Notes on ITV's Lucan

Caught the first episode of this last night. So far it's fine social-realist TV drama in the tradition of Our Friends in the North, Tinker Tailor, Red Riding, etc, and certainly better than anything the Beeb have done this year I reckon. (Definitely better than last year's shambolic effort in this regard.)

 

There's quite an interesting political thread running through it, too. Christopher Eccleston is deliciously demonic as gambling club owner John Aspinall. An unusual amount of script space is given over to Aspinall's Randian dialogues full of references to Alpha Males, biological determinism, the survival of the fittest, the importance of accepting the growth of an inferior underclass, and all that shite. He's basically a walking Adam Curtis theory, a right-wing crank grumbling about the power of "the Miners" in social-democratic post-war Britain, a sinister Blimp full of embittered determination to reassert what he calls the "natural order". Of course, the character is all the more shady because his views will become depressingly mainstream some ten years after the early-seventies moment that provides the backdrop to Lucan's narrative.

Another interesting thing is the way this class narrative is synthesised with a powerful feminist argument. Egged on by Aspinall's reactionary Alpha Male spiel, Lord Lucan starts to intimidate his wife Veronica - mentally and physically - in an attempt to get her committed so he can win custody of his children. Fortunately, this is the progressive early seventies rather than the Downtonite 1920s, so the courts decide in favour of the independent, sound-of-mind woman against the imperious, bullying aristo. The tragedy is that the working-class nanny who has supported Veronica in the run-up to the trial is bludgeoned to death by a crazed Lucan at the end of the first episode.

The symbolism here - of a brutal, quasi-Darwinian patriarchy reasserting its authority after a period of "effeminate" egalitarianism - is not difficult to grasp. The unheimlich contemporary relevance - bearing in mind certain recent uber-Darwinian pronouncements of the British Conservative Party - is also striking.

And then you realise who Aspinall's step-nephew is:

There can be no more denying it.

The conspiracy theory is the true realist art form of the twenty-first century.


[Cross-posted from http://thefantastichope.blogspot.co.uk/]

The People Vs. Milton Friedman

Snow Space

It is very cold where I am. I want to go back to work where the heating is high and carefree but I cannot do that today so I will close the curtains and write this while waiting.
This is going to be a rank confessional diatribe.

I had a thought about a book I had read a long time ago, I wanted to write about this, but writing wasn't enough, so it became a script and then it became sequential images, sounds and stories, and more writing and then it was just too much and I shelved it for a few weeks, thinking of other things, leaving the house some times.

Walking in the snow, grnush grnush grnshed ground cover and lack, the sky halogen orange all night low and thick and disturbing my sleep. The outhouse is frozen and was leaking when I went out to take a shit this morning. I don't have any ill feeling toward any of these things though, causes and effects all.

It is hackneyed to talk of the alienating qualities of snow which reterritorializes space. Hackneyed too perhaps to contrast these with the hidden feelings of immanence which the cold brings. Awareness of the body and pedestrian existential romanticism. Or romantic existentialism. Regardless of this it raises some interesting thoughts about assimilation and contact, the ability or inability to install distance.

A few days ago I was sitting in a pub listening to William Kherbek trace the history of Nixon ending the Bretton Woods system and out through the window snow just started falling.

Quintet. Dir. Robert Altman. 1979

"My analysis is concerned with what I want to call ‘epic nihilism’, a conjugation derived from Badiou’s analysis in The Century where he remarks: ‘may your force be nihilistic, but your form epic.’ I think that this conjunction and form is already encoded in the Ur-work of the Spaghetti Western genre: Sergio Corbucci’s Django (1966). After all it begins with the epic dragging of a coffin through the mud, a coffin, as we later find out, that contains the machine gun with which Django [will] exterminate his adversaries. And the film ends in a gunfight in a cemetery in which Django, with smashed hands, painfully and finally manages to shoot his chief tormentors after propping his gun on a grave cross. The film is bathed in mud, the allegory of the practico-inert, as Django becomes mired in the inertia that seems to afflict the supposedly decisive spaghetti western hero."
Benjamin Noys - Spaghetti Communism? The Politics of the Italian Western. 2011.

The cold slows everything down, we know that as folk lore. A few times at school we played rugby in the snow. Coming in one boy couldn't move his fingers to do up his shirt buttons and with the bell ringing and all of us leaving he appealed to the teacher for help who laughed and left also.

