Politics

Corbyn: In The Box To The Left

RobertLeave a comment

Corbynmania is exciting stuff. It seems there’s actually debate to be had when it comes to politics. People are discussing things rather than just accepting the Tories’ line of austerity, tax breaks for the rich and cuts, as if these are immutable truths. Jeremy Corbyn, front-runner for the leadership of the Labour Party, is leading the debate and offering an alternative politics – one of hope. But it was Beyoncé who told her ex to put everything he owns in the box to the left and my concern is that Jeremy Corbyn is being resigned to that very same box.

One thing Corbynmania proves is that the Conservative victory at the last general election does not spell the end of politics. We are not consigned to a future of corporate giants crushing communities, endlessly bailing out big banks and the poor getting poorer until climate change melts us all, no, it seems politics could still shift leftwards – back to a bigger state that dares to close tax loopholes, challenge corporatocracy and reduce inequality.

But this isn’t enough (even if it happens). If we really want to change society for the best then we must recognise that some of the big issues we face are so much bigger than left and right-wing politics. For example, to address climate change we cannot just cut carbon emissions and green consumer capitalism because woven into the fabric of our political-economic system is an inherent flaw: it depends on endless economic growth on a planet that offers finite resources. As the name suggests a growth based economy has to keep growing to function but, as we saw with the banks, when things do get too big they can fail, except rather than just a financial system collapsing, rampant globalised capitalism threatens the very earth itself (imagine an impossible hamster getting bigger and bigger until it eats the whole world).

Whether you go rightwards to a smaller state and bigger corporations, or leftwards to a bigger state and smaller corporations, neither approach will tackle this underlying threat because both take capitalism at face value – they just have different ways of dealing with its problems (Labour tend to be nicer to the poor whilst the Tories like to ignore them). Corbyn hints at transcending party politics when he talks of distributing power beyond the state to include communities as well and certainly a push towards peace over arms proliferation could recognise that one of the many reasons we go to war is to ensure our economies can keep growing (the arms industry being a great example of the illogics of growth based economics because so much of the stuff it makes gets destroyed but this is a good thing for the economy because it means more stuff can be built to replace the old).

Corbynmania is exciting stuff. He’s diversifying and opening the debate, putting the demos back in democracy, but that doesn’t mean he’s answering all the questions which is why we’ve still got to keep asking them. We can’t let him get trapped in the box to the left because questioning our tired, destructive political-economic system in its entirety means transcending the left and right debate. Having enjoyed Beyoncé I’ll now leave you with a nice video of that impossible hamster I mentioned earlier…

Quentin Letts And The Right To Bigotry

RobertLeave a comment

“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,” said Evelyn Beatrice Hall, an English writer of the 19th and 20th centuries. It’s a nice summary of the principle of freedom of speech – i.e. we’re all free to say what we like and anything that curbs that freedom is a form of censorship and an abuse of our rights.

Well, I disapprove of what Quentin Letts had to say about the latest series of The Great British Bake Off, and whilst I’m probably not going to risk my life so he can repeat it I do wish to explain exactly why I disapprove in the hope that he’ll be less likely to say it again. To clarify, I am most certainly not advocating censorship, far from it, I think it better that the views of Letts are aired precisely so we can challenge them and in doing so maybe even inspire him to be a little less of a bigot.

He begins by describing the different contestants that have been chosen for the sixth series of Bake Off. He notes that one of them is Muslim and wears a headscarf, one is a house husband, another is a female vegan bodybuilder from Lithuania, one of the men has tattoos and wears a hat, one of them is Afro-Caribbean, there’s one on a gap year, at least one of the contestants lives in the north of England, there’s a British-Asian male and another man originally from the Philippines.

This might sound like an exciting and interesting group of people who we can look forward to getting to know as the series progresses but not for Letts. What he takes umbrage with is the very diversity that the contestants represent. He considers this part of a grand political conspiracy as perpetrated by the BBC, in his own (far too easily parodied) words: “a leaning to modernity, to fashion, to ‘the alternative’, the ‘different’, sometimes for reasons of group-think, sometimes out of a desire to jack up the ratings in the manner of a commercial TV station. It is in keeping with the creed of egalitarianism. It is deeply unconservative.” No doubt it’s political correctness gone mad, something he writes about in his book Bog Standard Britain as crushing “the individualism from our nation of once indignant eccentrics.”

