Brexit and the ‘Left-Behinds’: How Neoliberalism Broke Britain

Brexit is haunting modern Britain from the shadows. It has been the political football tossed around the streets, and the House of Commons, for nearly a decade with no satisfactory endgame. However, the latest diplomatic rift with Washington has forced a strategic hand.

In the wake of Donald Trump’s military action in Iran, and his subsequent criticism and mockery of the Prime Minister for not providing offensive support, PM Starmer has signalled a major pivot towards a closer partnership with Europe and the EU.[1] It seems that the phantom may yet be re-corporealised. 

Prime Minister Keir Starmer has signalled a major pivot towards a closer partnership with Europe and the EU.

Photo by Simon Dawson / No 10 Downing Street. © Crown copyright, licensed under Open Government Licence v3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

How did we get here? It is fatiguing and dispiriting to recall Britain before Brexit. But the tension on the ‘Special Relationship’ has forced introspection. Given that the structural effects of Brexit have amounted to a chronic, slow-burn erosion of the UK economy,[2] why is it that a majority of the public voted to leave the European Union? Particularly if we now, only ten years later, are forced to reconsider?

To understand this impulse, we must begin with the direct consequences—the collateral damage—of Neoliberalism, Britain’s economic ideology since the 1980s. It is within those decades of structural degradation that we might find the answer as to why the public, in 2016, voted for what economists forecast as an act of economic self-harm.[3]

The British public voted to leave the EU in 2016, despite most economic forecasts describing it as ‘economic self-harm.’

Photo by Johannes Plenio via Pexels.

More Than A Protest

‘This was more than a protest against the career opportunities that never knock and the affordable homes that never get built. It was a protest against the economic model that has been in place for the past three decades,’[4] wrote Larry Elliott for the Guardian, three days after the Brexit vote in June 2016. And, indeed, the perception of Brexit from its champions has been that of a kind of ‘people’s revolt’ against a monolithic global elite.[5]

According to a study by Alabrese, Becker, Fetzer & Novy, there was a clear correlation between low educational attainment, unemployment (or employment in declining industries like Manufacturing), a lack of quality of public service provision and the decision to vote to leave the European Union.[6] In other words, a decisive majority of traditional working-class voters voted Leave. According to a Lord Ashcroft poll, the only socio-economic groups voting with a clear majority for Remain were professional, managerial and administrative demographics.[7]

Photo by Dylan Bueltel via Pexels.

For traditional working-class voters, we could interpret their Leave vote as a reaction against what the system had been offering them, and how their prospects had been unfolding under the economic, political consensus of the time.

So, what is Neoliberalism, the dominant economic and political ideology of the UK since the 1980s? And how did it create a demographic of dissatisfied voters Ford & Goodwin have called ‘the left-behinds?’[8]

Neoliberalism, Globalization & The ‘Left-Behinds’

Though Globalization has always existed in one form or another, Margaret Thatcher’s government integrated the UK economy more openly into global trade through privatization.

Photo by Maxim Hopman on Unsplash.

Neoliberalism is a market ideology favouring decentralization, deregulation, and open borders for trade. Globalization acts as a process of reinforcement for this; increasing international integration, facilitating the rise of the transnational corporations (TNCs) and diminishing the economic (and political) influence of the nation-state.[9] The effect is an increasing ‘deference’ of the nation-state to international capital.

Though Globalization has always existed in one form or another, Margaret Thatcher’s government integrated the UK economy more openly into global trade through privatization; meaning that, ultimately, four years into her eleven year term, the UK had become a net importer of manufacturing for the first time in two centuries.[10]

Margaret Thatcher’s government integrated the UK economy more openly into global trade through privatization.

Portrait of Margaret Thatcher (c. 1995).
Original photo by Terence Donovan via the Margaret Thatcher Foundation; derivative work by Begoon. Released by the Thatcher Estate for unrestricted use.

Thatcherism facilitated de-industrialization, and the economy’s modern dependence on the financial sector, by appealing to monetarism (the preference of capital-as-money over capital-as-production). Proliferating through a program of opening up government shareholdings and nationalised industries (the lifeblood of many working-class communities), Thatcherism allowed international capital to penetrate the UK economy from overseas.[11]

This change killed off national enterprises so that, by the late 90s / early 20s, ‘crown jewel’ UK businesses like Rolls Royce, Thames Water, Powergen and O2, had entirely foreign ownership.

Describing Thatcherism for The New Statesman in 2019, David Edgerton (Professor of Modern British History) opined: ‘How did the most successful conservative party of the 20th century become the agent for a national humiliation?’ [12] This sentiment echoes the weary public criticism in 1997, which helped deliver a decisive victory to Tony Blair’s ‘New Labour.’

Thatcherism facilitated de-industrialization, and the economy’s modern dependence on the financial sector, by appealing to monetarism (the preference of capital-as-money over capital-as-production).

Photo by Alan Wang via Pexels.

As a consequence of privatization and a deregulated market, the larger pool of international competition pressured employers to hold down the costs of production, as well as allowing them to outsource to lower-cost countries, with the omnipresent threat of outsourcing degrading the bargaining power of unions and workers.[13] The closure of national industries in favour of imports, with no subsequent retraining or equivalent employment, lead to a decimation of regional communities, and by the second year of Thatcher’s second term, unemployment had more than doubled.[14]

Thatcher’s programs of deregulation and privatization (ostensibly promoted to improve the efficiency of the public sector via ‘survival of the fittest’ for market forces[15]) eroded the ‘post-war settlement,’ which had pursued full-employment, welfare support systems, the National Health Service and free higher education, transforming the lives of working-class people. Thatcher’s policies, Hall suggests, betray the true intentions of Neoliberalism as a ‘direct attack’ on the post-war welfare state.[16]

Through cuts directed at housing, education and personal social services, this ideological ‘attack’ hit vulnerable communities the hardest (the proportion of pensioners living below the poverty line rose from 13% to 43% and child poverty doubled.) British journalist and social policy expert Malcolm Dean, best known as the creator of The Guardian’s Society pages, summed up the situation as follows: ‘In 1979 the post-tax income of the top 10% of the population was five times that of the bottom 10%; by 1997 it had doubled to 10 times as much. After three decades during which economic growth was shared across income groups, the distribution went into reverse.’[17]

Through cuts directed at housing, education and personal social services, Thatcher’s ideological ‘attack’ hit vulnerable communities the hardest (the proportion of pensioners living below the poverty line rose from 13% to 43% and child poverty doubled).

Photo by BEN ELLIOTT on Unsplash.

The Thatcher government also pursued new restrictions on trade unions, forbidding organized protests, allowing employers to dismiss strikers, and making unions liable for financial penalties, effectively ending collective action.[18] So, on top of the crumbling welfare state, working-class communities were also chronically underrepresented, seemingly abandoned by a state which appeared to have forgotten them. As Nunn argues, we may see the long-term project of Thatcherism as a fundamental weakening of the working-class in economic and political representation.[19] The effects of which were arguably only superficially addressed by successive New Labour and Conservative governments who, at most, minimized the excess without charting a new path.

Thus, Thatcherism halted the productive sphere of the UK economy in favour of finance capital and imports, and focused government policy on distancing trade unions from the state and meeting TNC demands. In 1986, Thatcher’s government opened up the London Stock Exchange to foreign investors, dubbed ‘The Big Bang,’ transforming the capital into a global financial hub.

In 1986, Thatcher’s government opened up the London Stock Exchange to foreign investors, dubbed ‘The Big Bang,’ transforming the capital into a global financial hub.

Photo by Oliver Hale on Unsplash.

This unprecedented growth of financial capital fundamentally reshaped London, transforming its top earners into a new class of ‘super-earners;’ but, as a consequence, it also significantly widened the North-South economic gap.

‘Global Cities’ and the Regional Divide

London, by virtue of its density of people and historical institutions, was successfully marketed as a financial centre after the ‘The Big Bang.’

Photo by Andres Garcia on Unsplash.

Thatcherism’s de-industrialization and dependence on finance capital has seen the emergence of ‘global cities’ in transnational trade as the western economy’s lynchpin.

Noah Toly, a former Senior Fellow for Global Cities at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, defines global cities as a necessity in our open, international economic system, concentrating large numbers of this borderless economy’s ‘winners,’ and developing unparalleled levels of political influence.[20] They represent ‘nodes’ in a network of TNC activity around the globe.

