“I’m not sure that we are modern”: An interview with Nina Power
Lucy Sparling and W. Xiao
On November 2, 2024, Platypus Affiliated Society members Lucy Sparling and W. Xiao interviewed the cultural critic and social theorist Nina Power, author of One Dimensional Woman (2009)[1] and What Do Men Want? (2022).[2] An edited recording of this interview appeared on the Sh*t Platypus Says podcast.[3] An edited transcript follows.
Becoming an activist
Lucy Sparling: Take us back to the period from the anti-globalization moment to the anti-war Millennial Left moment. Did you register changes on the Left at that time and in what way did you participate? How were you politicized?
Nina Power: Thank you for inviting me. It’s nice to speak to you both. Years ago, I signed a letter against Platypus;[4] I’ve since retracted my signing of that letter, largely because I have no idea why I signed it in the first place. This is a lesson for everyone signing open letters!
I was born in 1978, so I am at the end of Gen X. My family are de facto social liberals, neither particularly religious nor political, and they live in the countryside where the concern is to get on with each other, regardless of politics. Politics was not the thing that people cared about in the 90s; often people were upset that things weren’t politicized enough. People who were involved in activism were looked down upon: “why do you care?”
I was at university from 97 to 02. I was not particularly political, because I was in Coventry, at Warwick University. I think there was a de facto Left-liberalism in the universities, but it was gentle. The 90s are often regarded as quite depoliticized, partly because of the victory of the unipolar world since the collapse of the Berlin Wall — that was my first political memory; we went to a farmer’s house to watch it on the television.
In the early 2000s there was a big arms fair, maybe in London, maybe at the ExCeL,[5] and that was the first big protest I went to. I was moved, initially, because Britain was — still is — involved in exporting arms.
When 9/11 happened I remember thinking, like many of my Leftist friends, almost conspiratorially about it — conspiracy is now more associated with the Right, but after 9/11 it was the Left that was saying, “There’s something suspicious about this; it will be used as an opportunity to crush domestic descent and go to war.” That was the main position on the Left. People were circulating DVDs about what was really going on. “The evil empire, the American government — they want war; they want oil. This is an asset raid on the Middle East, and these justifications about human rights are just absolute pablum, an ideological cover story.”
I became involved in the huge anti-war protests of 2002 and 03. Many people did. One of the main slogans, which I thought was a bit weak at the time, was “Not in Our Name.”[6] It indicates a sort of politics: “This is our country, and we don’t want to be involved in this war. We’re opposing it as citizens.” It was probably effective in getting people on board. And of course, it was a Labour government that went to war, under Blair.
And then I was largely not involved in politics. I was doing my PhD and teaching, with Mark Fisher, at Orpington College.
Warwick University and CCRU
LS: Mark Fisher had been part of the CCRU[7] milieu at Warwick. What was your involvement?
NP: I came to Warwick in 97, when I was 18. Mark was 10 years older. A group had come over from Birmingham with Sadie Plant and they worked with Nick Land. There was an interesting mix — a productive antagonism — between people doing cultural studies and people doing philosophy. We were talking about the internet and the world to come.
LS: Was there a political sensibility?
NP: It was anti-political. People were thinking in terms of the technology to come, and how this would transform the human. At Middlesex University I wrote my PhD about humanism and anti-humanism, largely in relation to the political Left, the history of Marxism, Feuerbach and the Young and Left Hegelians, Sartre, and Althusser. Partly because in my time at Warwick I had been so confused by the way in which everyone would describe themselves as “anti-humanist.” There are lots of different ways of being an anti-humanist: scientific anti-humanist, post-humanist, trans-humanist; it could even be about your reading of Marx. It took me a long time to isolate the different strands.
Politics in the old mode was regarded as passé. Everything to do with protest, political parties — all that stuff was “so early 20th century.” What was more interesting was robots and the internet. People were having all kinds of fantasies, some of which were not necessarily inaccurate or uninteresting. The idea was that the human subject would be transformed through technology, and this was already happening, and we would enter a post-political state.
