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ideology

Summing Up, Part 3

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Last time in ‘Summing Up’, we talked about how the right-libertarian “views the horror of socially-arranged altruism as worse than the horror of letting people die for want of medical care” because “libertarianism is against individual freedom for all because it depends upon collective liberation”.  This, of course, raises another issue.  Where does one draw the line?  If socialised medicine is totalitarianism for doctors, why is the tacit threat of destitution which lies behind the wage labour system not considered equally bad?  The answer to this question is the same brute and vulgar answer we gave already.  It comes down to which side you’re on… which, most of the time, in an instance of capitalism creating a self-fulfilling prophecy of the selfish and cynical actor of its own ideological account of human nature, comes down to which class you’re in, or which class your interests are aligned with.  

Let’s pause again to notice all those ‘vons’ in the names of the great Austrians.  And let’s also pause to again notice that, in applying such cynicism about human nature, such distrust of democracy, such a strategic splitting of the concept of freedom, and such naked class interests, the libertarians are, indeed, the heirs of the Founding Fathers – not just of the United States but also, as we’ve seen, of Ireton and Cromwell and the equivalent bourgeois revolutionaries in England.  They carry many of the most fundamental imperatives of the founders of the bourgeois state into the present era.

The libertarians’ philosophical rationale for this partiality to the rights and privileges of the ruling class, and the attendant indifference to those of the working class, is that private property is the basis of liberty (to the extent that some have taken to rechristening them, far from unjustly, ‘propertarians’).  But this philosophical rationale manages the impressive feat of being both a tautology and a contradiction.  It’s a tautology because it assumes the point under question.  It’s a contradiction because if private property, while conferring liberty on its possessors, also structurally curtails the liberty of the propertyless, then whither the concept of liberty… except as a luxury to be enjoyed by a few?  From here the libertarian is inescapably pushed towards somehow justifying the inequity, towards explaining why yes, liberty is a luxury to be enjoyed by a few – and quite right too!  And hence we get the various distinct but similar ways in which the different strands of this tradition of bourgeois thinking (libertarianism, classical liberalism, etc) have imported justifications in from outside, from conservatism.  The justifications are easy to find.  You need only look at the many and drastic specific inequities generated by capitalist society, generalise from them, and amputate history and context so that they appear to have no cause.  That’s how you end up with libertarians and liberals enthusing over The Bell Curve, etc. 

(The necessary amputation of context is actually especially striking in the case of the libertarians, because a whole host of the inequities they seize upon to justify hierarchy are based on the imperialism – or at least war – they profess to be against.…

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Summing Up, Part 1

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As we know, the Austrian School is – but is not limited to – a heterodox branch of bourgeois economics.  It is, however, founded upon a more-or-less explicitly political project.  And this project continues to animate its zombie, and its zombified victims, infected by its bite.  But then the Austrians’ iteration of the new (in the 1870s) bourgeois economic doctrine of marginalism was always a political project, even in its dry theoretical basis. 

Marginalism itself arose as a way to escape the increasing obviousness of the fact that capital exploits labour.  This was a necessary project as capital spread across the globe.  It took the conscious form of an attempt to address genuine weaknesses in the classical labour theory of value.  These weaknesses were interpreted as evidence that the theory needed to be discarded precisely because the class position/alignment of the theoreticians addressing the issue pushed them towards a view of value which did not derive from labour.  It became an even more necessary project after the Paris Commune scared the shit out of the bourgeoisie. 

The Austrian School, in the person of Menger, helped create marginalism.  But it continued to exist as a distinct trend within marginalism because of the nature of Menger’s iteration of marginalist ideas – namely his rejection of mathematics; vociferous and foundational opposition to what was called the ‘Historical School’, basing himself on “general laws” and “typical phenomena” rather than historical specifics – which he passed down to a succession of thinkers which formed the Austrian tradition.  For contingent historical reasons (the intellectual climate of fin de siècle Austria, the existence of Austro-Marxism, etc), the Austrian marginalists were the ones who concerned themselves most especially with attacks on Marx in particular and socialism in general.  They made the political (i.e. class) aspects of marginalism relatively explicit, at least in terms of what they attacked.  The Austrian trend within marginalism was the most consciously ideological.  This approach is inherently ideological.  Bohm-Bawerk develops Menger in direct response to Marx, and this as a result of combat with Austro-Marxism.  But the emphasis on the subjective and the general is political in itself.  It is based on a class position, and on interests.