London, for example, by virtue of its density of people and historical institutions, was successfully marketed as a financial centre after the ‘The Big Bang.’ This deregulation of the London Stock Exchange (abolishing fixed commissions, ending the separation between brokers and dealers, and allowing foreign ownership) engineered a framework designed to attract global private investment above all else.[21] This shift fundamentally altered the British state’s role. Today, unlike most developed countries, the UK relies primarily on the private sector to finance its core infrastructure.[22] This leaves national development uniquely at the mercy of private enterprise, exemplified by one of the world’s only fully privatised water systems.[23]

The resulting accumulation of finance capital in the City has ensured that job creation remains overwhelmingly lopsided. London and the South-East, representing only a quarter of the population, have accounted for almost a third of net job growth since the 2008 financial crash, with precarious ‘gig economy’ service roles comprising a disproportionate number of these new positions.[24]

London and the South-East, representing only a quarter of the population, have accounted for almost a third of net job growth since the 2008 financial crash.

Photo by Szymon Shields on Unsplash.

Toly’s analysis reminds us that this dichotomy of the affluence of global cities in comparison to the struggling ‘hinterlands’ is a vital lens through which to view the Brexit vote.[25] Research by Dijkstra, Poelman & Rodríguez-Pose suggests that the ‘geography of discontent,’ prevalent in post-industrial towns burdened by low educational attainment and stagnant employment, correlates statistically with high densities of regional Leave votes.[26] Their findings indicate that anti-EU sentiment was not a sudden fever, but a symptom of long-term economic decline. As Dijkstra et al. argue, these ‘places that don’t matter’ often hail from the very industrial heartlands that were dismantled to make way for the London-centric, finance-led model of the Thatcher years.[27]

One stark indication of the regional divide is a disparity in mortality rates. Populations in the richest parts of London and the South-East in have very low mortality rates, whereas those in post-industrial areas of the North (Blackpool, Hull and Liverpool among them) have rates statistically closer to parts of Poland and Turkey than London.[28]

Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown once referred to the UK as ‘united in name only.’[29] In the wake of the Brexit vote, Brown described a ‘revolt of the regions’ against London’s failure to ‘trickle-down’ or disperse wealth regionally.[30] However, Brown’s own New Labour government marketed themselves to affluent metropolitan workers, failing to address post-industrial anxieties or reverse Thatcher’s union sanctions.[31]

In post-industrial areas of the North (Blackpool, Hull and Liverpool), mortality rates are statistically closer to parts of Poland and Turkey than London.

Photo by Peter Hall on Unsplash.

Thomas Freidman, a journalist for The New York Times, optimistically argued that technological advances have ‘flattened’ economic opportunity in our global era.[32] The evidence, on the other hand, speaks more to his rival, Richard Florida’s, counter-argument that the economy has ‘peaks,’ in metropolitan innovation centres like London, which have become more dispersed; while the distance between talent-exporting ‘have-not’ regions, and developed, ‘have,’ capitals has grown.[33] As Dörry & Dysmki note, London’s intricate economic relationship with Europe and heavy nourishing by the single market, allowed the city to emerge as a financial powerhouse.[34] A powerhouse which, by the 2016 Bexit referendum, generated 22.7% of the UK’s total GVA (Gross Value Added), while the entire North East region contributed just 3.0% (a nearly eightfold disparity in economic weight).[35]

Despite its stark internal inequality (where the immense wealth of the London Stock Exchange is counterbalanced by a sprawling, precarious service economy), London functions as a classic example of what Dörry & Dysmki call an ‘archipelago-economy’[36]). It successfully materialises high-speed capital flows through a unique ecosystem of merchant banks, capital brokers, and dense clusters of professional expertise, acting as a kind of ‘suction’ for national resources, with regional areas frequently see their talented workers and economic resources syphoned away towards the metropolitan core.

The immense wealth of the London Stock Exchange is counterbalanced by a sprawling, precarious service economy.

Photo by Jeffrey Zhang on Unsplash.

Access to the single market allowed London-based firms to conduct direct trade with the EU through passporting rights and euro-dominated bonds and shares, but the loss of the single market formally ended passporting rights for London firms, forcing them to relocate assets and staff (estimated at over £900 billion) to EU hubs. While London has retained its ‘pool of liquidity’ and global expertise, it now operates as a ‘third country,’ increasingly vulnerable to regulatory shifts in the Eurozone and the looming 2028 deadline for the repatriation of euro-denominated clearing.[37] As Sean O’Grady dryly remarked for The Independent in 2017: ‘house prices, fancy restaurants, luxury car dealers and champagne sales in London would be hit.’[38] Perhaps, in this small way, the ‘revolt of the regions’ was a success; a substantiating of discontent if nothing else. However, as the UK economy struggles with lower investment and productivity, this ‘revolt’ has perhaps caused a collective ‘levelling down,’ rather than the regional ‘levelling up’ voters may have truly desired.

From this, we can conclude that a key accelerant for the flames of the Brexit vote calcified over regional animosity towards London into a specific attack on London-based firms benefitting massively from the intersection of transnational capital; a ‘revenge of the places that don’t matter,’[39] which prioritised the re-assertion of national borders even at the cost of global financial supremacy.

A key accelerant for the flames of the Brexit vote calcified over regional animosity towards London into a specific attack on London-based firms benefitting massively from the intersection of transnational capital.

Photo by Jeffrey Zhang on Unsplash.

The Political Liability of a Borderless World

The key point of articulation on the road to the Brexit vote seems to have been the 2008 financial crisis. Spanish-American sociologist and political economist Mauro Guillén describes a dynamic where blue-collar workers have simply ceased to buy into the values of middle class professionalism, and the liberalism of the political and media classes has come to be associated with the negative consequences of trade, capital movements, migration and technology.[40] Middle-brow liberalism becomes a proxy for an ineffable political/economic system.

For the working-class voter, the ballot box no longer offered a choice between different economic systems.

Photo by ChiralJon, licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Ford & Goodwin write of a growing divide between the traditional working-class and emerging social groups such as ethnic minorities, graduates, and middle-class professionals, holding very different values from the ‘once-dominant but now fast-declining’ demographics (older, white voters, traditional working class people and school leavers).[41]

The battle lines of that divide can be seen germinating in Labour’s rebranded ‘New Labour’ of the 1990s. Facing repeated electoral defeats and the shrinking of its core voter base, Labour reoriented towards codifying Thatcher’s economic settlement rather than challenging it. By accepting the permanence of privatised utilities and the supremacy of London, New Labour effectively orphaned the post-industrial working class, aiming its appeal at the growing demographic of socially liberal, university-educated professionals, who were the primary beneficiaries of this globalized, market-led Britain.[42]

With Labour seeming to abandon its grounding principle of economic redistribution, and the Conservative party pitching a competing modernized social liberalism to woo back the middle-class voters it had lost to Labour,[43] this ‘convergence of the centre’ meant that for the working-class voter, the ballot box no longer offered a choice between different economic systems, but merely a choice between two variations of the same metropolitan liberalism.

Facing repeated electoral defeats and the shrinking of its core voter base, Labour under Tony Blair reoriented towards codifying Thatcher’s economic settlement rather than challenging it.

Photo by Jean Guyaux / European Communities (© 1997), licensed under CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Socially liberal attitudes towards growing discussions on national identity, diversity, and multiculturalism, had been mostly cultivated by educated, insulated middle-class demographics, and somewhat alienated, or appeared distant from, traditional working-class voters and their everyday lives. Thomas Sampson, an Associate Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics, pointed to an identification with the nation-state, and a sense of ‘scapegoating’ the EU in rhetoric, as strong factors in the Leave campaign’s success, with polling data showing that older, white school leavers identified significantly more with national identity than socially liberal graduates and middle-class professionals.[44]

Work by Ford & Goodwin found declining groups tended to be more nationalistic, with national identity thought to be linked to ancestry and birthplace, more than institutions or civic attachments. They also tended to place high value in a sense of ‘order’ and ‘stability,’ defined by firm national identity and sovereignty (which could be threatened by ‘diversity, mobility and rapid change;’ the very things championed by socially liberal emerging groups).[45]

In this way, the EU, immigration, and the larger ideology of global integration could be seen as a kind of scapegoat for the ‘left-behind’ demographics and their concretely declining, institutionally overlooked, situation.[46] From this, we can surmise that some of the Leave campaign’s success is owed to the ‘Left-Behinds’ of modern Britain. This is why Guillén described the argument for a borderless world post-financial crash as a ‘political liability.’[47]

The EU, immigration, and the larger ideology of global integration could be seen as a kind of scapegoat for the ‘left-behind’ demographics and their concretely declining, institutionally overlooked, situation.

Photo by ChiralJon, licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

But it is in this sense that the socio-cultural effects of Globalization are somewhat disarticulated from the simultaneously solidifying economic system. While the negative effects of the system drive anxieties of ‘left-behind’ demographics, fuelling a counter-drive for ‘order and stability,’ the fundamental Thatcherite dismantling of organized labour and national industry remains decisively unchallenged.

We must therefore question whether a globalized world inevitably leads to this level of inequality, or whether a system fortified by robust domestic protections could have mitigated these percolating inequities. The tension suggests that Brexit was not an exit from the economic system itself, but a desperate, paradoxical attempt to find security in a framework that continues to prioritise capital over community.