Galactic Pot-Healer was published in 1969 but that's really an arbitrary point. Here is that video I talked about.

Day Of Infamy

Suburban Salvation

"Where has God gone?" he cried. "I shall tell you. We have killed him - you and I. We are his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained the earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not perpetually falling? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is it not more and more night coming on all the time? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we not smell anything yet of God's decomposition? Gods too decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, murderers of all murderers, console ourselves? That which was the holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us? With what water could we purify ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we need to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we not ourselves become gods simply to be worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whosoever shall be born after us - for the sake of this deed he shall be part of a higher history than all history hitherto."

Here the madman fell silent and again regarded his listeners; and they too were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern to the ground, and it broke and went out. "I have come too early," he said then; "my time has not come yet. The tremendous event is still on its way, still travelling - it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time, the light of the stars requires time, deeds require time even after they are done, before they can be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the distant stars - and yet they have done it themselves."

Friederich Nieztsche 

When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.

Umberto Eco

The Press

"Now, whereas the Classical, and supremely the Forum Of Rome, drew the mass of the people together as a visible body in order to make that use of its rights which was desired of it, the "contemporary" English-American politics have created through the press a force-field of world-wide intellectual and financial tensions in which every individual unconsciously takes up the place allotted to him, so that he must think, will and act as a ruling personality somewhere or other in the distance thinks fit. This is dynamics against statics, Faustian against Appollonian world-feeling, the passion of the third dimension against the pure sensible present. Man does not speak to man; the press and its associate, the electrical news service, keep the waking consciousness of whole peoples and continents under a deafening drum-fire of theses, catchwords, standpoints, scenes, feelings, day by day and year by year, so that every Ego becomes a mere function of a monstrous intellectual Something. Money does not pass, politically, from one hand to the other. It does not turn itself into cards and wine. It is turned into force, and its quantity determines the intensity of its working influence.



Gunpowder and printing belong together - both discovered at the culmination of the Gothic, both arising out of Germanic technical thought - as the two grand means of Faustian distance tactics. The Reformation in the beginning of the Late period witnessed the first flysheets and the first field-guns, the French Revolution in the beginning of the Civilisation witnessed the first tempest of pamphlets in the autumn of 1788 and the first mass-fire of artillery at Valmy. But with this the printed word, produced in vast quantity and distributed over enormous areas, became an uncanny weapon in the hands of him who knew how to use it. In France it was still in 1788 a matter of expressing private convictions, but England was already past that, and deliberately seeking to produce impressions in the reader. The war of articles, flysheets, spurious memoirs, that was waged form London on French soil against Napolean, is the first great example.

Today we live so cowed under the bombardment of this intellectual artillery that hardly anyone can attain to the inward detachment that is required for a clear view of the monstrous drama. The will-to-power operating under a pure democratic disguise has accomplished its task so well that the object’s sense of freedom is actually flattered by the most thorough-going slavery that has ever existed.



What is truth? For the multitude, that which it continually reads and hears. A forlorn little drop may settle somewhere and collect grounds on which to determine "the truth" - but what it obtains is just its truth. The other, the public truth of the moment, which alone matters for effects and successes in the fact-world, is today a product of the Press. What the Press wills, is true. Its commanders evoke, transform, interchange truths. Three weeks of press-work, and the "truth" is acknowledged by everybody.

With the political press is bound up the need of universal school-education, which in the Classical world was completely lacking. In this demand there is an element - quite unconscious - of desiring to shepherd the masses, as the object of party politics, into the newspapers’ power area. The idealist of the early democracy regarded popular education as enlightenment pure and simple, and even today one finds here and there weak heads that become enthusiastic on the Freedom Of The Press - but it is precisely this that smoothes the path for the coming Caesars of the world-press. Those who have learnt to read succumb to their power, and the visionary self-determination of Late democracy becomes a thorough-going determination of the people by the powers whom the printed word obeys.



