2018. A short summary.

I spent a lot of time on the road talking about artificial intelligence, postcapitalism and radical social democracy…

A year is a long time in politics. I spent a lot of the first half zipping around talking to political and business audiences about post-capitalism, about the British Labour Party’s experiment with radical social democracy, and about the politics of AI. I finished the first draft of Clear Bright Future in January, delivered a second draft in September and am looking at proofs right now. Next year I will be focusing on the themes and messages of this new book, but what struck me in 2018 was the rising salience and acceptance of the themes of Postcapitalism: A guide to our future (2015). Anyway here’s a quick summary of what I did this year.

January

Postcapitalism came out in Chinese. I filmed in Paris, Berlin, London and Manchester — always in sub-zero temperatures — the series K is for Karl: a primer in the ideas of Karl Marx. Here’s Paris, seen from Montmartre at dawn…

At University College, Oxford, I delivered the Attlee Memorial Lecture to a packed audience…

February

I went to Warsaw to deliver a speech about the far right threat and the need for a new politics to combat them. Funded by the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung and Das Progressive Zentrum I did a workshop with the Polish left.

Then I went to Milan to do a keynote at the Feltrinelli foundation, where one of only three original battalion flags from the Paris Commune is stored.

March

I went to Zagreb to discuss Postcapitalism with philosopher Srecko Horvat at the Croatian National Theatre. Almost straight after that I was in Vienna to discuss the book, and the darkening political situation, with the historian Philip Blom…

This was also the month where I gave a lecture on the Grundrisse on the picket line of the UCU union, generating a popular internet meme…

But the highlight of Q1 was going to Toronto to receive the inaugural Ellen Meiksens Wood prize and deliver the Broadbent Lecture, again on Postcapitalism.

April

In April I was in Berlin for a second performance at the Volksbuehne of my boardgames (designed with Sam Williams) Culture in an Era of Global System Failure. Then I went to Warsaw and Lublin to report on the Holocaust revisionism controversy. I took this photograph of the gas chamber at Majdanek during a personal guided tour by the Museum’s curators.

The blue on the walls is from the Zyklon B chemical. It is a chilling reminder of what the alt-right have in store for us if we lose Western democracy for a second time. Five hundred people escaped from Majdanek: today’s fascists will use drones, CCTV and face recognition technologies. Nobody will escape. I interviewed the Auschwitz survivor Marian Turski and visited the moving Polin museum of Jewish life in Warsaw, where (we think) my great-grandfather Dovid Leib Wilchinsky was born.

I also travelled to Lisbon for the CCCB’s Ulysses festival, which included a discussion of European democracy and an interview for the 2084 Imagine programme which I don’t think has yet been televised.

May

May began with the Marx anniversary in Berlin. The Rosa Luxemburg Foundation showed all five films during the celebrations, and the fact that they carried a psychedelic copy of the Marx/Engels statue into the courtyard of the old Stalinist building of the Neues Deutschland was a good symbolic way to acknowledge the terrible things done in the name of Marxism, at the same time as celebrating the work of Karl himself…

I attended an event in Vienna organised by the Karl Renner Institut with former socialist PM Christian Kern, about the future of work and the left.

June

Saw me doing book tours, TV appearances etc in the UK, including at the ERS conference on democracy in Glasgow, and the Kings Place politics festival.

July

I delivered a keynote at the Paard, The Hague, alongside Jeremy Corbyn and PvdA comrades, and the next week was in Durham for a three day political conference organised by The World Transformed, where we showed the Marx films — and also at the Unite political school. Then, cold pasty in hand, was up bright and early for the bands and banners at the Durham Miners’ Gala.

August

I took a holiday in Greece. Then I spoke at Failte, a brilliant cross-cultural festival in West Belfast, and then flew to Seoul to deliver a keynote on the ethics and moral philosophical challenges of AI, which are going to be a big theme of Clear Bright Future,

I spent the rest of August in Pembrokeshire, finishing the second draft of Clear Bright Future.

