A new Left Unity group in Brighton and at Sussex University

Keston Sutherland

Keston Sutherland is the new Left Unity organiser for Brighton. He is a lecturer at Sussex university where he has given the students full support in their recent occupation.

I am a 36 year old Brighton resident and a Reader in English working at the University of Sussex. I teach poetry, Marxist theory, Samuel Beckett and anything I think students might be interested to learn about. I decided to join the Left Unity project for lots of reasons.

First, it is impossible to go on living under the daily barrage of jargon, prevarication and outright lies that makes up the bulk of official political conversation in the UK without becoming deeply sick of it and painfully offended by the way it is used to justify and smooth over horrendous attacks on the lives of working class and vulnerable people. A new order of political conversation is urgently required. We need a conversation that will allow the voices of precarious and vulnerable people really to be heard on their own terms, not more of the usual cynical party-political manipulation of those voices in soundbites and slogans. We need to start listening to each other and not to the politicians.

Second, the scale of the assault on the working class is now so vast, and the propaganda that justifies it is as ever so mechanical and overwhelming, that only a new sort of very determined resistance will stand any chance of rescuing the rights and entitlements that working class people have struggled for decades, even for centuries, to secure. We need to stand up to capital and its functionaries–the managers, outsourcers, big businessmen, venture capitalists, asset strippers, gambling-addicted bankers and retro yuppies–with complete, inspiring determination. The lives of working and poor people must be put first, over the career paths and bloated disposal incomes of the new manager class. Loads of isolated leftist splinter groups will not be able to do that. Left Unity stands a better chance.

Third, just about everyone I know feels like this. It seems crazy, no matter how we might get used to the fact, that so many people should just go on living under the domination of capital and its manifestly corrupt executive committee in parliament, and that they should all go on being depressed, outraged, offended and even in despair, often for their whole lives, without somehow trying to make possible a more generous social existence based solidly on altruism, common humanity and the fair and equal distribution of comfort, freedom and potential.

It is often smilingly repeated that after all, democracy as we know it may be a very bad system, but it is better than all the others. The answer to this slippery counsel of despair is very simple. Any system that is very bad is not good enough. We are not talking about systems for counting sheep or assembling mobile phones, where the best of a bad lot will do for now. We are talking about the lives of millions of people. A bad system is not acceptable. Millions of people in the UK know this and feel it. Left Unity should give them real, substantial hope that their suffering under capital will not be in vain, but that we can learn real lessons from the failure of market economies and start to think creatively, and always with fundamental respect for others, about a society we could actually be grateful and happy to live in.

My own most direct and intimate experience of politics has been through my union, UCU, and the strikes at Sussex over the past ten years, and the several occupations at Sussex in that period. I have protested against Labour and the coalition with new energy since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, but also before then. I am the author of a book of critical theory about Marx and poetry, lots of essays about politics and art, and lots of books of deranged poetry. I look forward to meeting and listening to anyone who would like to come along and get involved in the conversation in Brighton. Let’s make a space that feels really productive and hospitable to people from every background. Lives before profit!