In Lieu of a Statement of Aims

Our project has existed for roughly a month now, and in that time we have yet to explain publicly what we’re doing here and why we’re doing it. It's quite clear to anyone with even a basic aesthetic sense to see what we're going for with Labour & Leisure, the visual register we employ, our rhetorical style, our allusions to existing publications and aesthetic forms. We ape the Financial Times pink on our Substack, we aim for a stark, clean, professional register in our communications, and we have so far refused to engage in the mud-slinging and ragebaiting that dominates the present condition of Marxist discourse. This comes primarily from a shared sentiment between myself and co-editor S.E.P. that the labour and Marxist movement (particularly in Britain) doesn't take itself seriously enough, doesn’t project institutionality, prestige, or legitimacy, pertains to a stifling folk-political conceit, its praxis amounting to palliative care for a knowingly terminal enterprise.

We strive for one aim, to create something which serves our class in the same manner that the FT or Bloomberg serve the enemy. The pursuit of this form of institutionality, however, presents innumerable snares, principal among them being the hideous discontinuity of where we are now and what we want to become. The movement we come from finds itself circling the drain of mediocrity and immobility, both physical and theoretical, and the posture we take in response is one of preemption or premonition of a journal-to-come, something which we can’t fully realise in the here-and-now, by the basic fact of our present size and reach, but a form which we will continue to hold up as a lodestar for what we want to see realised, the aesthetic and contextual world we believe the labour movement must inhabit and outwardly project for its present survival and future victory. And yet, in the pursuit of something better, something which can give our movement a sense of stature and sovereignty, we find ourselves confronted, as ever, by the creeping spectre of idealism, precisely the thing which our project and the whole of our movement seeks to vanquish, being in this instance the privileging of a specific, discrete form over and above the actuality ceaselessly confronting us. So we’re caught in a bind, one which permits a covert pathology in the infrastructure of our thinking, a morbidity which threatens to corrupt the edifice entirely, to make our preferred form in the aspirational projection of legitimacy collapse by an inadequacy to achieve this ambition, the prospect of annihilation before we can realise ourselves as the real formal expression of a social content which itself we find find wanting.

In a dispute with my co-editor the other day, we arrived at a proviso agreement that our science, historical materialism, can’t be conceived of in discrete terms, that we have no right to make claims in the abstract which might prove themselves valid within the perceived theoretical boundaries of our discipline. Of course, as is true for physics or mathematics, advancements made in the abstract can be proved highly practical, even essential, for the development of technologies necessary for the advancement of the human species at later stages of historical development. Just as Henry Ford can be called the most authentic Marxist of his century and Karl Marx can be read and understood as the poet of commodities, so too are we incapable of knowing the degree of genuine historical import that our contributions might disclose, to how our theoretical interventions might realise themselves at a later time. But this wager doesn’t satisfy; we must concern ourselves as much with the optimism of the future as with the reality of the here-and-now. We are not allowed to sit idle, nor hold ourselves above anyone or anything without proof.

Precisely in its scientific character Marxism is ‘theological’, pertains to being the queen of the sciences rather than one discrete science amongst other sciences. If Communism is true, if it’s the ‘riddle of history solved’, then we can’t afford to take our articles of faith as they are, nor can we conceive of the universal validity of our conception of reality as if we were resigned to sagely catalogue and index all of creation according to an airtight and immovable hermeneutic. I will say with no hesitation that Marxism is correct, and that we can prove it, but that our proof requires explication, that it is at once absolutely realised in the present and at the same time completely beyond our grasp.

In this way, Labour & Leisure ought to be seen as the outward-facing product of a conspiracy, and in so being we are to maintain our edifice of obscurity. However, at this still early stage in the unfolding of our conspiracy, we can't afford not to let people in. We inevitably will have to make concessions to you, to where we come from, that my co-editor and I share the same ground as you do, that we are you, and that we soberly recognise the obvious tension that you may well have seen yourself between this shared space we inhabit and our ambition to rise above it. If you’re to be seduced by our project, which is our intention, then we’re forced to tease a little out for you, to allow you in just enough so that you can make it a part of yourself, to identify with the ambition, and to realise it with us.

I and my co-editor instinctively deplore parasociality, what it’s done to the human psyche and to society in general, and for that reason we find the prospect of streaming and podcasting distasteful. We both belong to Gen Z, and in that we are still tethered in some manner to a nostalgic yearning for those brief few years of our youth wherein institutions meant something. We don’t breathe the air of the digital age quite as deeply as the generation now coming up, so there is a degree of hesitation in our approach to this world, even if we can’t deny its immense significance to our own maturation. This personal dislike we have, however, means nothing in the face of what has to be done, to the commitment we have to realising our aims. Our period is a parasocial one, and parasociality ultimately spells the end of the old form of institutionality, both socialist and bourgeois, to which Labour & Leisure is posturing. We can’t afford to float above reality when we have no command of the reality we are enmeshed within, that which gave rise to us, and that we will always inevitably be expressions of, to greater or lesser degrees of self-conscious awareness. If we were to just opaquely present ourselves as the ‘paper of record’ for the working-class to only a small cohort of the theoretically interested then we would only ever remain one blog amongst many, a blog with perhaps a somewhat idiosyncratic and pompous self-presentation. We belong to this era, and therefore must concede a part of ourselves and pay our debt to reality.

This doesn’t mean abandoning the edifice of institutionality entirely. The contemporary period is just as defined by combinatorics, nostalgia, yearning for prior forms as that which Marx encountered. The traditions of dead generations continue to weigh on the brains of the living like a nightmare, and as such the adoption of a certain register of institutionality pertaining to dead or dying forms doesn’t disqualify us in our striving to project as a legitimate standard-bearer of contemporary Marxism. Rather, we chart a course along the knife’s edge between various forms of appearance now in existence, adopt whatever guise fits, and extend our conspiracy as far as it might go. Before we raise ourselves out of the gutter completely, we must become worthy of the gutter.

NISI GRANUM FRUMENTI CADENS IN TERRAM MORTUUM FUERIT, IPSUM SOLUM MANET: SI AUTEM MORTUUM FUERIT, MULTUM FRUCTUM AFFERT.