This culminates in the work of Nick Land, who moved to China to chase the flows of capital off the ends of the Earth. And there is that aspect in people like Deleuze and Guattari and the post-1968 stuff, which people were heavily invested in at Warwick — it was Foucault, Deleuze, neo-Nietzscheanism, and against the human. But it wasn’t a critique of humanism from a post-colonial standpoint. It was more like, “Humans are over; it’s capital and robots all the way down.”
LS: And how would you characterise the Gen X Left, of which some of this Warwick milieu was part?
NP: The absence of leadership. We were a suicidal, withdrawn, and drug-taking generation. The 90s were hedonistic. It didn’t translate into a great political generation. So many of the cultural figures — Kurt Cobain, David Foster Wallace — they just killed themselves. There was a passive personalism. There’s no great Gen X politician. Also, numerically, we’re not very big.
Shifts in the politics of the Left in the 2000s
W. Xiao: What was the nature of the shift from the anti-globalization movement to the anti-war Millennial movement?
NP: There was huge suspicion of corporatism, of multinationals, of state complicity with them, and I don’t know if it would even describe itself as the Left, but anti-globalization was partly about the preservation of difference. It wasn’t against nationalism, interestingly. It’d say, “There are different cultures and different countries; we’re up against this homogenizing force, in the form of capital, that will destroy all of these differences, and will destroy indigenous ways of life, in this great push to commodify and asset-strip.” It was partly environmental, partly anti-capitalist. There was a great suspicion of big pharma. Millions of people were being prescribed the first generation of antidepressants, including friends of mine who were brutalised by them. A friend killed himself, unable to get off those drugs.
It was also tied up with a critique of bad food — that was a Left position. There was a defence of the naturalness of the human body and a defense of difference. This is reflected in a lot of the post-68 philosophy, where difference is key. These arguments have largely moved to the Right now.
9/11 crushed the anti-globalization movement. People were reading Naomi Klein’s No Logo (1999)[8] — and Hardt and Negri’s Empire (2000)[9] if they wanted something stronger or longer. There was a kind of hope in the anti-globalization movement. It seemed powerful. It’s tied in with rave and the fact that people were hanging out a lot together, in person — this is way before internet capture and a certain kind of atomization.
Obviously 9/11 was used as a justification for wars in the Middle East and the politics became more local in the sense that, as “the people,” we were opposed to “our government” doing this, and that included a lot of people who’d voted for the New Labour project.[10] Even though they had voted for Blair they hadn’t known that he was going to become “Bush’s poodle” — a lapdog for the empire. People were using that language, talking about Bush as Hitler.
A lot of the slogans were things like “Make tea, not war” — milquetoast. We had about a million people on the street in 2003; they were upset that we hadn’t stormed Parliament: “We had the numbers; we could have done something more. This ‘nice day out’ business didn’t change anything.” Blair was saying, “Saddam Hussein wouldn’t have allowed his people to have this protest and we, in our democratic societies, did — and therefore we should bring them democracy.” People like Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore were important at this point. People who were very critical of the American Empire.
WX: And within the Millennial era, how did you transition from being a politically motivated activist in the anti-war movement to a highly intellectual academic milieu?
NP: There was disillusionment after 2003, but it wasn’t as bad as what happened, in my local experience, after 2010, when we’d lost the student movement. This experience of a whole series of failures was extremely demoralizing and led to the factionalism that seems to plague the Left. This was then mediated through the technology, and then people were just denouncing each other constantly. I was getting on with things, thinking, “I should probably get an academic job, I don’t know what else to do with my life.”
There wasn’t such a stark opposition. It doesn’t take much time to go to a protest or a meeting. There were a lot of intellectuals involved in the anti-war movement, and I was hanging around with people who then got involved with Historical Materialism and Verso. There was a London Left scene that was first-and-foremost intellectual and secondarily activist.
LS: Did you have a sense of your role as an intellectual within that moment?