Of course, Letts’ version of individualism (and conservatism) is of a particular hue: namely white. He makes it pretty clear that in his world it’s not Muslims or Lithuanians that bake but homosexual men or older, white, middle-aged women (“mum-next-doorish” types as he describes). As a white, middle class male Letts has the privilege of being one of the most represented groups in mainstream culture (and history in general), so it’s no surprise that he gets a bit uppity when suddenly there are fewer people like him appearing on his favourite television shows. He wants to see more “humdrum, plain-as-white-flour, Middle-English bumblers” (nice to see him appealing to the casual bigotry of equally insecure Middle-Englanders, that infamous squeezed middle beset upon by socialist loons, crafty immigrants and vicious feminists). His privilege is being undermined and whilst this is a good thing because it represents power being more equally distributed and an increase in equality all Letts wants to do is get angry. He expresses his anger (and deep set insecurity) by cracking racist, sexist, homophobic and Islamophobic jokes in his article, no doubt scoffing into his favourite suitably middle class and white supremacist breakfast cereal as he does so. For all his life Letts will have found positive discrimination working in his favour but because it’s so ingrained and commonplace he never will have questioned it, let alone give it a second thought. But now’s it not working in his favour he’s going to kick up a fuss.

“I just wish I didn’t feel, as I looked at the contestants yesterday, that I was being preached at – that the BBC’s social engineers were up to their transparently political tricks again.” Some unintentional comedy gold from Letts here who has just spent a whole article preaching bigotry and narrow-mindedness at us. He accuses the Beeb of having a political agenda whilst clearly forgetting that white, heteronormative, androcentric patriarchy fired at us on a daily basis is itself just drenched in politics. But it doesn’t suit Letts to acknowledge this so instead he’ll deride the “sinister” politics of the BBC, one that favours equality, diversity and representation – you know, those really sinister values. He’s scared these values depart so far from the mainstream “that they often fail to represent adequately that very mainstream” – but Letts doesn’t really care about these people, his article has shown such a lack of compassion that it’s hard to think he cares about anyone, no, he cares about himself and wants more men just like him on TV (he wont’ be happy until Mary Berry’s been replaced by Jeremy Clarkson and Sue Perkins has been ousted for someone overtly heterosexual, such as Katie Hopkins).

So no I don’t approve of what Letts has to say and whilst I won’t risk my life in defence of him saying it I still won’t call for its censorship. His argument is as floppy as a failed souffle and has the soggiest of soggy bottoms. Whilst the BBC’s sinister world of equality and diversity is just brimming with creamy Victoria sponges and rolling Swiss Rolls. He’ll figure it out one day – that a more equal and fair society works out better for everyone, even people like him, but in the meantime we’ll just have to tolerate the bitter aftertaste of his bigotry.

Quentin Letts with spaghetti (interestingly not a baked good)
Quentin Letts with spaghetti (interestingly not a baked good)

Jurassic Out-Of-This World

RobertLeave a comment

All willing disbelief suspended, all fond memories of the original shelved and all expenses paid for an average seat at the Odeon – yup, time for Jurassic World. And my Gobisaurus, there was not a lot that film didn’t do – a blazing example of anti-capitalist, Marxist, feminist critique. Here are a few of the highlights.

Jurassic World

Consumerism Will Destroy Us: So, the two young white male protagonists arrive at Jurassic World, twenty-two years after lots of people got killed at Jurassic Park, and it’s basically a giant zoo. Screaming kids are riding baby Triceratops, screaming crowds are watching great white sharks being fed to Mosasaurus and profits are screaming (in delight) as the park rolls out its latest asset – a genetically engineered new dinosaur, the Indominus Rex. The film paints a pretty grim picture of humans as greedy, selfish consumers. Meanwhile, it swiftly becomes apparent that the money behind the park is corporate, so much so that the companies want their brands to form part of the dinosaurs’ names – the Nokiasaurus, iRex etc. The dinosaurs are also referred to as ‘assets’ and seen as profit-making objects rather than real living creatures. Put this alongside the film’s own product placement, what with Mercedes, Coca-Cola and Samsung all getting an appearance, and there’s a pretty strong anti-consumer capitalism message going on here. Not to mention that the entire park actually forms part of an elaborate military project to breed dinosaurs as weapons – so it’s not just the greedy business types pulling the strings it’s also the war generals, quite the military-industrial complex going on here.

