The Historical Materialist and the Concept of History

Just to note that the above essay, on the Philosophy of History page in this website, has been newly revised.  It deals with the intellectual roots of Marxism and its historical materialism via a discussion of the 1978 work The Poverty of Theory’ by Marxist historian EP Thompson in his famous polemic against the French structuralist Marxist Louis Althusser.  In fact I give the great Thompson, who died in 1993, a bit of a rough time – who am I to do that? Anyhow, you might like to judge for yourself!

Happy reading!

He Gives - He Gave – He Gove…

It’s the technocrats – those who scorned public opinion and asked us to trust their expertise – who have brought us the disaster of the euro, and a failure to prevent the financial crisis of 2008. (Michael Gove, Times - quoted in i 22.10.16)

          ‘Ah yes,’ said Dr Fritz von Heldenleben with a wicked glint from his pebble lenses, ‘the late Führer Adolf Hitler despised all expert technocrats (with the exception of Albert Speer) and especially those  military experts of the Wehrmacht General Staff who would have sought to dispute his judgment as the greatest war leader of all time!’

          I’m not thinking about education, said Jack Blanchard, impatiently. I mean the euro: what about the euro?

          ‘The success of the euro will depend upon the political unity established by Europe’s politicians. However devised by experts, the euro cannot function optimally without closer political union, which is not in the experts’ domain, nor did we ever assume it was. We experts and technocrats devise plans and outline detailed objectives (since this the politicians cannot do) but we would expect fully the politicians to order the fundamental priorities. When they – as like Hitler, really – do not know what to do, they blame the experts advising them, and when we all do not know what to do we must of course all blame the media.

          ‘- And it was speculators who caused the financial crisis of 2008, not economists as such.’

          Hardly any of the economists predicted it, countered our reporter.

          ‘Experts do not access crystal balls amongst their sources,’ said the good Doctor. ‘We are not astrologicians.’

          Astrologers?

          ‘Just so. We draw up simply the blueprints as directed by our political and business masters.’

          Speaking of education, said Jack, Mr Gove was at one time in charge of it, in our country.

          ‘I know nothing of education,’ replied Dr von Heldenleben, ‘but again I would suggest that it, too, is a field whose priorities are best set by elected representatives in response to perceived needs. The experts can only implement (and of course attempt to influence) a policy determined by a vision of what should be done, an objective. What do your people want and need from education? And the children? Experts can help to find out but it is not for them to lay down the fundamentals.

          ‘It is like directing a lawyer in proceeding on your business. The lawyer needs first to know what you want. He or she can propose alternatives but whether it is a matter of disinheriting certain relatives or removing pensions or of pleading guilty or not guilty, any lawyer must know your mind before taking action on your behalf. How clear were Herr Gove’s own educational priorities? How close was he towards balancing priorities against practicalities?’

          Nobody knows what Gove thought he was up to, said Jack. He certainly roused the whole Blob against him.

          ‘Blob? What is this – Blob?’

          It would take too long to explain, sighed Jack. It’s beyond satire to try.

* * * *

     With the bonfire of expertise that spread across Britain in the wake of Mr Gove’s remarks, technocrats were purged from positions in education, atomic energy, the Prison Service, operating theatres in the NHS, food and drug administration, sanitation, town planning, agronomy, National Parks and nature conservancy and veterinary services, and a whole host of other elitist enclaves, while educational training in these spheres of so-called expertise was gradually and economically dismantled (or privatised, which amounted to the same thing). The nation experienced a robust return to the 16^th century – the age of Good Queen Bess, Shakespeare and Sir Francis Drake – and became amongst other things a great Time Capsule and obvious magnate for time-travelling tourists from all over the world. After four hundred years people actually or vicariously could revel again in the poverty, ignorance, disease and bloodshed of our glorious ancestors…

         

Moments in History

Or

History in ‘Moments’ (1)

(WARNING: This history may be a little out of order.)

          As she rode (rowed?) to Tilbury Theresa pondered on the words she was so famously to utter as she bade farewell and bon voyage to her EU negotiators:

          ‘I may have the political skills of a local councillor and the heart of a Chief Whip, but I have the stomach of a male Prime Minister,’ she said to cheers on the deck of the sinking ship HMS LastoneLeft.