NP: Not really. Everyone started writing blogs, and this is before social media took off. So, the interaction was much more organic and spontaneous because it was just people linking to each other in an uncoordinated way. Mark Fisher was a huge figure for everybody in that scene; he was encouraging — he got everyone to write, in a lovely way. A very enthusiastic man. People like Slavoj Žižek were a big deal, people who were fusing Marxism with cultural analysis with politics. Mark was good at that, and widely read. I think Capitalist Realism (2009)[11] sold at least 30,000 copies or something, big for a small, independent press.
2010s, the UK student movement
LS: The early 2010s were dominated by the post-financial-crisis austerity experience. There was Occupy; there was the Arab Spring. Students protested in the UK over the massive hike in tuition fees. The philosophy department at Middlesex University was threatened with closure, and there were protests against it. You became more involved in activism with these student movements, and through Defend the Right to Protest[12] (which was, in part, a “front group” for the Socialist Workers Party (UK) (SWP)). It was a high point of activism. If you were to try to educate a new generation of activists, what lessons would you want to pass on?
NP: Something people were trying to do but which was stopped for various reasons was to link up the different struggles. The student movement had an idealistic focus, and I completely agreed with it: free education for everybody. I was worried about the class politics of it. It’s not a Marxist or a political point; I felt there was a real injustice in terms of people’s capacity to learn that was stymied by class. I thought that the fee increase would massively prevent people who were from poorer backgrounds from going to university because of the calculation of risk, and the loan.
But the student movement was never attached to class politics. People were talking about having “no future” — this was a line that many on the Millennial Left were talking about, including Novara.[13] The idea was that young people would be in debt; there would be no jobs or intense competition for very few jobs — and that is what transpired. This led to, or aided and abetted, things like cancel culture. People thought, “I can get rid of my rivals by accusing them of something — whether it’s true or not, it doesn’t matter.” A Hobbesian state of nature among the middle class came about because people didn’t want to lose their position; they were clinging on for dear life to the life they’d been promised.
The Millennial Left was not necessarily wrong to talk about “no future” as their horizon of possibility. But I’m not sure how helpful it was because it increasingly detached people’s struggles and situations from each other. The detachment of the intellectual from manual labor was total at this point, and it reinforced a disharmonious separation of the Left, which became increasingly abstracted — and really opposed to the working class. The middle-class Left, the liberals, hate normal people. That’s a huge problem.
I got involved in the protests. I was going out with someone who was on trial for a long time, someone very seriously injured by the police in 2010.[14] It was very emotional, and I went crazy because the trials were going on for years. The state, under UK Conservative party leader, David Cameron, was trying to crack down on protests. We were worried about the huge amounts of injustice going on in terms of trials and sentencing.
We were opposed to “the bad state,” to put it in a vulgar way. We were opposed to the police, the courts, and the authoritarian punitive state. I’m still worried about the authoritarian dimension of the state. It was current UK Labour Party Prime Minister Keir Starmer, as DPP, who was overseeing the prosecutions of students and the rioters.[15] We were trying to tie police violence against the students to police violence in general: “Who has the monopoly on violence?” But at the same time, and I didn’t notice until late on, there was this identitarian thing that was happening, which was a divisive mechanism which lots of people used to punish each other.
It took off around 2013. Some of the people who got involved in the student movement, especially those who supported Alfie, my then-boyfriend, were almost like an avant-garde. They were art students who were “anarcho” socially — squat parties, etc. A lot of them were posh; they wanted to be cool; they were into Tumblr, and they imported its politics. And I didn’t see it coming because I was friends with the SWP and other anti-authoritarian people.
A downturn
LS: Once the “high” activist moment of 2011 was on the wane, there were various organisational shifts that occurred. The SWP, following an organizational crisis regarding the handling of an internal investigation into a rape allegation, had a crack-up. New network-type organizations emerged. They all had different relationships to the history of the SWP, but the majority of these groups were made up of the younger (Millennial) generation. Other sectarian Leftist organizations also experienced their younger generations, who had been recruited in activism of the anti-war movement or later in the early 2010s, breaking away. You also saw early examples of cancel culture. For example, the Feminist Society at Goldsmiths started burning Trotskyist literature.
