My father used to go out each week delivering leaflets and door-knocking for the Liberal Party. All through my childhood, out he went. And at each election the Liberals failed to win our Hazel Grove constituency near Stockport from the hated Tories. And then after a good 30 years of trying they finally won it in 1997.
Not coincidentally, my father was brought up in the Second World War. He was part of a generation that, though they never really talked about it, knew about a certain political darkness. They knew they did not have the luxury of ignorance. And that is why my father went out each week. He was doing his bit for a society worthy of such a name.
I’m 59. My life, the life of people around my age, feels like a multi-decadal betrayal of my father’s generation. Neoliberalism creates a deep forgetting: Stalin, the Holocaust, Hiroshima. It all becomes sanitised, put away in a box, only viewable on the screen. This, it seems to me, is why we seem so unprepared, on so many levels, for the next bout of darkness. One that promises to be unique due to its finality. Our extinction.
We can scarcely mention the word without an involuntary protest, as if it breaks a law of nature. Such is the depth of our received ideology – the end of history. We say we have kicked the habit of such nonsense, only to slip back into it when it offers an irresistible promise of escape from our finitude, our fallenness, the piling up of crises; the sickening vertigo of our historical moment.
The correct response to all this is, I believe, door-knocking. The visceral experience of it slices through the deep layers of performativity with which our contemporary conceit has hidden from us for so long. That fateful moment when you come, face to face, with the great unknown: the all too real other. Unmediated and raw.
I went door-knocking just about every week for two decades. In inner-city housing estates, along Victorian terraces, through new build suburban developments, off to out the way villages – the various living places of our British tribes in all their varied glorious humanity. They open the door. “Sorry to disturb you,” I always start. And then something miraculous happens. Connection. In a flicker they relax, you are in conversation, there is flow.
Left defeatism, caged within its 19th-century physicalism, cannot conceive of any such possibility for the human. Along with its cousin, capitalist rationalism, this perspective only sees what it allows itself to see: mechanical forces between dead things, oppression, confinement, no hope of escape. But out there on the doorstep, reality’s unknowability bursts through. The body relaxes, the tone softens, the words spring forth. It is this miracle that proclaims that we need not accept any inevitable surrender to fascism.
But, but: we have to do the work. A lot of it. Our future has to become as real as the past was for my father’s generation. Like them we have to say never again – and act as if we mean it. We have to look at the future and understand our own responsibility and duty. This is ever so difficult, as we know. There is so much distraction. But it is upon the ground of this difficulty that our humanity – in both its senses – is enacted or betrayed.
Our fate depends not upon warm words, clever arguments, flickering across the screen. Not upon the closed inwardness of our tribal loyalties, but rather the simple invitation that constitutes the knocking on a door. That confrontation with someone else, someone new – someone who is not us. It is what a forgotten philosopher of my father’s generation, Emmanuel Levinas, called an engagement with “our responsibility to the other”. It means we have no choice: we either connect, go “face to face”, or we end up condemning the other, and in doing so we condemn ourselves – and, now, the whole world.
So it’s door-knocking or fascism! This is the only grounded slogan for our time. But not door-knocking as a neoliberal tactic, an instrument, a transaction, a means to an electoral end. But rather door-knocking as a religious act, in the old meaning of “religious”, before it was tragically imprisoned within the individual and private act. The approach we need is one that enters into a dialogical adventure that provides for the depth I have outlined. You listen, and they speak. You ask what is going well and not so well.
It is open-ended. It is its own end and paradoxically, being so, it creates a commitment to engage in local assemblies, to connect together and take collective action. It is this that we now have to do – more than ever. Recently I helped prepare a programme, with the organisation Assemble, to train thousands of Your Party activists in how to door-knock in the spirit I have outlined. It has not been accepted. “Politics” sees so little. Even at this late hour, it is still waiting to be redeemed.
[Further reading: Voting isn’t democratic. We need sortition]
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