September

I updated my HEFAT qualification with the brilliant instructors at Pangolin Security and then did some reporting on attitudes to Brexit in the pro-Leave Labour heartlands of South Wales. I made a swift trip to New York City to appear at the opening of The People’s Forum, a “movement incubator” populated by movements of the poor, marginalised, people of colour and women. I was honoured to be the only white man allowed anywhere near the platform for the whole two days of this really inspiring initiative. While I was there, the left won the Democratic primaries so we celebrated with a few pints of Guiness (not shown).

September continued with Labour Party Conference, and the parallel politics festival The World Transformed, which I helped design. Here’s me with one of Liverpool’s spectacular murals.

Also in September I began archive research on the British Battalion of the International Brigade, which I will write about in an upcoming work. I spent days goign through the reporter’s notebook of Katherine Wise Bowler — later Kitty Wintringham, partner of Tom Wintringham, the commander at Jarama. It was humbling to see she starts out in the first pages the same way as we do today: with some phone numbers and leads. That’s all… into a revolution where you needed a lot of press credentials just to avoid getting arrested by the Stalinists (she didn’t avoid it unfortunately).

October

I travelled to Berlin to keynote at the opening of Denkfabrik — a digital thinktank inside the ministry of Labour. The building has been modernised but you cannot avoid a slight shiver when realising it was Goebbels’ ministry of propaganda. Once again, we have to cleanse the past by confronting it…

I also went to Barcelona to do a keynote at Decode, an EU Commission sponsored project about technology strategy and AI in collaboration with the Barcelona city council…

I did Question Time from Barrow-in-Furness. I did a lecture on Corbynism at the Greek National Conference Centre. I did a big meeting on Postcapitalism at the Brainwash Festival, Amsterdam and made a 12 minute TV lecture about radical humanism, previewing some of the themes of Clear Bright Future, for the TV channel Human.

November

I did a keynote at the Democracy Festival organised by Respublica and Newport City Council. I hosted a discussion with director Mike Leigh about his new movie Peterloo. In Madrid, the Reina Sofia Museum hosted a two day residence by me, in which I did a lecture, a private showing of the a film of Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere, my anti-Trump play (commissioned by the BBC last year and televised for some reason only once (!))… and conducted a day long seminar about the postcapitalist transition with anthropoliogists, economists, local politicians and ecologists. Meanwhile Pablo Iglesias interviewed me on Otra Vuelta de la Tuerka…

On the last day in Madrid I managed to visit the site of the British Battalion’s action at Jarama (12–14 February 1937). Here’s the reverse slope of “Suicide Hill” seen from the position where the machine gun company conducted their last ditch defence on 12 Feb.

December

…was supposed to be quiet but the rising chaos around Brexit meant I was on the media a lot. Tonight, New Year’s Eve, I’m on University Challenge with other Sheffield alumni. I marched and spoke at the big anti-fa demo in London. It won’t be the last…

I spend my life in almost continuous verbal communication with people — during and after seminars, speeches, interviews — and listening to their stories when I’m reporting. And with 600k followers on Twitter, and 25k on Facebook, you are always exposed to the zeitgeist. I just hear rising concern, confusion and pessimism — above all an absence of the kind of class analysis that can make sense of the world as neoliberal globalisation gives way to ethno-nationalism and anti-universalism. Hopefully the journalism, performance, writing and film-making I’m doing helps counteract this.

Professionally this year I had to switch from a regular column in the Guardian to one for the New Statesman, whose editors gave me much more freedom to write about what I want to, which is the sharp end of UK and global politics, antifascism and the culture war. And of course Brexit — which one way or the other will be over by this time next year.

I’ve noticed a rising interest and acceptance in the themes of Postcapitalism but to write the next book I’ve had to put on hold developing the economic transition aspect of this work. This will be remedied in an upcoming article in Political Quarterly, before launching into the arguments around Clear Bright Future in May. The new book is an attempt to defend humanism and scientific materialism from the rising tide of anti-humanism, anti-universalism and fatalism.

As a freelance you feel the slanders, attacks and elite-inspired attempts to delegitimise left journalism much more sharply than people with a pay cheque. But at the end of it, all you need is a circle of good friends, comrades, family and trusted collaborators to give you encouragement and support, plus belief in what you are doing…