The New Protectionism

Official presidential portrait of President Donald J. Trump (2025) by Daniel Torok.

Courtesy of the Library of Congress. Public Domain.

Considering all of this, what, then, is the alternative to Globalization proposed by the champions of Brexit?

The organized blow-back against Globalization in Brexit finds its transatlantic analogue in US President Donald Trump’s simultaneous election (mere months after the referendum result), who also successfully catalysed a ‘left-behind’ post-industrial base. As Pareschi notes, Trump himself immediately linked the two campaigns together, identifying a ‘common will’ to reclaim national sovereignty.[48] By 2026, in Trump’s second term, this ‘alternative’ in the US has evolved from rhetorical threats into a chaotic, but hardened, ethos.

By 2026, in Trump’s second term, the ‘alternative’ to Neoliberalism in the US has evolved from rhetorical threats into a chaotic, but hardened, ethos.

Photo by The Now Time on Unsplash.

The alternative proposed by Trump is Protectionism, or: taxing imports to shelter domestic businesses from international competition. Following his return to the White House after Joe Biden, Trump escalated the trade wars of his first term[49] into a blanket ‘Declaration of Economic Independence,’[50] culminating in the April 2025 imposition of a 10% baseline tariff on almost all imports to the US.

For post-Brexit Britain (initially seeking a ‘Global Britain’ model of openness), this protectionist era has proved a costly paradox. To secure market access for its ‘crown jewel’ sectors, the UK was forced into a landmark US pharmaceutical deal,[51] effectively trading higher NHS drug-pricing thresholds for reduced tariffs.[52] In this landscape, the ‘alternative’ to globalization appears to be, not a return to 19th-century isolation, but a fragmented world of ‘trade-defence’ toolkits and bilateral concessions where sovereignty is bartered for survival.

28/07/2025. Turnberry, United Kingdom. Prime Minister Keir Starmer meets with US President Donald Trump at Trump Turnberry golf course.

Photo by Lauren Hurley / No 10 Downing Street. © Crown copyright, licensed under OGL v3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

American economist Jospeh Stiglitz has argued that this tactic has considerable support from billionaires and companies who compete with imports precisely because of the significant financial upside for them;[53] making it hard to see the rhetoric as anything more than a cynical manipulation of anti-globalization sentiment. By 2026, we see a stark paradox: the same corporate titans who lobbied for the 2025 ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs (ostensibly to defend the American worker) are simultaneously leading legal challenges to dismantle union rights and roll back workplace safety regulations. This suggests that their interest in the welfare of disenfranchised blue-collar workers is purely instrumental, using protectionism as a shield, not for the worker, but as a subsidized barrier to competition, allowing the continued exploitation of domestic labour without the threat of foreign intervention.[54]

Similarly, in Britain, the high-profile foreign takeovers of firms like the defence contractor Cobham Plc and the satellite operator Inmarsat Plc prompted a political shift towards protectionist rhetoric. In an effort to secure the ‘Red Wall’ post-industrial regions won over spectacularly during his 2019 election victory, Boris Johnson’s Conservative government promised to relax state-aid rules and encourage ‘Buying British.’[55]

In 2019, Boris Johnson’s Conservative government pledged to relax state-aid rules and encourage ‘Buying British.’

Photo by David Sedlecký, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

However, the narrative of New Protectionism ignores a structural reality: today, in early 2026, the service sector accounts for a staggering 81% of UK economic output,[56] whereas manufacturing has dwindled to just 8.6%.[57] This reflects a decisive lack of manufacturing apparatus in a post-Thatcher Britain that, without unprecedented levels of state investment, can’t be rebuilt.

Furthermore, the UK faces fierce competition from developing nations that have spent decades cultivating highly industrialised economies. As Stiglitz notes, even a minor resurgence in domestic manufacturing would not provide a windfall for the ‘left-behind’ demographic; modern production relies on automation and AI-driven technologies that require entirely different skill sets than those of traditional manual workers in Northern England or the Rust Belt in the US.[58] In 2026, protectionism acts less as a bridge to the industrial past, and more as a defensive screen for a nation that has fundamentally outgrown its manufacturing heritage.

The UK’s manufacturing sector now faces fierce competition from powers like China, which have spent decades prioritising high-output, state-backed industrial growth.

Photo by Peter Xie via Pexels.

As Stiglitz reminds us, major economic transitions historically trigger more job destruction than immediate creation.[59] Consequently, a comprehensive program of deglobalization is likely to repeat this painful cycle, and the potential losses for sectors that rely on global supply chains far outweighs the marginal gains for domestic exporters. Furthermore, as Leung notes, the imposition of tariffs and quotas restricts consumer choice and inflates the cost of living.[60] In 2025 and 2026, these measures have acted as a regressive tax, disproportionately impacting the working classes whose stagnant wages are further eroded by the rising cost of essential goods. Far from protecting the ‘left-behind’ demographics, deglobalization risks entrenching their hardships within a weaker, more isolated economy.

With the absence of resurgence in manufacturing, and the mounting collateral damage to the service sector from protectionist trade frictions, the unskilled ‘left-behind’ worker remains marooned in an economy that offers little by way of a genuine alternative to Neoliberalism. In 2025 and 2026, it has become evident that the anti-globalization sentiment driving both Brexit in the UK, and Trumpism in the US, focused on the symptoms of global integration rather than the mechanisms of neoliberal neglect.

The ‘left-behind’ worker remains marooned in a post-Brexit economy that offers little by way of a genuine alternative to Neoliberalism.

Photo by David Pickersgill, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 via Geograph. 

By the first quarter of 2026, the UK’s regional economic gap has actually widened, with London and the South East continuing to capture over 60% of new high-value service jobs, with growth in the North East and Scotland lagging significantly below the national average.[61] Similarly, in the US, despite Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs, manufacturing employment has actually fallen, with firms struggling over the increased cost of imported components.[62] The political sea-change of the Brexit/Trump era have not dismantled the neoliberal order, but have merely layered an ineffectual program of Protectionism on top of it, further failing to address the very inequities which catalysed that sea change.

With the ‘Red Wall’ still crumbling, and the US relationship turning toxic over Iran, ‘New Protectionism’ has been exposed as a hollow alternative, forcing Keir Starmer’s government to reconsider the UK’s relationship with Europe.

Donald Trump announcing joint US-Israeli combat operations against Iran (28th February 2026). 

Official White House Video/Photograph by the Executive Office of the President. Public Domain, https://x.com/realDonaldTrump/status/2027651077865157033.

So, where do we go from here?

Globalization Without Neoliberalism?

The Interconnected World. 

Photo by NASA via Unsplash. Public Domain.

In the wake of this double-failure of Neoliberal neglect and Protectionist friction, we may pose the question of whether some form of Globalization could exist without the Neoliberal policies which have so decisively skewed the balance of power.

The effects of Globalization which, for example, Collins for Forbes identifies as desirable: the influx of information between countries, cultural intermingling and the values of openness and tolerance,[63] have met with negative associations in-part because the onset of Globalization has measurably made the lives of certain demographics more difficult. But a global model could, in theory, be reconciled with a system that is fairer. So, how exactly could this happen? How could Globalization be fixed?

A ‘global pot’ of capital: in the Neoliberal era, the vast wealth accumulated by TNCs has grown to subordinate both national and individual interests.

Photo of Commercial District During Dawn by Negative Space via Pexels.

On the understanding that the fabric of the global economy is that of a ‘global’ pot of capital accumulated by TNCs, growing alongside national and individual capital, which, with Neoliberal policy, has grown to subordinate the other two; Wim Dierckxsens, a Dutch social scientist and former UN administrator, argues for a ‘citizen-led, totality-based’ model, reconciling the interests of the latter with those of the former.[64]

Post-war style policies attuned to national economies are incongruous in the modern age, where the global pot of capital dwarfs national budgets. However, global interconnectedness may provide the opportunity for a new kind of regulation.

Competitiveness in the global system, Dierckxsens notes, depends on technological innovation and, thus, technological depreciation: meaning that productivity will inevitably grow more slowly than the cost of innovation, with government subsidies and accommodating fiscal policies promoting chronic underutilization of installations and accelerating this process.[65] The resulting capital flight to speculative spheres is one example of how the global system can cause job losses and the further concentration of capital to financial entities (accumulating again in global cities).

As the cost of innovation outpaces productivity, traditional industrial installations are often left underutilized while capital flights to speculative global spheres.

Photo by Simon Kadula on Unsplash.

As a possible solution, Dierckxsens proposes a global auditing process. In this way, technological depreciation could be monitored by credible international firms, like PwC and KPMG who already conduct ecological audits.[66] This would, however, only work on a global scale: if conducted on a national, or firm-by-firm, basis it would simply be met with greater capital flight.

