TINA, as the Marxist political philosopher, historian and essayist Perry Anderson reminds us, stands for ‘there is no alternative’. Anderson’s article – Regime Change in the West? in the April edition of the London Review of Books – is, as might be expected, an exemplary piece of analysis. It unpicks the West’s recent economic history as it impacts on its politics as seen from his usual Leftist position. Oddly, however, it seems to me that his analysis is limited by its own form of Leftist TINAism.

I first read Perry Anderson in Issue 144 of the New Left Review, back in 1984. It contained his Modernity and Revolution – a critique of Marshal Berman’s book All that is Solid Melts into Air (originally a lecture) – along with Berman’s The Signs in the Street: a response to Perry Anderson. The fact that I still have my heavily annotated copy of that 1984 issue is testimony to my respect for Anderson’s analysis of the multiplicity of quite distinct modernisms in early twentieth-century art, a reading which has had a considerable influence on my own understanding. But I’ve also kept it as a tangible reminder of my ability, as a twenty-four-year-old, to try to “think through” the arguments of my elders, however persuasive, and to make my own judgements. To avoid, if you like, the seductions of other people’s implicit or explicit claims that ‘there is no alternative’ to their own authoritative views.

Anderson’s argument in 1984 was that European modernism in the first years of the twentieth century: ‘flowered in the space between a still usable classical past, a still indeterminate technical present, and a still unpredictable political future’. In short, as perhaps any good Marxist would, he assumes that the core co-ordinates on which his analysis must rest are cultural, technological and political. That assumption seemed to me then, as it does now, to ignore a significant aspect of the historical evidence. Namely, the roll of immerging and new forms of understanding of the sacred or spiritual, most notably perhaps those of theosophy and anthroposophy. Traces of such alternative belief systems can be seen in the art of, among others, Hilma af Klint, Kandinsky, Agnes Pelton, Malevich, Mondrian, Hyman Bloom, Beckman, Miró, Arthur Dove, and Paul Klee. A disparate line of alternative thinking that extends from the late nineteenth century through into the work of more recent artists, for example Joseph Beuys. I recognised even then that, as a subscriber to Marxism’s own brand of atheistic TINAism, Anderson could not be expected to give serious consideration to that evidence. 

My problem with Regime Change in the West? is not altogether different from Berman’s problem with Anderson’s critique of his book back in 1984. In short, that Anderson’s analysis, both knowledgeable and brilliant as it is in many respects, is based on a particular form of high-altitude thinking that simply does not acknowledge some all-important ground level evidence. Misses, that is, The Signs in the Street (the title of Berman’s NLR response to Anderson’s criticisms). There is only one brief mention of the “climate change” that threatens global disaster for us all in Regime Change in the West?, and, in its discussion of politics, none whatsoever of any Green Party throughout its analysis. It seems that Anderson remains the victim of the same form of Leftist TINAism, one that prevents him from seeing any way of addressing the maelstrom in which we find ourselves that does not conform to the Marxism on which he’s built a life-long career. 

Perhaps there’s a lesson here for us all. We may each have to let go of some of our most cherished beliefs, positions in which we are most heavily invested, if we are to face the reality of the local and global situations with which we are now confronted. We simply cannot afford to accept that ‘there is no alternative’ to the current status quo anywhere in any of its cultural, economic or political forms.      

I am a big fan of Ursula K Le Guin’s writing. Everything from the Earthsea series, through the straight science fiction to Always Coming Home, which I regard as the best fictional deep mapping going.

Back in 1974, Le Guin wrote a short piece called Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons? I’ve just re-read it and realise that it goes some way towards to explaining why, sadly, Donald Trump is merely a grossly exaggerated symptom – however unpleasant – of something deeply embedded in the culture of the USA. Not the centre of the universe, as he apparently believes. If Le Guin is right (and I believe she is), it all has to do with the American male’s fear of dragons or, to be less metaphorical, with the fact that ‘a great many American men have been taught … to repress their imagination, to reject it as something childish or effeminate, unprofitable, and probably sinful’. Given the fundamental role of imagination in our ability to empathise with other beings – human and more-than-human – that’s a pretty concerning claim.

