing them altogether, and that brings us back to capital and its apparatus of command. Liberals fly from even trying to understand how their system works, and that might have something to do with why their anti-fascism considers racism and white supremacy matters of individual moral failure.

On Labour's "Sexist" Industrial Strategy

When Jess Phillips speaks it rarely ends well. On this occasion, seemingly determined to ruffle as many feathers as possible, she is reported as saying that "left-wing men are the absolute worst" when it comes to sexism, and that Labour's industrial strategy is sexist. Challenged on this by Caroline Molloy, she said she really meant lefty men are merely the more annoying than the sexists of the right who parade their misogyny alongside their stupidity. Ah yes, she didn't mean to say left men are the worst, just like the time she bathed in the media attention after telling Diane Abbott to "fuck off". Or when she threatened to stab Jeremy Corbyn "in the front", or of accusing the Labour leader of "hating women". Now, I'm not about to dismiss Jess's experiences of sexism and mansplaining in the party. It happens and if you're a bloke who doubts it or doesn't see it, why not ask some women comrades? Sadly sexism is alive and well because Labour is not hermetically sealed off from the rest of society and is bound to reflect what happens in the social world. The point is not to let it lie. Here all men in the party have a duty to support women and challenge sexist attitudes. Remember sexism, like racism, is scabbing.

Where I am going to say Jess is wrong is on the "sexism" of Labour's economic programme. Of the industrial strategy, women are "entirely missing" as it's all about "men with shovels", she says. Let us examine the evidence. The documentation that has gone to the National Policy Forum says its key task is the creation of highly skilled, high waged, and high productivity jobs. This means focusing on skills via the introduction of a National Education Service for lifelong retraining and learning, more money in infrastructure investment, a more industrially active state that identifies and makes up for gaps created by market failure, better procurement practices, capping energy costs and investing, getting a good trade deal with Europe, and investing heavily in research. Looking at the economy section of our 2017 manifesto, the same sort of stuff is repeated. True enough, combing through both we don't see any mention of women and gender inequality and superficially it looks like a poor show versus, say, the Women's Equality Party. However, to suggest this is indicative of sexism in Labour's programme is a real failure of political imagination. Or cynical reasoning, depending on your view of Jess.

Take, for instance, the national education service. A lot of the Labour right don't like this idea because they would prefer to cling to tuition fees and, for some, too much education is a bad thing. Yet who would benefit most from this? Women would. If the job-destroying predictions of the coming wave of automation are realised, it is women who are going to be disproportionately affected. Clerical work, and particularly the low-paid and most repetitive sectors vulnerable to automation and obsolescence is going to hit them more than men. Therefore a new education service can help them retrain and relearn, just as it would for mums who take extended career breaks to look after their kids. It would be there to help them acquire new skills and knowledge or just to provide a refresh. In short, it gives more opportunities to women to lead the kinds of lives they want.

On procurement, Labour would expect companies vying for public sector contracts meet certain social criteria around wages, paying taxes, equal opportunities, workers' rights and trade unions. Think about the burgeoning care industry, which in local authority areas is largely outsourced after decades of privatisation. Care workers are expected to meet a client's care needs in a strictly allotted time frame before moving on to the next, pay is poor, and workers are often demotivated and cannot do a proper job. As you tend to find women in these roles, again, tell me who is going to benefit from changing the rules?

It goes on. Making life easier for small businesses would benefit women surging into self-employment. Tougher regulation of finance and more state intervention makes the economy less vulnerable to shocks, which benefits women who are more likely to be in casual work, and "insourcing" utilities and price controls means household budgets stretch further.

As we live in the 21st century and our society is increasingly characterised by immaterial labour - the production of knowledge, information, services, social relations, people - what is work and what is the economy is increasingly fuzzy. I don't expect Jess to be up on the leading edge of debates in radical and social theory, but I would have thought her experience working for domestic violence and sexual abuse services might have alerted her to the role women by and large play as 'affective labourers' doing emotional work for partners and children, and how important this work is for the reproduction of social life. Therefore, Labour's pledge to tackle violence in the home, to ensure women's refuges and rape crisis are properly funded (and cannot simply be turned off by central government, as has happened under the Tories), outlaw maternity discrimination at work and look at ways of making work more pregnancy-friendly, and lastly gender pay auditing are as much industrial strategy issues as rolling out superfast broadband and investing in renewable energy. The same applies for raising the minimum wage, protecting pensions, reworking social security and the NHS and introducing an integrated NHS/social services National Care Service. All are entirely central to an industrial strategy, and all are entirely central to improving the lot of women.

Could more be done? Yes. Labour needs to be more explicit about the intertwining of economic and social relationships, and that the former is only possible because of the social infrastructure that women, generally, have a greater role in providing and reproducing than men. Here the Women's Equality Party manifesto does a good job, even if some of its policies don't go far enough in my view. Though it is something worth looking at and learning from. That however does not mean Labour's industrial strategy is sexist considering the substantial contribution it would make to the material lot and provision of opportunities for women.

Sadly, this truth about Labour's economics does not matter for Jess Phillips. As someone with a talent for attracting the spotlight, Jess has constructed a media personality solely around a snide remark here or a "brave" intervention there against the party and its leadership. For all I know she might attack the Tories more venomously and vociferously, but there you have your problem - we just don't know. How she carries on is entirely up to her, of course. Just as it will be up to her constituency organisation whether they give Jess another four or five years come reselection time.