NP: There was so much disappointment and disintegration that it almost necessarily took a form of self-hatred. I remember being confused, thinking, “Aren’t we opposed to exploitation?” And, sure, oppression is a form of exploitation. But for these people, being upset about something was like a new civil rights issue. It took me a while to disentangle: “Hang on, some of this stuff’s mental. This doesn’t make any sense at all. It is completely opposed to the stuff we were doing. This is a shift away from the politics that we were doing before. And some of this is really divisive. Why are people denouncing each other online?”
And the SWP became irrelevant. Their opportunism was blatant, and all the good organizers, the people who actually did things and could explain why they were opposed to capitalism and so on, were no longer there.
In Defend the Right to Protest, which had far more women than men, most members were not in the SWP. There were lots of people who were motivated by what had happened. Lots of young people were charged and arrested; we had 16 trials. This stuff takes a long time, and the state has a lot of time, but you don’t. It’s brutal; it goes on for years.Some of them became human rights lawyers.
I remember someone who moved to America and became involved in the earlier iteration of Black Lives Matter.
We were doing stuff around Prevent at that time, because the War on Terror was still going on and Prevent was being used against Muslim students.[16] People were being arrested or suspended for downloading material that they were researching.
We were thinking from the standpoint of defending protest itself — rather than the content. But the content is not incidental. I wrote an article for The Guardian defending the EDL’s right to march,[17] which was controversial at the time, and people still cite it as proof that I’m evil. But I was trying to be consistent on the rights of protestors. I’d been thinking about protest, free speech, freedom of expression, freedom of association. In that sense, I was more classically liberal than some on the Left. I was obviously denouncing the politics of the EDL, but I was saying that they had a right to march and we shouldn’t do this because then the state will use it against us.
LS: How did the shift happen, in terms of freedom of speech?
NP: In the 90s there was an acceptance of freedom of expression and speech. It was the Left who were making controversial comedies, saying things you weren’t supposed to, pushing the envelope, and being transgressive. It was almost like we’d reached this point historically where, because things were relatively okay, people were allowed to mock everything. It was a party at the end of history. I had internalized the idea that the Left was for free speech, free expression, avant-garde art, and investigating dark things.
The new censorship, the partisan politics of some groups and the idea that you couldn’t make jokes about others groups — I associate those with 2013–14, after the student movement. The “Left” started to move in an identitarian direction and it was much less fun, frankly.
The gender stuff got totally confusing; no one would speak to me about it, and I absolutely lost my mind. I really looked up to this old-school anti-globalization anarchist Helen Steele, who’s opposed to the state. She’s been spied on by the police. She’d won a libel trial. She was a hero on the Left. She said something like, “Can we have a conversation? I don’t know what I think yet, but if we’re going to change the law, can we discuss it? What is a man and what is a woman?” For that she was attacked at the anarchist book fair.[18]
WX: In 2011–13, you were already sensing this authoritarianism, this moralizing identitarianism. But you didn’t leave the Left. You were supportive of and sympathetic to what your comrades were doing in the Labour Party. Why did you not respond more violently to those doubts?
NP: Personally, I was messed up. Alfie’s trials had gone on for so long and I had two teaching jobs and was doing too many things. In 2016–17 I withdrew. I was not well. When they shut down the art gallery LD50, I was not involved.[19] In retrospect, that was a bad moment. I was trying to convince myself, “Maybe these people are right. Maybe there are Nazis and fascists. But hang on. They’re calling 1980s lesbians Nazis. There’s something wrong here.” Nobody would speak to me about it. I didn’t understand what was going on. But I also refused to understand because I didn’t want to accept it. And then, at a certain point, it became absolutely unbearable. My conscience was in pain. And so I wrote something on Facebook about Labour suspending female members, which was controversial.
Corbyn, etc.
WX: The image in my head is the SWP as a big tent organizer: people who are members of the SWP, plus a whole broader milieu that you were a part of, such as intellectuals and activists. Amidst the crisis and collapse of that big tent a lot of those individuals were sucked up into electoral politics and into the Labour Party.
