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bourgeois ideology

No Crime and No Punishment

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Aww, don’tcha just love the bourgeois mainstream?  I mean, ain’t they precious and priceless?  Isn’t their disingenuous, blithe, untroubled faith in recieved opinion; and their unquestioning belief in the fundamental goodness and honesty of the world they live in; just kind-of adorable?  Like toddlers who treat Mummy and Daddy like all-knowing, ever-protective gods.  And aren’t they sweet the way they get all serious about pondering the eternal verities they take for granted, like the way little kids are when they get all serious about a let’s-pretend game they’re playing.

I mean, look at this…

Dostoyevsky’s characters “justify murder in the name of ideological beliefs” which, according to the BBC, means he “foresaw the rise of the totalitarian state”.

Because it goes without saying that ‘democratic’ states never ever justify murder ideologically.  Nuh-uh.   The idea. 

Mindless, vacuous, unconcerned contentment of this type is sort-of cute, like the way cattle just mooch aimlessly around fields taking in the same sights over and over again, and happily munching on the cud.…

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Public Service

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Might as well put this up too…

Been watching a PBS documentary about the Scottsboro Boys.  The narration does everything it can to infantilise the Communists who got involved, to downplay their contribution, to chalk it up to cynical opportunism, to suggest their involvement did more harm than good, etc. 

The basically accurate account of events makes it clear, however, that it was the involvement of communists (and other people who got involved because communists made the case an issue) which ultimately led to the Scottsboro defendants getting even the meagre amount of justice and freedom they did. 

Towards the end, the narration says “not protests or marches or newspaper articles but simply time itself” brought Alabama to free most of the defendants… which, if you stop to think about it, is an absolutely out-fucking-rageous thing to say.  As if just waiting for a while would’ve freed the defendants by itself.  As if the Alabama ‘justice system’ would’ve seen the light eventually even if nobody had ever kicked up a ruckus about it.  As if the Alabama racists didn’t need to be opposed and fought and exhausted and embarassed into submission.

The message is clear: don’t fight injustice, or protest about it, or write about it, or do anything that could be considered political agitation.  That’ll just make you a cynical opportunist doing more harm than good – like the Communists.  Just shut up and wait.  Time and the system will heal all problems.  Then we can look back on it all nostalgically, with a sense of our own modern-day superiority, and call what happened a ‘tragedy’ (the title of the documentary is ‘Scottsboro – An American Tragedy’).

Also been looking at another PBS documentary about what a humanitarian Herbert Hoover was.  This is the guy who basically tricked loads of people into contributing to a charity scam.  People donated to his fund to relieve starvation in wartime Belgium.  But he charged the Belgians for the food and denied relief to areas that couldn’t pay. 

He pulled a similar trick with the Russian famine after the Civil War.  The documentary refers to this as a natural disaster exacerbated by the policies of the Bolsheviks.  Of course.  But the famine was the big deal it was, and the Bolsheviks were forced to take some of the measures they did (some of which were disastrous) because the famine came after (and partly as a result of) the Russian Civil War, which was basically a West-sponsored attempt to unseat the new Bolshevik government.  The Americans and the British (largely owing to the agitation of Winston Churchill… who was rather fond of using famines as political tools) not only invaded Russia themselves, but also sponsored the invasion of Russia by a bunch of counter-revolutionaries who were essentially proto-fascists.  They rampaged through Russia using tactics that put the much-more-talked-about ‘Red Terror’ (which was defensive) in the shade. 

Hoover took advantage of the famine to attack Bolshevik Russia.  He hated the new regime because it had cancelled deals he had planned in Tsarist Russia (along with a British capitalist partner) which would have made him one of the richest men on Earth. …

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Harry Potter and the Popular Consumption of Hegemonic Bourgeois Moral Ideology

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Killing people.  It’s a tricky one, isn’t it?

We… (and, in this instance, by the word ‘we’ I mean that rather narrow band of people who produce and consume the artefacts of the Western narrative culture industries) … we want to tell ourselves – in those bourgeois morality plays we call entertainment – that killing is WRONG.  Wrong, wrong, wrong.