I think there is a question as to what extent the Austrian School actually exists in any coherent form rather than as a broad tendency or aesthetic, with its opposition to Marx and socialism as its most important markers.  There are delineable basic intellectual principles, but even they tend to be quite flexible.  Thinkers within the Austrian tradition will disagree about many things, some of them quite fundamental.  This is worth mentioning because it can cause trouble as one generalises – which one needs to do unless one is engaged in a detailed account.  What is true of one ‘Austrian’ is not true of another.  The Austrian School has a built-in defence mechanism which makes it hard to take aim at: it doesn’t really exist.  That’s a somewhat cheeky and overstated way of saying that its members believe all sorts of things, many of which are contradictory, some at a fundamental level.…

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Islands and Beaches

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A Fragmentary Digression on Individualism, Freedom, Necessity, and Utopia.

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Individualism is a key part of reactionary dogma.  It is relentlessly fetishized by the right, by libertarians, by conservatives, by the YouTube ‘rationals’ and ‘sceptics’, etc.

Murray Rothbard, Austrian School dogmatist and founder of right-libertarianism in America, gave “individual human beings act” as the foundation of his entire philosophical system.  But, aside from the question of whether or not one can logically derive from it what Rothbard does, what does this mean? What can it possibly mean? Apart from anything else, what even is an individual?  The concept, at least in the way that it is asserted by bourgeois ideology, is not supported by the evidence. 

Not only is no man an island, but it appears that people are actually more like beaches. 

A beach is a liminal zone.  Liminality is its essence. It is defined by its lack of definition.  It is sometimes long and sometimes short, depending on the time of day, and the time of year.  Its very nature as a location is that it lies at the edge of the entire concept of location.  It is undeniably a place, but a place at the outermost reach of two different ways of measuring, experiencing, conceptualising location.  It is a place where one kind of human idea of place ends and another begins. It is a place where different kinds of mapping space begin and end.  It is a place with huge, variant, but overlapping significance to both human and physical geography.

It is a place conceivable in different ways.  Even within one language, it will take on very different connotations depending on whether we choose the words ‘beach’ or ‘coast’ or ‘shore’…  Its quiddity lies in its lack of fixity.  It will move, creeping inwards across the land, and yet never arriving anywhere because it always brings itself with it.  A beach is a constantly moving interplay of sand and temperature; of gravity pulling and pushing on waves that crash and recede, which slowly grind rocks into sand, sand that is then shaped into dunes and flats by the waves.  And the patterns change day by day, hour by hour.  Sand is the result of a process of slow erosion; temperature is always fluctuating.  Both have an independent essence which may be measured, but we inevitably bring subjectivity in measurements.  As we know, the act of measuring something changes it.

At a different phenomenological level, a beach is a site of joy or melancholy, or even war, depending upon history, context, the given moment, the quality of the light, the culture that sees it.  A beach means something very different to an island hunter-gatherer looking out from the forest and a European colonialist wading ashore.

There is, of course, such a thing as determinism acting on beaches.  Some things are determined. The existence of the beach itself is determined by material realities which are accidents of history, natural or sometimes social, but no less real for that. …

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Margaret on the Radio

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This is post is kindasorta both a Tricky Dicky and a Psychic Landscape entry. It doesn’t quite fit into either series, but should – hopefully – be read in the context of them.

 

When Margaret Thatcher died in 2013, so many people downloaded the song ‘Ding Dong! The Witch is Dead’ from iTunes that the BBC were seemingly forced into the position of having to play it on Radio 1, in line with their usual practice of giving airtime to songs that are currently in the charts.  (In the end they copped out and played a clip – of a song that’s under a minute long anyway – with an explanation.  I didn’t hear it but I’d stake internal organs on it involving use of the word ‘divisive’.)  This awkward situation for the BBC, very much not of their choosing, created what is called a ‘row’, or a ‘controversy’, or a ‘scandal’.  This is when the right-wing media, rather than report the facts with headlines like ‘Thousands Celebrate Baroness Thatcher’s Death by Downloading…’, instead publish stories with headlines like ‘Outrage as BBC plans to Celebrate Baroness Thatcher’s Death by Playing…’.  The ‘outrage’ the paper is supposedly reporting is always illustrated with a few hysterical quotes from people the paper contacted to supply them with hysterical quotes.  For instance, the Telegraph contacted Cecil Parkinson, one of Thatcher’s erstwhile cabinet minions and staunchest loyalists.  Lord Parkinson proved a disappointingly philosophical commentator however, telling them – bizarrely – that Thatcher wouldn’t have cared because she’d have been too busy watching Songs of Praise.