NP: The idea was that you could drag the Labour Party Leftward and that even though it was still going to be part of parliamentary capitalism there would be an attempt at redistribution, and student fees would be free. It wasn’t a fantasy that they were proposing. It was probably a fantasy to think that Corbyn would ever become Prime Minister. I didn’t understand how dominant the Labour Right were, and how underhanded they would be. That was yet another disappointment.
Basically, the Left lost every single battle for a million years, and of course that demoralized many people; lots just disappeared and did their own thing.
WX: There must have been friction going into the Labour Party. You went from an in-the-streets moment, being persecuted by people like Keir Starmer, to entering the Labour Party.
NP: For a lot of the anarchist Left or Antifa, they were never going to be on board with electoral politics. A lot of those people were working around individual workplace grievances, but they got very captured by the identitarian thing; it’s often the anarchists who are protesting the feminists. It’s weird how the anti-fascist movement started defending state policies, almost like the shock troops of neoliberalism. They’re supposed to be opposed to states. Everything got inverted.
And then Mark died. Mark killed himself in 2017. This was awful for everyone, and not just people who knew him. Symbolically, it was the end of a moment. It’s easy to politicize it, even though it’s a personal matter. Mark dying was perceived by many as a deep sadness about the state of the Left, rightly or wrongly.
LS: There’s a chapter in your first book[20] with a tantalising title about the socialist “program.” To what extent did you think of yourself as a socialist? Concerning going into the Labour Party — is that a strategy that future socialists should think about?
NP: Capitalism ended up being blamed for everything in a strange way. “I’m depressed; blame capitalism.” Paradoxically, this created a false impression of agency; people felt unable to do anything at all, including organize, because capitalism was a black iron prison. But there are different ways of understanding it — as a process and as a set of relations.
We didn’t have a good historical or political analysis of the economic situation. The micro-promises around free education, etc. were so alluring that they switched people onto Corbynism, and their energy was then directed solely towards that, only to be disappointed yet again. It was bound to end in burnout, crisis, and people leaving.
In terms of socialism: before any analysis, there is a more basic feeling of injustice, more or less exacerbated by the perception of the Right as cruel: “the Tories are mean.” It’s correct that the economic interest of the ruling class and the Right is always opposed to the interests of most people, but it was personalized when it shouldn’t have been, and politicized when it shouldn’t have been.
WX: In what periods would you have considered yourself a socialist?
NP: Probably from 98 onwards. And if we’re talking about defending the working class or protecting humanity, these are still things I’m committed to. I want everybody to flourish. But elitism crept in on the Left; it started to abhor normal people. That was partly a function of the massive expansion of higher education, which was damaging — loads of people massively in debt. Not only do they think of themselves as consumers and clients — and that changes the learning relationship — it also changes people’s expectations when they leave, especially when there are fewer jobs. People feel aggrieved and they think, “What capital do I have? I have cultural capital. This is what differentiates me from everyone else. And this is what makes me middle class.” It detaches people from real life, and it becomes a new moralism.
LS: Does the feminist notion “the personal is the political” have a lot to answer for in the current moment?[21]
NP: The original phrase was both: the personal was political and the political was personal. When Sheila Rowbotham and others were talking about political activism, they were saying, “We’re given all of the crap work because we’re women.”
In my experience, the socialist Left is a misogynistic load of men who pay lip service to feminism but are actually megalomaniac demagogues. There are some seriously messed up men on the Left who have this fantasy of themselves as great leaders, but they hate actual people.
That was revealed around the gender stuff. A lot of them came out against their comrades — the women who were involved in trade unions and long-term activism who were simply saying, “Can we discuss this? I’m not sure we should change the meanings of words in law without a proper democratic discussion.” And it didn’t matter how reasonable the women were. They were absolutely demonized and targeted as Right-wing fascists or Nazis.
One dimensional woman
WX: What motivated you to write One Dimensional Woman?
