Listening to The Bomb on the BBC World Service in the early hours of this morning I was thrown back to the wood-pannelled dining hall of School House on 28th October 1962. Mr Stott, the house master, paced up and down in high anxiety as we awaited news on whether or not John F Kennedy would go to war with Nikita Khrushchev.
I was just 13 and just beginning to follow world news — I knew just enough to know that the ‘Cuba Missile Crisis’ provoked the terrifying prospect of an exchange of nuclear warheads. All 50 or so us ‘boarders’ at Liverpool College, the cheapest, and probably the worst private school in Britain were emotionally alert enough to recognise that our lives were in danger. For some of us, racism was an everyday fear; for all of us fear of annihilation was, briefly, our dominant experience of the political domain.
I thought of this when I picked up today’s Guardian from my genial local shop owner and read that Labour’s top spad is telling Keir Starmer and his Cabinet that, to win back the voters’ trust Ministers must display emotion and empathy. Apparently evidence would also help. Morgan McSweeney is right about emotion and empathy (if little else).
‘The Guardian Exclusive: Morgan McSweeney says Labour needs emotion, empathy and evidence, sources say’ [Photograph: Thomas Krych/Story Picture Agency/Shutterstock]
As I’ve argued in other occasional contributions to Substack on ‘sensuous materialism’, our praxis must be recalibrated to fully understand and respond to the emotional dimension of politics. As Trump’s authoritarian regime is unapologetic about its Might Is Right ideology, another generation is experiencing the raw fear that the new world (dis)order is generating.
Significantly, the Guardian didn’t elaborate on how McSweeney argued his case. Perhaps Jessica Elgot, who broke the story, didn’t get any more details. Perhaps she didn’t think his point about ‘emotion’ was that important. The bulk of her story was more about ‘evidence’ — that Labour was already making progress on the bread-and-butter issues, and its leadership’s role is to explain its material achievements more effectively.
But in everyday life there’s no distinction between people’s experience of their material challenges — the cost of living, illness, unsatisfactory housing etc — and the feelings aroused when these difficulties become unbearable. They are embodied. We feel these hardships in our bones and in our souls.
Even those of us who are well-fed and warm know that calamities are not so far away.
I asked CHAT GPT how many people in the UK are three pay-cheques away from homelessness. It didn’t know, of course, but it found a survey which said almost 40% of us couldn’t meet our housing costs for more than a month if we lost our income (i.e., I presume, our job, pension or benefits). Homelessness is a frightening prospect, with enormous emotional repercussions.
I’m of an age where many of my friends are living with health problems. Ill-health isn’t just a physical issue — it provokes emotional distress. In the worst cases, death may be in prospect, and every sick person experiences a disorientation of their sense of self. They worry about burdens placed on partners, children and friends, and they often experience guilt about the trouble they feel they are causing. Countless younger people live their whole lives with the emotional stresses that inevitably accompany disability and chronic illness.
So why can’t our politicians speak publicly about the issues we all face that are simultaneously emotional and material? We British are notoriously afraid of emoting. We didn’t impose our Empire by gazing at our navels, did we? Our upper lips were stiffened and they did not tremble as we loaded our guns. One of the MAGA slogans that intrigued me most said FUCK YOUR FEELINGS. So it’s not just the Brits’ issue here.
I think the problem is that to speak about emotions is to open yourself to the accusation that you are weak. Worse still, that you’ve been ‘feminised’. Even women politicians seem to fear this barb. One of Mrs Thatcher’s triumphs apparently, was to be the best man in her Cabinet.
My proposal that we re-think our socialism as ‘sensuous materialism’ is based on Marx’s simple, and irrefutable proposition that humans are ‘sensuous’. We make the world, through our paid and unpaid work, as humans who laugh and cry and love and hate. We go to work, online or in the flesh, to run that gamut of emotions each day. Without a wage, life is heavier in the tears and fears.
Whatever our material circumstances, we all experience a world where climate disasters are nearby and species are being extinguished. There is a huge emotional price being paid here, too. How hard is it to phrase our political manifestos in these sensuous terms?
References
‘The Bomb’ by Nina Kruscheva and Max Kennedy for the BBC is here https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w3ct8vc4
The Wikipedia page on the Cuba Missile Crisis is here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis
Jessica Elgot ‘Cabinet lacks emotional link . . .’ article in the Guardian (6 & 7.1.26) is online here https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/jan/06/labour-government-emotion-link-starmer-mcsweeney
My longer piece on sensuous materialism is here https://www.maxfarrar.org.uk/writing/sensuous-materialism-an-emotionally-charged-type-of-marxism/