Beyond Class and Identity Politics

In their Commonwealth, Michael Hardt and Toni Negri address the increasing importance of the common both to capitalism and our futures beyond it. In this vein they discuss the barriers to the realisation of its potenza, or potential power, presented by capital and the contradictory relations that form the common themselves and discuss in particular identity politics and its simultaneous expression and frustration. Before we go there, we need to wind the discussion back a touch.

In a number of posts looking at the emergent mass appeal of Jeremy Corbyn and Corbynism, their Empire trilogy of books were drawn on to make sense of what is happening to British politics. It is an interpretation that accounts for how old certainties were stirred up, and why it puts the Tories at an inescapable disadvantage. In sum, it's the economy, stupid. To be more precise, it's the class politics underpinning the economy.

To recap, for mature, industrial capitalism the secret of capital accumulation and profit lies in the value creation process, of surplus labour and surplus value. That doesn't mean other opportunities for profit didn't exist. Marx, for example, was particularly interested in rent. The model beloved of establishment economics ultimately roots profits in buying cheap and selling dear. The point, however, is that neither were sufficient to explain the dynamics and tendencies of capitalism as Marx wrote about it. Hardt and Negri suggest there has been a movement away from the production of material commodities as the primary means by which capital grows, and increasingly finds itself in invested in a new relationship of exploitation. The tradition of Italian autonomism, of which Negri is part, argued that increasing numbers of people need to be employed to attend to the social fabric that makes the possible exploitation and capital accumulation. Western Europe in the post-war period with its expanded welfare states clearly demonstrates this. It meant public sector workers were also productive, but productive of relationships. The autonomists extended this argument beyond workplace into wider social relationships. Women stuck at home were as productive as the assembly line worker because of the affective and socialising labour they performed in the context of the family, which led some feminists to agitate for wages for housework in recognition of the benefits the reproduction of living labour provides capital.

Hardt and Negri take this a step further with their argument about the spread of immaterial labour. Welfare states may have fallen back, but socially productive work has spread. In the advanced countries, workers increasingly perform a service, generate knowledge, and create social relations as the object of their work. Immaterial commodities and commodified relationships is the emerging way of the world. This doesn't mean material production isn't important, but is gradually being displaced as the primary arena of accumulation and hegemonic way of working. Yann Moulier-Boutang in his Cognitive Capitalism suggests the Silicon Valley worker shows us our future in the same way the industrial waged labourer in Marx's day was the coming wave against an ocean of agricultural work. Nevertheless, this presents capitalism with three challenges. The first is the move to intangible goods, and in the case of capital intensive information commodities, their infinite capacity to be copied poses the circuit of capital a severe difficulty. Secondly, whereas "classical" capitalism pulled workers into places of work and furnished them with the tools and knowledge needed for production, workers now bring their own skills, knowledge and aptitudes to the table that were acquired outside of employer/employee relations. Capital therefore is dependent on the store of living social knowledge, sometimes referred to as the general intellect, and in Commonwealth referred to as the common, to keep on keeping on. This represents a major tilt in the class balance between capital and increasingly socialised workers. Thirdly, and in a nice twist of irony, as the materiality of commodities evaporate the class relationship underpinning capital condenses and becomes visible.

If these weren't bad enough, engaging socialised workers produces a surplus of information that cannot be consumed by the commodity in the production process. The programmer retains the knowledge of their contribution to a video game. The Uber driver has their car at the end of the journey. The sales assistant takes their personality home with them. Their knowledge and experience adds to the social store, the common, enhancing its capacity to produce relationships, experiment, and generate new identities and new ways of being. Capital is always exceeded, its attempts at capturing and monetising the social value of aspects of the common can never be total. The more it tries to take a scoop out of the common, the more that is left behind.

Lastly, socialised workers are simultaneously networked workers. Under capitalism work has always required cooperation in the workplace, and over the course of its development has arranged a highly complex division of labour mediated at all levels by bureaucracy and machinery. Immaterial labour is cooperative too, but with a difference. "Classical" capitalism enforced cooperation in the workplace, the performance of service provision or knowledge production draws on cooperative relations outside of work, of competencies forged by communication and interaction. When I teach dozens of scholars are effectively co-present on my side of the lecture hall, for instance. The development of the internet and the coming of social media has multiplied this cooperative sociality. As we move through life now many millions of us are embedded in dense networks. There is no longer an online and an offline, the digital and the real are fused in an immediately accessible common.

For Hardt and Negri, the socialised and networked worker is the hegemonic worker of the 21st century. As the processes driving its numbers roll on, something else interesting happens: all workers are transformed into socialised workers. The machinist, the assembly line worker, the brickie, new technologies and immaterial labour might inform the production process without meaningfully changing how they do their work (assuming the jobs aren't automated out of existence), but out of work they are plugged into and networked up with the common as much as any socialised worker. Additionally, while access to the most rewarding, both financially and personally, immaterial occupations is restrictive generations of young people are being socialised in the expectation of getting a career that ticks those boxes. That they don't is piling up frustration, and is helping drive radical politics. It is also alienating them from work and encouraging them to find themselves in the common. That suits capitalism as it leeches off collective social knowledge, but doesn't as capital starts appearing increasingly superfluous and unnecessary to the constitution of social life.

