Human Stock Crisis; Depleted

 "And the opposite of socialist is not capitalist. Our party is older than capitalism, and wider than any class. It grew up in the first place out of concern for liberties, traditions and morals. It has evolved a good deal in the past three centuries yet it has retained its essential character; its area of concern is the whole of public life and all matters which should be of public interest down to the treatment of every man, woman and child."

...

"Such words as good and evil, such stress on self-discipline and on standards have been out of favour since the war with the new establishment. They have preferred the permissive society, and, at the same time, the collectivised society. At first sight this paradox might seem inexplicable. Why should people who believe in strict state control over economic life, who disfavour private enterprise, independent education, private pension schemes, private medicine, so strongly favour what they call permissiveness in social life? How is it that those who claim to oppose the exploitation of man by man and what they call commercialism should favour the commercial exploitation of indecency, the commercial exploitation of woman by man?"

...


"The decline is spreading. We know that some universities have been constrained to lower their standards for entrants from comprehensives, discriminating against more the talented [sic] because they come from grammar or independent schools. We see how the demand for absolute equality turns into the new inequality.

In the universities, which should be sanctuaries for the pursuit of truth, the bully-boys of the left have bean giving us a foretaste of what leftwing dictatorship would endeavour to achieve, actively cheered on by the casuistry of some members of the university staffs, cuckoos in our democratic nest, and by the pusillanimity of others, by the apathy of many and, I must add, by moral cowardice in public life.

...


"It was the radical Socialist writer and patriot, the late George Orwell , who described the left-wing intellectuals as men motivated primarily by hatred of their own country. Socialists who spoke most about brotherhood of man [sic] could not bear their fellow-Englishmen, he complained. Their well-orchestrated sneers from their strongpoint in the educational system and media have weakened the national will to transmit to future generations those values, standards and aspirations which made England admired the world over.

It is just because their message is that self-discipline is out of date and that the poor cannot be expected to help themselves, that they want the state to do more. That is why they believe in state ownership and control of economic life, education, health. Their wish to end parental choice in where and how their children shall be educated, in spending their money on better education and health for their children instead of on a new car, leisure, pleasure, is all part of the attempt to diminish self and self-discipline and real freedoms in favour of the state, ruled by socialists, the new class, as one disillusioned communist leader called them."

...

"It was Freud who argued that repression of instincts is the price we pay for civilisation. He considered the price well-paid. So can we, now. But we must see the dilemmas, we must argue it out among ourselves, to find a way through these moral dilemmas, while we fight for our ideals in wider fora through words and deeds. But you may ask what can fallible politicians in short-lived governments do in the face of all these tidal forces? Most of what needs to be done, I have stressed, is for individuals as themselves and as members of all manner of bodies. But some tasks are for government, and to these I will return on a future occasion.

This could be a watershed in our national existence. Are we to move towards moral decline reflected and intensified by economic decline, by the corrosive effects of inflation? Or can we remoralise our national life, of which the economy is an integral part? It is up to us, to people like you and me."

Keef lays it out in 1974; the eugenics arguments near the end of the speech possibly cost  him leadership of the Party, but did provide the example for Thatcher to cloak 'moral responsibility Toryisms' in euphemism and wordplay. The conception of the left as some pervasive conspiracy is staggering, as is the thought that Joseph was at the helm of Thatcher's policy decisions. As I recall from Peter Henessy's The Secret State, he was also one of the politicians assigned to the government's Cotswolds bunker in the event of nuclear war. Enoch Powell too. Brr.

I Wanna Cleave a Capitalist!

Bruce the Barbarian was a cartoon by New Zealand-born cartoonist Murray Ball, apparently well known for a series called Footrot Flats, about a farm. It ran in Labour Weekly, an official Labour Party publication that was closed down in 1988 - and given the year, and the tone of this cartoon, it's not hard to imagine that the weekly was being run by a cabal of those who, as official Labour Party history has it, ran the Party into the ground - macho, workerist, class warring, hairy. A book was published in 1973 collecting the strips, all of them dating from the Heath era, and it's as vivid and expression of polarised, oppositional politics in the British '70s you could possibly want. It's also quite funny.