          How far they had all come as a result of her late father’s drastic solving of the King’s Great Matter and now This Realm, This England, stood alone. As did Theresa, steering her way through the labyrinth of a treacherous Court that might so easily have had her long since ‘remaindered’ like an unread old book of political memoirs. It was more vital than ever that she trust no one and keep her own counsel.

          Then there was Nicola of the Scots chafing behind Theresa’s northern border while seeking behind Theresa’s back to resurrect the ‘Auld Alliance’ with Theresa’s great continental enemy. But she was a problem that would have to wait, and meanwhile both Nicola and the EU were issues too delicate to be left in the clumsy hands of her bumptious First Minister, Blundering Boris, Earl of Weshallsea and notorious jester-turncoat….

DR VON HELDENLEBEN AND HIS LIEBLING

          Dr Fritz von Heldenleben, EU Commissioner for Deregulation, began his interview with our European correspondent Jack Blanchard with an observation on his country’s linguistic practices. ‘We Germans who are short speak High German, while we Germans who are tall speak Low German. In that way do we achieve mutual audibility.’ (A little warm-up joke?) We sat, writes Jack, sipping chilled Moselle in Dr von Heldenleben’s  magnificent high-vaulted panelled study in the family schloss which offers a panoramic view of the Reichstag Valley across which spreads the medievally picturesque old town of Knappertsbusch, ancestral home of the Heldenlebens.  The houses have that charming cuckoo-clock look about them, as indeed we hear all the cuckoos cook-cooing on the hour every hour. ‘Yes, it is wunderschön,’ said Dr von Heldenleben, ‘with the highest suicide rate in the world, which is only natural, of course - our traditional Weltschmerz.’

          Von Heldenleben is currently implementing a Greek Rescue Plan to save the German economy in the event of the fall of the Deutsche Bank but the subject of the discussion was Brexit Britain. The Commissioner was sanguine about future prospects:

          ‘We and the Dutch and the French own nearly all your railways and energy companies, so I do not see too much of a problem with any so-called separation. And as your banks gradually re-locate to Frankfurt (and New York also) and we buy up your Stock Exchange as originally planned, I view the future with optimism. One problem remains: you are not sufficiently privatised to prepare the ground for further acquisitions of your assets by our government-owned companies, but no doubt that tag will come.

          ‘But ach, Joachim, such opportunities going to waste! As that charming freulein of yours, Juliet Samuel, in your Daily Telegraf for 14.10.16 asks [‘If the government won’t build new infrastructure let others have a go’], how to unlock private capital for more fracking, new coal plants, a third airport runway and more autobahns , not to speak of unaffordable housing? I think she realises all too well that time is of the essence if you are to push back further the natural environment to achieve all these things before the world comes to an end – a race for profit against time, schnell!, schnell!

'As she notes also, and as you see I have here the newspaper in front of me’ (Dr von Heldenleben wiped and adjusted his pebble glasses) ‘“Yesterday, Simon Wolfson launched his annual economics prize. The task was centred on Britain’s infrastructure problem: find a way of improving our clogged road network.”’

          To have less cars? ventured Jack Blanchard.

          ‘But nein! nein! More autobahns with first- and second-class lane tolls, supplemented by a north-south, high-speed business-class railway! Infrastructure, Joachim! Infrastructure! All that green but useless countryside… And, as Freulein Samuel says: “If the government isn’t prepared to build, it could at least let private companies do so.” As she says also, housebuilders and airport owners and shale drillers cry out to invest but are held up at every turn “while the police gently talk protesting hippies out of the bushes.” How very English!  Ha! Ha! A good expression!’

          I’m not sure all the protesters are hippies, protested Jack of Marxist Moments.

          ‘It does not matter: they act as hippies, whoever they are!’

