Dry January, Wet Politics
Sobriety stories should stress collective solutions to the harms of alcohol
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It started in December. As the holiday season grew near, more and more stories popped up in the press with advice for people who don’t drink on how to navigate alcohol-fuelled festive events. Once the final cork had popped on the New Year’s champagne, the focus shifted: away from non-drinkers to those who had imbibed too much over the holidays and were now desperately seeking a detox.
There are serious challenges to cutting down or giving up alcohol in a society where so much socialising revolves around drinking. Contrary to stereotype, however, there is nothing inevitable about the popularity of booze in Britain. It’s true that the country has a lengthy history of public drinking that continues today in many – not all – communities. This is the land of the beloved local pub, after all. But the way alcohol seeps into so many areas of our lives in the 21st century is not the inevitable effect of some timeless cultural tick. It’s sustained by structural factors: a free market with limited curbs on businesses that make a killing from alcohol sales while offloading responsibility for dealing with alcohol-related harms onto individuals.
As the British Medical Association put it in a critique of current government policy, alcohol-related harms are too often treated not as a public health crisis, but as the personal failing of drinkers.
Yet as we enter the second week of Dry January, you’ll be hard-pressed to find serious analyses of the alcohol industry or alcohol policy. You’re also unlikely to see alcohol called a drug, or drinking referred to as drug-taking. That’s because our society’s warped relationship to alcohol is embedded in a legal framework that oversees the regulation and mass sale for profit of one drug, while criminalising people who sell and consume others.
Despite all this, the information available in the mainstream media for those who want a short- or longer-term break from liquor focuses largely on what we can do to change ourselves, treating drinking as a lifestyle choice instead of suggesting how we can work together to change the system. The non-drinking stories that pile up from mid-December to early January echo books on how to get and stay sober, with plenty of tales of personal struggle and triumph.
The best of this literature provides a lifeline for people looking for guidance on giving up alcohol. But as a genre it can reinforce the idea that alcohol-related harms are an individual problem. As Jennifer Dines argues in her critique of women’s Quit Lit in the US, these books are characterised by scientific weakness, political floppiness and economic opportunism. Many are written by and marketed to socially and economically privileged women, peddling expensive treatment programmes while downplaying the structural factors that make working-class women and women of colour more vulnerable to the consequences of drinking (job loss, arrest and convictions), and less likely to access decent healthcare to address health problems related to alcohol use.
Dines, on the other hand, concludes that a feminist approach to reducing alcohol-related harms should be modelled on grassroots harm-reduction programmes, such as needle exchanges for people who use drugs intravenously.
Dines ends her tale of women’s Quit Lit by putting alcohol where it belongs: in the company of other drugs. That’s precisely where James Wilt begins his book Drinking Up the Revolution: How to Smash Big Alcohol and Reclaim Working-Class Joy. “The War on Drugs is a global genocide,” Wilt declares in the introductory chapter, “The Invisible Drug.” The author sides firmly with decriminalisation as part of a radical politics of workers’ rights and anti-imperialism. Where he departs from the global left is on its failure to confront
“the extreme harms caused by one of the most popular legal and regulated drugs on the planet: alcohol”.
Drinking Up the Revolution has lots of inspirational tales of workers coming together to address social problems associated with alcohol use: anti-colonial movements that discouraged and even banned drinking; revolutionary governments that nationalised the alcohol industry along with other businesses; popular struggles to provide safe supplies of alcohol and other drugs to people who use them.
But the bulk of the book is a detailed account of the rapacious power of Big Alcohol. There are sections on monopolies; the invention of “craft beer” (much of it produced by multinationals); the abysmal working conditions and low pay in breweries and distilleries; the proliferation of chichi bars in gentrified neighbourhoods, where poor and racialised people are demonised as “problem drinkers”; the industry’s campaign to push its drug in emerging markets in the global south.
Wilt challenges the truisms too many on the left have swallowed about drinking: that alcohol is good while other drugs are bad; that drinking is an essential part of working-class culture (an idea that seems to be particularly popular in Britain, where it also reinforces the myth that real workers are white and male); that attempts to curb drinking are necessarily bourgeois and moralistic. Challenging the for-profit alcohol industry, Wilt insists, must be part of a wider anti-capitalist movement, a decommodification of the world that includes a commitment to finding safe ways to address individual and collective stress and trauma, as well as “a struggle for a safer pleasure”.
Drinking Up the Revolution is not a call for alcohol prohibition or a guide to getting sober. But the book did get me thinking differently about my own drinking – not so much what and why I drink, and the effects on my body and life, but where the alcohol I drink comes from, and the wider harms caused by our collective relationship to drink: harms to the planet, to animals, to other people. To our movements for radical change.
It’s not that we need fewer stories about how to stop or cut down on drinking. It’s that we need more of these stories to focus on how we can work collectively to change our relationship to the widely used and misunderstood drug called alcohol.
I’m easing my way into 2024. This month’s 3rd Tuesday will fall on the 4th (23 January), and will feature a list of activist reading and listening. I’ll be back on track next month, with a new essay on the 1st Tuesday (6 February) and an activist-writer audio conversation on the 3rd Tuesday (20th February). See you soon.
Pen in Fist is written by me, Carrie Lou Hamilton. You can find my other writing and projects here. If you like what you read you can:
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A really thought provoking article - thank you Carrie! Our drinking culture over here is so unbelievably bad. The quote you included about ‘seeking a safer pleasure’ is so fascinating. I had never thought about collective and individual consumption of alcohol that way. Because it is inherently unsafe in a multi layered way (personal, financial, health, inciting violence etc etc), so what does that say about the wider necessary human need for safety if most of the pleasure society seeks is so unsafe? Creates an atmosphere that is completely unfulfilling. (Always thought alcohol is unfulfilling of course but I mean I’ve never thought about it so collectively across the whole of the UK for example). It’s like we’re all be sedated about the state of the world by the alcohol companies that own so much. And cause so much damage.
I wonder where it goes from here. Perhaps going sober needs to be reframed a lot more as for the community as well as yourself. As a gen z I have never known so many sober people as I do right now as I have many sober peers. I hope that means something good.
This is great. Scale of production and the financial power of major alcohol producers make them wildly unsustainable as well as too powerful. Especially interesting considering much alcohol began being made to deal with agricultural waste!