Hardt and Negri refer to the social collective as the multitude. This is, effectively, their shorthand for the classes and categorisations who, throughout history, are not the ruling classes. The popular classes in the 20th century were proletarians, the peasantry, and small business people. You might add to that fractions of classes and transitory locations, such as the unemployed (temporary and long-term), students, professions, the retired, and what have you. They were multitudinous, but they were discrete classes and fractions with their own interests, propensities, and potential for friction with other popular classes. These still exist, but the coming of the socialised worker has inserted a new quality into the multitude: the more socialised and networked all become, the more their common interests are brought out. It's not a case of a borg-like proletarian mass bearing down on capital as per mechanical renderings of Marx's approach to revolution, but more like a swarm in which the differentiated nature of the multitude nevertheless swarms in a particular direction; and that is against the homogenising exploitative character of capital.

What has any of this got to do with identity politics? In Hardt and Negri, the multitude and the common are blurred. Both are irreducible and interdependent properties of each other. When you add to the general intellect, when you engage in social production you modify too the composition of the multitude. As the multitude comprises of more socialised workers, the spread and potenza of the common increases. They argue the coming of the networked, socialised worker has an equalising effect. No one class position is "better" or more politically "potent" than another, as per the industrial worker in old imaginings of proletarian revolution, instead the spread of social production via the reach of the common, and capital's attempt to exploit the common via the immaterial labour of others multiplies the points of antagonism across the body of the multitude. It's not the case of finding the weak links in capital's chain anymore because all points are brittle, all points offer opportunities to condense the constituent order-making power of the common and all can act as moments of rupture for swift, exhilarating change.

The multitude then is comprised of the mass of humanity. It is the living, breathing medium and constituent of the common, and it is increasingly capable of collective thought and collective action because all points of it are engaged in social, or  'biopolitical' production. However, the multitude also comprises of what Hardt and Negri term singularities. These are the locus of the identity politics/new social movements that emerged toward the end of the 1960s, and they typically comprise of gender, race/ethnicity, sexual, disabled and culturally-based identities. These are axes along which oppression has been exercised and continues to be exercised, as well as offering rallying locations against social injustice and points at which the social world can be challenged. The term 'singularity' for identity does not mean essentialism for all identity locations are socially constituted and determined, all are internally variegated, and all derive meaning from relationships with other singularities and a history of oppression. They nevertheless have a tangibly irreducible character to them, a refusal to read them off as the epiphenomenon of some other relationship of exploitation. Hardt and Negri also suggest that singularities are not fixed, they're always in a process of becoming or tendency, of being on the road from somewhere to a future destination.

Singularities are necessarily the immediate subjectivities because this is the way we are addressed by the state and its institutions. Its recognition of identity categories and efforts made to at least manage structural oppression are a consequence of past struggles, but are have also been recuperated into the structures of management. Therefore the first task, which is repeated over and over again by identity politics is to make visible the hierarchies of violence that underpin them. The danger lies in losing sight of this violence, of treating identity as less a matter of inequality and more a problem of difference. Which leads into the second potential difficulty. The state recognises us as individuals with certain rights and responsibilities, but most crucially as individual owners of property. Liberal democracies only recognise the sovereignty of individuals, and therefore take the identity locations to be individual properties. Here lies the first problem that can arise out of identity politics. Because sovereign powers treat identities as a property, some themselves might also so treat it. Rather than a political location, or a possible route to freedom it is deployed, sometimes cynically, to make the individual. It becomes a resource for career advancement. Unsurprisingly those sections of identity movements that are closest to and seek accommodation with established power are the ones most likely to treat identity this way, and also possess a stake in maintaining it as such. The third issue is identity politics in the revolutionary mode go beyond accommodation and seek to abolish themselves. This has nothing to do with sameness and everything to do with obliterating structural violence - proletarians are interested in the abolition of class, women the abolition of gender, non-white ethnicities the abolition of race, sexual minorities the abolition of sexuality, and so on. A revolutionary approach pushes each of these along because any can cause a rupture with the increasing order and throw capital on to the defensive. Despite the gains made, capital still requires gender and sexual systems, it needs racial hierarchies just as much as it requires the common and the people it provides to generate surplus value in the first place. Therefore, a biopolitical identity politics recognises the violence done and the oppression and disadvantage suffered, it affirms, contests, and repositions identities away from victimhood, and these are then resources for strengthening the constituent power of the common and throwing capital onto the defensive. In effect, working with identity politics means going beyond identity politics because it is intersectional. It is simultaneously a singular politics that mobilises a multiple (or multitude) of singularities.