No tamer has his animals more under his power. Unleash the people as reader-mass and it will storm through the streets and hurl itself upon the target indicated, terrifying and breaking windows; a hint to the press-staff and it will become quiet and go home. The Press today is an army with carefully organised arms and branches, with journalists as officers, and readers as soldiers. But here, as in every army, the soldier obeys blindly, and war-aims and operation-plans change without his knowledge. The reader neither knows, nor is allowed to know, the purposes for which he is used, nor even the role that he is to play. A more appalling caricature of freedom of thought cannot be imagined. Formerly a man did not dare to think freely. Now he dares, but cannot; his will to think is only a willingness to think to order, and this is what he feels as his liberty."

Oswald Spengler - "The Decline Of The West"

Got Carter

It was Carter, not Reagan, who brought the religious right into national politics. Even though they turned against him later, Carter won the Southern evangelical vote in 1976 by advertising himself as a born-again Christian. Like Reagan later, Carter, the folksy farmer and veteran from Plains, Ga., appealed to the nostalgia of white Americans in the 1970s for a simpler, more rural, more traditional society.

Carter, not Reagan, pioneered the role of the fiscally conservative governor who runs against the mess in Washington, promising to shrink the bureaucracy and balance the budget. Early in his administration, Carter was praised by some on the right for his economic conservatism. Ronald Reagan even wrote a newspaper column titled "Give Carter a Chance." The most conservative Democrat in the White House since Grover Cleveland, Carter fought most of his battles with Democratic liberals, not Republican conservatives.

Carter, not Reagan, presided over the dismantling of the New Deal regulatory system in airlines, railroads and trucking. Intended to reduce inflation by reducing the costs of essential infrastructure to business, Carter's market-oriented reforms have backfired, producing constant bankruptcies and predatory hub-and-spoke monopolies in the airline industry, an oligopolistic private railroad industry that has abandoned passenger rail for freight, and underpaid, overworked truckers.

Tomorrow Belongs To Them: The Powell Manifesto

The Apathy and Default of Business

What has been the response of business to this massive assault upon its fundamental economics, upon its philosophy, upon its right to continue to manage its own affairs, and indeed upon its integrity?

The painfully sad truth is that business, including the boards of directors' and the top executives of corporations great and small and business organizations at all levels, often have responded -- if at all -- by appeasement, ineptitude and ignoring the problem. There are, of course, many exceptions to this sweeping generalization. But the net effect of such response as has been made is scarcely visible.

In all fairness, it must be recognized that businessmen have not been trained or equipped to conduct guerrilla warfare with those who propagandize against the system, seeking insidiously and constantly to sabotage it. The traditional role of business executives has been to manage, to produce, to sell, to create jobs, to make profits, to improve the standard of living, to be community leaders, to serve on charitable and educational boards, and generally to be good citizens. They have performed these tasks very well indeed. But they have shown little stomach for hard-nose contest with their critics, and little skill in effective intellectual and philosophical debate.

A column recently carried by the Wall Street Journal was entitled: "Memo to GM: Why Not Fight Back?" Although addressed to GM by name, the article was a warning to all American business. Columnist St. John said:

"General Motors, like American business in general, is 'plainly in trouble' because intellectual bromides have been substituted for a sound intellectual exposition of its point of view." Mr. St. John then commented on the tendency of business leaders to compromise with and appease critics. He cited the concessions which Nader wins from management, and spoke of "the fallacious view many businessmen take toward their critics." He drew a parallel to the mistaken tactics of many college administrators: "College administrators learned too late that such appeasement serves to destroy free speech, academic freedom and genuine scholarship. One campus radical demand was conceded by university heads only to be followed by a fresh crop which soon escalated to what amounted to a demand for outright surrender."

One need not agree entirely with Mr. St. John's analysis. But most observers of the American scene will agree that the essence of his message is sound. American business "plainly in trouble"; the response to the wide range of critics has been ineffective, and has included appeasement; the time has come -- indeed, it is long overdue -- for the wisdom, ingenuity and resources of American business to be marshalled against those who would destroy it.

Click on link for full text. 

Addicted To Addiction

"A monotone value is one that either only increases or only decreases. Its curve has no kinks; that is its curve never changes from increase to decrease or vice-versa. Desired substances, things, patterns, or sequences of experience that are in some sense "good" for the organism - items of diet, conditions of life, temperature, entertainment, sex, and so forth - are never such that more of the something is always better than less of the something. Rather, for all objects and experiences there is a quantity that has optimum value. Above that quantity the variable becomes toxic. To fall below that value is to be deprived.