Le Guin doubts that ‘the imagination can be suppressed’ and that attempts to do so result in it being ‘deformed’, in its transformation into ‘mere ego-centred daydreaming’ or, at worst, into a form of ‘wishful thinking, which is a very dangerous occupation when it his taken seriously’. Particularly by the types of individual now hell-bent on “making America great again” and whose fear of imagination is actually fear of anything that might deepen their understanding of their world, and their fellow beings, their own feelings and destiny, rather than confirm the narrow-mindedness and prejudice that allow those with pathological fantasies to stoke tendencies to hatred and vindictiveness to advance their own authoritarian ends.

I think that understanding this has a certain value, if only because it points beyond the media fascination with one or two American “big fish” – who feed on being the focus of media attention – towards the roots of the global problems we must now face. Namely, that Europeans have long been absorbing the values that feed those root conditions. We may not be able to do anything about Donald Trump, but we can certainly be more watchful with regard to the ‘fear of dragons’ and its consequences in our own lived culture. That’s my reason for recommending reading Le Guin’s piece, which you’ll find in Dreams Must Explain Themselves: The Selected Non-Fiction of Ursula K Le Guin, Gollancz, London, 2018.

I have spent the morning writing the following to my MP. If you’re a British citizen, please consider doing the same on behalf of many of those in our society least able to fight for an ethical and just approach to social benefits.

I am contacting you as one of your constituents and as a member of an Advisory Committee to the ‘Healthier Science through Collaboration’ project (https://www.ukdri.ac.uk/hxc-healthier-science-through-collaboration). I am intimately involved in issues of illness and disability through both family and work; not least as the result of my wife and I having been carers for my daughter for the last thirty-five years.

It is abundantly clear to those involved with the ill and disabled that the government is presenting wholly false figures to the public to justify its claim that benefit cuts are necessary.

https://www.jrf.org.uk/news/factsheet-health-related-benefit-cuts

https://www.disabilitynewsservice.com/government-claims-of-spiralling-spending-on-benefits-are-false-and-ideological-official-figures-show

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/mar/12/the-guardian-view-on-labours-welfare-plans-betraying-the-vulnerable

As the Rowntree Foundation makes clear, the proposed policy amounts to an attack on those least able to survive it, showing that “72% of people receiving LCWRA or PIP are in the lower half of the income distribution, rising to 89% for those only receiving the LCWRA component of UC and that the proposed cuts would damage the financial security of these low- and medium-income families the most”. 

No amount of rhetoric about “the dignity of work” or “the economically productive” can disguise the fact that the Labour Party is simply continuing the previous government’s attack on the most vulnerable members of our society. To impose further economic hardship on the ill, the disabled and therefor on their (often unpaid) carers, rather than address the root causes of our current social situation, is profoundly unethical and, in the long term, economically and socially counterproductive. 

Instead, what is needed is:

             fair and proper taxation of those whose “dignity of work” consists of collecting very substantial economic benefit in the form of unearned income; 

proper analysis of the situation that has resulted in a health system unable to properly address long-term illness or to address the consequences of covid and long covid and swift action to address this; 

legislation to ensure that there is meaningful and effective support for those many ill and disabled individuals anxious to find appropriate paid work, rather than the current ineffective lip-service in this respect.   

It is time that the Labour Party stopped pandering to those with a vested interest in sustained the Tory status quo and listened instead to those at the sharp end of the current crisis affecting the ill, the disabled and their carers. 

Yours sincerely,

Dr Iain Biggs

As often happens, a topic that’s preoccupied me for a while continues to be pondered somewhere other than in consciousness. I have been reading two very different books – Paul Hammond’s Constellations of Miro, Breton (City Lights Press, 2000) and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Books of Earthsea (Gollancz, 2018), which collects together all her writing on that place, the six main books and a number of short stories. Having done so, it now occurs to me that I need to add an afterthought to my earlier posts about art and magic.

