Ash Sarkar - Left Q&A
Ash Sarkar is Contributing Editor at Novara Media
How would you define your politics? I describe my politics as communist because I believe that everything that we need to survive, and to live good lives, should be managed and owned and controlled by all of us from the bottom up rather than the top down. And this comes for me from a democratic impulse - it's about how we maximise control over the most important aspects of our lives, rather than an authoritarian impulse. I think that the utopianism of communism, the idea of everything for everyone, is so important, and that should be the horizon that all of us work towards whether we describe ourselves as communists or not.
What book has had the biggest influence on your political outlook? I would have to say it's Frantz Fanon's work both The Wretched Of The Earth and Black Skin, White Masks, because for me, those are the texts which introduced me to Marxism. Frantz Fanon is using all of these words like lumpenproletariat and it meant that I had to go back to the OG, Karl Marx, to find out what it meant. And the fact that imperialism and racism as a technology of governance is front and centre made an awful lot of sense of my family's own experiences - being Indian-Bangladeshi, the experiences of colonialism. Particularly Black Skin, White Masks, there is a poetry that suffuses it. There is almost a Dante-esque journey into hell, which is coming to the imperial metropole. And the way in which it is so exquisitely agonising, Frantz Fanon puts you within his own skin, that has stayed with me forever.
And what book are you currently reading? The book I'm currently reading is This Is Your Mind On Plants by Michael Pollan and it is a look at psychoactive substances focusing on opium, caffeine, and mescaline. I'm reading this because I think at some point, I might interview Michael Pollan and this is part of my interest in decriminalising psychoactive substances.
Which figure or figures from history do you take inspiration from? I think for me, a lot of them have to be those early post-colonial and very often explicitly socialist leaders who are part of the non-aligned movements. I'm thinking here, Michael Manley, Nkrumah, Thomas Sankara. I think these are really important because that we can still learn an awful lot from.
Name one issue on which you have changed your mind. Oh my god, I change my mind about everything all the time, so just naming one is impossible because I reserve the right to change my mind about twenty times a day. I suppose one of the really big ones is electoral politics, because my beginnings in being interested in politics started out with anarchist, non-hierarchical, horizontalist and explicitly revolutionary forms of politics - because of course, in 2010, I was part of the student movement, and it ended up being really shaped by 2011, the Arab Spring, Tahrir Square. I kept thinking about social change as emerging from a series of confrontations with the state. And I do think that is, to a large extent true, but you also need vehicles for when that isn't happening, for when there isn't this kind of rush of blood to the head of moment of political contestation. So I had to come round to electoral politics being a meaningful use of time and energy and resources; and looking at things now maybe I was wrong on that, too. Maybe it is just a big waste of time. I don't know.
What one thing do you most dislike about how we do politics and how would you change it? I dislike everything about how we do politics. I hate the backbiting, I hate the lying, I hate the fact that people routinely say things that they don't even believe. I hate the normalisation of suffering and I hate the way the principle of negative solidarity has come to dominate politics in this country. By negative solidarity, I mean the idea that you can't have something better in case somebody who you feel doesn't deserve to have that thing might also get it. I think that nastiness, that sadism, is a product of how media has changed over the last forty/fifty years and if I wanted to change that climate, I'd say you have to change the media.
What media do you turn to for news and analysis? It's part of my job that I have to look at everything, so every morning I read the Politico London Playbook, I read the Financial Times, The Times, the Guardian. I read The Telegraph just to see what Boris Johnson's paymasters are thinking, I have a look at Al Jazeera and the New York Times. Occasionally when I can get translations, stuff like la Repubblica and Le Monde diplomatique but that's only when I'm feeling very, very pretentious and fancy, I'm not gonna pretend like it's a regular occurrence at all.
Where do you do your thinking? The shower and the Victoria Line.
Name five songs or pieces of music you couldn't live without. This is actually the hardest question that's on this list, because for me personally, the music that I love is very context-driven. So it depends what kind of mood I'm in, or what's going on, or what kind of memory I'd like to access by listening to a song which is associated with particular people or a particular setting. So coming up with five context-free favourites - that's practically torture under the Geneva Convention. So with all those caveats, here we go.
The first one on my list is Love Come Down by Evelyn "Champagne" King. It reminds me of it being five in the morning at a party, it should be winding down but actually you and all your mates are still on the dancefloor, singing at the top of your lungs and it was very often the song.