It is even possible that when we consider money, not by itself, but as acting on human beings who own it, we may find that money too becomes toxic beyond a certain point. In any case, the philosophy of money, the set of presuppositions by which money is supposedly better and better the more you have of it, is totally anti-biological. It seems, nevertheless, that this philosophy can be taught to living things."

Gregory Bateson - "Mind And Nature"


The anthropologist, biologist and cyberneticist Gregory Bateson characterised all biological systems, including human civilisations, as conforming to either one of two modes. The first mode he called steady state. In this mode organisms operate in their environment in a self-correcting, homeostatic manner, in which any variable of behaviour is not allowed to get too out of hand without being corrected by another behaviour. Bateson’s own analogy was the steam engine with a governor that allows it to slow to prevent overheating, and his archetype of a society that had achieved a steady state system was Bali, whose culture forbade competition and rivalry in favour of a near-artistic sense of social balance.

The other mode in which a system can operate he termed runaway. In this mode, like an engine without a governor, a behaviour will become ever-increasingly extreme and distorted until it reaches some kind of catastrophic climax.

Steady state and runaway are connected to two other Batesonian concepts - the evolutionary ideas of adaptation and addiction. For Bateson, evolution was what he called a stochastic process, which meant that it was partially random, and yet at the same time had certain favoured outcomes. A creature was adapted to its environment if it was readily able to cope with any change in variables (e.g. temperature, food supply) that it might encounter. An organism was addicted if it was overly specialised in one ecological niche, and subject to extinction if this niche were to become no longer viable. The stochastic process of evolution is liable to produce many variations in organisms (and systems) that appear to be advantageous in the short term, but are fatal over a longer period.

There is, of course, no more magnificent an example of a runaway system of addiction than Western capitalist society. It is a mistake to believe that Anglo-American capitalism promotes addictions. Anglo-American capitalism IS addiction. There is almost no aspect of our society that is immune to metastasis or rarefaction, whether it be banker’s bonuses, binge-drinking, death metal or Las Vegas casinos. These are not different phenomena, but rather different manifestations of the same phenomenon - the sheer inability of Western social, cultural or economic trends to self-correct before they reach exhaustion or catastrophe. We are born addicts into an addictive society whether we like it or not.

Perhaps the two realms where the metastatic results of this addiction are most prominent are in the symbiotically linked realms of architecture and finance, and their two most cherished creations of the modern age, the skyscraper and the fiat currency. The 1970’s witnessed perhaps the most significant inflection points in their dual evolution with the withdrawal of the US Dollar from the Bretton Woods system, and the completion of the World Trade Center.

The "Nixon Shock" of 1971 saw the US end the direct convertibility of the Dollar to gold, ostensibly to end the demands of European creditors to have their dollar holdings converted to gold. This is in turn was due to the persistent US Governmental and trade deficits that had been aggravated by the Vietnam war, and had been partly ameliorated by a surge of dollar printing. Whatever the short-term relief it gave to the American economy, the de-linking of the currency to a finite commodity had the longer-term effect of facilitating the ephemeral money-economy of neoliberalism, in which the immaterial realm of money creation via financial transactions was able to far exceed the real wealth generated by physical production.



If the current global economy can be rightly described as a virtual system, the World Trade Center could almost be described as a virtual building. Mies van der Rohe’s International style has always been superbly appropriate for the financial industry, with its blank poker face pointing streetwards while all sorts of arcane machinations (usually involving variations of mortgage fraud) go on inside. The Twin Towers, which were the complex’s focal point, perhaps marked the moment when the concept of the skyscraper went from being an ingenious structural solution to the problems of land utilisation, and became more a kind of boastful expression of size for size’s sake. Minoru Yamasaki’s design was interpreted by many as being finance Capitalism waving two rigid digits at the rest of the world.

The tube-frame structure of the Twin Towers was to prove notoriously insubstantial during the fateful attacks that sealed their doom, and as such they can viewed as a metaphor for the equally insubstantial and equally doomed global economy that they helped to facilitate. We may feel ourselves to be omnipotent in our virtual realms, but it is the greater force of nature that will put an end to our illusions. As the Club Of Rome’s Donnella H. Meadows put it:

"There will always be limits to growth. They can be self-imposed. If they aren't, they will be system-imposed. No physical entity can grow forever. If company managers, city governments, the human population do not choose and enforce their own limits to keep growth within the capacity of the supporting environment, then the environment will choose and enforce limits."