The killing curse is an ‘Unforgiveable Curse’.

“Make the foundation of this society a man who never would”.

Luke can’t be won to the Dark Side because he won’t kill his father.

“Coward.  Every time.”

“Stop!  I command it!  There will be no battle here!”

Etc, etc, etc.

But lookity here… our heroes kill people, or they support the necessity of killing people.  Even the ‘moral’ ones (i.e. the ones who aren’t James Bond) do so.  Luke is nobly refusing to kill his father even as Han and Leia and Lando are killing loads of Imperial soldiers in the big battles.  The Doctor refuses to kill the threatened people of Earth even as the survivors of the Gamestation are fighting and trying to kill Daleks, and Rose solves the whole thing by coming back as the Bad Wolf and committing magical genocide.  The Doctor decrees the end of the battle, but relies upon soldiers: the Brigadier, Bambera and Ancelyn… maybe even Ace too… and the Brig saves the world by pumping silver bullets into the Destroyer.

Etc, etc, etc.

Harry Potter never kills anyone.  He barely ever fights anyone.  But he manages this by hiding in a tent when the war comes, while Neville actually fights the Death Eaters in Hogwarts, and his mates form a resistance cell and an underground radio station.  Yet Harry accepts the necessity of killing Voldemort.  He passively accepts (as he pasively accepts everything) that killing Voldemort is his destiny.  Luckily, as in every other instance (something Voldemort rightly points out), something comes between him and the ugly necessity.  Wormtail dies when his own hand strangles him, assorted Death Eaters fall over and accidentally kill themselves and their friends in order to oblige Harry.  In the same way, Voldemort gets shot by a wand, acting of its own volition out of loyalty to Harry.

In the Potter stories, killing is categorically wrong, evil, unforgiveable.  So the goodies fight the magic-Nazis with jinxes that make you fall over.  Luckily, the magic-Nazis also (for some reason) generally refrain from using the killing curse.  Meanwhile, Voldemort clearly and explicitly needs killing… and Harry is Chosen to do it… yet he can’t do this without either

a) using the unforgiveable killing curse, or

b) getting very lucky (i.e. Voldemort accidentally trips over the hem of his own robes and falls onto the tines of a passing threshing machine).

Luckily, luck always comes to Potter’s rescue (as, once again, Voldemort rightly points out), and – through sheer good fortune – there’s some complicated business that means Voldemort gets killed by a sentient wand that, like so many expedient creatures before it, stands in front of Our Hero and does all the difficult, icky stuff for him.…

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Koba the Ape

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Post-Spoilerocalyptic.

I went to see Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.  Banalities first:  A well-crafted film.  Cogent and coherent in terms of aesthetics and plot (though there is a pleasingly bathetic moment when, following lots of atmospheric shots of apes engaged in social interaction, one ape suddenly addresses another in sign language as “Maurice”).  Nicely acted by the principles. 

Now.

In The Dark Ape Rises, the ‘good’ ape leader is Caesar and the ‘bad’ ape leader is Koba.

Caesar is the reasonable one, the compromiser, who wants peace with the humans.  Koba is the nasty one who can’t let go of his resentment of humans, who doesn’t trust them, who betrays Caesar and launches an all-out war against the humans.

Thing is, Koba is fucking awesome.  Because, unlike Caesar, he understands that when you have the oppressor on the floor, you don’t help him up and dust him down.  No.  You stand on his neck.

Here’s Koba, riding straight at the enemy (who are armed with rocket launchers by this point) while simultaneously holding (and firing) two machine guns instead of the reins of his horse.  Caesar never does anything this fucking spectacularly brave and principled in the entire course of the movie.

It reminds me of what Philomena Cunk once said in reference to the revolution advocated by Russell Brand.  She worried about it until she realised that it was a revolution in the mind… which is safer than a real revolution because nothing actually changes.

Revolutionaries are all very well, you see, until they actually start doing anything, or – horror of horrors – winning.  You’re allowed to be a radical or a rebel or a firebrand, as long as you are a noble failure.  That’s why Rosa Luxemburg – through no fault of her own, may I stress – is sentimentalised, whereas Lenin is the epitome of evil.