The next one is Nights by Frank Ocean. Frank Ocean's ability to tap into the emotion of longing, yearning, melancholy is absolutely unparalleled. And also the beats, which in the middle I imagine that's what taking opium feels like. Not that I've ever done that.
Third is Just So You Remember by Pusha T. So this is a bit of a newer song, but I just really, really love the vocal sample he uses in it. And it's one of my favourite emotions to vicariously experience through music, which is menace. I'm not particularly menacing person so being able to ventriloquise it through another artist is something which I do really enjoy.
The fourth song is I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free by Nina Simone. Because I think that captures something really fundamental about left wing politics. It is this marrow-deep yearning for freedom, for a radically different experience of the world that you've never had yourself, but you would recognise it if only you had it. And I think it's something which is conveyed in the music and in the lyrics, but also just in the quality of her voice - the way it sort of soars within her chest as the song builds up. So that's my number four.
And number five is the national anthem of the UK, Talkin The Hardest by Giggs. If you don't know the song already, you really should listen to it. It is one of the hardest grime songs that has ever been written. And if I am ever head of state, that would be the national anthem.
Is there a building that you love and if so, what is it? Yes, there is a building that I love and it is Le Corbusier's Cité Radieuse in Marseille. I love it because when you approach it from an angle, you see all these details that you would otherwise miss in this quite hulking and intimidating block of concrete. So you see that the little inlay bits, which take you from the facade of the building towards the windows, they're all painted in primary colours or green, so you end up looking at something that that looks like a Mondrian or something like that. The inside, the colours and the floors, there's just so much to feast your eyes on. And that's not something that people normally associate with brutalism, but I genuinely feel that it is one of the most perfect buildings in the world. It contains within it this kind of utopian impulse, this desire to make things different through building a different thing, which I think is at the heart of my politics. It's not that I want every single home on the planet to look like that building, but it symbolises something really important to me.
What is your favourite film with a political theme or content? Easily, Battle Of Algiers. It is my favourite film of all time. I think it's superbly-acted, shot, made; and the politics of it refuses to be reduced to pro-violence or anti-violence. It is unflinching in its look at both colonialism and the violence required to get rid of it. And it is something which with every viewing I feel like it's something new. Oh, and the musical score is perfection.
Is there an artist or artwork that connects to your political viewpoint? Well, I suppose there's loads because there is this incredible tradition of socialist and communist and feminist and decolonial artmaking. So just to list a few of my favourites, I suppose it would have to say Fernand Léger, Paula Rego and Sonya Boyce.
So those are the ones that I suppose connect to my interest and my viewpoint, but in terms of what I also love to look at, I love looking at Renaissance art. One of my favourite paintings of all time, is Caravaggio's painting - which I went to go and see in Malta - which depicts the murder of St. John the Baptist, because it really makes clear that this is a state murder. It is a grisly murder at the hands of prison guards in a dank dungeon. And there was something about that - the refusal to find godliness in this act of violence, instead seeing a brutal and violent state which has always stayed with me. So I think that would surprise some people about me, that I really love Renaissance art.
If you had a parliamentary majority for a day, what one law would you pass? I would make it illegal to rent out a property that you don't live in, either as an individual or a corporation. I think that landlordism is one of the single biggest blights on our society. I think that it is social parasitism, and yet it is portrayed as somehow entrepreneurial, so I would get rid of the landlords.
If you could choose to witness one moment in history, what would it be? I think it would have to be the Women's March on Versailles, just because it is so vividly written in Hilary Mantel's A Place Of Greater Safety that it has always made me curious about what it must be like.
Is there a living political figure or movement that gives you hope? That's a difficult one to answer because there are so many things that give me hope on a daily basis: seeing the way people in the neighbourhood that I live in stick up for each other in the face of police violence, I think is hugely inspiring. For instance, not that long ago, there was a video that went round all the local group chats because a police officer had punched a black teenager in the face, and then the community turned out. We went down to Tottenham police station, and protested. And that kind of outpouring of solidarity in real life I found hugely inspiring.
I think the resilience of the Palestinian people in the face of the attempt to eradicate their identity, and their political being, and their neighbourhoods, the day-to-day indignities and violations and violence, I find hugely inspiring. I would like to think that I would be as resilient and as determined in the face of such violence but I can't promise that I could. I think it takes something truly extraordinary.
As told to Simon Fletcher