The premise is a little peculiar, but once you've accepted it, the cartoon is not exactly complicated. Bruce, a Barbarian from the East - specifically, New Zealand - comes to invade the (falling) British Empire to 'RAPE and LOOT and PLUNDER', but, says the blurb, 'he found the Tories had got there first!' So he sets out to 'save the British from Ted the Tory and grab a fair share of the looting, plundering and raping'. This should give you some sense of the somewhat complex allegiances of the strip, particularly with respect to sexual politics. Various forms of disbelief have to be suspended - most of all the portrayal of Edward Heath, or rather, 'Emperor Tedius Heath', as a proto-Thatcherite Roman Emperor bent on class war - but the lack of pissing about occasionally makes for extremely sharp political satire, which the hint of wrongness only helps. It's Up Pompeii-goes Class War, with Frankie Howerd replaced with an Antipodean barbarian armed with a 'pig-sticker', which gets regularly plunged into sundry toga-ed plutocrats.

It's just a little a bit startling to find an official Labour Party publication advocating, via Roman/British Empire alternative reality or otherwise, that shoving daggers into the bellies of the ruling class is the means of changing society.

Reading it, it becomes obvious that this is the very thing itself that the Blairites wanted to change about their Party, not just in terms of politics but also of machismo. Bruce, barbarian and defender of the British proletariat, is as you see above a bit workerist. The workers themselves are usually a bit shorter than him, but usually in flatcaps and somewhat more downmarket togas.

The more things change, etc.

What is especially fun about it is how much it advocates things which would surely not have been official Party policy even at the time. Private Healthcare, which Bruce encounters after being impaled in a Gladatorial bout, is fit not just for nationalisation but also for avenging via pig-sticker.

Private education, similarly. Here you get the impression that for a lot of people in the Labour Movement, Thatcherism - in the sense of a concerted attack on unions, the Welfare State, etc - was seen coming a long time before it actually arrived, which leaves some of the attacks seeming a little odd. Thatcher as Education Secretary basically continued Labour policies (save for that heavily symbolic milk-snatching), much as Heath failed to make any real break with the social democratic consensus. That's what it seems like at this distance, anyway - but reading Bruce the Barbarian, the war is already here.

Yet lots of the things he opposes are Labour Party policies anyway. Only four actual politicians are encountered by Bruce in his travels through Britannia - Heath, Enoch Powell, Thatcher and Harold Wilson, who Bruce casually encounters in the street. In the strip above, Bruce stands against the construction of motorways, something the Wilson government did a lot of. They didn't exactly curb Private Health or Private Schools, either.

Being a barbarian, Bruce takes a dim view of Empire, and of its leading apologist in the ruling party.

That said, the strip is relentlessly unreconstructed. In terms of anti-racism, it's all fairly impeccable, if very un-PC in its use of inflammatory language. What is less so, is the sexism that runs through the book. He is a barbarian after all, and the scheduled raping, looting and pillaging doesn't leave much room for reading Spare Rib.

Hence the Up Pompeii! comparison. Bruce the Barbarian, despite being quite magnificently left-wing by today's standards, is still identifiably in the same world as the sex comedy, as George & Lynne, even, with a fair bit of bouncing bosoms and titillation. Bruce, maybe like the Labour movement itself on its Hard Left, Class War side, is not quite sure what he thinks of the women's movement.

So large breasted ladies are a sign of plutocracy as much as anything else.

The strips above and below encapsulate quite well the fact that Ball evidently wants to support feminism and take the piss out of it at the same time, to be a male chauvinist and supporter of equality at once. Ken Livingstone claims here, 'Old Labour culture was quite sexist and racist'. It probably was. But it was also perhaps vaguely, dimly aware that it shouldn't be, before the 80s New Left rammed the point home.

In its premise it's weird, as politics it's almost equally strange (Wilson as friend of the Marxist barbarian), and sometimes (well, rarely) it isn't funny - but isn't it great to see all the anger and violence and unadulterated class rage in this strip all there, all out in the open, and not just that, but celebrated? And more to the point, can you imagine the editors of any Labour publication looking at it now with anything other than aghast horror?