Hardt and Negri therefore offer a novel way of going beyond the dull, reductive and unproductive debates/theory wars that have taken place when it comes to intersectional politics. By situating social (biopolitical) production of the common as the increasingly important pole of accumulation, the multiplication of the reproductive circuits of capitalism, the diffusion of the socialised worker and the spread of antagonisms establish a fundamental equality between singularities, of placing class and gender and race and sexuality on equal footing while placing them in the context of a crisis-ridden political economy. Pitting them against one another when they all mutually constitute the social and capital stymies the potential of the multitude to make and remake the world. It winds down the possibility of building alternatives, of producing the modes of living and the human beings for whom sharing life with capital is unbearable. To emphasise the point and use the trusted rhetoric of class conscious politics, sexism, racism, homophobia and so on are little more than scabbing. Multitudinous politics are necessarily co-present at each possibility of rupture, which means we should always be alive to deepening solidarity amongst ourselves in the face of exploitation and oppression wherever it is taken on.

Double Dragon for the Nintendo Entertainment System

I love me some Double Dragon. Whether back in the day or more recently, it's always good for a quick whirl. While not the first scrolling beat 'em up, it took the arcades by storm in 1987 and bequeathed home conversions for every format going. Even the Atari 2600. Its three dimensional play field, the ability to pull off multiple moves, pick up and use weapons and simultaneous two player action saw it become a massive, massive hit even though (whisper it) the game wasn't amazing once the novelty wore off. One for when you had your mates around.

In all, Double Dragon was a depthless experience. It didn't take long for the most novice of players to master it and breeze through the game in 20 minutes or so. I can remember being forced to play it using keys on my beloved Spectrum and it was still a breeze. Unfortunately, as the eight moved into the 16-bit era and game styles evolved, in all fundamentals Double Dragon did not. While developer Technos released a couple of sequels to the arcade, by 1989 and the appearance of Capcom's Final Fight it looked very tired and dated indeed. Nevertheless its position in the video game pantheon was secured and is one of the better remembered titles of the era.

The NES version, however, is a game apart from the arcade and other versions. It has the Double Dragon title on the cart, sprite design follows the original, and level themes just about match up to the parent machine. And it involves you beating up lots of thuggish folk. And there the similarities end. Whereas the original is a simple left-to-right fighty affair, the developers rejigged the NES conversion and gave it a bit of extra oomph by extending the levels and introducing some simple platforming (as folks who were around at the time know, platforms were the game type for Nintendo's system). It certainly added to the challenge and gave the cart some longevity. Indeed, in terms of difficulty the game is on another planet compared to other home versions. This was a regular practice for arcade conversions on the NES, particularly where they were shallow experiences - a value-for-money approach their Sega rivals never quite cottoned on to.

Adding to the difficulty were some quite unnecessary innovations missing from other versions. These included a forced one player experience - no co-op here. An experience system (of sorts) where passing score thresholds unlock extra fighting moves and, annoyingly, the readiness with which the game discards weaponry you've picked up. Using the baseball bat was always a favourite on other versions, so its removal ramps up the tough gameplay. Yet for all that, it remains entertaining if a touch unbalanced in the CPU's favour. However, provided you can master the elbow punch most enemies won't give much trouble.

As the first modern brawler Double Dragon set out the terms not just for its sequels but a genre too, until the scrolling fighter petered out with the coming of three dimensional gaming anyway. It was an edgy game, and the NES surprisingly retained that quality. Here was bare knuckle fighting and, if you chose, you could hurt your enemies with bats, knives and bombs. There were even women you had to fight, which was also something of a first. Considering the wholesome reputation Nintendo in America had assiduously cultivated its surprising Double Dragon made the trip from Japan with all the violence intact, despite the redesign. For 1987 and 1988, this was a watershed moment. Ironic then that a cutting edge title was a deeply conservative game that drew from the cultural well of the time.

As a Japanese title, the setting and art direction drew heavily from 1980s Hollywood action/martial arts films, wrapped around the tired damsel-in-distress trope. Indeed, the intro infamously starts off with your girlfriend getting punched in the guts. Classy. But you know what to expect - the action begins in a crime ridden depressed inner city area and you proceed from there, ending up in some fancy semi-mystical oriental (and orientalist) fortress at the end. Very Big Trouble in Little China, etc. And the baddies are unambiguously bad: they're criminals. When it comes to video games, there's a whole load of politics around who gets to be the baddie. For example, rumblings of disquiet were recently audible when UbiSoft announced that the antagonists in the latest of their Far Cry series were Mid-Western USA white supremacists. Back in Double Dragon, and like many games of the time, the politics of bad guys was straight forward. Who can object to beating up street thugs? Ditto aliens, Nazis, robots, faceless soldiers, etc. This digital war against crime dovetailed with increasing media panics about urban lawlessness and the authoritarian clamour to "do something" about it. This was a seam RoboCop famously mined and satirised, and here Technos picked up on it, repackaged it, and sold it back to Western markets. Coincident with this was a return to the city in North Amercan and European economic policy. The late 1980s were a moment where sundry governments and local authorities were rebuilding, "regenerating" city centres and gentrifying urban neighbourhoods. Sometimes, ironically, in locations made credible and glam by cinema's tours of the seamy underbelly of criminalised - but iconic - cityscapes. As regen agencies were driving out the demon poor and flushing away the lumpen crims, Double Dragon did its bit by breaking ideological ground for public indifference to the complaints and injustices urban regeneration was turning up.

