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Benjamin never offers a precise formulation of Left melancholy. Rather, he deploys it as a term of opprobrium for those beholden more to certain long-held sentiments and objects than to the possibilities of political transformation in the present. Benjamin is particularly attuned to the melancholic's investment in “things.” In The Origin of German Tragic Drama, he argues that “melancholy betrays the world for the sake of knowledge,” here suggesting that the loyalty of the melancholic converts its truth (“every loyal vow or memory”) about its beloved into a thing, indeed, imbues knowledge itself with a thinglike quality.

Left melancholy, in short, is Benjamin's name for a mournful, conservative, backward-looking attachment to a feeling, analysis, or relationship that has been rendered thing-like and frozen in the heart of the putative Leftist. If Freud is helpful here, then this condition presumably issues from some unaccountable loss, some unavowably crushed ideal, contemporarily signified by the terms “Left,” “socialism,” “Marx,” or “movement.”

The literal disintegration of socialist regimes and of the legitimacy of Marxism may well be the least of it. We are awash in the loss of a unified analysis and unified movement, in the loss of labour and class as inviolable predicates of political analysis and mobilization, in the loss of an inexorable and scientific forward movement of history, and in the loss of a viable alternative to the political economy of capitalism.

But in the hollow core of all these losses, perhaps in the place of our political unconscious, is there also an unavowed loss — the promise that Left analysis and Left commitment would supply its adherents with a clear and certain path towards the good, the right, and the true? Is it not this promise that formed the basis for much of our pleasure in being on the Left, indeed, for our self-love as Leftists and for our fellow feeling towards other Leftists?

But if read through the prism of Left melancholy, the element of displacement in both sets of charges may appear more starkly since we would be forced to ask: what aspects of Left analysis or orthodoxy have wilted on the vine for its adherents, but are safeguarded from this recognition through the scornful attention heaped on identity politics and poststructuralism?

this failure results as well from a particular intellectual straitjacket — an insistence on a materialism that refuses the importance of the subject and the subjective, the question of style, the problematic of language. And it is the combination of these two causes of failure that is deadly: “Our sectarianism,” he argues in the conclusion of The Hard Road to Renewal, “consists not only of a defensiveness towards the agendas fixed by now-anachronistic political-economic formations (those of the 1930s and 1945), but is also due to a certain notion of politics, inhabited not so much as a theory, more as a habit of mind.”

Certainly the course of capital shapes the conditions of possibility in politics, but politics itself “is either conducted ideologically or not at all.”11 Or, in another of Hall's pithy formulas, “politics does not reflect majorities, it constructs them.”12

It is important to be clear here. Hall never claims that ideology determines the course of globalization, but that it harnesses it for one political purpose or another, and when it is successful, the political and economic strategies represented by a particular ideology will also themselves bring into being certain political-economic formations within global capitalist developments.

Walter Benjamin sketches this phenomenon in his attack on Erich Kästner, the popular Left-wing poet in the Weimar Republic who is the subject of his "Left melancholy” essay: “This poet is dissatisfied, indeed heavy-hearted. But this heaviness of heart derives from routine. For to be in a routine means to have sacrificed one's idiosyncracies, to have forfeited the gift of distaste. And that makes one heavy-hearted.”14

What is entailed in throwing off the melancholic and conservative habits of the Left to invigorate it with a radical (from the Latin radix, meaning “root”), critical and visionary spirit again? This would be a spirit that embraces the notion of a deep and indeed unsettling transformation of society rather than recoiling at this prospect, even as we must be wisened to the fact that neither total revolution nor the automatic progress of history would carry us towards whatever reformulated vision we might develop. What political hope can we nurture that does not falsely ground itself in the notion that “history is on our side” or that there is some inevitability of popular attachment to whatever values we might develop as those of a new Left vision?

This is - it bears saying - a work in progress; Eritreans, Afghans and the Sudanese are every bit as brutalised as Syrians, the latter are not the ‘special case’ some tabloids have sought to define them as – a cherry-picked victim by which we superficially re-legitimise World War Two narratives of safe-havens and our own morality. This is not to say that we can or should take infinite refugees, rather, that we must give according to our own ability and the needs of others, and that our foreign policies ought be waged (if that is still the correct verb) in a fashion that considers these human repercussions and where they flee to.

My own position on how much we might do is, probably, more utopian than most. I love to imagine British people talking of the successes and difficulties faced in integrating the Syrian couple now living with them for six months. Of people telling their boss they’ll be late for work because of dropping-off an adopted child at an English class – the boss understanding because his neighbour is running a day care centre for similar reasons. I fantasise about the idea of us all being forced to interrupt our business as usual, being reminded that millions of ruined lives and our ability to help a little was worth more than what the damn markets are saying. Sure, plenty of it is fantasy, but, there again, a week ago the UK was to take a few hundred Syrians. Next week, already with a certainty that that number will have increased, tens of thousands will march on Downing Street to demand more.