In the face of this dilemma, Dierckxsens argues for a ‘global citizenry’ to put grassroots pressure on powerful agencies, like the IMF and WTO, which promote deregulation, towards changing objectives in favour of economic regulation, and acting as effective counterweights to TNCs.[67] Dierckxsens faith in grassroots organization may well be misplaced, but, by utilizing the tools of the interconnected world Globalization has provided, we could have an unprecedented opportunity for a new, international, form of unionizing.

By utilizing the interconnected world Globalization has provided for us, we have an unprecedented opportunity for a new, international form of unionizing.

Unite trades union strike action, Kingston upon Hull.
Photo by Bernard Sharp, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 via Geograph.

The activism of citizen groups in the global era has more and more highlighted the abuses of power by specific TNCs on ethical grounds; one of the largest TNCs in the world, Shell, was forced by citizen opposition into formulating a code of conduct addressing child labour and forced labour for the entire corporation.[68] But to have an effect on the global network of TNCs, such activism would need to line up with other citizen groups across the globe under a common banner of regulation.

Leslie Sklair, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, argues that a Capitalist Globalization, which relies so heavily on technology, not only for transport innovation, but also for mass communication and electronic marketing, makes implicit in its concept an emancipatory potential. This is because it cannot prevent counter-hegemonic challenges on the internet or related media.[69]

The twin desires of hegemony and openness cannot be reconciled. The potential for mobilizing discontent on, for example, high-speed networks like X or TikTok, are unprecedented. Any claim made in the interests of global capital could almost instantaneously be challenged by insurgent forces with first-hand testimony, or counter-evidence. This was demonstrated in the 2025 #MakeAmazonPay global strikes, where a ‘digital picket line’ was synchronised across thirty countries, hitting the corporation’s logistical spine on its most profitable day.[70]

The #MakeAmazonPay Protest in London on Black Friday, 2021.

Photo by War on Want, licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Such a movement, though, would, more than anything else, be a substantial project of global education and consciousness-raising on the economic, ecological and ethical concerns surrounding Globalization. The ability to do so, however, is closer than ever. Contained within the technological innovations so instrumental to global capital are Sklair’s ‘seeds of divergence.’[71] A citizen-based global network could, in theory, coalesce into a kind of international labour union, pressuring governments and regulatory boards to regulate markets and force TNCs to comply, under threat of co-ordinated global strikes. The 2026 UK-wide Uber ‘log-off’ strike serves as a blueprint for this: by collectively withdrawing their data and labour from the app, a decentralised workforce successfully broke the algorithmic management of a global platform.[72]  

App drivers’ May Day protest in central London (1 May 2025).

Photo via IWGB Union on X. Used for editorial commentary.

This could bring the state and markets back into closer alignment by eliminating the loopholes and replacing the global network of TNCs with a kind of international network of national economies, preventing the chaos of an unregulated global market while enjoying the benefits of open communication and international connectivity.   

There is the potential for a global interconnectedness without Neoliberalism, but it would ultimately be subject to shifts in political will and awareness which would require a program of global mobilization. Perhaps, ultimately, the most damaging and consequential effect of Neoliberalism in the West has been its thorough deterioration of popular class-consciousness. For this reason, it seems that, for now, Globalization and Neoliberalism are largely synonymous, with the feasibility of the former being contingent on the latter, the nurtured inequalities of which having asserted corporeality through the Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump.

Cleaning staff remove the Union Jack from the Justus Lipsius building (2016).

Photo by Milliped, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

The question isn’t whether globalization can exist without Neoliberalism, but whether the political will exists to make it fair. The political landscape to mobilize discontent doesn’t appear readily available; but, in this great digital age, the structural tools of a collective, global citizenry may be closer than ever before.

[1] Parker G, ‘Keir Starmer signals major UK pivot towards EU after Donald Trump’s taunts,’ The Independent, 1st April (2026), https://www.ft.com/content/9f3d05e0-d684-40be-8ecb-b8c9e69ddda5?syn-25a6b1a6=1

[2] Hajdari U, ‘A decade of Brexit: Britain falls behind peers in trade and growth,’ Euronews, 3rd December (2025), https://www.euronews.com/business/2025/12/03/a-decade-of-brexit-britain-falls-behind-peers-in-trade-and-growth

[3] Bloom N, Bunn P, Mizen P, Smietanka P, Thwaites G, ‘The Economic Impact of Brexit,’ NBER Working Paper 34459 (2025), https://doi.org/10.3386/w34459

[4] Elliott L, ‘Brexit is a rejection of globalisation,’ The Guardian, 26th June (2016). 

[5] ‘Elites in the political classes as well as middle class ‘cosmopolitans’ appear to have lost any awareness or reflexivity in understanding, or acknowledging working class experience without lapse towards demonizing and sermonizing,’ McKenzie L, ‘The class politics of prejudice: Brexit and the land of no-hope and glory,’ The British Journal of Sociology (68), (2017), p. 4.

[6] Alabrese E, Becker S O, Fetzer T, Novy D, ‘Who voted for Brexit? Individual and regional data combined,’ European Journal of Political Economy (56), (2019), pp. 132-150, p. 133. 

[7] Lord Ashcroft Polls, ‘How the UK voted on Brexit, and why: a refresher,’ 4th February (2016), https://lordashcroftpolls.com/2019/02/how-the-uk-voted-on-brexit-and-why-a-refresher/. 

[8] Ford R, Goodwin M, ‘Britain After Brexit: A Nation Divided,’ Journal of Democracy, Vol. 28, No. 1, January (2017), pp. 17-30, p. 19.

[9] Niggle C J, ‘Globalization, Neoliberalism and the Attack on Social Security,’ Review of Social Economy, Vol. 61, No. 1, March (2003), pp. 51-71, p. 60-1.  

[10] Edgerton D, ‘How Britain was sold,’ New Statesman, 15-21st November (2019), pp. 23-5, p.23. 

[11] Nunn A, ‘The contested and contingent outcomes of Thatcherism in the UK,’ Capital & Class, Vol. 38, No. 2, (2014), pp. 303-321, p. 313. 

[12] Edgerton D, ‘How Britain was sold,’ New Statesman, 15-21st November (2019), pp. 23-5, p.23. 

[13] Niggle, p. 61.

[14] Ball J, ‘The Thatcher effect: what changed and what stayed the same,’ The Guardian, 12th April (2013).

[15] Silverwood J, Woodward R, ‘The Schizophrenia of UK (De) industrialisation Policy,’ Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute, 1st October (2018). 

[16] Hall S, ‘The Neoliberal Revolution,’ Cultural Studies, Vol. 25, No. 6, (2011), pp. 705-28, p. 12.

[17] ‘No developed state, with the exception of New Zealand, suffered such a brutal widening of inequality.… Child poverty more than doubled,’ Dean M, ‘Margaret Thatcher’s policies hit the poor hardest – and it’s happening again,’ The Guardian, 9th April (2013).

[18] Pyper D, ‘Trade union legislation 1979-2010,’ House of Commons Library, Briefing Paper, No. CBP 7882, 26th January (2017).

[19] Nunn, p. 317.

[20] Toly N, ‘Brexit, Global Cities, and the Future of World Order,’ Globalizations, Vol. 14, No. 1, (2017), pp. 142-9, p. 143.

[21] Robertson J, ‘How the Big Bang changed the City of London for ever,’ BBC News, 27th October (2016), https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-37751599.

[22] Coelho M, Ratnoo V, Dellepiane S, ‘The Political Economy of Infrastructure in the UK,’ Economic & Social Research Council, (2014), p. 22-3.

[23] ‘The UK’ in this instance only meaning England and Wales, as Scotland’s water remains publicly owned (Scottish Water).

[24] Raikes L, Giovannini A, Getzel B, ‘Divided and Connected: State of the North 2019,’ Institute for Public Policy Research, IPR North: Manchester, November (2019), p. 12. 

[25] Toly, p. 142-3. 

[26] Dijkstra L, Poelman H, Rodríguez-Pose A, ‘The Geography of EU Discontent,’ The European Commission, Publications Office of the European Union: Luxembourg, December (2018), p. 19.

[27] Ibid. p. 18-9.

[28] Raikes, Giovannini, Getzel, p. 14.

[29] Chakelian A, ‘“A revolt of the regions”: Could Gordon Brown’s federal UK plan become Labour Brexit policy?’ The Independent, 3rd November (2016).

[30] Ibid.

[31] Pyper.

[32] Friedman TL, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, Farrar, Straus and Giroux: USA (2005), p. 8.

[33] Florida R, ‘The World is Spiky,’ The Atlantic, October (2005), pp. 48-51, p. 50-1. 