There’s been much comment from the critiots that this film is good because there are no fully good or bad characters, and everyone means well.  Bollocks.  Koba might be portrayed as doing what he thinks best, at least part of the time, but he clearly becomes the bad guy.  He even dies the traditionally spectacular/poetically-just villain death.

Koba is certainly a bastard.  You see, he immediately turns into a psycho when he becomes a political rebel from Caesar’s benevolent dictatorship.  As usual, inhabiting a zone outside moderate compromise with the status quo and the oppressors is an instant ticket into psychological instability and evil.  The radical is, by definition, an ‘extremist’, and the extremist is, by definition, both a fanatic and a nihilist, a dangerous utopian and a cynic, a zealot and a self-interested machiavel, a demogogue and an autocrat.

Caesar isn’t the only ape in the film with a name that recalls a famous political figure from human history. …

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Force Decides

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Israel is currently killing hundreds of people in Gaza.  As they do from time to time.  To make something Abba Eban once said true by simply inverting his meaning: the Israelis never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity for peace.  Though even that is too kind to them.  As even White House senior staff acknowledge, the Israelis don’t want peace.  Give them everything they’ve ever wanted, and it still isn’t enough – because what they say they want isn’t what they want.  What they really want is to continue the war until they have finally completed the work that David Ben-Gurion left unfinished, and eradicated the Palestinians.  The mindset of Israel is genocidal, and becoming more openly so by the day.

It is now clear to a great many people that what happened to the Native Americans as a result of the institution and independence of the United States of America was a scandal, a holocaust and a tragedy.  The idea is so commonplace it’s become a sentimental truism in pop-culture.  Well, Israel had not done very much that America didn’t do in the process of getting where it is today.  Israel has shaken off its origin as a colonial possession of the British Empire.  Israel has ethnically cleansed huge swathes of land of the original inhabitants, and then claimed this land for itself.  Israel has repeatedly started wars for territory.  Israel has herded the original inhabitants of its land mass into tiny, racially-segregated reservations.  And so on.  And yet the obvious – that ‘what happened’ to the Native Americans was terrible – doesn’t seem anything like so obvious to a great many people when you’re talking about the Palestinians.  People seem able to get past the fact that Native Americans did some godawful things to Americans, putting it – rightly – in the context of the Native American’s fight against territorial displacement and dispossession.  Yet Hamas is said to be responsible for the rampage of destruction and slaughter Israel is currently visiting upon the civilians of Gaza, because some people in Gaza have a few relatively meagre weapons which they occasionally have the temerity to use against the nation holding them in a massive concentration camp.  Context be damned.

Clearly, we are more than capable of holding nuanced attitudes to the question of killing people – the problem is that the proper nuances are usually provided for us by people in power.  The nuance allows us to see the sad necessity of killing that is accepted – with a sigh and a tear – by the official goodies, and the utter incommensurable evil of the official baddies.  Sometimes ‘we’ are even allowed to be the baddies – as long as it was a long time ago, and we’re all very sorry now, and nobody defends it (though we all still continue to benefit from it, and do the same things to other people now), and as long as no comparisons are drawn with anything happening today.  We can see that the Native Americans had a context for scalping people, as long as nobody is loopy enough to dare suggesting that perhaps Palestinians have a context for rockets.…

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Apropos of Nothing

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Bourgeois law sets up a system which seems, superficially, to draw its moral force from the common sense morality of ordinary people (in the West this is filtered through the formal Christian ethics internalised by our civilisation).  Its actual function, of course, is to promote and enforce a social orderliness which allows the relatively untrammelled existence of social hierarchy.