Of course, this would not be part of the Jurassic Park franchise if the dinosaurs did not escape and kill lots of people – which they do. We see one woman get chomped by the Mosasaurus, multiple people get flayed by Pterodactyls and the Indominus Rex goes on a feeding frenzy.  The moral of this story: consumerism will destroy us – in a wonderful irony, befitting of even the most esoteric of French philosophers, the very products of consumerism (namely, genetically modified dinos) will turn on those that consume them by…consuming them. Ouch.

Nature Does Not Exist: First there was the earth – a barren lump of rock, then there was nature – trees, rivers, animals etc, then there were humans. We labour under the belief that humans are not part of nature, hence our endless quest to reveal nature’s secrets and dominate it. Simultaneously, we idolise the time of pre-human nature and in Jurassic World they try to recreate it by breeding extinct dinosaurs. However, as one of the chief scientists in the film reminds us, “nothing in this park is natural” because the humans have been tinkering with the dino DNA right from the start. But that still begs the question “what is natural?”

That’s an incredibly difficult question to answer if we still believe in the binary of pristine, nonhuman nature versus dirty, human artifice. We can never win if humans are the ones that render everything unnatural simply by existing. So, I suggest we give up this confused notion of nature and accept that that sort of nature never existed. Instead we can place humans alongside animals, rivers, plants etc, in a broader understanding of the natural world. This can also include all the mechanical and technological contraptions that humans like to create. Thus, rather than having degrees of ‘natural’ we could have degrees of ‘engineered-by-humans’ – i.e. a rock-as-hammer being a less engineered human technology than, say, a car. Of course, this says nothing for how humans treat the world they form part of, pretty badly basically.

White Men And Families Will Save Us: Jurassic World is a 12A, it’s a film for all the family. Thus, it’s only right that Bryce Dallas Howard’s character, Claire Dearing – the park’s white, single, overly organised, female stereotype operations manager, ends up with Owen Grady (played by Chris Pratt), the white, rugged, dino fighting, sexist, male stereotype Indiana Jones knock off. Meanwhile, Zach and Gray (yes, he is called a colour) the two white, siblings who start the film squabbling end up fulfilling male and fraternal stereotypes thanks to numerous near death experiences with dinosaurs. Also, the implication at the end of the film is that their possibly-divorcing parents will stay together now the dinosauar attacks have put everything in perspective.

Indeed, the majority of characters that do positive things in this film are white, whilst the evil scientist is of Chinese descent and the dubious billionaire that owns the park is Indian. However, there is one white baddy – a gun-toting  military man who wants to use the dinosaurs as weapons, he ends up getting eaten by a Velociraptor. At least the film passes the Bechdel test as Claire talks with her sister, Karen (the mum of Zach and Gray), about something other than men…how to raise children.

In brief, the moral of this story is that it helps to be white, male, heterosexual and part of an atomic family, or planning to start one. That’s how to survive the dinosaur apocalypse.

Redemption: Just when we thought all was lost and the Indominus Rex was about to eat everyone the T-Rex, Velociraptor and Mosasaurus all come to the rescue and render the Indominus Rex very much dead. So, there is a happy ending of sorts as the friendly dinosaurs  help the white, heteronormative humans restore some form of order. It’s a confused message perhaps but it does imply globalised consumer capitalism does not have to spell the end of humankind. There may well be hope for us yet, thank you dinosaurs.

History Repeating

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Shirley Bassey said it best, whatever innovations and revolutions are promised, it usually just turns out to be a little bit of history repeating. The same is true for British politics. David Cameron can walk triumphantly (and smugly) back into Number 10 whilst Ed Miliband hangs his head in shame and exits stage left but underneath the trials and tribulations of party politics history will just keep repeating. It is a history of capitalism in the UK and before we can change it we must have the courage to critique it.

“What we have seen is a failure of politics, a failure of democracy at a cultural level, part of a larger story playing out across the struggling countries of the post-industrial west.” These words are taken from Dougald Hine’s exemplary blog, a philosopher who understands the underlying tectonics of politics and economics. Using some of his blog as inspiration I will analyse why contemporary politics are caught in the endless repetition of history.