(click on pics to make larger)

Bound By Magic

Whether or not one believes in the supernatural or paranormal aspects of magic, there is no doubt that magic is, in the words of Daniel O’Keefe, "real social action". If there is one aspect of magic that has always fascinated the social scientists that study it, it is the phenomenon of voodoo death. In the first half of the twentieth century, it became an object of almost obsessive study by the group of French sociologists of the Durkheim school, and the British anthropologists that were led by Sir Edward Evans-Pritchard. Whereas mana theory showed that human interaction can be deeply nourishing, perhaps even necessary for human health, voodoo death, which is a real phenomenon that has been observed on countless occasions, shows that human interaction can be toxic in and of itself.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of voodoo death is the rapidity with which it takes effect. When a member of a primitive tribe has the smouldering branch or chicken bone pointed at him by the witch doctor, the tribesman will die usually within a fortnight, and often within a couple of days. Ultimately, voodoo death is socially induced death - the man has been found breaking a tribal taboo, and the witch doctor condemns him to death on behalf of the rest of the tribe. Although the actual physical cause of death is still somewhat a mystery, the psychological mechanism of death is an attack by the super-ego, the component of the mind that Freud identified as ideally containing the parental and societal influences needed to compel the ego into controlling the unruly urgings of the id. In reality, the super-ego often works as what Christopher Lasch called "society’s agent in the mind", and this is especially so in modern societies where parental authority has given way to dissipated bureaucratic and corporate structures whose exigencies are disparate and often contradictory. In such circumstances, the super-ego, rather than functioning as the severe but measured moderator we know as "conscience", often takes a harsh and punitive form.

Mostly nowadays we individually experience the super-ego as a minor but persistent nuisance. It’s the voice in our heads that tells us we’re bad if we haven’t done an important task, or done it to a lower standard than we know we’re capable of. It also likes to throw up embarrassing or guilty memories, forcing to us to close our eyes and curse in order to send them away. The phrase "I could die from embarrassment" contains more than a germ of truth - the super-ego that punishes us for social misdemeanors is perfectly capable of killing us (or encouraging us to kill ourselves) under the right circumstances.

The politics of class are probably the area of greatest concentration of magic in modern society. Ultimately it can be said that class is magic. Perhaps the most urgent purpose of any ruling class is to cast binding spells on the lower orders, to force super-ego pressure downwards on those below. I would speculate that one sure definition of class is that the lower down the class structure you are, the more thoroughly you are bound by limiting magic, by the more firmly you have convinced yourself of what you are capable and incapable of doing. Ruling class magic is enhanced in its power by a number of tricks and props, the most important being:

* The symbolism and arcana of authority

* A clear, portentous, priestly manner of speaking, involving the incantatory repetition of key phrases ("there is no alternative", "we’re all in this together" etc.)

* Euphemistic and obfuscatory in-group terminology, expressly designed to preserve the magic of authority from coming under detailed scrutiny.

* Terrifyingly convoluted etiquette intended to focus enormous super-ego pressure on the uninitiated

Margaret Thatcher was particularly masterful at the rites of ruling class magic. Her haughty tones, so redolent of the priest (that modern descendent of the witchdoctor) always make me think that she should have started her speeches with the phrase "Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today…". Her mastery of this kind of performance is probably the basis of her reputation for competence, which her short-sighted economic programme would belie.



For all the ramifications of economic relations, it is important to note that the class system is ultimately maintained by magical ritual and symbolism, by what Wittgenstein called an "agreement to agree". Essentially we all agree to agree which class we belong to, and to the social relations that result from membership of that class. Whatever privileges or cultural cringes we inherit from this agreement we accept ontologically, as "natural facts". Ultimately however, for all its pretense of sophistication, this is really an old compact that goes far, far back into the primitive realms of witchdoctor-magic, from which contemporary magic is descended, and which has evolved far less than most of us would like to believe.