Masters Of The Universe

Another glimpse into the corridors of power. Who can doubt that this is how our leaders really think?

Men Of Money, Women Of Steel

"But titanic, too, is the onslaught of money upon this intellectual force. Industry too, is earthbound like the yeoman. It has its station, and its materials stream up out of the earth. Only high finance is wholly free, wholly intangible. Since 1789 the banks, and with them the bourses, have developed themselves on the credit-needs of an industry growing ever more enormous, as a power on their own account, and they will (as money wills in every Civilisation) to be the only power. The ancient wrestle between the productive and the acquisitive economies intensifies now into a giant gigantomachy of intellects, fought out in the lists of the world-cities. This battle is the despairing struggle of technical thought to maintain its liberty from money-thought.

The dictature of money marches on, tending to its material peak, in the Faustian Civilisation as in every other. And now something happens that is intelligible only to one who has penetrated to the essence of money. If it were anything tangible, then its existence would be forever - but, as it is a form of thought, it fades out as soon as it has thought its economic world to finality, and has no more material upon which to feed. It thrust into the life of the yeoman’s countryside and set the earth moving; its thought transformed every sort of handicraft; today it presses victoriously upon industry to make the productive work of entrepreneur and engineer and labourer alike its spoil. The machine with its human retinue, the real queen of this century, is in danger of succumbing to a stronger power. Money, also, is beginning to lose its authority, and the last conflict is at hand in which Civilisation receives its conclusive form - the conflict between money and blood."

Oswald Spengler "The Decline Of The West"


"The dictature of money" and "material peak" are obviously the Spenglerian terms for "neoliberalism" and "late capitalism" respectively. Curiously, the birth and death of these phenomena can be dated from visits to the British Isles by teams from the Washington-based International Monetary Fund, the first to the United Kingdom in 1976, and the second to the Republic of Ireland in 2010.

The original IMF bailout to the UK, negotiated by Labour’s Chancellor of the Exchequer Denis Healey, has always been something of a historical curiosity, following on as it did attacks on Sterling on the international markets based on Treasury deficit statistics that have subsequently been found to have been unduly bleak. Even the original pessimistic estimates could have been ameliorated if Britain had included her newly discovered oil reserves within her potential earnings, as Tony Benn had recommended. Although the IMF loan was rapidly paid back within three years, the monetarist incomes policies insisted on by the IMF were the first victory for finance capitalism over industrial capitalism, and the harbinger for the neoliberal decades that were to follow. I leave it to others as to outline Healey’s membership of certain elite global plutocratic groupings and to speculate as to what extent these events were genuinely accidental.

Certainly in the years since 1979 when the IMF loan was originally paid back, money in its neoliberal capitalist guise has "thought its economic world to finality" in a way that would have been beyond even Spengler’s fertile imagination. Not for nothing did Spengler call Western civilisation "Faustian", as he believed that Western man’s attempt at "expansion into infinity" via abstraction piled upon abstraction was always doomed to failure, but the inventive excesses of the money men eclipsed the achievements of the engineers and scientists many times over. Although, remarkably, the glass and steel temples to mammon are still being constructed in the City Of London, much like the last Mayan temples that were being decorated as the people starved in the fields, the deeper insolvency of the system is presenting finance capitalism with an unenviable predicament: the only way to save the system is to cancel the debts and wipe out the bondholders, and yet it is the bondholders who primarily run and benefit from the system.

In the last few weeks, the IMF have visited Dublin as part of the EU/IMF "team" who have been offering Ireland "bailout" loans of up to €85 billion on its sovereign and bank debts. Although this has been largely viewed as an archetypal neoliberal problem/reaction/solution "shock doctrine" wealth transfer from the working population to the financiers, there are unusual factors involved that give cause for consideration. Most notable is that the IMF portion of the loan is charging interest at 3.12 to 4%, as opposed to the contribution from the European Union’s European Financial Stability Facility which is reportedly being charged at 6.7%+.