For those of you who don’t know, Songs of Praise is the longest running television show in history.  It has been aired more-or-less weekly on Sunday afternoons on BBC1 since 1961, and features recordings of Sunday church services – from a different church each week – complete with lots of hymn singing, helpfully subtitled so the viewer can join in at home.   The show is notorious for depicting anomalously large congregations which fail to accurately reflect the reality of Christian worship attendance figures in the United Kingdom.  As such, it is also one of the most subversive television shows in history, albeit unwittingly, being a weekly demonstration of both the psychologically deranging effects of the spectacle, and an infallible index of some of the quintessential sins of the British middle classes: pride, vanity, hypocrisy, etc.

Lord Parkinson’s idea in saying what he supposedly did was, presumably, to emphasize both Mrs Thatcher’s admirable contempt for the opinions of the people of Britain, but also her Christian piety.  He didn’t bother to explain why watching a particular television programme would mean Mrs Thatcher wouldn’t find time to care about an unconnected issue.  As I recall, Mrs Thatcher was quite an efficient multi-tasker.  Also, based on the occasional instance of seeing Songs of Praise in my youth, I’d say that the show was singularly conducive to making the viewer think about other things… and in my day it was presented by ex-Goon Harry Seacombe, so there always seemed a muted possibility that the cloying air of respectable tweeness might at any moment be discarded in favour of an atavistic reversion to random gibbering and screeching. …

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Tricky Dicky, Part 6: Dress Modern

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We are now in an odd, reversed position when it comes to William Shakespeare and Richard III: all of a sudden, and for the first time, we seem to know where Richard III’s head is, but not where to find Shakespeare’s.

I’ve written in previous instalments of this series about the relationship between Richard III (the man), Richard III (the play), William Shakespeare, and history. 

Essentially, my argument is that William Shakespeare was, for various reasons to do with his class position, his family, his career, and the historical moment and social milieu in which he found himself, peculiarly well placed to dramatise social energies, feelings, anxieties, and vertigos, which still speak to us today.  He was writing at the dawn of modernity, during the years immediately following the end of the medieval, in the immediate aftermath of the English Reformation… all of which is related to the fundamental fact that he was writing during the transition from feudalism as the dominant economic form of English society to capitalism.  We still live with the energies and dystrophies of modernity, since we still live in capitalist society.  Indeed, Shakespeare has in some ways only become more relevant as capitalism has become more predominant.  He dramatises some of its foundational myths, legends, conflicts, and anxieties.  He offers a still relevant interrogation of much foundational bourgeois ideology that has gone on, in mutant form, to become hegemonic.  His drama is based on people torn apart in social struggles, and though feudalism is long dead in Western Europe, we still today understand the feeling of being pulled between the imperatives of capitalist society and other non-capitalist instincts.  As I said before, I don’t claim that any of this constitutes any particularly original insight on my part… though I may be slightly original in claiming that part of why we continue to find Shakespeare compelling is because he wrote about life during the phase of ‘primitive accumulation’ and, at least according to David Harvey drawing on Rosa Luxemburg, primitive accumulation has never quite gone away.   Capitalism has always accumulated primitively, and this has only become more noticeable in the Western world with the rise of neoliberalism, which has cannibalised social wealth built up during the years of social democracy.  Moreover, Shakespeare is embraced and performed in many other parts in the world than Europe, including places wracked by even more violent and rapacious forms of present-day primitive accumulation, usually practiced via Western economic and/or military imperialism, and/or corporate extortion.