NP: My friend Tariq Goddard had set up Zero Books because he was desperately in debt and he saw us all writing blogs around 2004–05. I don’t know how much money he made, but there was a market for short theory books, and Mark Fisher, who was involved at the start, said that we should write books for 16-year-olds. My book was a cobbled-together piece of crap. It’s a pamphlet. It was scrabbled together from bits of my blog. It was not edited or proofread; it’s full of errors. We were all so used to putting stuff up online. It wasn’t like these were worked-out positions. These were hasty thoughts that were part of an ongoing conversation. But the moment you put something in a book, you’re tied to it. I didn’t realize that would be the case.
I agree with a lot of what I wrote; some of it’s funny. The stuff about work was insightful because it’s based on the experience that we were having in the knowledge economy. I was doing agency work and I hated the feminine branding: “The new economy is female.” So, I was thinking, what if the economy is now like the man — the boyfriend? Why are we being groomed for this economy? It is in no way a proper analysis. When I speak to Zoomers, people in their early 20s, they have a syncretic understanding because they’ve grown up with the internet, and they’ve read millions of different things. I didn’t even know what other books were out there. So my book doesn’t refer to much existing literature; it ignores tons of feminism. The point I made in the book about the ideological use of feminism to invade other countries was a good one; it’s absolutely correct.
LS: Would you say it was a critique of third-wave feminism?[22]
NP: It was a superficial critique of consumerist feminism and the way in which feminism is used to justify anything, as if anything a woman does is feminist. It was about the co-optation of some of the second wave and the gross invocation of feminism to wage war and to sell things. This was obviously, radically against the spirit of the second wave.
LS: Does that third-wave moment have anything to say to the present? The kind of freedoms that are offered through capitalism in that late neoliberal moment — is there anything positive to say about those freedoms, like freedom of expression of one’s sexuality? Freedom of integration into the labor market, the ability to work? What would it be like to uphold freedom in that moment?
NP: I was suspicious of what I perceived to be the Right’s image of freedom, as I understood it then. I’m not sure if I really had a Left image of freedom at all. I’m still suspicious of Leftist freedom insofar as it says things like “sex work is work” or “surrogacy is good.” I’m very second wave in that way. I think that sex is real and important. I’m opposed to the exploitation of women on the basis of their biology. There is an emancipation of women, insofar as I agree with de Beauvoir, that freedom is the freedom to fail. That has been achieved in the West. Freedom is the freedom to be unhappy. Female melancholy is historically important. It would involve making wrong choices.
But I was wary of the argument that feminism had reached its apex in the emancipation of women through work, through labor rights. The idea that once women are economically independent, that means that women are free — how can that possibly be true? I had an anarchist critique of work which was under-theorized — we would have to separate labour and work and so forth — I didn’t do that.
WX: What was the incremental value that second-wave feminism brought to the Left? Why did we need it?
NP: It was the most serious intellectual historical moment in feminism — women realizing themselves as historical subjects, being able to say, what would it be like to tell a history from the standpoint of women, what it would be like to think about sexual difference in a meaningful way? In the Hegelian manner: coming to self-consciousness of the female. Of course, it was a consequence of various economic shifts. It participated in them, and also responded to them. In the post-war consensus, and through women’s mass entry into the workforce. This raises issues about what it means to be a subject, and men and women become more and more alike. Ivan Illich makes the point that after the Industrial Revolution, you create an economic sex, which is an almost indistinguishable subject, and he’s sad about that.[23] We don’t have to differentiate between male, female, and child labor.
New needs and history
LS: In your later book, What Do Men Want?, you explore how the integration of women into work has put greater pressure on the family. Maybe women would prefer to stay at home. There’s a continuity with One Dimensional Woman in terms of an anti-work perspective — and also regarding the freedom of expression of one’s own sexuality. You’re highly sceptical of these forms of freedom; they have a consumerist quality to them. One Dimensional Woman is named after One Dimensional Man (1964),[24] in which Marcuse is responding critically to cultural phenomena in society to see how they might point beyond themselves. He is also responding to the Old Left, which emphasized a critique of production; he’s recognizing that there needs to be a critique of consumption. That suggests a sense in which his work is anti-consumerist. But I wonder if that is doing justice to Marcuse. Do the new freedoms that capitalism produces in society enable the possibility of experiencing new needs?