          Dr von Heldenleben goes on to say that enormous private pension funds lie idle as the government stalls on infrastructure, as Juliet Samuel writes. ‘”Set the people free” as our former enemy Churchill once said to you austere-rationing English (betrunken alter Dummkopf); and then that charming Gallic expression of Guizot: “Enrichissez-vous!” Privatise all your infrastructure! But here is once more from the newspaper meine kleine liebling:

‘“Toll roads are lambasted as unfair. Train companies are accused of price gouging…new nuclear plants have been regulated to death, new windfarms are banned, coal plants are being shut down and shale drilling permits take years…The Government has lost the courage to level with voters and admit that from each development, there might be losers in the local area, but that this is the price Britain must pay to stay a competitive modern economy that can pay for its own defence and decent services.”

‘Do you not see, Joachim, that we keep telling this to the Greeks, the Portuguese, the southern Italians? Until they learn that each country has a price to pay, and that there are inevitable losers, such as them, Europe too will never be competitive!’

          It proved too much for our reporter, unable as a conscientious interviewer to argue back point by point, so Jack has instead turned to editorialising in print:

          So, Monty – I like the way Juliet Samuel writes about ‘losers’, but since potential fracking sites are dotted all over the country, including choice bits of Southeast England, who is to pick the fracking locations for the losers while leaving the ‘winners’ alone? Why not start all this in the North, for example? They don’t vote Tory up there anyhow. And so we have. And at what point will all the loser areas join up, one way or another?

          ‘Britain paying for its own defence.’ Does this include Trident renewal, by the way, said by military critics to be entirely – and dangerously – obsolete in the cyber age? Perhaps cutting out dozens of billions of that might make ‘paying for our own defence’ a little less prohibitive?

          If nuclear plants are ‘regulated to death’ does Juliet Samuel mean they shouldn’t be regulated at all, or perhaps only a little bit regulated – like Chernobyl?

          And don’t the problems of our existing infrastructure stem from its privatisation in the first place? Vast sums are creamed off services to pour into shareholders’ and hedge-funders’ pockets, as well as into the coffers of foreign state-owned enterprises that subsidise cheaper rail fares and energy-bills for their own citizens at our expense (we pay just about the highest rail fares in Europe). And with yet more privatisation will yet more private building and owning not lead to yet more ‘price-gouging’ - on a huge, larcenous scale?

          And where do renewables come into the picture – something Juliet Samuel leaves unmentioned?  We can have off-shore wind-farms without invading the land. Carbon-capture can be developed for coal production (she doesn’t mention that perhaps because she wants to keep the argument confrontational, tough and gritty); there is solar power, wave and water power, even power out of the methane from excrement! But of course as all these apart from carbon-captured coal are relatively cheap they won’t yield the big profits both of coal itself and of the other non-renewables.

          Ultimately there was something unclear about her argument. On the one hand, shale drillers and so on are crying out to invest but are held back by Government hesitation. On the other hand, infrastructural building is apparently held back by timidity over releasing privately invested funds, not to speak of unleashing private building companies. But I thought fracking and coalmining and so on were already invested in and run by private companies? And in any case the Government is fully committed to fracking, so where’s the hesitation? What this argument turns out to be is a pitch for yet more private profitmaking, on a vast scale and as soon as possible to bring ‘recovery’ to capitalists. Though we’ve seen what privatisation has done to our ‘decent services’ so far. With the Government’s stance on fracking, it’s only the ‘hippies’ who need neutralising now. And it looks as though what Samuel is insinuating is that all protest against non-renewables must be forbidden by law so that Britain remains ‘competitive’.  Perhaps this can be extended to banning protests in favour of renewables.

We shall see in due course (almost no doubt about it) what Nature has to say on the matter…

Fortunately for Dr von Heldenleben, he can enjoy the luxury of a beautiful view and pristine air, whatever the cuckoo-clock noise-pollution plus the suicides, because he’s sat in the middle of the mountains, which one can do little with except climb, riddle with pistes and yodel across.

That [says Jack, veering from conviction to unhingement] is what Britain needs: mountains!  Not piddling Pennines and Ben Nevises but the real deal: Alps, Rockies, Himalayas! Maybe after all the frackings could induce greater earthquakes, leading to mountainous upheavals! Volcanos never did Iceland any harm: it’s the most prosperous post-Crisis country in or near Europe!

Think about it, Monty. Think about it.