One of the ways in which theatrical performances attempt to express, mediate, or emphasize Shakespeare’s continued ‘relevance’ is through modern dress productions.  There’s an interesting irony about modern dress productions.  They are almost the rule rather than the exception these days, and yet you still hear people say they dislike them.  And yet it would be fair enough to describe what Shakespeare and his company did on stage at the Globe and the Blackfriars as modern dress productions.  It appears that they did not generally try to present the past as looking much different. …

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In the Loop

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Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the British Labour Party, recently asked Seumas Milne to be his director of communications. Milne is one of the few journalists currently working in the British media who is genuinely worth reading. Milne, for instance, wrote The Enemy Within, which is not the novelisation of the 1996 TV movie (Gary Russell courageously tackled that one), but rather a rigorous investigative expose of the way the Tory government – with help from the ‘security services’ and the tabloid press – set about trying to covertly undermine, smear and frame the NUM and Arthur Scargill during the 1984-5 Miners’ Strike.

Certainly, when you recall that David ‘Pigfucker’ Cameron’s choice for an equivalent post was Andy Coulson, you see evidence of a stark division – authentically based on a decency and honesty gap – opening up between the parties for the first time in quite a while.

Milne, however, is one of those Left-wing journos who has been repeatedly (and rightly) criticised by Media Lens for being less than brave about criticising the paper he writes for, even as he savages bias elsewhere. So he will already have ability to ruthlessly criticise other people for doing stuff that his own employers do too – something that will come in handy for the director of communications for a political party.  (Just so as you know, Phil – if you start supporting Western imperialism, I’mma call you on it, ‘kay?)

Milne’s appointment has been hysterically decried by the Right (well, obviously) and also by figures ostensibly on the Left in ostensibly Left-wing publications (I won’t link to any of this tripe – if you want to see some of it, just google ‘corbyn milne’ and it’ll be the first stuff you see).  Milne’s great crime is supposedly that he’s ‘an apologist for dictators and terrorists’, etc.  If you actually go past the gibbering rhetoric of the denunciations and look at the articles they link to, you find Milne objecting to the ridiculous, dangerous, and hypocritical way Vladimir Putin (of whom I am certainly no fan) is demonized, or trying to provide valuable historical context for terrorist attacks on the West, and turmoil in the Middle East, and having the bad taste to locate such context in the sordid history of Western ‘intervention’.  (The detractors link to these articles seemingly confident in the hope that you either won’t bother reading them, or that you’ll be wearing the same kind of ideological blinkers they do.)  I don’t agree with every syllable of what Milne writes, but to call him an apologist for terrorism is just dishonest; and the whingeing about his Oxbridge background is hypocrisy of the highest order coming from the British media and political elites. 

Relatedly, somebody asked me on Tumblr if I thought that Jeremy Corbyn has been so comprehensively smeared in the press that he is now useless against David Cameron. In other words: has a man who looks like Ben Kenobi (after resigning from the Jedi and becoming a Geography teacher) now been so traduced that he seems like a worse option than a man who lies like other people breathe, and whom most people seem to consider a plausible candidate for necrophiliac beastiality?…

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Solid Dick

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NOTE: This article has been amended to correct factual mistakes and clarify arguments.

 

Iron Man (2008), starring Robert Downey Jnr. and directed by Jon Favreau, is objectively one of the most evil films ever made. Possibly the most evil, actually.

 

Boilerplate

 

I’ll get around to justifying that opening statement in a bit. But first, I just want to say… ahem… fuck Tony Stark. Seriously, fuck him. The arrogant, smug, privileged, sexist, immature, selfish, capitalist prick. The rich, preening, self-satisfied asshole. The callous, self-involved, vainglorious, narcissistic wanker. This guy isn’t charming or funny or lovable. He’s scum, masquerading as humankind’s best friend. He’s the 1% as saviour of the world, at a time when the 1% are directly and knowing destroying the world. He’s the smiling face of the anthropocene (or rather capitalocene) extinction. He’s genocidal imperialism as (lone) humanitarian intervention. He’s neoliberal capitalism and neoconservative foreign policy as a series of bad-boy quips. He’s private capitalist industry as heroism. He’s mega-wealth as heroism. He’s white male privilege as heroism. He’s militarism, imperialism and American exceptionalism as heroism. He’s the War on Terror as heroism. He’s everything sick and twisted and rotten and filthy and evil and insane and false about our world, presented to us as aspirational role-model. He’s Donald Trump in a Robert Downey Jnr. mask… no, scratch that… Robert Downey Jnr. is a rich, reactionary dick too, isn’t he… so we might as well say that Tony Stark is Robert Downey Jnr. in a Robert Downey Jnr. mask. In any case, Tony Stark is everything we need to tear down, ruthlessly demolish, trample on and bury, presented to us as the best of humanity.