(This isn’t a conspiratorial view, by the way.  Conspiracies undoubtedly happen – the ruling class, and their adjutants, are as capable of getting together and discretely working towards their own agendas and advantages as anyone else – but conspiracy is not the basis of the system.  Conspiracies are often criminal and, though frequently winked at by The Law, they are theoretically punishable.  They are, in a very real sense, an aberration.  An endemic aberration certainly – and more endemic the more confident the ruling classes get – but an aberration nonetheless.  It’s important not to be too cynical about the concept of law, to imagine that it is just a sham, and that everyone at the top knows it to be.  That isn’t how systems of control endure.  Systems of control endure by being extremely plausible both to those who are screwed by them and those who benefit from them.  Corruption is real.  It is a by-product of a system that generates unaccountable and hierarchical structures.  Corruption is also an important psychological category for making the system seem plausible, for making it seem to have validity and integrity.  Everyone – the corrupt and the non-corrupt – partly derives their idea of what constitutes legitimacy from their idea of what constitutes illegitimacy.)

Part of how bourgeois law manages to be an effective and enduring system of control is by appearing to be impartial in its normal operation, to be aimed at securing justice except in aberrant circumstances, and to be based on moral categories… and one way in which it manages this is by, to some degree, some of the time, actually bothering to be all those things.  You can get good results from the bourgeois justice system.  It has to be capable of working properly in order to look like what it claims to be.  You can trace the influence of popular ideas of morality in its structure and strictures.  This is, to the greatest extent, the accreted result of popular pressure to reform the system.  But then the absorbtion and adaptation of popular demands, the rationed distribution of progressive gains, the assimilation of democratic ideas, is another part of how systems of control survive.  Ultimately, all worthwhile conceptions of ‘justice’ come from the democratic impulse from below.  This isn’t to say that they come from the innate goodness of people, or the nobility of the oppressed, or the spirit of mankind, or anything like that.  Rather, the oppressed – always the more universal class because they are the most widespread and the most thwarted – develop the democratic impulse towards justice precisely because they are denied it.  Injustice breeds the idea of justice in people. …

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Sarcasm and Chips

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Every time I read The Prince I become more convinced that it is a work of sarcasm.  Not conscious sarcasm perhaps, but sarcasm nonetheless. 

It is the product of bitter disappointment and disillusion.  This man, Machiavelli, had been a fierce Florentine patriot, a republican, a defender of the revolutionary city after the popular ousting of the plutocratic Medici psuedo-kings.  He lost the game and, having been tortured and exiled, he sat and wrote what is supposed to be a job application to the triumphant Medici… and it turns into the first open admission (in modern European letters) that ethics and politics are separate and often irreconcilable. 

It is coded, deliberately or not, to imply that the failure of Republican hopes in the face of the Medici stemmed from a failure to be sufficiently ruthless against them, to be as utterly cynical as the Medici themselves.  In the process, Machiavelli praises Cesare Borgia as the perfect Prince.  The Medici had regained their status in Florence partly owing to an alliance with the bellicose Pope Julius II, who had been one of the Borgia’s most implacable enemies. 

Gramsci famously argued that the book was aimed at the common man, because the leaders to whom it was supposedly addressed already knew everything Machiavelli was saying.  They just didn’t talk about it.  In this reading, The Prince might become the whistleblowing of ruling-class secrets.  If you convert much of the advice into mordant irony, you find a book that laments a world in which people like the Medici can prosper precisely through a secretive, two-faced instrumentalism based on the most pessimistic view of mankind possible.  Of course, for the Prince himself, the most pessimistic view of mankind is actually the most optimistic, because it posits humanity as a weak and easily-exploited mass of flesh-puppets. 

The essentially double-edged nature of the rise of modernity (i.e. bourgeois social relations) is expressed in the book’s implicit recognition of this.  Part of the promise of modernity, of its greater openness and ductility and possibility, is an inextricable co-habitee: opportunistic political tyranny based on the utilisation of people as counters, bargaining chips.  Money.  To be banked, exchanged, invested, harvested.  The market is the basis of Medici power.  They make society a market in which people are the tokens.