We thought about it and advised Jack to take a short holiday, preferably in the Fens.

           

         

At It Again

         

Lucifer Satan now appears to have been a prime mover behind a concerted attempt to pressurise the Swedish Academy into awarding Donald Trump the Nobel Peace Prize as a consolation should he fail to rally Middle America for peace and unity as a presidential candidate.

There is considerable support around the globe for such a face-saving move. The main grounds for it are that Trump would be a major force for world peace if he failed to gain the US presidency.  ‘People and politicians all over the world will be so relieved that they will fall into each other’s arms in a spirit of universal harmony, united at least on one thing,’ said Mr Satan at a hellish press conference in Las Vegas, where he is appearing nightly as himself at The Sands. ‘And you know how much I like universal harmony! It may be a con but while it lasts it’s good for business!’

Mr Satan’s last success was as long ago as 1974 when Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize, an event that forced Tom Lehrer to give up satire. This was Mr Satan’s prime object at the time. He has always hated satirists. Because they show no respect.

The Mexican government declined to comment. Mexicans, hoping their security would be guaranteed forever if a great wall was erected across their entire border with the United States, will now have to re-consider their options.

You Couldn’t Make It up

          Lucifer Satan has decided to seek a return to full-time religion after a number of decades in retirement building up his portfolio.

          Mr Satan, who spoke to your reporter Jack Blanchard at his extensive centrally-heated basement in Belgravia, London SW 1, said ‘With the revival of war, famine, pestilence and environmental catastrophe in recent years it seems only right for me to re-assume some sort of co-ordinating role. I was always regarded as a pretty straightforward kind of guy, after all, unremitting over years, centuries actually, in finessing the onward march of evil.’

          In Mr Satan’s view evil has taken a back seat and needs to reclaim ‘the centre ground’ in the shaping of events. Once regarded as all-powerful, ‘Old Nick’, as he is still affectionately called by members of the secretive 666 Club, refused to be drawn out on specific strategies and tactics. ‘One doesn’t want to show one’s hand too early in this game, but I still have scads of believers in the States, for one thing,’ he said, and he hoped ‘the so-called 1%’ would in time rally to his leadership more openly. Mr Satan faces a phalanx of big rivals on the world political scene, however. ‘I’ve always been a formidable double-crossing tempter but the field’s a bit overcrowded these days.’ He also admitted that there would be considerable popular resistance to his new bid for a public role once more.

          Fear may prove to be his strongest suit: ‘You don’t have to be popular to scare the hell out of people,’ Mr Satan said, ‘and I was always good at that. People like being scared and I’m certainly the one to put the wind up.’ It’s fear that makes the world go round – as he said recently in an expensive (‘expansive’? – ED) speech to the Brimstone circle thinktank – but today’s leaders aren’t up to the challenge because they lack the courage of their non-convictions: ‘We must never forget that evil forever triumphs in an atmosphere of constant and totally unreasoning fear, so something along these lines will form my plan of attack. Be steadfast, Brimstoners! Always remember that a week is a long time in global mastery. I should know, I’ve been at it ten thousand years! And’ (with a wink and cheeky whisk of his tail) ’I’m still comparatively young, really.’

NEWS FLASH

          Daily Telegraph for 6.10.16 (Tim Wallace):

          ‘Global debt record risks economic stagnation.

          ‘IMF report issues chilling prospect of populist politics sending world economy into reverse.

          ‘Global debt has hit a record high of $152 trillion, weighing down economic growth and adding to risks that the economic recovery could turn into stagnation or even recession, the International Monetary Fund has warned.’

          There is also the fear expressed in this report that ‘populist politics’ would reverse globalisation, ‘with protectionist politics hitting international trade, investment and immigration, sending the world plunging into a prolonged period of economic torpor.’

          ‘Recovery’, as always in these financial reports, means the ‘recovery’ of capital profits. There is no way of defining what ‘recovery’ under capitalism would be otherwise. It can’t mean the general well-being of people in a permanent high-wage, high-spend economy since wages are drawn from employers’ profits, and higher profits must invariably come from lowering wages. Low wages mean either no-spend or high personal debt in order to spend.