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Tories: the Tories think they have won and, for now, they have. They quite marvellously (and maybe even unintentionally) weakened their political rival the Labour Party. The Tories successfully made people believe that Britain’s economic woes were the result of Labour’s over-spending and conveniently forgot to mention that the actual cause was the unregulated banking sector capitalising on the housing market and using too-good-to-be-true sub-prime mortgages to profit from toxic assets. The public bailout of the banks nationalised a private debt to the tune of billions that has still not been paid back. Yet the Tories have done next to nothing to try to re-regulate the banks thereby increasing the likelihood of another recession all too soon.

They tried to scare people into voting for them – it’s either our ‘sensible’ economic plan or ‘chaos’ – and it worked. Unfortunately, capitalism churns on unchallenged and booms and busts will continue to affect Britain. Yet, the Tories are unashamed in their imposition of austerity – a policy that will exacerbate inequality, weaken the working and middle classes and actually undermine Britain’s economic recovery. Even the IMF has advised against such a plan but George Osborne has ignored it. They got votes by promising people houses and security. But the middle classes will not be safe from the Tory cuts – austerity will undermine public services that middle class people rely on and increased inequality will cause greater social discord, discord that will reach the doorstep of middle class houses.

Meanwhile, with no serious redress of the housing crisis and no attempt to curb ruthless profiteering in the housing market, prices will continue to rise and people will find themselves trapped in unaffordable mortgages or conned into suspiciously affordable mortgages born on an ongoing housing bubble. The Tories are signing their own death warrant. They’ll take as much credit as possible for any minor growth in the economy and then squirm if/when the next bubble bursts and the economy dips. They told us that voting for Ed Miliband would result in ‘economic chaos’. That chaos is going to unravel anyway and this time it will be on the Tory watch and they won’t be able to scapegoat Labour anymore.

Labour: is trying to figure out how to rebrand themselves. Some think it best to become a New-New Labour type party, whilst others think they need to appeal more to the working classes. Going right for Labour means trying to play the Tories at their own game – using the defunct discourse of class politics to convince people that they can rise up through the social ranks and embed themselves comfortably in the land of the middle class. Heading this direction affirms the view that Labour have now shifted right of centre, a process initiated by Tony Blair as he embraced the precepts of neoliberalism (he was, after all, Margaret Thatcher’s self-professed “greatest legacy”).

Going left for Labour means trying to appeal more to the working classes but in a post-industrial society the working classes are not what they used to be. Firstly, Margaret Thatcher effectively won the class war when she crippled the mining communities and their means of representation in politics, i.e. the unions (it’s also worth bearing in mind that basing one’s community around the extraction of a finite resource, i.e. coal, is always going to ensure a limited shelf life). Secondly, in our post-industrial economy many of the industries we have now revolve around 0 hour contracts, call centres and other service sector jobs – it is very hard to imagine flourishing and cohesive communities forming around these sorts of work. We have also outsourced so much of our labour to countries like China that we have far less of a working class anyway. So if Labour do go left they won’t be able to rely on their old industrial working class style rhetoric.

Ukip: will do what they do best – completely ignore the larger macro-economic issues and scapegoat immigrants for the inevitable loss of jobs following a recession. A tried and tested approach, remember Enoch Powell.

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The Next Five Years: sadly things won’t magically get better. Unless the ruling government addresses the economic instabilities built into the British capitalist system then history will keep repeating – we’ll have more recessions which will result in people losing jobs, even more jobs will be lost as labour is taken on by machines and the sectors in which new jobs are created will only provide temporary redress (although maybe not for hairdressers and plumbers).

So in about five years time we’ll be fed up of the Tories who will have crippled the long-term chances of the British economy with over-zealous austerity. We will be desperate for change and will turn to the rebranded Labour Party, they’ll promise a land of milk and honey, and will blame the Tories for causing the latest recession. If they get into power, which isn’t guaranteed, they’ll try to ride the wave of what little economic growth follows the recession. Meanwhile, extreme right-wing parties will scapegoat immigrants for our economic woes and stir up xenophobia. It will be all too similar to the times that Thatcher beat Callaghan, Thatcher lost to Blair and Brown lost to Cameron/Clegg. Indeed, as Shirley Bassey astutely observed, it will all just be a little bit of history repeating.

More Than Hope

RobertLeave a comment

Following the election many are saying it is time Labour went back to the drawing board and engaged in some serious soul-searching. Two such pundits include Pat McFadden, shadow Europe minister, and Owen Jones, Guardian columnist. Below I analyse their views and argue that both do not go nearly far enough because they don’t address the underlying issue – an issue much bigger than a Labour party rebrand and petty party politics. In truth, it is an issue as big as capitalism itself.

