The Bard of Capitalist Realism

This is for those who never made it
For those in the center of the earth
Who cracked apart in the holding cell
The enormous noises of the border.
— Sean Bonney, Our Death

Prophets often die before their time, usually when the rest of us need their voices most. This was the fate of the English radical poet Sean Bonney, who died last November, at age 50, in his adopted city of Berlin. Prophet is perhaps an ironic designation, given Bonney’s suspicion of that term. In his poem “We are the Dead,” he calls prophecy a “word that for the past few months I’ve only been able to associate with surveillance, with cameras and with judges” and a vocation based on “excessive and possibly aberrant interpretation of all available elements of what we like to call the present.” Asking to whom such panopticon abilities belong in the current age, Bonney answers, “It isn’t poets, and it isn’t mystics either.” And yet in the fullest biblical definition of prophet—not a clairvoyant or a psychic or a secret agent but one who bears witness to injustice—Bonney was as poetic a prophet as has written in this century.

“These days everyone is writing their final book,” Bonney notes in Our Death (Commune Editions, 2019), published just a month before he died. It was his 20th collection and his first published in the United States. A line from the book’s tribute to the Greek anarchist poet Katerina Gagou, who committed suicide in 1993, sums up the theme: “This is barbarism we’re living in.” Although he wasn’t widely read in the United States and although his lyricial idiom is strongly British and even more strongly European, Bonney’s poetry is as fully commensurate with the fevered, queasy, anxious, often tedious nature of the current global mood as that of any of his more lauded contemporaries. Bonney’s poetry is not of the graduate seminar but of the picket line, not for the poetry reading but for the punk show.

Born in Brighton in 1969 and raised in east London, Bonney held a PhD in English from Birkbeck, University of London, where he completed his dissertation on African American literature. He was fluent in revolutionary poetics, and his work married the Afrocentric radicalism of American poet Amiri Baraka to the transgressiveness of the queer Italian communist Pier Paolo Pasolini. From both poets, as divergent as their biographies and work were, Bonney drew a radical afrontness that made his political commitments clear. Such is the singular pedigree of Bonney, whose last blog post, dated October 20, only a few weeks before his death, stated “while people are starving, wealth / is a crime. I am not willing to argue. / if you are hungry, no laws apply … weapons / can be made from anything. / crime should not go unpunished.” Bonney concluded that last poem with the invocation that “the meaning of royalty / it too can be killed”—a prescient line given the tumult of Brexit, climate change, and the uncertain US election.

There’s nothing more British than an aspiring regicide. With his proudly non-Anglocentric pantheon of influences—Gagou, Pasolini, Baraka, Antonin Artaud, and Jean Genet—and with his expatriate life in Berlin, Bonney seemed a distinctly non-English Englishman. (In the journal Post45, the critic Keston Sutherland describes Bonney as “passionately literary, European, [and] not English.”) Although he hated his homeland for good reason, Bonney nonetheless drew from the rich wellspring of English radicalism that, going back to the 17th-century civil wars, imagined a republican future and a more egalitarian economy. With rhetoric that recalls the Ranters of the English Revolution, Bonney declares in Our Death, “I can smell the burning remnants of Britain.”

From Berlin, he obliquely reflects on Brexit, that “act of self-destruction [that] was one of [Britain’s] more minor manifestations, of course.” He chooses his language carefully to inflict maximum damage on the inflated egos of nativists such as Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage; their actions are “preening” and “little,” Bonney writes, and even the matter-of-fact of course undercuts a nation that still considers itself a superpower. An alumnus of past upheaval, Bonney emphasizes that the electoral success of the Brexiters shouldn’t be seen as sui generis; no, this latest madness is but a “minor manifestation” of a long history. In the prose poem “A Butcher’s Lullaby,” he sketches a genealogy of the last three decades of British revanchism from Margaret Thatcher on: “Let’s see. There was the poll tax revolt. The criminal justice bill. Britpop. The rise of the ironic wank. The phrase zero tolerance. The boredom of enforced hedonism. The skeleton of Tony Blair. The flames of humanitarian intervention. The inevitability of jihad.”