The second issue here, again something copied by later beat 'em ups, is the treatment of women. Yes, there is the girlfriend who not only gets battered, but is actually a prize you fight for. At the end of Double Dragon you go up against your twin brother (in other versions, if you're in two player co-op you get to scrap with your buddy for her hand). What does interest me however are the female opponents. From the first level you're occasionally assailed by big haired beefy women ... wearing dominatrix outfits. Some approach you carrying a whip you can half-inch and temporarily turn against their owners. Just consider the optics of this. To codify the male villains as baddies you have permutations of a thuggish countenance. Well, as much as the NES could manage it (the depiction is clearer in the arcade version). However, for a woman to be denoted as 'bad' they sexualise her. You find exactly the same in Streets of Rage 2, the Final Fight series, and so on. This draws on age-old characterisation of women with independent sexual agency as evil, scheming, and self-serving. Moving beyond the vamp and the seductress into something else entirely, Double Dragon annexes the obvious association between fetish wear and BDSM and positions our Miss Whiplash characters (or 'Linda' according to the manual, as in Lovelace?) as violent enemies you are invited to smack around, whip, and in later levels pin down and punch. If it's only a bit of fun, then why are bad women depicted this way in game after game, in this franchise and beyond?

There's your Double Dragon for you. An easy game on other systems, and an entertaining, if tricky NES romp. The real difficulty lies, however, with its feeding into the complex of ideological alibis for the punitive clearance of the awkward classes from our city centres. And that's before we mention the reinforcement all the hypocritical, conservative nostrums about women and sex. If only those attitudes could be rendered digitally and taken out for a fun kicking instead.

Why Far Right Terrorism is on the Rise

And here we are again. Another day, another terror attack with one dead and eight others injured. Though, on this occasion it's definitely not Islamist-inspired. According to witnesses the man who rammed worshippers leaving Finsbury Park Mosque screamed "Kill me, kill me, I want to kill all Muslims". It's to the credit of the traumatised crowd that the suspect wasn't granted his wish and got carted off into police custody. As the legal process is now in train there is little that can be reported about him or his intentions, but there are points we can make about hate crime and political violence motivated by far right politics.

While incidences of Islamist terror are shocking, in another sense they aren't. For the last 16 years the press and politicians have talked up the possibility of attacks from this quarter to justify military action overseas and authoritarian legislation at home. It's part and parcel of measures that have the consequence of scaring, cowing, atomising large numbers of people. It is an approach utterly disinterested in dealing meaningfully with the roots of terror as it raises uncomfortable questions. And so we have a sensibility, a notion that as awful Islamist atrocities are they are also banal, or something to be expected. The state is prepped for it. Culture is prepped for it.

Unfortunately, it is possible we could be approaching a similar situation when it comes to far right terrorism. Permit me to quote this post on the murder of Jo Cox:

But you know what the really awful thing about this is? We should have seen it coming a mile off. In most of the advanced Western states, acts of political terror tend to be committed by two creeds of extremist. The Islamist, and the Neo-Nazi. The depths to which the debate around the referendum has plunged has seen Leave, and I'm singling out the Tory right and UKIP in particular, raid the BNP playbook and repeat their attack lines have contributed to a febrile atmosphere where migrants are terrified for their future, and a good many decent people share those fears too. But remember, it's definitely not racist to scaremonger about tens of millions of Turks coming here, about "rapist refugees", about people "with a different culture". This poisonous drivel is all about addressing "the very real concerns people have about immigration", not pandering to racism, whipping up hysteria and hate.

What happened to Jo is a violent culmination of a politics that has played out over decades. The finger should be pointed at every politician who has used immigration and race for their own selfish ends. Farage and Johnson are two well accustomed to the sewer, but all of the Leave campaign have been at it. They more than anyone are responsible for the present climate. But blaming them alone is too easy. The Conservative Party as a whole have played the immigration card repeatedly throughout its history, more recently the PM doing so by portraying Labour as the party of unmitigated immigration and open borders. And idiot Labour politicians calling for restrictions here and peddling stupid pledge mugs there have all done their bit in feeding the drip drip of toxicity. The media as well carry some of the can, especially those regular Daily Mail and Daily Express headlines that scream out as if ripped from Der Stürmer. Their ceaseless diet of Islamophobia and refugee-bashing pollute our politics and ensure its eyes are dragged to the gutter instead of being fixed on the horizon. The press are windows onto the political world for millions of people, and they what they see is tinted with purposive misrepresentation and lies. They too are culpable for this mess.

In short, when you have a huge propaganda operation, of so-called intellectuals poisoning the waters, and politicians seizing upon race and religion to grub for headlines and votes, we should not be shocked that a small subset of people who gorge on these lies should feel compelled to act on them. Mostly, they are content shitposting racist memes on social media or forming their own internet cesspits well away from the mainstream. Others get involved in political activity and/or the "street activity" of the English Defence League and/or Britain First. And for some, well, terror is a viable option - at least if the number of racists and far right activists banged up for weapons or bomb making offences are anything to go by.