 

There’s no secret about this, of course. I’m not expecting any awards for searing, original insight. Everybody knows who and what Tony Stark is. He is, quite literally, stark. The films themselves make no secret about any of this. On the contrary, they loudly and proudly boast of it.

 

This stuff is baked into the character. It’s part of him by design.

 

I don’t pretend to know much about the Iron Man comics, original or contemporary. Generally speaking, I’m not a comics guy. I intend no disparagement of comics; they’re just not my can of Tizer, on the whole. So I come to these Marvel Cinematic Universe films (as I come to most films adapted from comics) as someone with little knowledge of the source material. But I’m not going to apologize for that, or seek to remedy it, for several reasons:

 

a) I can’t be bothered,

 

b) I don’t think it’s necessary, since the comics cannot possibly fundamentally alter the meaning of the films that stem from them, and

 

c) the vast majority of the audience – target and actual – are, like me, coming to these films without knowledge of the comics.

 

Having said that, I was told – by Holly B., during Shabcast 9, in which we chat about Iron Man, amongst other things – that Stan Lee’s original goal with Iron Man was to create a hero whom the hippies would hate but also be unable not to love.…

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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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Secret Reality

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Spoilers

The last episode of The Blacklist was hilarious.  Red describes an international cabal – comprised of people in government and the private sector – who run the world behind the scenes, start wars, control the media, kill to protect their power, etc.  It’s supposed to be so edgy.  Dark, terrifying conspiracy.  He has to get loads of investigate journos to attend his briefing in secret.  They’re all stunned by what he says.  But… he’s just describing the ruling class!  Seriously, the ‘Cabal’ is just the capitalist military-industrial-media-government complex.  But we’re supposed to be shocked by the existence of this group.  Once informed about it, the Washington Post runs a front page story telling everyone of the breaking news.  SHOCK NEW REVELATION: SMALL NUMBER OF POWERFUL PEOPLE ARE POWERFUL AND GET UP TO STUFF FURTHERING THEIR OWN POWER WITHOUT TELLING US!  The evil director of the CIA looks at the paper in horror, like he’s thinking “oh no, now everyone knows!”  It’s like structuring the big, dramatic denouement of a drama series around the astonishing revelation that water is wet, and having all your characters suddenly back away in terror from any rivers or taps they happen to be standing next to.

On the other hand, I can’t help thinking this is still more charged than a story in which such facts of life are ignored.  Even presented as an outlandish, shocking revelation, it’s still presented.  Even framed as a surprise, it’s still there.  

Reminds me of the best Bond film ever, Quantum of Solace, in which a bunch of corporations, eco-businesses, military hardmen and Western politicians are presented as members of a secret criminal cartel who are trying to take over Bolivia’s water reserves.  Now this basically happened in the real world.  The film depicts it as an evil secret conspiracy that MI6 wants to stop.  It also depicts Quantum as sneakily damming up loads of water to create an artificial shortage.  But it basically connects with the real world, albeit distantly.  It’s far more connected to the real world than anything in the follow-up movie Skyfall (which is total shit, by the way, both politically and as entertainment).  Quantum of Solace also connects with the idea that powerful Western interests are behind politically-motivated Right-wing coups in South America… which is just one of those things that any sensible person takes for granted as an established historical truth, but which the mainstream media treats as a bizarre revelation.  But Quantum of Solace at least acknowledges it.  The movie puts the evil secret conspiratorial organisation behind such things rather than, y’know, the CIA and the US government… though it does have the CIA complicit in Quantum’s machinations, even if it is because one CIA guy is a rotten apple.

Is this subversive?  Of course not.  It’s gatekeeping.  It acknowledges things about the real world that people either know about or strongly suspect.  It then packages them in the classic methods of containment of such incendiary truths.  Bad Apple Theory. …

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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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