As is apparent, Bonney’s work is not purely aesthetic or for its own sake; it’s not romantic or confessional in the sense of the personal divorced from the political, if such a thing is even possible. That’s not to suggest that his work is simple or accessible. In keeping with the British Poetry Revival of the 1960s and 1970s, in which poets rejected the prevailing conservatism of British literature, Bonney’s work is difficult, transgressive, subversive, and at times hermetic. “Don’t get me wrong,” Bonney writes in “Letter Against the Language,” “I’m not about to disappear into some kind of curate Cloud of Unknowing, or worse, some comfortably opaque experimental poetry. I mean, fuck that shit.” Our Death bears the imprints of such avant-garde movements as sound poetry, concrete poetry, visual poetry, and performance art. As a working-class boy from Brighton, Bonney was steadfastly leftist in his verse, though, as he noted in a recent interview with Jeffrey Grunthaner in BOMB, “I hate mainstream left wing artists. I don’t consider my work to be protest work. I’m not trying to convince anybody to not like capitalism. My ideal audience already hates cops.” Some of the best prophets aren’t there to make you do stuff; they exist to bear witness.

In Bonney’s work, Sutherland argues, “hatred is essential to revolutionary survival […] hatred shapes the texts on the page, decides the content, determines what language is usable, and in general keeps the filter of negative passion clean, to stop the poetry getting clogged up with fatty affects.” Although Bonney can’t be accused of extraneous ornamentation in his verse and an electric current seems to filter his political pronouncements, the word hate isn’t the only one that could describe such poetry.

Perhaps closer still is wrath: Bonney’s revolutionary predilection is for the hard, analytical, rational apprehension of injustice rather than the sometimes subjective connotations implied by hate. In “Cancer: Poems After Katerina Gogou,” Bonney writes

We talk of political parties. A hole in the earth where we cast our votes.
We know that the cops carry grenades. That means nothing. So do we.

These lines coil with latent violence. But they’re also as rigorous as an equation: clear-eyed, objective, and more literal than passionate. Bonney’s hate is subsumed by wrath, the only sin of which the scholastics believed God capable.

It’s rare to offer a theological gloss on a leftist poet, but Bonney’s poetics of wrath are among the most religious of the past several decades. “I know explosives. magic I know and dialectics,” Bonney writes in his poem to Gogou, conflating theurgy with the vocabulary of Marxism. Sutherland notes that Bonney’s verse “is theological despite the manifest atheism.” The poet writes with a biblical parallelism and with scriptural anaphora: “And so you wake up in the morning and tell yourself that ‘psalm’ means ‘vitriol’. … You wake up in the morning and say that to praise is the same as to curse.” Contrary to the assumed knee-jerk disavowal of religion from leftist politics, Bonney borrows the express urgency of the prophetic idiom to condemn capitalism, militarism, patriarchy, and all other oppressive systems as being veritable idols of the current age. “I’ve been studying magic, utopia and weaponry,” he writes, moving from the ethereal to the concrete, with Utopia a bridge between the supernaturalism of magic and the brutal facts of violence. Perhaps we’re to intuit a formula of sorts, whereby Utopia becomes possible by adding revolutionary violence to magic. A poet with the Dadaist sense of the latent revolutionary potential of a well-made joke, Bonney informs readers “I’ll keep you up to date with my progress.”

Bonney’s radical dissenter faith is antinomian; it may not strike one as faith if that word is defined according only to the empty rituals of mainstream bourgeoise religion, so often handmaiden to authoritarian politics, although the poet certainly recognizes it as theological. Bonney explains that he loves “only sex workers, drug addicts, refugees and the terminally ill […] most mornings you think they are the only people deserving of citizenship.” This is a fully realized political theology grounded in an emancipatory model of what justice and sovereignty mean. It is also profoundly Christian. There is something distinctly English in Bonney’s atheistic Christianity, an engagement in nonconformist faith that has always thrummed just under the surface of respectable English life. Historian Christopher Hill, who catalogued the golden age of English religious radicalism in his classic The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (1972), argues that in the 17th century, “there was a great overturning, questioning, revaluing, of everything in England. Old institutions, old beliefs, old values came in question.” That describes Our Death as well.