[34] Dörry S, Dymski G, ‘Will Brexit reverse the centralizing momentum of global finance?’ Geoforum, Available Online: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016718518300393?via%3Dihub, 21st February (2018), p. 2. 

[35] Office for National Statistics, ‘Regional gross value added (income approach), UK: 1997 to 2016,’ ONS Statistical Bulletin, 20th December (2017), Available Online: www.ons.gov.uk, p. 5.

[36] Dörry, Dymski, p. 1.

[37] New Financial, ‘Brexit & The City: The Impact So Far,’ New Financial Research, March (2024), Available Online: https://www.newfinancial.org/reports/brexit-%26-the-city%3A-the-impact-so-far, p. 2.

[38] O’Grady S, ‘What will really happen if the City leaves the single market?’ The Independent, 19th December (2017).

[39] Rodríguez-Pose A, ‘The revenge of the places that don’t matter: left-behind places and the rise of populism,’ Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, Vol. 11, No. 1 (2018), pp. 189–209, p. 189.

[40] Guillén M, ‘The Demise of the Global Liberal Order,’ Survival, (61:2), (2019), pp. 87-90, p. 89.

[41] Ford, Goodwin, p. 19.

[42] Ibid., p. 18.

[43] ‘(David) Cameron’s modernisation strategy in this area was based on sending signals that the party had changed (or at least was changing) by striking a deliberately different tone on equality issues,’ Hayton R, McEnhill L, ‘Cameron’s Conservative Party, social liberalism and social justice,’ British Politics, Vol. 10, No. 2, June (2015), pp. 131-147, p. 137.

[44] Sampson T, ‘Brexit: The Economics of International Disintegration,’ The Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 31, No. 4, Fall (2017), pp. 163-184, p. 179.  

[45] Ford, Goodwin, p. 19.

[46] Ibid., p. 19-20.

[47] Guillén, p. 89-90.

[48] Pareschi A, ‘At a Crossroads or Business as Usual? British Foreign Policy and the International Order in the Wake of Brexit-Trump,’ Interdisciplinary Political Studies, Vol. 1, No. 4, July (2018), pp. 115-151, p. 166.

[49] Frankel J, ‘Trump’s trade wars and Brexit are making us all poorer,’ The Guardian, 27th November (2018). 

[50] Trump D, ‘Rose Garden Remarks on Liberation Day,’ White House Briefing, 2nd April (2025), p. 1.

[51] Department for Business and Trade, ‘Landmark UK-US pharmaceuticals deal to safeguard medicines access,’ GOV.UK, 1st December (2025), Available Online: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/landmark-uk-us-pharmaceuticals-deal-to-safeguard-medicines-access-and-drive-vital-investmentfor-uk-patients-and-businesses, p. 1.

[52] Nuffield Trust, ‘Impact of US-UK pharmaceutical deal on NHS budgets,’ BBC News, 1st December (2025), Available Online: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn0k520v4xro, p. 2.

[53] Stiglitz J, Globalization and its Discontents Revisited, Penguin Books, Random House: UK (2017), p. 55.

[54] Glass A, ‘US union elections declined in 2025 after Trump hobbled labor board,’ Center for American Progress, 11th February (2026), Available Online: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/11/labor-relations-board-nlrb-unions-trump, p. 2.

[55] Evans E, ‘Johnson Tries ‘Trumpian Protectionism’ to Woo Labour Brexit Vote,’ Bloomberg, 29th November (2019).

[56] House of Commons Library, ‘Service industries: Economic indicators,’ Research Briefing, 25th March (2026), Available Online: commonslibrary.parliament.uk, p. 2.

[57] House of Commons Library, ‘Manufacturing industries: Economic indicators,’ Research Briefing, 13th March (2026), Available Online: commonslibrary.parliament.uk, p. 1.

[58] Stiglitz, p. 57. 

[59] Ibid., p. 60-1.

[60] Leung C K, ‘Protectionism Actually Hurts U.S. Jobs And Economy: An Investigation Of Proponents And Opponents,’ International Business & Economics Research Journal, Vol. 5, No. 9, September (2006), p. 2.

[61] EY, ‘UK regional economic gap set to widen over the next three years,’ EY UK Regional Economic Forecast 2025, 19th March (2025), Available Online: https://www.ey.com/en_uk/newsroom/2025/03/uk-economy-gap-to-widen-ref-2025, p. 1.

[62] Independent, ‘Trump tariffs were supposed to save manufacturing jobs, but data shows the opposite,’ The Independent, 15th January (2026), Available Online: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-tariffs-manufacturing-jobs-data-b2901425.html.

[63] Collins M, ‘The Pros and Cons of Globalization,’ Forbes, Forbes Media LLC, 6th May (2015).

[64] Dierckxsens W, ‘Towards a Citizen-based Alternative,’ The Limits of Capitalism: An Approach to Globalization Without Neo-Liberalism, St. Martins Press, Inc: New York (2000), pp. 134-55, p. 134.   

[65] Ibid., p. 144.

[66] Ibid., p. 144.

[67] Ibid., p. 150.

[68] Ibid., p. 103.

[69] Sklair L, ‘The Emancipatory Potential of Generic Globalization,’ Globalizations, Vol. 6, No. 4, December (2009), pp. 525-39, p. 530.  

[70] UNI Global Union, ‘Thousands of Amazon workers strike in dozens of countries on Black Friday,’ UNI Global News, 26th November (2025).

[71] Ibid., p. 538.

[72] App Drivers & Couriers Union, ‘ADCU calls national strike against Uber over pricing and commission,’ ADCU News, 20th January (2026), Available Online: https://www.adcu.org.uk/news-posts/adcu-calls-national-strike-against-uber.

Bibliography

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Chakelian A, ‘“A revolt of the regions”: Could Gordon Brown’s federal UK plan become Labour Brexit policy?’ The Independent, 3rd November (2016).

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Collins M, ‘The Pros and Cons of Globalization,’ Forbes, Forbes Media LLC, 6th May (2015). 

Dean M, ‘Margaret Thatcher’s policies hit the poor hardest – and it’s happening again,’ The Guardian, 9th April (2013).

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Dierckxsens W, ‘Towards a Citizen-based Alternative,’ The Limits of Capitalism: An Approach to Globalization Without Neo-Liberalism, St. Martins Press, Inc: New York (2000), pp. 134-55.

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The Philosophy of ‘Non-Fiction:’ Truth Claims in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

‘What were we doing out here? What was the meaning of this trip? Did I actually have a big red convertible out there on the street? Was I just roaming around these Mint Hotel escalators in a drug frenzy of some kind, or had I really come out here to Las Vegas to work on a story?’

Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1979)
In 1981, American business journalist and author Joseph Nocera wrote a scathing diatribe for The Washington Post against the work of Hunter S. Thompson. ‘Thompson has given New Journalism a bad name,’ Nocera declares, ‘instead of being exhilarated by (New Journalism’s) freedom, he was corrupted by it. Instead of using it in the search for truth, he used it for trivial self-promotion.’[1] This demonstrates a larger debate around the distinction between Fiction and Non-Fiction, and a larger animosity from certain critics towards the Non-Fiction techniques pioneered by Thompson and his New Journalist ilk.[2] But what is a ‘search for truth?’ And why is Thompson so far away from this imagined standard? In this essay, I look to tackle these questions with regards to Thompson’s masterpiece, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, ‘truth claims’ and the concept of a ‘Creative Non-Fiction.’
Joseph Nocera, critical rival of New Journalism
The New Journalism, pioneered in the 1960s by the likes of Gay Talese, Truman Capote and Tom Wolfe, offered, in Wolfe’s terms, ‘the full objective description, plus something that readers had always had to go to novels and short stories for: namely, the subjective or emotional life of the characters.’[3] This was achieved through immediate, ‘gripping’ techniques previously associated with the realistic novel; techniques including scene-by-scene construction and realistic dialogue, approaching, in Wolfe’s estimation, some sense of people’s status life.[4] In other words, characterizing them with a place in society, hopes, desires and behaviours; making them three-dimensional. The ‘journalists’ became immersed anthropologists, interested, like their forebears in the realistic novel, in a sense of the lives of people, beyond the facts of people. Thompson takes this a step further by making himself a part of the story via a highly subjective first-person narrative (‘pure gonzo’[5]). A step that proved, for some, a step too far.
Fear and Loathing chronicles Thompson and his attorney barrelling through Vegas in a drug-fuelled frenzy, looking, as he continually reiterates, ‘for the American Dream.’[6] Nocera’s problem begins with the main drive of Thompson’s scattered, stream-of-consciousness narrative, which he sees as purely giving Thompson a writing ‘persona’[7] onto which he can project a compelling, but flawed, vision of the world; a lazy shorthand that ‘college students are particularly susceptible to.’[8] For Nocera, Thompson’s characterisation of self detracts from the journalistic ‘search for truth.’   
Ken Hogarty argues that the New Journalism arose from the failure of traditional, ‘official’ journalism’s elimination of the personal voice to achieve an ‘objectivity’[9] which is plainly impossible. As he notes, ‘if nothing else, journalists’ world views, language, and personal histories coloured what they determined was important.’[10] Indeed John Hersey, an early practitioner of New Journalism, drew his own line as to where ‘objectivity’ lies, famously taking against fellow New Journalists Wolfe, Capote and Norman Mailer on the grounds that they were inventing as opposed to reporting.[11] However in his most popular work, Hiroshima, Hersey borrows the structure from the novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey to link together the stories of six people who survived the atomic bomb. Though he remains relatively affectless in narration, the decision to focus on just six out of the dozens of people he interviewed creates its own kind of bias.[12] To Hersey’s chagrin, Wolfe wrote from the immersed perspectives of those he interviewed, perspectives he could never have known or successfully verified. For Hersey, Thompson’s subjective first-person narrative, awash with author’s statements one couldn’t possibly verify, like ‘Vegas is the meanest town on Earth,’[13] would probably not even qualify as a non-fiction style.
John Hersey, ‘the legend on the license must read: NONE OF THIS WAS MADE UP’
But, actually, Thompson’s statement is interesting, and illustrates a point (‘Vegas is the meanest town on Earth’). Mainly because it is followed by: ‘Until about a year ago, there was a giant billboard on the outskirts of Las Vegas, saying: DON’T GAMBLE WITH MARIJUANA! IN NEVADA: POSSESSION – 20 YEARS SALE – LIFE.’[14] These two statements illustrate the two polarities in a classic dual concept of language. In Logical Positivism, language can be divided into either emotive or symbolic. Symbolic language is the statement or recording of thoughts, the rational, whereas emotive language is the expression of feelings, the poetic (or aesthetic). In this dichotomy, language is symbolic if it is verifiable; the emotive is for contemplation, whereas the symbolic conveys information. Morris Weitz criticized Positivist aesthetics, arguing that it’s not that authors don’t make truth claims, though much of their language is emotive, but that they make a different kind of truth claim.[15] Weitz suggests an understanding of ‘depth meanings:’ those meanings which, psychologically, are suggested by the aesthetic surface meanings of a work. For Weitz, ‘it is here that the emotive meanings of art become symbolic and where one is to look for the truth claims of literature.’[16] What Weitz takes umbrage against in Positivism is the notion that ‘meaning’ is reserved only for tautologous statements of pure fact, where, to him, ‘depth meanings,’ or ‘second-order meanings,’ have certain potencies too. 
For example, in the excerpt from Fear and Loathing, the ‘depth meaning’ of these two statements about Vegas can be interpreted as a reflection of Thompson’s position; Thompson is ‘another ugly refugee from the Love Generation’[17] in a world gradually becoming more conservative (or ‘mean’). This evocation of a world where ‘Joe Fraiser, like Nixon, had finally prevailed for reasons that people like (Thompson himself) refused to understand – at least not out loud,’[18] is a ‘second-order’ truth suggested by the surface, emotive language, which may be false,[19] but presents itself for contemplation. As a side note, I would also argue that, in many ways, the ‘truth’ of this statement could be verified, by testimonies of the time[20] or by the facts that comprise it. On the semantics of verification, I echo Weitz’s sentiment: ‘To refute the thesis that truth is successful verification would necessitate a discussion as long as the whole of this paper. Anyway, it’s not particularly relevant to our thesis since, even if truth were successful verification, the second-order meanings of art can be, in many cases, successfully verified.’[21] Through discussing Positivism, we can argue that ‘second-order’ meanings in a narrative may possess truth, but does using them in Non-Fiction not undercut a factual narrative? Does Thompson’s invocation of a ‘truth’ centring on himself and his perception not intrude on (or perhaps infect) his reporting of the outside world? Hersey may have argued that a second-order meaning not reflected by and of itself would amount to an invention. But this is the central problem of objectivity; a world conceived in and of itself is an incongruity.
Nocera’s key problem with Thompson is that he accuses him of ‘catering’ to the prejudices of the counterculture, still an identifiable audience then, by propounding ‘intellectually fashionable’[22] stereotypes. Nocera notes a moment in the second part of Fear and Loathing where Thompson characterizes an argumentative cop as a ‘noisy little asshole,’[23] rambling: ‘I had been there with these fuzzy little shitheads… mean-tempered rule-crazy cops.’[24] To this, Nocera writes: ‘Thompson always liked to claim that what he was really after was the “truth.” These, then, are his truths. You have to be a member of the Weather Underground to believe they contain any lasting insight.’[25] And Thompson’s statement is definitely subjective, and prejudiced against the authorities of the time, but I think Nocera misses a key insight that proves to be fatal. To demonstrate this, I will look at Brett Lott’s discussion of Non-Fiction, and Ynhui Park’s concept of a ‘linguistic convention’ in Fiction.
An illustration by Thompson’s collaborator Ralph Steadman of the police convention in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Now, we must clarify, before going forward, our epistemology. Park summarises my position well: ‘There is no world tout court, no knowledge tout court. The world is made by the act of knowing it, and knowledge is constructed by a conceptual system. Since there are various ways of devising a conceptual system, and since knowledge is relevant to a conceptual system there are many forms of knowledge.’[26] Whichever way we explain/ think about (or narrate) the ‘unwashed mass of facts’[27] that constitutes our lives, it is only one of many. This is how Hersey’s style, minimal though it may be, still amounts to bias. From this, we can extrapolate that ‘art’ (or ‘fiction’) is just one of many symbol-systems, but one largely based in emotion and contemplation over cognition. For Park, the surface meanings of fiction are governed by a ‘linguistic convention’ which says: ‘the words and sentences in a linguistic product should not be taken as referring to any real things.’[28] Although novels, particularly realistic ones, may refer to things that are real (Park uses the example of Madame Bovary’s provincial northern France), ‘the convention says that the language in a fiction means what it means without its real referent.’[29] In other words: the ‘second-order meanings’ are its function and its cognitive surface meanings are either incidental, or serve the second-order meaning. Non-Fiction, on the other hand, is governed by the convention that its language is related to its real referent. So Thompson’s real referent then, in Nocera’s example, would presumably be the cop, and thus could we not say that his description is both indolent and partisan? Well, not quite. I believe that the real referent is not the cop, but Thompson himself.
Brett Lott introduces the idea of ‘the self as continent, and you its first explorer.’[30] For Lott, the ‘creative’ part of ‘creative non-fiction’ starts with you (or the ‘self’ that both Hersey and Nocera seem vaguely dismayed by, and that ‘official’ journalism has continually tried to eliminate). He explains: ‘without you and who you are, a piece of writing is simply nonfiction: a police report.’[31] As we have covered, subjectivity is inevitable when we choose to narrativize something, instead of this ‘police report,’ fact-sheet style of writing. For Lott: ‘when I begin to incorporate the sad and glorious fact that the way I see (the world) shapes and forms what it is to be seen, I end up with creative nonfiction;’[32] without this realization, Non-Fiction is merely notation. I would argue that Hersey’s ‘objectivity’ amounts to a narrative decisionto remain affectless (or ‘quietly recitative’[33]), and that it is only due to the subject of Hiroshima that this happens to be appropriate. It does, however, remain a decision nonetheless. What Nocera appears to miss in Fear and Loathing is that Thompson’s characterisation of the cop is not without its context. Thompson’s subject is himself: an ‘over-thirty drug dilettante’[34] in 1971, three years after Nixon’s election, and a year before his re-election.[35] Fear and Loathing remains ‘non-fiction’ because, though it holds the second-order meaning of a lamentation (‘’Consciousness Expansion’ went out with LBJ… and it is worth noting, historically, that downers came in with Nixon’[36]), conveyed through the aesthetics of Thompson’s drug-fuelled trip to Vegas, the ‘real referent’ is always Thompson himself and his experience of said trip. Thompson discovers the ‘continent’ of himself to be a creature of melancholy, caught in the morose tundra of ‘a proper end to the sixties.’[37]
My contention is that, as soon as Non-Fiction becomes Creative (or narrativized), it is no longer related explicitly to the cognitive. It is related, like the novel, to the emotive or poetic, but this doesn’t abolish its status as Non-Fiction. To the question of falsity (‘in my attempt to put order to my days, am I deluding myself, inflicting an order that was and is nowhere to be seen?’[38]), we can only respond with further introspection. Our inability to find a true narrative means that we can only approach the self (and the world) with ‘a rigorous and ruthless questioning.’[39] We must find order in chaos without creating it, and the decision of where to draw this line ultimately falls on our own introspection. In this way, the task of writing non-fiction is tantamount to our very being. As in Creative Non-Fiction, we are all fallibly, but necessarily, working towards ‘an understanding of what it is that has happened… (an attempt) to see order, however chaotic it may be,’[40] and I think that Nocera’s criticism, and the broader criticisms held to New Journalism, are at best reactionary, and at worst degenerative. In the end, the only sense of truth we can ever hope to find is, and will always be, our own.
Hunter S. Thompson and Oscar Zeta Acosta, the basis of the lead duo in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, sitting in a restaurant in 1971

[1] Nocera J (1981), “How Hunter Thompson Killed New Journalism,” The Washington Monthly, April 1981, pp. 44-50, p. 50.