The nation that has provided the greatest portion of funds to the EFSF is Germany, at 27%, and who may have requested the punitive interest rate in response to the Irish tempting the German Depfa bank to relocate to Dublin’s International Financial Services Centre, in which a special law was passed in Ireland (S.I. 470/2002) allowing it to operate as it wished. Depfa was sold to the German Hypo Real Estate bank in 2007, and subsequently brought its parent down (at a cost of €50 billion to the German taxpayer) thanks to its exposure to American municipal bonds conducted under lax Irish banking regulation. That the bailout also effectively marks the end of the Irish banking sector is a forewarning of what will happen to the Anglo-Saxon banking system as a whole, for which Ireland was an outpost.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel is the first international leader who has talked of punishing bondholders of both bank and sovereign debt instead of allowing the debts to be passed onto citizens in the form of tax rises or cuts to services. That she was persuaded not to by the European Central Bank with regards to Ireland, has merely resulted in an interest rate that will ensure that Ireland has to default. The certainty that Ireland cannot in practice tolerate the terms of this bailout effectively ends the era of neoliberalism, the era of money. Where Merkel leads, sooner or later, all other world leaders will have to follow.

The Management

"One of the few genuinely funny bits of research in recent years was Liam Hudson’s correlation of the social origin of British doctors with the parts of the body on which they later specialised. What he discovered was a statistically valid correlation between social background and U and non-U specialisms. Those from English public schools showed a significant tendency to specialise in work on the head as opposed to the body below the waist, the surface of the body as opposed to its innards, the living body as opposed to the dead body and the male body as opposed to the female body. This fact bore little relation to professional status - it goes deeper than that; into subconscious perceptions of cleanliness and dirtiness. (Clearly, the boardroom is the head and the factory the bowels of British industry.) Of course all doctors belong on the clean side vis-a-vis industry, but some are cleaner than others; they have their own aristocracy."

Alistair Mant "The Rise And Fall Of The British Manager"

Alistair Mant was an Australian social scientist who by 1977 had spent his career studying the role of management in British industry. His experiences led him to publish "The Rise And Fall Of The British Manager", nominally an excoriating attack on British management theory and practice, but also an extremely perceptive and funny dissection of the British national psyche.

By the 1970’s, Britain had, depending upon how you measured it, experienced well over a century of gentle but significant industrial decline, but it was in this new decade that this decline appeared to take on a critical mass and vertiginously accelerate. Its industries succumbed to a number of crises arising from internal labour disputes, external competition, supply shocks and product quality issues. Mant was convinced that all these issues were somehow related, and that the problem went deeper than simply how British business went about its business.

Mant identified the kernel of the problems in two key psychological patterns. Firstly, Britain had become a nation that was hooked on dependency. Like the stereotypical welfare-dependent family, it depended on "benevolent" others (the USA, the international money markets) and projected its fights inward, in industrial strife. In comparison, nations such as Germany and Japan behaved like the stereotypical middle-class family, with tightly established internal dependencies (Daddy as breadwinner) and projected their fights outward (in all-conquering export drives). Secondly, there was the national habit that he christened British Binary Thought - the tendency of the British to divide the world into clean/dirty dualisms, between the "clean" professions and "dirty" industry, between "clean" white collar work and "dirty" blue collar work, between "pure" science and "applied" science. Even the country itself could be divided between the "dirty" north where industry was located and the "clean" south, where its profits were spent.

There is nowadays a conceit, propounded mainly by the Left, that Britain was a country whose basic values were inherently opposed to Neoliberalism; that the Neoliberals only succeeded through an almost Trotskyite strategy of manipulation and entryism. Reading Mant’s observations from the Seventies themselves, this can be shown to be not the case - it is only too clear that the British couldn’t wait to rid themselves of their dirty, polluting industries, with their albatross-like histories of failure. If anything the Neoliberals were knocking on an open door, their Machiavellian exploits only delaying their ascendancy. Neoliberalism can ultimately be seen not to be an injection of hard-nosed business pragmatism, but as a flight from reality. Buoyed up with the new North Sea oil revenues, and with casino finance waiting eagerly in the wings, Neoliberalism offered the British what they had always secretly yearned for - a way of earning a living without having to make anything; that is without having to actually do any proper work. As Mant puts it:

"The British, with a genius for advertising, take marketing to mean the creation of favourable impressions about probably indifferent artefacts. To a Swede, for example, marketing is more like telling it like it is (and attending meticulously to every little detail till the customer has it working). Telling it like it is works so long as the end product can be relied upon to sell itself in the end. With such marketing skills, marginal improvement in British design and production would work wonders. Why has production slipped so in Britain? I can think of no explanation so convincing as that production is associated, in the national subconscious, with factories, and factories with satanism."