Some groups that emerged during that period, such as Quakers and Baptists, still remain, albeit they’re perhaps less transgressive now than they once were. Other groups with strange names—Muggletonians, Seekers, Diggers, Levellers, and Ranters—have long since disappeared. Some of the incendiary rhetoric associated with them is evident in Bonney’s poetry, particularly the anarchic vocabulary of the Ranters. Partisans against all authority—legal, royal, governmental, mercantile, and ecclesiastical—the Ranters were the vanguard of the English Revolution, as exemplified by the preacher and pamphleteer Abiezer Coppe. Almost unclassifiable in his radicalism and eccentricity, Coppe preached that the only obedience to God was complete disobedience to the systems of this world, and his syntax and grammar pulled apart in a manner that reflected his position, reading almost like experimental poetry. Writing in a 1649 pamphlet, for example, Coppe exclaims

and lo a hand was sent to me, and a roll of a book was therin … it was snatcht out of my hand & the Roll thrust into my mouth; and I eat it up, and filled my bowels with it, where it was bitter as worm wood; and it lay broiling, and burning in my stomach, till I brought it forth in this forme. And now I send it flying to you with my heart.

There is an echo, or maybe even metempsychosis, of Coppe’s rhetoric in Bonney’s verse, a similarity in pressured speech and glossophilia. In his poem for Gagou, Bonney writes

the whiplash of the calendar is the quiet conversation of the commodity
crawls out from the ocean its mouth filled with sand and glass
knows your passwords
destroys private property. knows all your music is prison.
knows all of your language is prison. all of your seconds are prison.

Bonney wrote from within his country’s native and often obscured revolutionary tradition. He drank from the same waters as the medieval Lollards who protested ecclesiastical corruption; the revolutionaries, dissenters, and religious nononformists of the 17th century; the Romantic Luddites, who protested the Industrial Revolution; the working-class socialists and anarchists who fought fascists at the Battle of Cable Street in 1936; and the agitprop punks of Thatcher’s Britain. That he was for neither queen nor country doesn’t negate his exceedingly English radicalism. What Bonney shared with Coppe, perhaps, was an understanding that whatever is worth fighting for in this world is fundamentally transcendent (or numinous, divine, what have you) and that the tools for resistance must be as well. As he told Grunthaner:

You have traditions of thought that are interested in serving power. And you have traditions of thought that are interested in freeing people from that power. Sometimes these traditions overlap. And sometimes they can be useful in both directions. Marx is one. … Poets are definitely within that.

Such is the liturgical potential of political poetry that when it fully acknowledges the ritual import of verse itself, it becomes possible to attack the demonic powers that Bonney opposed. In one evocative passage from Our Death, Bonney turns his attention to the Rasputin-like political operator Steve Bannon, the former White House strategist and ostensible architect of Trumpism. He mocks a 2016 interview in which Bannon told The Hollywood Reporter, “Darkness is good … Dick Cheney, Dark Vader, Satan. That’s power.” In response, Bonney writes

Whatever with that fascist shit Bannon. He can have Darth Vader. He can have that whatever-it’s-called from Lord of the Rings. But he can keep his paws off Satan. Satan is one of ours. Always has been. … It is very boring to write a poem about Satan. Baudelaire did it, and it was great. Milton too. And Blake. It is very boring to write a poem about Bannon. … Remember this. Our word for Satan is not their word for Satan. Our word for Evil is not their word for Evil. Our word for Death is not their word for Death. I hate the word “kill.” Will continue to use it.