McFadden was quoted in a Guardian article saying: “…if there was one thing Ed Miliband was clear about, he was turning the page on New Labour even more emphatically than Gordon Brown was, and we see the results even more emphatically last night. We don’t just need a new person at the top of the Labour party, we need a new argument, too. We will always be the people of the lower paid, but we need to be more than that and be the party of the aspirational family that wants to do well. We need to speak about wealth creation and not just wealth distribution.”

In his article Jones recounts the Conservatives’ masterful victory over their left-wing rivals: their successful scapegoating of the Labour Party for the 2008 recession, their forcing of Labour to turn their backs on immigrants and the right-wing media’s stirring of Scottish nationalism to ensure a mass shift to the SNP and their stirring/scaring of English nationalism to ensure more blue votes. The Tories severely weakened their opponent and are enjoying a majority for it. He concludes with his aspirations for a new Labour politics as so: “There will be a big debate now over the future of the Labour party, and what the left does next. This country desperately needs a politics of hope that answers people’s everyday problems on living standards, job security, housing, public services and the future of their children. That is needed more than ever, no matter what happens with the Labour leadership. What is needed is a movement rooted in the lives of working-class people and their communities. The future of millions of people depends on it.”

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I do not think either of these views are good enough. McFadden argues that Miliband’s leftwards shift from New Labour policies was a mistake. Now, Margaret Thatcher herself said that her greatest legacy was Tony Blair – he adopted right-wing neoliberal policies that she had initiated. He turned his back on the working classes and encouraged a capitalist rhetoric of ‘get rich and get middle class’. But the constant surge of boom and bust in capitalist economics, increasing levels of inequality and the squeezing of the middle prove that when push comes to shove the middle classes will be ignored by the establishment. We know trickle down economics are a sham as we witness the elite 1% drain wealth from wider society (e.g. in the public bailout of the banks and in the privatisation of the public sector). Yet McFadden still suggests that a traditionally working class party try to out compete a party that represents the wealthy establishment on the grounds of ‘wealth creation’ – good luck to them.

Meanwhile, Jones calls for a politics of hope rooted in working-class communities. Yet his book Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Classes demonstrates how severely the working-class has been undermined since the class wars of Thatcher – working class industries obliterated, trade unions weakened and workers’ rights eroded. The working-class reality today is 0 hour contracts, abysmal working conditions (e.g. as in call centres), food banks and increasing poverty. Thatcher said there was no such thing as society and it seems her prophecy has proved self-fulfilling. So, whilst Jones’ critique is insightful his proposal is lacking. We need much more than a vague politics of hope: we need a pragmatic plan of action informed by an inspirational vision of what our society could be. We need a plan and vision that transcends petty party politics and, above all, transcends capitalism.

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The recession of 2008 was not the fault of Labour it was the inevitable result of a deregulated and globalised banking sector that was ‘too big to fail’ and working under the ‘maximise profit’ mantra of capitalism. This trend of deregulation dates back to Thatcher and was not stalled by Blair, Brown, or Cameron. The rise (and rise) of the banking sector was a cross party achievement. Of course, the 2008 recession was just one of many – recessions are endemic to capitalist economics as bubbles are continually over-speculated upon and then burst. So Gordon Brown promising a departure from boom and bust economics during New Labour’s years, the Tories blaming Labour for the 2008 recession and George Osborne taking credit for the apparent economic recovery, are all just examples of a severely limited understanding of economics.

Neither McFadden nor Jones attempt to analyse the system of capitalism itself ensuring their proposals are either ill-informed or too flimsy. Booms and busts occur in capitalist economies because they have to – we are locked into a system that demands continual growth so we innovate new products and industries to ensure more money can circulate, and as the innovations increase so people speculate on them to make a profit.  When one well of profit dries up the infrastructure built around it collapses and the speculators start mining elsewhere. Profit maximisation is even inscribed in law as companies are obligated to maximise shareholder return on investment. We are literally locked into a system that demands us to make money before anything else. Unfortunately, Jessie J got it very wrong, it is about the money.

