So here’s a thing: I’m going to call it “nuance trolling”. It’s when bland political centrists say “the radical left just reduce complex issues to buzzwords; words like ‘austerity’, ‘neoliberal’, and ‘centrist’ are simplistic; we need nuance”. It really boils my piss.
Because actually some things are fundamentally quite simple. Take ‘austerity’. The underlying dynamic is simple; it’s about transferring incomes from labour to capital. But understanding this basic, underlying, core dynamic of what austerity is doesn’t deny the overlying complexity. You can say ‘austerity is fundamentally about transferring incomes from labour to capital’ and that can describe quite accurately the “big picture”; it’s a broad brush-strokes kind of statement. That doesn’t mean you can’t fill in the details with smaller brush strokes – with a finer-grained level of detail. The point is, an issue can simultaneously be quite simple at the same time as it’s infinitely complicated.
Let’s go back to the picture analogy –
I’m looking at a painting. I could describe it at the finest level of molecular detail – how the balance of chemical tinctures produces the different colours – let’s say the shades of yellow – comprising the picture. That would be a really “complex” description of the painting. At the same time, I can say “that’s a picture of some sunflowers”. The point is, “that’s a picture of some sunflowers” reduces the molecular complexity of the painting to a very simple statement – a statement that is nonetheless true. Complexity and simplicity can – and often do – co-exist.
And think how difficult it would be to learn anything if they didn’t. We need a framework – a “big picture” – to structure our understanding of the details. In fact, educational theorists have a name for it: it’s called a ‘scaffold’. A scaffold is a core idea or set of ideas we flesh out – that we nuance and consequently come to understand better – in the course of our learning. Without a set of core concepts, new information is just so much static. Scaffolds provide a way of organising that new information.
Narrative is another way of thinking about the same thing. Narratives allow us to make sense out of a constellation of facts – assigning weight and importance to some and backgrounding others. For that reason, political narratives are important. Going back to ‘austerity’ – it’s “a fact” that in 2007/8 the budget deficit increased. The Tory narrative is that the reason the deficit increased is because the Labour Party spent beyond its means. Metaphor is central to the story. The metaphor underlying the austerity narrative is that the British economy is somehow like a household budget.
This is, of course, nonsense. The narrative isn’t a very good one. The most intelligent reactionaries almost never lie; they just tell a good yarn – a story that backgrounds the most important facts whilst foregrounding the trivial. This particular story about a household gratuitously spending beyond its means doesn’t really explain what’s going on in the world and that’s because it’s not designed to. It’s meant to act as ideological cover for (wait for it)… “transferring incomes from labour to capital”. A better story is that when the financial crisis hit, banks stopped lending, businesses stopped investing, the economy stopped growing, and the tax-take declined, which punched a hole in the public finances. The budget deficit is the effect of the crisis, not its cause. This is quite a simplistic narrative – a “broad brush strokes” picture that we could render in much greater detail and complexity – but one that I think is fundamentally right (or at least more right than the – frankly stupid – household budget metaphor).
So narratives are important because they act as heuristics for making sense of the world around us. This should be reflected in our own political education. Recently, I’ve been involved in a lot of conversations about political education on the Labour left; there’s lots of talk about educating our members about what’s in the manifesto so that they know the policies inside out and are able to advocate for them on the doorstep.
Absolutely this is something we need to do, but we also need to go further. We need to give our members – and the wider public! – a narrative for understanding these policies; what’s the story we’re telling about the state of the country? What differentiates the left in the party from the right is that we actually have a coherent narrative for what happened to the global economy in 2007 that is significantly different from the Conservative’s. That’s why the centrist nuance troll is so keen to dismiss myopically what the left has to say as over-simplification. Bereft of an overarching understanding, all they have are the details, (I think that’s reflected in the criticism that the 2015 manifesto was a “shopping list” of policies lacking a coherent vision to pull it together).
So, yes, things are complicated, but they can be simultaneously very simple. Part of the art of politics is being able to condense complex social and economic processes into a straightforward, easily-understood core narrative. Give me nuance, but give me simplicity too. After all, it’s no use being able to describe the molecular composition of paint if you can’t also tell me I’m looking at a picture of some sunflowers.
The Retrofit Lefty 