Machiavelli may have come to accept this view in the counter-revolutionary period after the fall of the Florentine Republic he championed, but I don’t think his disillusion equates to an easy reconciliation with the kind of ‘realpolitik’ people often take from the book.  On the contrary, the book seems more like Michaelangelo’s Last Judgement on the wall of the Sistine Chapel – a work of melancholy recognition of the failure of the liberatory promise of the renaissance, destined to be perpetually overlooked by the ceiling upon which the optimism is forever frozen.…

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The Doctor has refused Enlightenment.  Turlough is nonchalantly (rather too nonchalantly) picking at his fingernails when the White Guardian offers him a share.

“It’s a diamond,” he says, staring at the massive, glowing crystal, “The size!  It could buy a galaxy. I can have that?”

The White Guardian tells him he can.

“I would point out,” interjects the Black Guardian, “that under the terms of our agreement, it is mine… unless, of course, you wish to surrender something else in its place. The Doctor is in your debt for his life. Give me the Doctor, and you can have this,” he indicates the crystal, “the TARDIS, whatever you wish.”

Turlough is evidently extremely tempted.  He has to struggle with himself.  When he shoves it towards the Black Guardian, it couldn’t be more obvious that he is angry and disappointed with the choice he feels have has to make.

“Here,” he shouts petulantly, burying his face, “take it!”

Even so, he does make that choice.

The Black Guardian bursts into flames and vanishes, gurgling and screaming.

“Light destroys the dark,” comments the White Guardian.  “I think you will find your contract terminated,” he tells Turlough.

Turlough takes a smaller crystal from his trouser pocket.  It’s the one the Black Guardian gave him to seal their bargain.  It has turned back, charred by the same flames that consumed the Black Guardian.  Turlough drops it.

“I never wanted the agreement in the first place,” he mutters.

Tegan is sceptical.

“You believe him because he gave up Enlightenment for your sake,” she tells the Doctor.

“You’re missing the point,” the Doctor says, “Enlightenment was not the diamond. Enlightenment was the choice.”

Well, isn’t that twee.

Except that it’s a bit more grounded that it sounds.

Listen to the words everyone’s been using.  Diamond.  Buy.  Terms.  Agreement.  Contract.  Mine.  Debt.  This is the language of trade, of commerce, of business, of employment, of property, of value and wealth and commodification.  Turlough has been desperately trying to wriggle out of a contract, a job.  He was basically coerced into it and given a misleading description of what it entailed.  He responded by slacking off, dragging his feet, working to rule, fobbing off the boss with endless excuses.  The boss got sick of this and tried to sack him.  Then, Turlough was presented with an opportunity to take up an altogether more alluring contract.  This time, it was a straightforward deal: a dirty great jewel of immense value (Turlough immediately conceives of it in monetary terms) in exchange for a crude hit.  No illusions.  No lies.  Just kill this guy you know to be pretty decent in return for a big pay-off.

He started the story leaning over a chessboard, moving pieces around, deciding which pawn to sacrifice in the cause of winning the game.  He ends the story leaning over a table, staring at a prize, given the option to pick it up in exchange for sacrificing one piece.   And he can’t do it.

This refers to more than just Good vs.…

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For March Against the Mainstream Media Day

The Editor (apparently he edits the whole of human society) has uncovered Suki’s true identity.  Instead of being just another inoffensive wannabe employee, she’s actually…

“Eva Saint Julienne, last surviving member of the Freedom Fifteen. Hmm, self declared anarchist, is that right?”  His tone is patronising.  Non-mainstream political principles are a quaint and amusing affectation.

“The Freedom Foundation has been monitoring Satellite Five’s transmissions,” says Suki, pulling a gun on the smug bastard, “We have absolute proof that the facts are being manipulated. You are lying to the people.”

“Ooo, I love it,” he giggles, still in the same tone of amusement, as though he’s listening to hilariously naff dialogue in a period drama, “Say it again.”

“This whole system is corrupt. Who do you represent?”

The Editor is self-aware enough to know that, for all his power, he’s a slave himself.

“I answer to the Editor in Chief…. If you don’t mind, I’m going to have to refer this upwards.”

Suki looks up, to see what the Editor is referring to.

“What is that?” she asks.

“Your boss. This has always been your boss, since the day you were born.”