In a section entitled The Wish-Landscape of This Everywhere, Hammond discusses the relationship between Breton’s book L’Art magique (1957) and his texts to accompany (‘illustrate’) Miro’s set of paintings known as Constellations. To do so he sets out Breton’s understanding of magic as it relates to Surrealism and the history of art in which he locates it, which in many respects draws heavily on Freud. Reading Hammond’s account, it seemed to me that Breton (and Freud) ultimately don’t offer us an understanding of the relationship between art and magic that breaks with the dominant culture that is now in the process of not only destroying itself but much of the web of more-than-human life along with it. A reading of Le Guin’s collected Earthsea material, on the other hand, does seem to me to do just that, both by drawing on her own concerns as a feminist and by reaching back to, and re-imagining, past understandings from non-Western cultures and how they might be enacted in everyday life.

It’s very possible that the particular reading of Le Guin I’ve come away with is coloured by having recently worked my way through the philosopher Eureka Santos Aesthetics of Care, an extension of her previous thinking in her Everyday Aesthetics in relation to a possible project. I read the second three books, and some of the short stories, as a critique and correction of the ‘masculinist’ assumptions that result in over-investment in the kinds of power enacted as ‘art magic’ (Le Guin’s term) in the first three books. I will not insult the subtlety, pathos and humour of Le Guin’s powerful storytelling by trying to paraphrase it in a “message”. However, while if I were to begin to address the notion of thinking art and/as magic together again, I would come to broadly the same conclusions, I would have save myself (and the reader) a good deal of time and unnecessary meandering by drawing directly on Le Guin’s Earthsea narratives.

Niamh Cunningham as an artist with a training in biomedical sciences who has been working as an artist in China for the last fifteen years. She has made a wonderful international homage to trees called The Memory Palace of Tree Stories. It seems to me this is just the kind of internationally-based work we need at this time.

If so, like me, you probably need to change your news reading habits. You might start with articles like this from Heather Cox Richardson. It’s not comforting but, unlike the BBC, it won’t skate over the important news about our current reality and then tell you about the lovely dog that found it’s way home after years away!

Rebecca Solnit has drawn attention to J. D. Vance saying that: “If American democracy can survive 10 years of Greta Thunberg scolding, you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk.” 

Setting aside all that’s ridiculous in that statement in terms of the inference that Thunberg threatened US democracy, not to mention the imbalance between the two figures, I think it suggests an interesting truth. Vince’s strange comparison seems to me to imply a wholly disproportionate fear of a young woman – Thunberg is still only 22 – whose concern for the global environment on which her and all our futures depend, he characterises as “scolding”. Scolding is, of course, a word most frequently used to refer to a female authority figure, most usually a mother, in relation to a child that has repeatedly done something stupid, inappropriate or wrong. Doesn’t his statement suggest a very real fear of, and resentment about, a woman telling truth to power and, behind that, a childish fear of, and resentment about, anyone who draws attention to his appallingly “bad behaviour”?

I find it very hard to write anything for this blog that feels worthwhile at present. This is in some small part due to the complexities of our current family circumstances but, much more centrally, as a result of what is happening in the wider world. I’m probably not alone in feeling that recent events in Gaza, Ukraine and the results of the election in the USA signify a slide back towards a world dominated by gross egoism, greed, bigotry, religiously-justified hatred, and much else that it might be hoped we, as a species, were slowly moving away from. And of course the increasingly rapid destruction of a habitable world, not only for the human population but, in all probability, for all living things.

I am in consequence very grateful to those who, like Rebecca Solnit, are continuing to do what I don’t feel able to do; to think and feel clearly and to act accordingly See, then, Solnit’s Meditations in an Emergence.