I simply believe that people are good and moral, especially where an agenda can be cleared of ulterior motives and polling data-induced paralysis, at which point you let people make up their own mind as to whether they like helping or vilifying those in need.

societies have an impulse for compassion, and where that impulse is continuously stifled – where we are consistently bludgeoned with ideas that we haven’t the time, the capital, the empathy – we eventually come to believe it. Western society needs to be reminded that it can stand for change and stand for good, not only for a cheap fiscal orthodoxy; it is vitally important that we seize this moment, for it is in times of crisis that humans are able to reinvent themselves by either rising to, or falling, in the face of the challenge

Crucial in the call to action now rising are the voices of those elderly people who remember the evacuation of children from cities during World War II – their memory is essential for in them is a precedent, a recollection, that people can take in strangers for the good of all, and that life as you know it can legitimately be interrupted for an act of conscience.

In many ways, what we are seeing now is a hacking of government politics - the mechanisms of a much-vaunted ‘sharing economy’ put to humanitarian rather than market ends.

People – whether in their accommodation, vehicles, expertise, time or spare belongings – are taking the unused value of their surpluses and investing it towards making good. This is what postcapitalism looks like, and here we see are seeing the network technologies of the twenty-first century mobilised to ameliorate the sort of crisis not seen since the twentieth.

Governments can be embarrassed, either by other governments' positions (read: Germany) or when their own populations demand more of them, either vocally, or by outdoing the efforts of the government itself; creating such a clamour that you break the machinery of government, the emotional armour, and break through to the humans that wear it. The Greek bailout crowdfunder, which so cheerfully managed to raise under 1% of only one debt instalment, illustrates that the efforts of networked individuals cannot match the smallest clout of a government. We should let this refugee crisis show that, whilst groundswell cannot replace government, it can and must help shape it.

According to Sherwood Ross, one reason is that amongst 28 countries ‘that held prisoners in behalf of the US based on published data’, are a dozen from Africa: Algeria, Djibouti, Egypt, Ethiopia, Gambia, Kenya, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Somalia, South Africa and Zambia. [9] In Gambia, for example, President Yahya Jammeh’s acquiescence to the CIA’s need for a rendition site for US torture victims may explain Obama’s blind eye towards his dictatorship.

And in January 2013, Pretoria deployed 400 troops to the Central African Republic during a coup attempt because, ‘We have assets there that need protection,’ according to deputy foreign minister Ebrahim Ebrahim, referring to minerals (according to his interviewer) [14] or to sophisticated weaponry that South Africa gifted the tyrant ruler there, François Bozizé (according to his reply in a debate with me in late February).

By mid-2012, Pretoria’s National Development Plan – overseen from within the SA Presidency and endorsed at the ANC’s December 2012 national conference – provided a variety of mandated changes in policy so as to align with South Africa’s new BRICS identity and functions. These mainly involved pro-business statements for deeper regional economic penetration, alongside the exhortation to change ‘the perception of the country as a regional bully, and that South African policy-makers tend to have a weak grasp of African geopolitics.’ [17] That problem will haunt Pretoria in coming years because, like the political carving of Africa in Berlin in 1884-85, the BRICS 2013 Durban summit has as its aim the continent’s economic carve-up, unburdened – now as then – by what would be derided as ‘Western’ concerns about democracy and human rights. Also invited were 16 African heads of state to serve as collaborators.

This notion, derived from Rosa Luxemburg’s thinking a century ago, focuses on how capitalism’s extra-economic coercive capacities loot mutual aid systems and commons facilities, families (women especially), the land, all forms of nature, and the shrinking state; Harvey’s accumulation by dispossession, and in special cases requiring militarist intervention, Naomi Klein’s ‘Shock Doctrine’. [22]

The forms of BRICS sub-imperialism are diverse, for as Yeros and Moyo remark, ‘Some are driven by private blocs of capital with strong state support (Brazil, India); others, like China, include the direct participation of state-owned enterprises; while in the case of South Africa, it is increasingly difficult to speak of an autonomous domestic bourgeoisie, given the extreme degree of de-nationalisation of its economy in the post-apartheid period. The degree of participation in the Western military project is also different from one case to the next although, one might say, there is a ‘schizophrenia’ to all this, typical of sub-imperialism.’ [23]

the more that specific companies targeted by victims require unified campaigning and boycotts to generate solidaristic counter-pressure, whether Brazil’s Vale and Petrobras, or South Africa’s Anglo or BHP Billiton (albeit with London and Melbourne headquarters), or India’s Tata or Arcelor-Mittal, or Chinese state-owned firms and Russian energy corporations. In this context, building a bottom-up counter-hegemonic network and then movement against both imperialism and BRICS sub-imperialism has never been more important. [24]