NP: I am conservative in the true sense of that word, which is that I don’t think human beings change that much. I’m deeply sceptical of false freedoms or things that present themselves as freedoms but actually turn out to be restrictive or oppressive. There is a continuity in the later book — the anti-globalization, the suspicion about corporations and consumerism that comes from the 90s. Stuff around sexuality and identity is boring and false, generally. But it’s interesting to look at One Dimensional Woman as a historical document, because the gender discussion hadn’t happened yet. It’s interesting to note that this was not an issue. The aims and ambitions of the second wave were co-opted and turned against it. One example of that would be the household need for double income, which means you can pay everybody less. This is presented to people as economic freedom, but actually it’s exploitation; you’re less free. I don’t see emancipation in new identities. These are yet more ways of selling things to people making oneself a consumer object: the commodification of the body, not just selling sex and selling images, but selling oneself as a worker, and more exploitative things like surrogacy.
WX: What you just described is not what I would think of as conservative. The only thing that I’ve heard you say that I would characterise as conservative would be describing freedom as “freedom from desire.” That seems to be a premodern articulation of freedom. Modern liberty, modern freedom, is not freedom from desire; it’s the freedom to become, and a part of that becoming is the almost infinite discovery and elaboration of human needs.
NP: Yes, that’s right, as a diagnosis of my position. I don’t think the mode of production changes us particularly, which is revealed when we can relate to texts from 2,000 years ago. I’m not sure that we are modern or have been modern. I’m not sure that modernity happened. Of course, there can be new modalities and new desires — but I’m not sure they’re always what they say they are. They are sometimes the opposite.
WX: Was there a universal abstract human being before the 18th century? Or were there just slaves, kings, peasants?
NP: In a way, I don’t think there are human beings. There are men and women. And that comes from thinking about people like Illich.
WX: Were there women before the 18th century? Was Cleopatra a woman?
NP: This is such a good question.
WX: She’s a semi-divine being, a relative of a god. She would have considered herself as qualitatively distinct material compared to her maid.
NP: Yes, it’s a really good question. But when I say that there are only men and women, it is to make a neutral but controversial claim that partly stems from Illich. A feminist was saying, “I’ve never seen a human body. There is no human neutral human body. There are only male bodies and female bodies.” This changed his whole outlook. What does it mean to think of human beings not as humanity, not as the human body, but as men and women? That changes how we see history.
You’re right, though, that it would not necessarily have been an important distinction compared to other, more important social distinctions, in pre-modernity. The democratization of humanity, the expansion of humanity, is to give it to more and more groups. But this is part of the problem with the Left: it wants to give more rights to more groups. What it ends up having to do is create new groups, which conflict with previous rights given to others. An obvious example would be rights for people who think they’re the opposite sex. Who is going to adjudicate in this clash of rights?
WX: My vulgar Marxism: even prior to political enfranchisement or political inclusion, as soon as we started reproducing humanity on the basis of socially necessary quantitatively commensurable labor time, that labor time is what has rendered all of us human. Wage labor — that’s when we get humans, when all these qualitative distinctions collapse.
NP: But you still need women and men to have children. To be vulgar and ideological for a moment.
WX: But this might not be like a men-versus-women thing. It’s more pre-modern versus modern. It’s historical.
LS: Humanity as such might have a different relationship to Nature than before.
NP: I will perversely insist on saying it hasn’t changed that much.
LS: Do you find Rousseau’s concept of “Second Nature,” which Marx takes up, meaningful?[25]
NP: It’s difficult for me to get away from a sort of Spinozism, where we are Nature. Everything we do to create ourselves anew, or to reproduce ourselves, doesn’t make much difference. We’ve destroyed the environment; we’ve created political subjects and systems. Aren’t we clever? But we should do a lot less. The problem is activity: most jobs are not just useless, but actively destructive insofar as they create nonsense and waste people’s time. I’m interested in useful work, and preserving human formations, many of which still persist despite the best efforts of modernity.