There was only one significant individual in British public life who was to offer any serious resistance to Neoliberalism, and that was the leader of the National Union of Mineworkers, Arthur Scargill. The Miners' Strike is generally considered to be a class conflict in which the forces of Thatcherism deliberately sought to break the back of organised labour. However deeper reflection gives pause to reconsider, as a simple class-based narrative doesn’t explain the sheer irrationality of the dispute. For a start, Thatcher wasn’t simply trying to destroy the NUM - she was trying to destroy the mining industry itself, regardless of its union representation. This is why the Miners’ Strike is so baffling to foreign observers - where else in Europe has a government deliberately set out to prematurely destroy the main source of the nation’s wealth? Has this ever happened on any other occasion in the entirety of history? Also, if this was primarily a class struggle, why was the rest of the Labour movement so lukewarm, indeed occasionally hostile, to the miners’ cause? Significant also was the fact that the useful idiots of the breakaway Union of Democratic Mineworkers saw their pits eviscerated just as comprehensively as those of the NUM.



It is difficult to resist the observation that mining is probably the dirtiest industry of them all, with its blackened men descending to the bowels of the earth, its long history of exploitation and disasters, its daunting winding wheels, and its blasted landscapes peppered with slag heaps. It is also difficult to resist speculating that the destruction of the mining industry was ultimately, at the subconscious level, an exercise in socio-cultural hygiene, enacted by the Right, but passively abetted by the broad Left. It is worth noting that a few short years later, the Cornish tin miners, no political threat to anybody, also saw their industry wiped off the map. Scargill had been shrewd enough to realise that it was the entire mining industry that was meant to be destroyed, rather than just his union. What he didn’t realise was that he wasn’t just fighting Thatcher - he was also fighting the ghost of William Blake.

The idea that Britain could replace productive industry with the reckless exploitation of North Sea oil, and the even more reckless financial "innovations" that the Big Bang opened up for the City of London, survived the Thatcher years and entered the political philosophy of New Labour. Prior to the 1997 election victory that put Labour into office, Gordon Brown had toyed with the idea of a German-style industrial bank that would lend investment money to British firms at low rates of interest. Like all his good intentions, this idea drifted into the ether, and the New Labour era was marked by an almost total absence of any kind of industrial policy - the huge pools of unemployment left by the Tories were instead hoovered up into an expanded public sector. Note again, that these were on the whole "clean" jobs. New Labour also strengthened the dependency culture with their prolific use of management consultants, the classic "absent fathers" who removed from managers the need to make painful, dirty decisions themselves.

The extended fantasy of Neoliberalism has only recently hit the rocks, and the full reckoning has yet to manifest itself. Nevertheless, the deep delusions inherent in British political discourse continue to manifest themselves in true Binary Thinking style, with the Left/Right debates about whether the City of London or the Public Sector shoulder the burden of the costs, as though they are two scales on a balance. Both in reality are dependent for their existence on the income from manufacturing production, and yet the main political parties offer only the vaguest bromides with regard to a new emphasis on manufacturing. The continuing refusal to be serious, even at this late hour, will have further deeply painful ramifications. The consequences for both the City and the State sector are likely to be catastrophic.

Incompatible, Errant Parents of Hip Hop

From left to right: The crumbling New York Transit system of the 70s, schoolyard skipping chants, Muhammad Ali, Michael Manley (the austere subversion of DJ/MC culture), Milton Friedman, porn, Sesame Street, the Black Panther Party, Marvel superheroes, Governor Nelson Rockefeller (also Vice-President to Gerald "drop dead" Ford), wrestling feuds and tags, Redd Foxx, Blaxploitation cinema, and TV remote control (hand-held 'sampling' in every home). 

