Really Useful Knowledge & Brexit
The amount of misinformation,bluster & plain lies on Brexit is huge. The TUC has underlined that Johnson’s Brexit deal will seriously impact on workers rights. There is a good deal more to the deal though than that. What is required is really useful knowledge on the question.
Below what that meant historically is outlined. At the bottom of the post is a link to a Tribune article by left economist James Meadway which provides a useful insight into what Johnson is trying to get away with.
What is ‘really useful’ knowledge? It is a lost analysis. An historically based category developed in the fight against the Tories last time in the late 1970s and early 1980s & then forgotten.
We’ll come to what it is-‘Spearhead knowledge’
But we can say what it is not.
It is not really useless knowledge. There is a good deal more of this now than in the period of the birth of the mass media from The Times to the Northern Star in the 1830s. In fact there is a daily media barrage of twaddle about the ‘fact’ that there is no alternative but to cut jobs and spending or the ‘fact’ that the last Government was somehow responsible for a global economic crisis.
Of course countering the twaddle is important but that it is not only what really useful knowledge is about.
It is knowledge for activists. The real counterpoint here is not useless knowledge but useful knowledge.
Useful knowledge is harder to define than useless knowledge. It may be genuinely factual but the crucial point is that it helps to challenge nothing and ultimately explains nothing about where we are and where we are going.
Richard Johnson’s original work on Really Useful Knowledge [1976] focused on the 1830s quite deliberately because this was,post the 1832 ‘Reform’ Act, the period of the first attempt to configure British capitalism in a way that would enhance and facilitate the exploitation of workers.
What were the categories that Richard Johnson used?
Spearhead knowledge or what I might term pikehead
Political Knowledge Tom Paine, William Cobbett- rights
‘knowledge calculated to make you free’ Poor Mans Guardian 14 April 1832
Owenite social science- feminism, secularism
Poverty & exploitation- labour theory of value often focusing on the ‘middleman’
It was this terrain that Johnson felt made up the framework of really useful knowledge
But it was not just the knowledge itself that was important it was how it was obtained and from who.
This was not under any circumstances officially provided information or ideas to be found in Parliamentary debates, The Times or such formally schooling as there was before the 1870 Education Act.
That meant of course that much of the unofficial really useful knowledge that circulated was neither political or, in some cases, credible.
It circulated via the unstamped press such as the Poor Man’s Guardian, from 1837 through the Chartist Northern Star and in particular through readings and discussions of articles in such papers in pubs, coffee houses and workplaces.
Link to James Meadway’s post
https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/10/boris-bad-deal
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