Until we can effectively challenge the all-pervasive power of capital we will never be able to articulate a sustainable and humane alternative to the status quo. Labour will constantly find itself losing as it tries to play the Tory game and the Tories will easily be able to scaremonger and scapegoat to ensure the establishment stays put. But the Tories and Labour are engaged in the neoliberal game, a game of wealth accumulation, greed and class warfare. Fortunately, there are other much bigger games to play. A politics of more than just hope is possible. Indeed, a politics of pragmatism twinned with idealism founded on a sustainable and stable economic basis is already in the making. Our task must be to understand how it works, to champion it where it is working and, above all, to make it. We have at least to be able to imagine the blueprint so we can start building. All this in another blog post soon, in the meantime here’s a bit of Jessie J…

 

It’s All A Load Of Kabul Sh*t

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The lyrics of Lily Allen’s song Kabul Shit speak for themselves. Climate change, corrupt politics and warmongering foreign policy are all astutely analysed in rhyming verses. So before you cast your vote this Thursday think on the words of that famous mockney singer:
 

There’s a hole in our logic,
There’s a hole in the sky
And one day just like magic
We’re all going to die,
‘Cause we didn’t turn the lights off
And we didn’t take the bus,
Even though we know we should have
Oh, silly old us.

 

These lines refer to the hole in the ozone caused by a range of chemicals including CFCs. Interestingly, in 1987 the Montreal Protocol was signed: an international treaty that phased out the production of numerous substances that contributed to ozone depletion. Unfortunately, the Kyoto Protocol – designed to limit the amount of carbon emissions and hence curb global warming – has proven much less effective even though 97% of climate scientists agree that humans are causing global warming. As Allen points out we carry on ignoring the evidence and consuming resources at a planetary pace, “Oh, silly old us.”

 

Well we should have recycled
And saved our resources
While there’s still someone else’s
Someone call the armed forces,
And we’ll blame it on terror
Also known as religion
But we shouldn’t feel guilt
For protecting our children.

 

Here Allen references resource wars – wars fought to gain control of a specific resource, such as land or water. The song alludes to the Iraq War – waged by the US and UK to allegedly find weapons of mass destruction but subsequently revealed to have been about ensuring access to oil. The war has been deemed illegal and many want to see George Bush and Tony Blair put on trial as war criminals. The lyrics also refer to terrorism, often evoked by Western governments to further justify racist and belligerent policies. Of course, some terrorism does reside in extreme forms of religion and one could even argue that capitalism is its own extreme religion forcing us to kill others for continued growth and profit. “But we shouldn’t feel guilt for protecting our children” is a wonderful sign off as Allen notes people’s tendencies to justify all sorts of actions for the safety of their own family, even if other families are harmed in the process – many of us did support the Iraq War even though it proved devastating for Iraqi civilians.

 

I don’t have the answers
I don’t know where we start,
Start to pick up all the pieces
Of everything we’ve torn apart.
Now, you’d think that we’d be grateful
For the fact we’ve got a choice
Instead we throw it back at people
Who don’t even have a voice.

 

This verse refers to scapegoating – the act of blaming someone for another’s wrongdoing. Recently we have seen Ukip scapegoating immigrants for the UK’s economic woes. Yet inherent to capitalist economics are periods of boom and bust linked to speculation on commodities (e.g. the internet, housing, financial ‘innovations’). However, rather than try and understand the root causes of these problems racist right-wing groups like Ukip play on xenophobia to try to turn people against immigrants. In the early 1900s the Jews were scapegoats, in the 1960s Enoch Powell called for ‘rivers of blood’ and recently Nigel Farage has been blaming Romanians. This is an ignorant and pernicious trope that Allen rightly challenges.

 

And the teachers always told us
Told us we should love thy neighbour,
And my mother always told me
Told me I should vote new labour,
But I don’t know who to trust
And I just find it all confusing,
All as useless as each other
Past the point of being amusing.
 

Allen highlights the increasing adoption of neoliberal policies by the UK’s main political parties. A trend initiated by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative party in the 1980s and adopted by Blair’s ‘New Labour’ party in the 90s and 00s. Now it seems that neoliberalism is a song all the parties sing too – one that promotes privatisation, austerity and deregulation. When all parties put profit over people it’s not surprising they all appear as “as useless as each other“.