I’m not saying that we’re not this amazing intellectual force — consciousness — but I don’t know where I stand on the Hegelian question. |P
[1] (Winchester: Zero Books, 2009).
[2] What Do Men Want? Masculinity and Its Discontents (Dublin: Allen Lane, 2022).
[3] “Ep 71: Nina Power Interview & the United Healthcare Assassination,” Sh*t Platypus Says (December 15, 2024), <https://soundcloud.com/platypus-affiliated-society/ep-71>.
[4] See <http://www.leninology.co.uk/2013/06/open-letter-about-platypus-affiliated.html>.
[5] The newly privatised Defence and Systems Equipment International until 2009 (thereafter Defence and Security Equipment International) exhibited in Surrey in 1999, before moving to London; the first exhibition at the newly opened ExCeL (Exhibition Centre London) opened on September 11, 2001.
[6] Not in Our Name (NION) was founded in the U.S. on March 23, 2002 by members of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, among others, to organise the anti-war movement along avowedly less sectarian lines than its sibling Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (ANSWER). The slogan was adopted internationally, albeit without reference to NION itself.
[7] Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, formed at Warwick University in 1995.
[8] No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2000).
[9] (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000).
[10] The UK Labour Party rebranded as “New Labour” for the general elections of 1997, 2001, 2005, and 2010. 9/11 and the War on Terror followed Tony Blair’s second landslide victory in 2001.
[11] Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester: Zero Books, 2009).
[12] Defend the Right to Protest was founded in late 2010 in response to state repression of the student protests against increased tuition fees. See <https://defendtherighttoprotest.org/>.
[13] “Dead End: ‘No Future’, Utopia and Optimism,” Novara Media (January 21, 2012), <https://novaramedia.com/2012/01/21/dead-end-no-future-utopia-and-optimism/>.
[14] After receiving a brain injury from a baton strike, Alfie Meadows was arrested and prosecuted for violent disorder. He was unanimously acquitted in 2013 and received an official apology and a damages payment from the Metropolitan Police in 2023. See Oliver Snow, “Alfie Meadows: Met agrees payout for man injured at 2010 protest,” BBC, September 15, 2023, <https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-66827856>.
[15] The Director of Public Prosecutions is head of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) in the UK; Keir Starmer held the position from 2008 to 2013.
[16] The Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015 made it a duty for those working in education and health to report incidences of potential “radicalization.”
[17] The English Defence League, founded in 2009; it has since disbanded. Nina Power, “A protest ban isn’t the way to stop the racist EDL,” The Guardian, August 30, 2011, <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/aug/30/let-english-defence-league-march>.
[18] Helen Steel, “My statement on events at London Anarchist Bookfair 2017,” Helen Steel (November 22, 2017), <https://helensteel12.wordpress.com/2017/11/22/my-statement-on-events-at-london-anarchist-bookfair-2017/>.
[19] In February 2017, Shut Down LD50 was formed to organize protests against Lucia Diego’s East London art gallery LD50, which had hosted a “Neo-reaction” conference the previous summer and showcased artworks considered far Right or fascist. LD50 was subsequently closed for several months.
[20] Power, One Dimensional Woman.
[21] Carol Hanisch’s 1969 essay “Some Thoughts in Response to Dottie [Zellner]’s Thoughts on a Women’s Liberation Movement” acquired the title “The Personal Is Political” in 1970 when it was included in the anthology Notes from the Second Year: Women’s Liberation, eds. Shulamith Firestone and Anne Koedt (1970).
[22] Recognition of third-wave feminism is commonly attributed to Rebecca Walker’s article “Becoming the Third Wave,” Ms. (Spring 1992): 86–87.
[23] See Ivan Illich, Gender (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), 22–66.
[24] Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964).
[25] See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men (1755).