While true, this propaganda apparatus has operated for a long time, so why should the prospect of far right terror become more likely? One cannot offer an exhaustive explanation, especially in the space of a blog post, but there are two things worth looking at. Firstly, there is the role of gender or, to avoid essentialist explanations rooting masculinity in hormonal aggression, the practices and expectations that come with being a man. After all, it is not insignificant that all the jihadi attacks and far right terrorist incidences to have taken place in Western Europe and North America over the past 20 or so years have exclusively been carried out by men? For younger men, the tendency toward the dissolution of gendered privileges but without a congruent retreat of gendered expectations is background noise to all extremist politics. For instance, IS is viciously misogynistic for a reason. For young white men, the parallel processes help fuel the ugly underbelly of online gynophobia and gay hatred though, it should be stressed, this has an outright purchase on only a minority of young guys just as the IS message draws in very small numbers. The fraying of gendered tradition impacts on older men differently. For some, they and wider society has undergone a process of emasculation, they just know it and feel it. Women don't know their place, boys are screwing around with boys, and men's jobs have given way to women's jobs. As far as UKIP and organisations further right go, part of their appeal is gendered nostalgia, of a strong Britain when men were men and took pride in being in charge and providing for their families. Nowadays, everything is so permissive and effete. Britain's gone soft, but something surely has to be done about Muslims taking the piss and killing girls and mums at pop concerts.

This is where masculine impotence intersects with political realities. With the collapse of UKIP at the general election from nearly 13% in 2015 to just under two per cent this year, effectively the constitutional outlet for right wing, xenophobic politics has dried up. And with the rise of the left, the general political culture is much less congenial to nudge nudge race hate than was even the case last year. Not least as politics is polarising and the Tories have smothered the political space the far right can operate in. With them locked out of the system, with politics more hostile and seemingly unconcerned by their hobby horses, and a studied refusal by the mainstream to blame Muslims in general for the terroristic acts of extremists, so non-constitutional methods start looking more attractive, be it vandalism of mosques or Muslim-owned businesses, hate crime, or terrorism. Their imagined grievances boil over into frustration, and that can in turn spin off into the kinds of actions we've seen a dramatic rise in.

That is why I believe the possibility of far right terrorism grows, not because it's strong, but because it's weak and out of kilter with the real world. What can be done? Using what laws already exist to round up and charge far right hate preachers, like the execrable Tommy Robinson, is something of a start. But more authoritarianism is not the answer, and so politics has to be. It means politicians should not be allowed to get away with toxic politics, that far right voices who pepper the airwaves and newspaper columns with barely coded race hate should be denied their berths in the mainstream, and a more robust challenging of this politics, be it the fascism lite of UKIP or the dyed-in-wool drivel of Britain First, wherever it appears sound like good places to begin.

The Sociology of the Camel Toe Knickers

Just when you thought you'd seen it all, along comes the latest in must-wear apparel: the camel toe knickers. I'm sure discerning women of whatever age will never be seen in anything else. This product is available on Amazon (though not presently in the UK - I've checked), but of interest their opposite number, the "Smooth Groove" which prevents the effect these knickers set out to advertise are yours for 22 quid. Given the incredible amount of time and effort most societies put into the observation, critique, and sanctioning of women's appearance and how bodies should be stylised and carried, what does the emergence of such a product have to say about the politics of gender and women's sexuality? Quite a bit.

Books shelves groan under the weight of titles and journals that have spilled ink on tracking, critiquing, and theorising the relationship between gender and sex. This blog periodically comments on it too. If there is a consensus, it is that the relationship between Western societies and what human beings have in their underwear is a fraught and ambiguous one. Fraught because, in recent centuries, clocking what a newborn baby had between their legs has an inescapable bearing on, well, everything. On your life chances, your upbringing, your relationships to virtually everyone you'll ever meet, the consequences of that classification of biological characteristics is so deep, thoroughgoing and fundamental that it appears taken-for-granted, natural and, until very recently, immutable. And ambiguous because the practices of femininity and masculinity Western cultures map onto them are contradictory and changeable internally, and interdependent and mutually constitutive of each other.

Unsurprisingly, just as the biological markers of sex are taken as the determination of gender, so the place genitalia occupy in received and conventional modes of gendered performance differ. With men, the jolly old meat and two veg is more out there. The cult of the penis casts a shadow over what it is and what it means to be a man, and particularly so (ironically) with straight men. It's the figurative seat of masculinity because it's the near-absolute focus of sex. Where it goes, what you do with it, how long for, and the number of women (or men) it comes into contact with all contribute to one's sense of self as a man. Small wonder dick pics are a oft-encountered hazard on dating sites for women. What do you look like? Dick pic. How do you like spending your free time? Dick pic. I've just joined, hello! Dick pic. If it doesn't measure up, so to speak, or is dysfunctional, not being able to perform in the bedroom (however one defines performance) can lead to/be a source of anxiety and, in some cases, exaggerated compensatory behaviours. Hence, even though men tend not to get it out and wave it around in front of other guys, willies are repositories of masculine performance and the locus of manly display.

The politics of the vagina are different. Traditionally, hegemonic notions of femininity were not about the genitals. In fact, it could be interpreted as a flight from them. The romantic ideologies of toys, magazines and films aimed at girls, through the practices of becoming a woman as filtered through make up, dressing, shopping, to the inculcation of care as the key feminine virtue, the apparatus of normative discourse and institutions on the surface almost position the ownership of a vagina as a secondary characteristic. Almost. In fact, it exercised an absent presence. It asserts itself as the unmentionable and, as such, it too was suffused with angst. The uneasy relationship between the refinement of femininity and an organ that bleeds, of poise and - for many - regular pain and discomfort. Of womanhood and cleanliness on the one hand, and the potential site of infection and illness on the other. And of femininity absolutely actively avoiding the pleasures of possession. Sex was a duty, the vulva a site for male pleasure, not one's own. This was how sex was framed in the feminine complex, and woe betide any girl or woman who eschewed its coy prescriptions.