[2] McDowell E (1984), “Nonfiction Techniques Debated Anew,” The New York Times, 20th June, 1984.

[3] Wolfe T (1975), The New Journalism (ed. Wolfe and E. W. Johnson), London: Picador, an imprint of Pan Macmillan, p. 35. 

[4] Ibid., p. 46.

[5] Weingarten M (2005), quoting Bill Cardoso, The Gang That Wouldn’t Write Straight, New York: Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, p. 235.

[6] Thompson H S, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, St Albans: Paladin Books, an imprint of Granada Publishing Ltd., first mention: p. 14.

[7] Nocera (1981), p. 46.

[8] Ibid., p. 46.

[9] Hogarty K (1991), “Audit Them: Biographies, Autobiographies, and Other Nonfiction,” The English Journal, Vol. 80, No. 4, pp. 57-60, p. 57.

[10] Ibid., p. 58. 

[11] ‘The legend on the license must read: NONE OF THIS WAS MADE UP.’ Lemann N (2019), quoting Hersey, “John Hersey and the Art of Fact,” The New Yorker, Conde Nast, April 22nd, 2019, p. 9.

[12] Ibid., p. 5.

[13] Thompson (1979), p. 44.

[14] Ibid., p. 44.

[15] Weitz M (1943), “Does Art Tell the Truth,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 3, No. 3, pp. 338-348, p. 342.

[16] Ibid., p. 344.

[17] Thompson (1979), Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, p. 62.

[18] Ibid., p. 27.

[19] Weitz (1943), p. 346.

[20] “I think he (Thompson) saw the generation as falling apart long before most of us who were still trying to be practicing members. It was pure inspiration,” Weingarten (2005), quoting David Felton, p. 250-251.

[21] Weitz (1943), p. 348.

[22] Nocera (1981), p. 49.

[23] Thompson (1979), p. 103.

[24] Ibid., p. 103.

[25] Nocera (1981), p. 48.

[26] Park Y (1982), “The Function of Fiction,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 42, No. 3, pp. 416-424, p. 418. 

[27] Heyne E (1987), “Toward a Theory of Literary Nonfiction,” MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 33, No. 3, pp. 479-490, p. 489.

[28] Park Y (1982), p. 418.

[29] Ibid., p. 418.

[30] Lott B (2000), “Roundtable: What is Creative Nonfiction? Two Views,” Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction, Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 191-192, p. 195.

[31] Ibid., p. 195.

[32] Ibid., p. 195.

[33] Lemann (2019), p. 5.

[34] Thompson (1979), p. 185.

[35] ‘But what is sane? Especially here… in this doomstruck era of Nixon,’ Ibid., p. 165.

[36] Ibid., p. 186.

[37] Ibid., p. 27. 

[38] Lott (2000), p. 198.

[39] Ibid., p. 198.  

[40] Ibid., p. 193.

Bibliography:

Heyne E (1987), “Toward a Theory of Literary Nonfiction,” MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 33, No. 3, pp. 479-490.

Hogarty K (1991), “Audit Them: Biographies, Autobiographies, and Other Nonfiction,” The English Journal, Vol. 80, No. 4, pp. 57-60.

 Lemann N (2019), “John Hersey and the Art of Fact,” The New Yorker, Conde Nast, April 22nd, 2019.

Lott B (2000), “Roundtable: What is Creative Nonfiction? Two Views,” Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction, Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 191-192.

McDowell E (1984), “Nonfiction Techniques Debated Anew,” The New York Times, 20th June, 1984.

Nocera J (1981), “How Hunter Thompson Killed New Journalism,” The Washington Monthly, April 1981, pp. 44-50.

Park Y (1982), “The Function of Fiction,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 42, No. 3, pp. 416-424.

Thompson H S (1979), Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, St Albans: Paladin Books, an imprint of Granada Publishing Ltd.

Weingarten M (2005), The Gang That Wouldn’t Write Straight, New York: Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group.

Weitz M (1943), “Does Art Tell the Truth,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 3, No. 3, pp. 338-348.

Wolfe T (1975), The New Journalism (ed. Wolfe and E. W. Johnson), London: Picador, an imprint of Pan Macmillan.

Writing ‘Realism:’ Lucia Berlin and Raymond Carver

The works of Lucia Berlin and Raymond Carver represent two different types of Realism in short fiction. As a writer of autobiographical short fiction, it’s difficult not to catch myself tackling the dueling legacies of these two great writers.
Lucia Berlin’s style; conversational, free-floating, ‘you feel as though you’re gossiping with her at the table;’ seems to be less of a construction than Carver’s tightly minimal, savagely edited prose, but both aim to reach, albeit with different methods, a type of ‘Realism.’ I will look at Carver’s ‘Why Don’t You Dance?’ and Berlin’s ‘Angel’s Laundromat’ to explore these two distinct styles.
‘Carver’s fabled ‘Dirty Realism,’ often focusing on the everyday problems of blue-collar workers (including drug abuse, alcohol abuse and divorce), reflected his own life experiences through a form of minimalism which reduced prose and focused on surface descriptions. Oliveira describes a ‘voiceless desperation’ in Carver’s characters who, representative of a lower, desperate social class, are ‘not happy or satisfied with their social position.’
While this can be seen all over Carver’s work, a quick example from the story in question would be: ‘the man sat on the sofa, leaned back, and stared at the boy and the girl.’ In this line, we see Carver’s restraint, his absence of adverbs, almost reflecting a sort of journalistic objectivity which Kita has called, a process of ‘giving all his attention to the concrete and avoiding all possible abstractions.’ Later on in the story, Carver describes the man dancing with the girl on his porch: ‘the girl closed and then opened her eyes. She pushed her face into the man’s shoulder. She pulled the man closer,’ the spare descriptions leaving us to read the subtext, or text, from our own perspectives. One feels compelled to talk about aging, or the generational passage of time in relation to this story, but Carver remains ruthless in pushing a certain ambivalence on his readers.
As Kita summarizes ‘Carver leaves the reader to decide, who, if anyone, is truly a victim or villain,’ and this method of ‘three-dimensional’ character sketching confirms Carver’s commitment to the realistic with a striving for a faithful depiction and exploration of the complexities and battling narratives in ‘real-life.’ In this sense, returning to Oliveira, Carver’s focus on the nuances of the everyday creates a space where ‘blank spaces are as important as the spaces filled with words.’
This Realist ‘ambiguity of interpretation’ is near-perfectly exemplified by Carver himself in the closing paragraph of ‘Why Don’t You Dance?:’ ‘She kept talking. She told everyone. There was more to it, and she was trying to get it talked out. After a time, she quit trying.’ Just like the characters in the story, we are unsure of its exact ‘meaning,’ but, with Carver, what Oliveria described as that sense of ‘voiceless desperation,’ and the insecurity inherent to it, may, pointedly, be the defining consistent motif. We could almost interpret what Kita referred to as Carver’s successful employment of omissions, using ‘the spaces between the words to give a sense of evanescent and elusive feelings,’ lending his work the air of an anti-surrealist, blue-collar version of what David Lynch’s films tell us about the Suburban middle-class; there is always more to it. That beneath the veil of certainty and security, there is, in fact, ambiguity and insecurity.
Raymond Carver
Contrasted with Carver’s ‘dirty,’ spare Realism, Lucia Berlin’s claim to the 'Realistic' is conversational, confessional and free-floating, tending to lurch from recalled images and memories, emerging as a kind of cohesive whole by the end. In ‘Angel’s Laundromat,’ this can be seen in the first paragraph: ‘A tall old Indian in faded Levi’s and a fine Zuni belt. His hair white and long, knotted with raspberry yearn at his neck,’ the image springing from nowhere and providing a ‘root’ for the rest of her recollections. Like most of her stories, ‘Angel’s Laundromat’ follows an addict of some kind, an alcoholic Indian in this case.
Geoghegan writes that Berlin’s stories echo memoir writing; often being based on her own life, and her style of recollection resembling a particularly idiosyncratic, free-wheeling autobiography. As Geohegan notes ‘like most great storytellers, Lucia was a first-rate gossip. But her gossip was never banal. The best of it always connected to her life.’
This free-wheeling, recalled quality is characterized well by Power: ‘the waves of memory crash again and again in Berlin’s work,’ creating a string of associations and compacted narratives. Such an effect can be seen when, between describing the Indian who forms the subject of the story, Berlin returns to an earlier recollection of her elderly neighbour: ‘The only time I had spoken to Mrs. Armitage outside of the laundry… She gripped my arm with her cold dying hand,’ making us think of aging and fragility, pertaining to the following story of the Indian as though we can see the connections being made in her mind, roughly as if the reader truly were ‘gossiping with her at the table;’ albeit a somber, and profound, gossip.
Power notes that Berlin is a close relative of Carver’s ‘Dirty Realism;’ and indeed we can see that, similarly to Carver, there is always a certain ambivalence to Berlin’s work. The Indian depicted in the story is described as ‘very drunk, mean drunk’ but Berlin qualifies this with a very humanistic sense of sympathy when the ‘Angel’ of the title says: ‘I know just how you feel,’ causing Berlin’s narration to retort ‘anybody says he knows just how someone else feels is a fool.’ This faithfulness to complex human characters, to a world where, like Carver’s, ‘no one is wholly bad,’ approaching what Power calls a ‘universal empathy,’ shows a commitment to the Realism that both Berlin and Carver are indebted to.
Berlin’s personal narrative adds a more subjective and, thus, more honest dimension to Realism than Carver’s precise, snooker-cue pauses and spaces. Berlin doesn’t limit surface descriptions like Carver, describing Fourth Street as a landscape of ‘shabby shops and junkyards.' Though she does limit herself, her limits appear to extend only to the nature of recalled narratives. Berlin does not over-saturate us with information, she does however try to accurately follow the rhythms of human recollection and interactions, which gives the impression that no included detail is irrelevant. As Geoghegan summarises: ‘The moves she makes in her fiction shadow the peripatetic nature of intimate conversations.’
Lucia Berlin, another famous tobacco enthusiast
In choosing my style, I gravitated more to Berlin’s peripatetic, loose prose than Carver’s delicate constructions. Being that my story was married to a highly subjective first-person narration, I found Berlin to be a perfect influence, encouraging me to draw connections between memories and images, accurately portraying the ‘scattered’ quality of a stream-of-consciousness, and the complex nature of human interactions/perceptions. I do however think that it is always conducive to bear in mind Carver’s ‘loaded’ pauses for tension and ‘secret longings,’ particularly when dealing with the unique status insecurities of blue-collar characters.