Lower down Satellite 5, the Doctor is quizzing Cathica, who has lived all her life on one level.

“I don’t know anything,” she says proudly.

“Don’t you even ask?”

“Why would I?”

“You’re a journalist.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

She genuinely doesn’t understand him.  She doesn’t know what is on the floors above her… except that on the executive level, the place she’s been trained to yearn for, “the walls are made of gold”.  She doesn’t know why “immigration has tightened up”.  Forced to guess, she flails around and suggests some vague notions, all based on the random ‘shit happens’ model, none of which point any blame at anybody powerful or any powerful structures.  And this is a member of society in which people are surrounded by ‘News’, in which they have holes carved into their own heads so information can be beamed directly into their brains.  For all the ‘news’ and ‘information’, they don’t know what’s going on or why.

“This society’s the wrong shape…” says the Doctor.

When the Doctor and Rose reach the top floors, the walls aren’t made of gold, they’re made of frosted steel, and the workstations are manned by zombies – including Suki.

“I think she’s dead,” says the Doctor.

“She’s working,” says Rose.

In capitalism, mindless labour transforms you into the walking dead… or, in this case, the sitting at a desk dead.

“It may interest you to know,” smarms the Editor, “that this is not the Fourth Great and Bountiful Human Empire. In fact, it’s not actually human at all. It’s merely a place where humans happen to live…”

There is an angry snarl from the ceiling.

“…yeah, sorry…” the Editor corrects himself, jumping at the growl of his boss, “It’s a place where humans are allowed to live by kind permission of my client.”…

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Midge walks into the Gym.  You get the sense that it’s not the sort of place the old Midge would’ve visited.  The old Midge would’ve been scared of the self-defence crowd.

The new Midge is all swagger, in his shades and his shiny jacket.

“Waiting on the Sarge?” he asks the room full of silent, watching, bemused, singlet-and-sweatpants-wearing blokes.  “He’s been held up. He asked me to have a little chat with you.”

This is a lie.

“I learned a secret today. The secret of success. Thought I’d share it with you.”

Midge has been learning all sorts of things.  He’s been quarry in a quarry, hunted through a rocky wilderness on another world, stalked by carnivorous beasts.  He chose to survive at all costs.  He killed… not just to survive but for fun, for revenge, for a feeling of power that – one senses – is entirely new to him, a new experience in a stunted and powerless dead-end life.  Of course, in the process, he adopted the viewpoint of the beasts.  The logic of tooth and claw.  The logic of ‘fuck you, I’m all right’.  The logic that makes you escape the lions by feeding them your friends.

“It’s common sense, right?  It’s just the way of the world, right?  Survival of the fittest.”

And he’s right, in a way.  It is the way of the world.  Everyone in his sleepy little home town, his pokey little corner of Thatcher’s Britain, is obsessed with the survival of the fittest.  It has seeped all the way through society, into every nook and cranny.  It’s in the shops, where Hale and Pace are scared of being driven out of business.  It’s in the suburbs where the net curtains twitch.  It’s in the Territorial Army training sessions where the Sarge says young men have to be taught to fight.  It’s in the housing estate where Midge comes from.

It doesn’t matter that it’s one logic among many in nature, or that sometimes we see it in nature where it isn’t because we often mistake mirrors for windows, or that it may be fitting for the beasts but applying it to people is vacuous and specious and destructive.  Truth is: for the purposes of the people who benefit from it, the more vacuous and specious and destructive it is, the better. 

“Get rid of the deadwood, let the wasters go to the wall, and the strong will inherit the earth. You and me.”

Why do I suspect that some of the lads in this room used to bully Midge when they were at school with him?

“Do you hear what I’m saying?” he demands, furiously, enraged by their failure to respond to his glib soundbites, “Do you know what I’m talking about?”

He takes off his shades.  Beneath them, his eyes are the yellow, mindless eyes of an animal.  But that’s what he chose.

The Master is there.  A stalking, diseased old man, seething with resentment and malice.  Through Midge, his slavering pet, he casts his hypnotic spell over the young men in the room. …

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