Time waits for no woman, and what were private parts have now become public parts. The successes of the feminist movement almost entirely destroyed the feminine denial of sexual pleasure, whether at the hands of a partner or, ahem, yourself. Women's body autonomy, still a battleground in the ceaseless wars over sexed bodies, has enshrined the right to say no in the law and the right to say yes, yes, yes in popular culture. The right to have sex and the right to have good sex has, since the 1960s, become an increasingly important facet of the feminine. But like so many other achievements of progressive social movements, it has been incorporated into dominant flows of power and subjection, and has undergone commodification and repackaging. The acceptance of sex within hegemonic femininity coincides with the explosion of sexual anxiety. Just as men have performance worries, large numbers of women fret about their climax. The stress of premature orgasm for men finds its obverse in orgasm (forever) delayed in women.

With the convergence of genital angst around matters of sex, the vulva has come out from the trousers, the skirts, the undergarments, and the knickers and is newly visible. Women's bodies have gradually become more exposed as hemlines have headed upwards, sleeves retreated, and necklines have plunged, so the revealed skin plays hosts to zones patrolled by magazine columnists, celebrity watchers, and the wandering eyes of men ... and women. The passage of the swimming costume to swimwear, allied to hegemonic femininity's century-long war on body hair has allowed for new anxieties and new territories for the manufacturers of razors, depilatory cream, and the professional waxer. Perhaps this would have always happened, but porn has had a hand in pushing the visibility of the vagina too. First the easy availability of video cassette recorders and then the internet, its ease of access has had a number of consequences for sexuality as a whole. That visibility has also staked out even more territory for the aesthetics of the pubis. The variously stylised and displayed vaginas viewed by millions of men have generated new vectors of pressure on women's bodies. It's not just the glossies telling women they need to engage in this or that style of downstairs topiary, large numbers of women are managing men's expectations and preferences. And that is not all. As the vagina is ubiquitous, so hegemonic femininity itself has appropriated and decreed particular looks and shapes. Lo and behold, a burgeoning industry for the surgical alteration of a non-problem has bloomed into existence.

As femininity has shifted to accommodate and inculcate a genital sexuality for women, so men's bodies have come under the purview of waist down aesthetics. North America has always had a preoccupation with the utterly unnecessary practice of male circumcision simply because (they believe) it offers a better look. All those heaving vaginas in porn aren't always unaccompanied, and so, what you might describe as "male grooming", has become annexed by hegemonic masculinity as a permitted option and femininity also. As part of the changed sexual habitus of women, they too are now encouraged to develop the sorts of preferences men have for their genitalia. Waxed, shaved, styled, trimmed, untamed, tattooed, pierced, men, especially younger men, are increasingly encouraged and pressured into rocking a particular look.

This is where we return to the camel toe knickers. Most women aren't about to grace their smalls drawer with a pair. Yet had the vagina not been repositioned as the repository of women's sexual pleasure, if the mons pubis wasn't a zone of surveillance and a battlefield fought over by journalists, beauticians and surgeons, if its display and maintenance wasn't assiduously policed by culture and, consequently, presentations of the gendered self, then such a product would be unthinkable. Whether it's a progressive or regressive development I'll leave others to judge, but as well as producing a bulge of a particular dimension and shape, it says a great deal about where women's sexuality is today.

White Men Can't Grump

Writing about dicks last night, I may as well carry on doing so. Graun journo Simon Jenkins caused ripples in the social media pond yesterday after suggesting white (middle class) men are the new oppressed minority. Of all the groups making up the rich tapestry of British social life, Oxbridge pedigree caucasian blokes of a certain age are getting squeezed out of all the plum jobs in the media and politics. That's right, you can't move for black women editors, producers, columnists, panellists, cabinet ministers.

I suppose it's natural for old journalists to have a Status Quo moment. From rockin' all over the world one minute, the next it's like having your latest material dropped by Radio 1 for the Justin Biebers of politics.

The obvious point doesn't bear labouring. White men still hold the cards when it comes to wealth ownership and holding down the top jobs. The people who matter, the key establishment opinion formers are mostly white men. Both Houses of Parliament find an over-preponderance of the buggers and, as we say in Derbyshire, board and senior management positions are snided out with them. Jenkins is completely wrong, but we'll return to him in a moment.

Nevertheless, he has articulated a sentiment that has a wider currency. There are men and not a few women who share similar views. For a generation that knew more rigidly defined gender roles and seldom came across people from non-white backgrounds, the shift in British culture toward state-sponsored equality and the growing public presence of people other than white men can be a jarring experience for some. If everything else was fine and dandy, it probably wouldn't matter. Unfortunately, almost 40 years of market fundamentalism has seen deindustrialisation and the destruction of traditional "manly" jobs. Not only have they been replaced by occupations that appear as effete as they are bewildering to a whole layer of Britons, men increasingly have to compete as equals in the job market. There is still gendered special treatment and jobs for the boys, but that increasingly tends towards the top. The de facto sexual division of labour in working class and graduate jobs is dissolving.