Lily Allen’s is a political and pop tour de force. In a few verses she analyses the status quo with laser precision. So, before you put a cross in a box remember that this status quo does not have to go unchallenged – the power of elites and capital, the neoliberal consensus, the damage of climate change, the erosion of democracy and the waging of wars are all things that can change if we adopt policies that promote people and planet together. We do have agency and we can take action – it begins with a vote. The alternative is denial, the consequences of which are already proving dire:

 

Excuse me, sir,
But is this what they call denial,
Just to carry on regardless
We’ll only do it for a while.
We’ll carry on straight down the line,
Down the road to nowhere,
Do you know where it is leading us
And do we even wanna go there?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spTtXaR3vAI

Out Of Style

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Style, a new song by Taylor Swift. The lyrics tell the simple story of a fraught relationship. Swift is picked up by a male lover who she can’t stop thinking about despite the fact he rarely calls and is rumoured to have been sleeping with other women. He drives a little recklessly and they eventually go back to her house. He admits the rumours are true and Swift also states that she has been sleeping with others. A catchy chorus intersperses these dramatic moments:

“You got that James Dean, day-dream look in your eye
And I got that red lip, classic thing that you like
And when we go crashing down, we come back every time.
Cause we never go out of style,
We never go out of style.”

The chorus captures two central themes of the song. The first is that of crashing: be it a car or a relationship. Nevertheless, Swift asserts that they will survive the metaphorical car crash of their partnership and keep returning to one another. The second theme concerns their looks – they are both classically and timelessly attractive. Other verses sing of his “long hair, slicked back, white t-shirt” and her “good girl faith and a tight little skirt.” Meanwhile, the video shows Swift and a male model casting smouldering looks, walking in front of projected images, holding up pieces of glass, striking poses, getting wet by the sea and generally doing what conventionally good-looking people do.

However, there is something very concerning about the central message of this song. The fact that Swift and her partner will never go out of style because of their looks is basically a threat: if you’re not one of the stylish few then you never will be. If a man does not look like James Dean and if a woman does not look like Taylor Swift then it’s off to the ‘ugly’ pile. Now, a social hierarchy based on looks is no new concept but it does often rest on the presumption that beauty is an objectively measurable scarce resource possessed by a lucky few. Furthermore, the less this view is questioned and contextualised the more it seems that the timelessness of beauty is an unquestionable truth. Hence, Swift’s ability to never go out of style.

But I like context and ours is one of capitalist, consumerist patriarchy. Bodies are constantly commodified and objectified by consumer capitalism’s endless quest to turn everything into profit. Advertising, films and television fall back on simplistic tropes of body image in an effort to get us to hate our bodies and buy their products. It is not that the people we see on adverts are more beautiful than the rest of us – bearing in mind they are heavily made up and airbrushed – it is that a group of predominantly male ad execs with limited imagination and social awareness will have once again failed to exercise any creativity or compassion. Meanwhile, whilst sexism is continually being challenged it still remains rampant – in the streets, in work places, in the home and in presentations of beauty. Watch 4music for any prolonged period of time and more often than not it is women who are presented sexually on-screen and reduced to sexual objects in lyrics. It happens to men too, but not as much. Furthermore, these women are often held accountable for how they appear rather than the larger dehumanising cultural and political milieu. In essence, sexist, consumerist capitalism dictates to and sells us a very limited, dubious conception of beauty.

So what could beauty look like in a world beyond patriarchy and consumerism? Imagine a beauty that transcends gender binaries, one that is happy to embrace queer bodies and blurred boundaries, rather than forcing us into little boxes. Imagine a beauty that ages, one with wrinkles, sagging skin and grey hairs, rather than one that relentlessly presents youth as the one thing worth possessing even though aging is the one thing we all do. Imagine a beauty that is not dictated to us by billboards and those who profit from them, not predicated on the fear of loss, and not treated as a scarce resource in constant need of capitalisation, but one that is an abundant commons available to all, hierarchy free, enjoyed as it changes, enjoyed because it changes and never answerable to currency.

This unfettered beauty already exists in our society and is available to all, should we wish to engage with it. Of course, it can be very difficult to feel beautiful in a society where we are constantly made to feel ashamed of ourselves for the way we look. Challenging this agenda will be tough but worth it as we prove that style is something for all of us and not just reserved for the James Dean and Taylor Swift lookalikes, although they are welcome to partake of it too.

The Establishment’s Deckchairs

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The Establishment is Owen Jones’ latest book. It is a brilliant critique of the UK’s elite and how they rig politics, economics, business, law and media in their favour. He highlights the hypocrisy of the neoliberals who decry state intervention but then rely on the state for the  implementation of their wishes. His critique is brutally well researched and his findings are damning, yet I do not think his examination of the establishment is sufficiently rigorous. In this brief post I shall add one further criticism to Jones’ multitude.