The Ghost Town of Famagusta Bay

Our boat rocked in the wind as we sat in the middle of Famagusta Bay. Remarkably clear, the pastel sky trailed off, bright and gleaming.

There were seven of us on-board: five tourists, the tour guide and the Captain. On my left there was an older couple, a man and a woman around sixty. The old man was unassuming, but with a scrunched-up sort of face, like he was sucking some perpetual lemon. His wife wore an over-sized floral hat, slightly too large for her head. They sat near the edge; he rested one arm on the handrail and she gazed out at the sea. A younger couple sat further along the port side. The woman was beautiful with sun-kissed skin and long, silky brown hair billowing in the wind. She kept brushing hair off of her face, tucking strands behind her ears; the man kept an arm around her and peered through black wayfarer sunglasses. The Captain sat at the helm, wearing summer shorts and a shirt buttoned up to his chest. He didn’t talk much, but just held the wheel loosely, occasionally checking the map on the dashboard. Our guide was hairy and tanned with a wet, clinging yellow t-shirt. He stared out into the horizon, shielding his eyes from the sun.

We stopped moving. The beating sun and turquoise sea dissolved, fading away. There it was, a melancholy mirror: a pale reflection of the vibrant body of Cyprus. Like Alcatraz, it sat as a lonely and remote sinister blemish on the island, hidden away in its furthest corner. I was struck by a monolithic cornucopia of dilapidated hotels and greying horseshoe beach around the water’s edge. Like a resort, but uncanny, ghostly and ineffable. Fences and barbed wire dotted the beach, blocking entry on every side, trailing across the beach and disappearing into the sea. This picture in the distance seemed altogether too still. Dead: it seemed somehow new, and untouched, but wracked with decay all the same. As I stared into this bleak horizon, the guide began: ‘This was once the most popular resort in Cyprus.’

In the sixties, Famagusta accounted for fifty percent of the total hotel accommodation of Cyprus. One of the best-known tourist spots in the world, it accommodated Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, Brigitte Bardot; the biggest stars of their day. Following the post-war ‘package holiday’ boom, thousands of Brits holidayed in Famagusta through the sixties and early seventies. It was Cyprus’s tourist capital. Famagusta had nine nursery schools, seventeen primary schools, and eleven secondary schools. It was a cultural centre too, with a library, an art gallery, a rich archaeological museum and a municipal marketplace. In the sixties, it saw industrial growth fifty percent higher than the rest of the country. Famagusta had a vibrant nightlife, cinemas, restaurants and bars; it flourished in an unforeseen advanced market of international tourism.

We looked out at this strange, unnerving spectre of a resort. Everything looked strangely rotted, even at that distance, a moulding, decayed yellow hanging over the buildings, as if the city’s very existence was choking the life out of it. The old woman with the hat glibly remarked: ‘stunning, isn’t it Richard?’
The tour guide glanced over to a dark, stony guard tower perched alongside the barbed wire. It was far away; he squinted in the sun. Seemingly satisfied, he went on, keeping one eye in the distance.

The Cypriot National Guard received support from the Greek government for a coup against the Cypriot president, Archbishop Makarios. Looking for a greater presence in Cypriot affairs, the Greek Cypriots planned a union with Greece. The Turkish Cypriots (who shared power with the Greek Cypriots since the UK granted the island independence in the sixties) responded by launching a military invasion. The Turkish invading force was code-named ‘Operation Atilla,’ but Turkish Cypriots called it ‘Kıbrıs Barış Harekâtı,’ or ‘Cyprus Peace Operation.’ The Turkish occupied the northern third, Famagusta took a hard shelling during the second phase and, within two days, the Turkish military fully occupied the city.

At this point, the young woman with the brown hair was leaning on the handrail next to me. She’d let her hair flop over her face in the wind, but between the strands sat a hazel iris. I stared through sunglasses at the depth of this colour, for a moment, as she contemplated Varosha.

By August 1974, the Turkish army occupied thirty seven percent of the whole island. The 39,000 or so people who lived in Famagusta (who didn’t perish in the bombing) fled into surrounding fields, believing that, after the initial violence, they could return. The Turkish Army, however, had already cordoned off Varosha for the UN buffer zone. The buffer zone, or ‘the Green Line,’ is gash slicing Cyprus in half: Nicosia and Larnaca on one side, and Kyrenia and Famagusta on the other. Permanently under guard by UN peacekeepers, the buffer zone now comprises three percent of the whole island. Anyone caught in Varosha today risks being shot on sight. In the decades since that day in August, people who made their homes in Varosha could only see the city through barbed wire. Once the modern quarter of Famagusta, Varosha remains abandoned over forty years later.

The guide suddenly stopped what he was saying, raising a hand to his brow. He stared at the guide tower and, after a nod, dismounted the bow. He explained: ‘that’s the UN telling us to go back.’ It appeared that, in agreement of making these trips possible, organisers pre-arranged some signal with the UN to indicate when we’d come close enough.

The fact that Varosha had remained exactly the same, completely frozen in time, struck a chilling note of the spectral in me. According to rumour, there’s a car dealership on Leonidas, Varosha’s leisure street, with a brand new set of 70’s Toyotas put out just before the invasion, still parked exactly where they were on that day. One wonders exactly what level of deterioration they’ve endured in all that time.

I stared for a further moment, as we headed back towards Larnaka Bay. In forty years, nothing had changed for Varosha. It remained an anomalous, dusty painting; a capsule floating through the winds of time. I looked back at the city, fading further and further from view, and spied a tower crane hanging over the skyscrapers, seemingly mid-swing, stuck in the seventies and beyond escape. I wondered how long it would take for all the old iron and steel to rot away, for the foundations to collapse, and for all these old, dying buildings to fall like dominoes. Perhaps then, in the crumbling and decomposed ruins, nature will fully reclaim the quarter, and it will stand as a monument to lost civilization, to the immovable immutability of man’s self-destruction and the ever-present cyclical return of the natural order. All that remained for now was an empty vessel.

this side of the mattress is not the sleeping surface

This began as a poem, and I’ve since re-purposed it as song lyrics:

–

I can’t feel the very bones holding me together,

the wobbling skeletal gel

of congealed soul-juice.

Or

The cantankerous, sickly curvature of a face with

eyes that see too much, like a shibboleth

of the 21st Century dream.

The yellowed white sheets are made up

of burns and wounds, decomposing remains, disregarded

in the rising smoke.

Its plumes of retreat and remand.

–