The so-called GamerGate controversy, the vilification, stalking, and doxing of women and non-hetero, non-white men, for daring to employ the tools of cultural critique to video games paved the way for the diffuse current of hipster fascists and Neo-Nazis credited with powering Donald Trump to the White House. The screeching of a rising tide of YouTube-based man-babies found resonance with a wider audience discomfited by the upending of gender and race relations, and obliteration of the class-based social compacts that used to legitimate capital. It is also a clear factor in the surge of right wing populism here in Britain. There is a reason why Nigel Farage and UKIP tended to appeal to (white) men of a certain age.

There is something going on, and it requires a political response that strikes at the roots of this gender-based discontent. It might mean getting to grips with how the economy is structured and driving out the anxiety and radical uncertainty that is the lot of too many people. That is not pandering to or empathising with these sorts of concerns, but understanding them so they can be dealt with. I know it probably isn't as satisfying as writing something for The Graun attacking millions of people as bigots, but then again that's one reason why I'm not a liberal.

None of this excuses Simon Jenkins. His moans might carry some social currency, but he knows as well as anyone that it's all bollocks. I'm no groupie or even a regular reader of his musings, but he's capable of taking a dispassionate, analytical view of things. He's sneered at people who've shown less ignorance. This, I'm afraid, is little more than shit stirring from someone peripheral to the social media-powered age of comment. He is trolling the hip young gunslingers of now to pay him the dues his sagely ego thinks he deserves and, annoyingly, it worked. But for what? As Jenkins winds down into retirement, as attention moves quickly onto something else, he'll be remembered - if at all - for being a deeply stupid, dishonest man.

A Load of Old Dick

2016 has proven awful for all kinds of reasons, but where things have actually gone well is in science. Among the many discoveries to have made the headlines this year, this little tiddler copped some media attention in recent days. A problem that has long befuddled students of primate biology is why all our cousins possess a baculum - a penis bone - and we, or at least half of us homo sapiens, haven't. And now there is a solution. Apparently.

According to the original paper, 'Postcopulatory sexual selection influences baculum evolution in primates and carnivores' (here), the absence of said bone apparently has something to do with mating habits. The authors suggest there is a relationship between the baculum and the duration of sexual activity. Basically, the shorter the bonk, the less need there is for a bone. They suggest that long sex allows the penetrating male to fend off other suitors while making conception more likely. They surmise that it disappeared in humans because our ancestors started practicing monogamous relationships some 1.9m years ago, therefore our forefathers didn't have to fend off amorous others.

This is a perfect example of ideology masking itself as scientifically informed speculation. It probably wasn't intentional on the part of the authors, but it is worth noting how the rules of evidence and rigor governing scientific study are entirely suspended when one moves into speculation about matters social.

The first point is you can't stick fossilised social relationships from prehistory under the microscope. There is no surviving evidence about the courtship, mating, and familial habits of our ancient ancestors. We can have a guess by having a look at the behaviour of our primate cousins, but as their mating and clan practices show some variation within as well as between species, it doesn't matter how informed the guesswork is.

Second, our scientist friends have come up with an explanation that neglects another defining characteristic of the male member in humans. What we lack in bone we more than make up in length and girth. Yes, it's seldom known but among the primates we are less King Kong, and more King Dong. Gorillas are packing an average 3cm (fully erect), chimps at 8cm, and humans measure up with around 13cm. Why? There are a couple of explanations that sound pretty tendentious. Allow me to indulge some speculation: as the female orgasm is linked to ovulation, and was likely the case in our ancestor species, it is possible evolution selected for bigger penises because sex was more satisfying for our foremothers, who then tended to couple with more endowed males. Therefore men have women to thank for their meat and two veg ... possibly. I haven't a clue, but it sounds at least as plausible as any evolutionary psychologist nonsense. Either way, a convincing explanation of the baculum's disappearance has to address the Big Willy Problem too.

Third, coming back to the monogamy question, our authors suggest we moved to monogamous behaviour to combat the transmission of STIs. This is also unconvincing, seeing as hyper-brainy homo sapiens are still prone to this problem, despite the risks and dangers of disease being well understood. And, again, this is ventured in the complete absence of evidence.

Lastly, when monogamy, or at least the control of women's fertility by male partners did become the dominant reproductive strategy for our species, we're talking 10-11,000 years ago. All the available archaeological evidence points to a coincidence between the development of agriculture, the foundation of permanent households, the production of surpluses over and above the needs of the settled population, the foundation of class societies, and the subordination of women within a sexual division of labour. All of which indicates monogamy became the norm relatively recently in the story of modern humans, and within a blink of an eye if you count our ancestor species. And also, by this time, our baculums had disappeared. In fact, they had vanished completely some 100-200,000 years previously.

This isn't a diatribe against scientific investigation, or a suggestion that oh so wise sociology is king (which, of course, it is). But, again, it's another egregious example of someone in the name of science sallying forth from their discipline and making themselves and those who swallow their speculation look ridiculous. Simultaneously, they're lending scientific credence to and naturalising a set of social relationships that have underpinned the oppression of women as a sex class, and that means their conclusions must be challenged.