The Establishment

In essence, The Establishment charts the rise of neoliberalism in the UK. After the second world war and with the rise of the welfare state it was looking as if neoclassical capitalism was here to stay – an active and paternalistic state working with strong unions to foster economic growth. A few lone voices bemoaned these turns of event and think tanks were established to promote neoliberalism – the rolling back of and privatisation of the state with an emphasis on supporting those at the top of the ladder rather than the bottom. Margaret Thatcher and Richard Nixon are familiar figureheads for this movement and between them they ensured neoliberalism became the status quo. The bailing out of the banks after the late noughties recession and the current government’s commitment to austerity all form part of the neoliberal narrative. It explains why inequality is growing, the rich are getting richer and more people are being pushed below the poverty line.

At the end of the book Jones offers some “pretty timid” solutions to the current problem that sees a greedy fraction of the population twist the system to fill their coffers. He calls for the state to once again play a more active role in society with regards wealth distribution, taxation and public service provision. He wants a clamp down on the banking system and tax avoidance. He calls for a “democratic revolution” without offering much of a guide as to how the public could actually play a greater role in a highly corporatised and economically beleaguered country.

A distinct lack of viable solutions aside my main concern with The Establishment is its failure to articulate the deeper political and economic impetus that has guided our country for decades and served the establishment very well. It is called capitalism – “an economic and political system in which a country’s trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state.” Capitalism takes capital and adds an -ism to it, in other words, it turns money making into a religion. Capitalism measures everything with money. For something to make sense in a capitalist system it must be price tagged. At a national scale a country’s overall material throughput – namely how much stuff and how many services are bought and sold – is measured in GDP, gross domestic product. Jessie J got it wrong, it turns out it is all about the money, money, money.

With this backdrop in mind it becomes clear that whether or not capitalism is guided by a neoclassical or neoliberal inclination it is still capitalism. Increasing profits and GDP will always be the priority, whatever the cost. We are relentlessly having to churn up finite resources, abuse human labour and innovate more soon-to-be-obsolete products so our economies can ‘grow’. So, whether the state is guided by an establishment willing to make concessions to the working class or by one that is cut throat in its pursuit of the bottom line we are still just rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic as we remain committed to a political and economic (il)logic that prioritises profit over people and planet.

The lack of a coherent analysis of capitalism may explain why The Establishment is so heavy on criticism, around 300 pages of it, but so very light on solutions, we only get 20 pages of “pretty timid” suggestions. The irony is that Jones has lain waste to the crooks that rig the system in their favour yet fails to hammer home a criticism of the very system that assures their power – capitalist economics. Until we understand the perils of a commitment to contemporary capitalism we remain seated on the deck of a swiftly sinking ship frantically rearranging the deckchairs. Tbc…

50 Shades of Neoliberalism

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The Green Party’s 2015 Election Broadcast is spot on – David Cameron, Nick Clegg, Nigel Farage and Ed Miliband all singing to the same tune. And that tune is neoliberalism. Whilst having many definitions neoliberalism is a form of capitalism typified by a laissez faire approach to economics that prioritises privatisation, free trade and austerity. Neoliberalism is also underpinned by an adversity to state intervention, unless that state intervention is designed to facilitate privatisation, free trade and austerity.

The Green Party’s music video shows Ed Miliband being tempted to join the other ‘old boys’ reminding us that once upon a time Labour stood for a neoclassical  approach to capitalism – one that encouraged state intervention in economics and championed workers rather than bosses. Unfortunately for neoclassicalism New Labour happened and as Margaret Thatcher – arch neoliberal – once said, her greatest achievement was Tony Blair. He set the ball rolling for Labour’s adoption of neoliberalism.

So it seems that when we’re asked to vote on politics come May what we are inevitably voting on is economics. Be it Tory, Lib Dem, Ukip or Labour, all are just different shades of neoliberalism, with some making tokenistic gestures towards alleviating poverty whilst others roll back the state faster and harder. But the Greens aren’t grey and are questioning these economic paradigms. Paradigms that have been so embedded in our culture over the past few decades that they seem like immutable truths.

But just as one globally popular boyband will inevitably be  replaced by another so too can the economic status quo shift. It’s just that we’re the ones that are going to have to vote on it.