This is an ars poetica for that venerable tradition that sees the fallen angel not as a harbinger of darkness but as a metaphor for rebellion against oppression, a poetics inviolate from the Gnostics to Lord Byron. What’s notable here isn’t just Bonney’s justified disdain for Bannon but also the invocation of a certain type of religious knowledge, an occult wisdom. There is the hieroglyphic question of how words attach themselves to reality, an understanding that the arrangements of letters in particular ways affects the world (“I hate the word ‘kill.’ Will continue to use it”), which in other contexts is called magic. There is the defense of Satan as a metaphor against authority. And there is the funny castigation of the self-important Bannon, an intentional juxtaposition of the vital and romantic energy associated with Lucifer in a Miltonic sense with the banality of Bannon’s evil. Most distinctly, Bonney’s poem is theological in its understanding that the only rebellion against metaphysical forces must itself be metaphysical. More than an expression of Bannon’s badness, the poem is an expression of Bannon’s wickedness.

As Bonney makes clear, somebody as boring as Bannon can’t possibly be the dark prince. What, then, is that which should be named? Bonney’s answer is the structure in which most of us are entrenched: “ffs [for fuck’s sake] all of us bastards of capital. yeh we deserve everything we get. … say guillotine. say razor say fuck it.” An admirable quality of Bonney’s poetry is that none of it is occasional verse; he doesn’t write agitprop indictments against specific individuals (even as Bannon, Johnson, and Theresa May are called out by name). Our Death is bigger than Brexit, bigger than any election or politician or grifter. Bonney reserves his condemnation for the demiurge of the world, the system of international capitalism and all its attendant policies—deregulation, austerity, surveillance technology—that have increasingly reigned supreme since the days of Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.

In Neoliberalism’s Demons: On the Political Theology of Late Capital (2018), Adam Kotsko writes that the governing ideology of the Western economic system “makes demons of us all, confronting us with forced choices that serve to redirect the blame for social problems onto ostensible poor decision making individuals” with the purpose of “claiming that the current state of things is what we have all collectively chosen.” Bonney understood that capitalism is a totalizing force that colonizes our waking hours, our sleeping hours, our bodies, our minds, our souls. He writes that it’s “impossible to tell who’s a cop these days,” the ultimate logic of surveillance capitalism democratizing oppression, making all interactions and exchanges into a type of commodity. Our Death, as its title suggests, isn’t a hopeful book, despite Bonney’s faith in revolutionary politics. It’s not a manifesto or a blueprint. One does not turn to poetry for solutions, whether legislative or activist. However, Bonney’s wrath precludes nihilism because somebody who believes in nothing can’t be wrathful. Wrath is a testament of faith: it must always be directed toward a moral aberration. Hopelessness is arguably the operative mode of our current moment, the emotional tenor of what the late philosopher Mark Fisher called “capitalist realism,” that sinking and permeating sense that it’s not even possible to imagine a better world. Bonney is the bard of capitalist realism.

He is also the great chronicler of our pre-apocalyptic moment. Fisher, among other thinkers, pointed out that in some ways, imagining the end of the world is easier than imagining the end of capitalism. Bonney was a lyricist for “the end of the world, when you can’t tell whether it’s just happened or is merely about to happen. An endless stillness. An aching blue. A scraping sky. A screeching of blackened burning bells. A sleepless night. An endless regret,” as he writes in “On the Refusal of Spite.” Every day, we read of some new injustice, some new indignity, some new indiscretion. With the exhaustion that accompanies just staying abreast of the news, Bonney quips that “this end of the world shit is making me sick.” Exhaustion is a quality prophets often share: think of Jonah attempting to avoid Nineveh only to be swallowed by the whale or Ezekiel lying on his side and eating a scroll with honey pressed between its papyri. Cracked prophet that he was, radical and irreverent, blasphemous and obscene, heretical and wise, Bonney asked, “What else are we supposed to do, as we sit here waiting for the end of everything. Reinvent prayer? Behave yourself.”