Disorganised Sport #4

Disorganised Sport #3

Heroisch

Literal:



Ironic:



Literal:

Pulp Sorcery

In cinema, fashion, and not least political rhetoric, the 30s chic of Bonnie and Clyde was highly influential. However, if the cinematic past couldn't help but be concerned with the present by the late 60s, the 70s looked backwards with less urgency. The 30s were everywhere in 70s pop culture, but what the 30s 'meant' became elusive with the shift towards nostalgia. The darker aspects of the 30s were reserved for neo-noir howls of pain like Chinatown or The Conformist, just as bleak revisionist westerns like McCabe & Mrs. Miller alluded to contemporary political anxieties. In contrast, hit films such as Murder on the Orient Express offered shop-worn motifs and predictable resolutions. 30s nostalgia was used for the comforts of genre and style, not something as troubling as history, or how it resonates in the present. The viewer would have to dig very deep for historical relevance in the originals; never mind the pastiche, or affectionate parodies such as Young Frankenstein. It was the past as theme park, suitable for all ages.
 

In the early 70s, the revival of the 30s pulp was also underway. American comics, having reinvented superheroes via the technology and anxieties of the New Frontier, aimed to keep an ageing audience* by reviving the harsher heroes of the Great Depression. Doc Savage, the Shadow and Conan the Barbarian were being dusted down and resold to college kids hip to nostalgia, and especially for the 30s (with HP Lovecraft finally hitting the big time). With the decline of TV's pop art Batman - and the emerging gay monopoly on camp - these 70s versions were strangely po-faced in their reverence. Pulp revivals were also mirrored in paperback fiction, with Heinlenesque space opera and 'sword and sorcery' becoming huge money-spinners. Cultish revisionism like Philip Jose Farmer's Tarzan Alive! also paved the way for today's darker, but no less reactionary, 're-booted' heroes. Creaky 30s serials also found a new lease of life via TV and a booming nostalgia market.
 

It's been already been noted here how movie vigilantes emerged in the Nixon years. With a paranoid loner in the White House, and neoliberalism looking for enforcers, the fantasy of barbarian kings or crime-fighting oligarchs complemented vigilantes with aggressively pre-New Deal values. The original pulp heroes offered simple solutions to escape the Great Depression. The wealthy Shadow just knew "what evil lurked in the hearts of men" - he had no need to explain it to his hypnotised employees. Doc Savage could finance imperial adventures with profits from his South American mines. Conan could slay his way to monarchy without doubts, as might was the only right in his era of declining empire and lawlessness. The ruling class superman was back with a vengeance.
 

In the latter part of the decade, and true to postmodernism, nostalgia piled up on itself. With the emergence of mass collecting and 'fandom', every popular medium harked back to a 'golden age', comic books included. Bereft of a gold standard, various 'golden ages' were nevertheless agreed to end with Eisenhower's presidency. The 'innocent' 50s celebrated in Happy Days and Grease vied with the 40s 'good war' being endlessly fought on screen and print throughout the 70s. 'Golden oldie' songs were reanimated on radio and TV. Primetime hosts like Joe Franklin or Michael Parkinson toasted ancient stars (and by implication, the values) of a monochrome past. However, there was only one 'golden age' actor still on his way up. 

Despite uncomfortable connotations for certain sectors of the audience, pre-60s nostalgia was mainstream lingua franca by the end of the 70s. George Lucas, unsuccessful in his attempts to revive 30s icon Flash Gordon, followed American Graffitti (reimagining his own youth as theme park) with Star Wars**. Its inventory of pulp cliches, and shot-for-shot pastiche of older Hollywood glories, led to a boom in retro fantasy targetting all ages, on screen and beyond. Serials, cartoon characters, pulp icons and b-movies got big money makeovers, with varying degrees of success. Revived reactionary assumptions could lurk beneath the gloss of 'pure entertainment', as much as the Hollywood president could sell his agenda with a cute one-liner or movie reference. Raiders of the Lost Ark consolidated Hollywood's rush to the past, synthesising its childish influences and repackaging them for 'knowing' adults. This overdressed Republic serial was nominated for Best Picture, in a year when almost all Oscar nominations looked towards the distant past, its genres or stars. In Reagan's year of re-election, Indiana Jones advertised his second whip-cracking campaign with the tagline: "The Hero is Back!" Before long, the retro hero was even re-winning long lost wars. By the mid-80s the hero could do anything - except look forward.

*In the early 70s, average audience age for superhero comics was 11. In the 21st century, it's about 35.

**70s/80s film versions of 'new wave' science fiction (ie. downbeat, political, environmental, 'adult' and very 60s) were notable flops upon first release - these include Slaughterhouse Five, Damnation Alley, A Boy and His Dog, The Final Programme, Dune and even Blade Runner.