          If this dependence on labour for profit were not so, why the IMF’s concern for the consequences to business of controls on immigration? The source of profit is the value accruing from unpaid labour time and into which wages make inroads the higher they become. This necessitates drops in wage levels as a given period passes its economic peak. So the cheapest possible labour is needed at this time to get the economy ‘on the move’ again. And that means immigration as a necessary component of the labour market. Meanwhile a problem arises when employers skimp on both investment in more modern and efficient machinery and on labour costs: a decline in the level of productivity. This is happening all over the world and is of major concern to economists. Lower productivity is not mentioned in the IMF report, but it should be, although it is not very clear what can be done in practical, realistic terms to raise it.

‘Recovery’ to the capitalist means the recovery of profits through the lowering of wages, ‘flexibility’ in the labour market (i.e. no secure  jobs), the undercutting of wages through the mass employment of immigrants: hence immigration controls pose a threat to the free movement of labour and thus to globalisation  and the maximising of profit. (And high profiting must be maintained to offset the steady lowering of the overall rate of profit.) The IMF here urges governments to push ‘to keep borders as open as possible’. Unfortunately this invites the wrath of workers fearing that their wages will be undercut by the influx of cheap labour. And with this that it will lower their buying-power even further, not to speak of their job security.

          Capitalism can only come out on top if the world buys back all that it has produced, in capital goods as in direct consumption. But if demand is threatened by the erosion in the real value of wages, then debt will ensue. Debt works its way from individual consumers into businesses that have invested through borrowing and into banks that have loaned. IMF: ‘At 225pc of world GDP, the global debt…is currently at an all-time high. Two-thirds consists of liabilities of the private sector, which can carry great risks when they reach excessive levels.’ Meanwhile:

          ‘The political climate is unsettled in many countries. A lack of income growth and a rise in inequality have opened the door for populist, inward-looking policies’ which make the job of preventing ‘a gradual slide into economic and financial stagnation’ very problematical, to say the least.

          What the IMF doesn’t openly admit, although it more or less states it, is that ‘populist politics’ are not a contributory factor but are the effect of the very globalisation, free-market system that the IMF seeks to save. The political response to ’a rise in inequality’ and to wages deterioration in the restoration of profit is the very reason for the ‘unsettled political climate’ in the first place. Which the urged measures will only intensify. Capitalism is its own worst enemy. There is a disconnect in this latest report between cause and effect. You have this factor here and you have that factor there, but meanwhile you turn a blind eye to how these factors interrelate and create each other. And that is because you are trying to save a system in which the chief barrier to capital realisation and accumulation is capital itself. It is a contradiction. And so only an argument on behalf of a contradiction must be blind to its own logic, or lack of expressing it. Economic and financial commentary from the fundits is not notable for the logic of its analysis because the system is so illogical and irrational that any kind of logic applied to it will take on the mantle of a critique of it.

          Capitalism superseded feudalism because feudalism came to stifle possibilities of economic growth through over-regulation of one sort or another in the maintenance of the feudal order. Over the centuries we have come full circle: capital itself is stifling its own continuing expansion, which is what capital is required to achieve in order to be. Time for a change?

FUNDITS

          Some people still believe that a pot of gold may be found at the end of a rainbow and their belief is validated by the fact that a few people actually do discover it there. For most of us, the end of the rainbow simply recedes further and further from us no matter how relentlessly we chase it, until it vanishes altogether. But not so for some, and so it is the job of financial pundits – or fundits, as I call them for short – to encourage those most likely to find the pots of gold to go on looking. But this task in the present economic climate can be challenging for them, though fortunately the fundits can afford to ignore a few things along the way in boostering for the stock market.  Which is as well for them.

          Thus with regard to the overwhelming majority of the population who will never reach the end of the rainbow, let alone find any gold whatsoever, the following may be of interest:

          According to a new report on Britain by Oxfam, 1% of her population owns almost more than 20 times the total wealth as the poorest fifth: that is, 634,000 of the wealthiest people against the poorest 13 million. This makes Britain, the world’s sixth wealthiest economy, one of the most unequal of countries in the developed world. Over half of Britain’s wealth is concentrated in the hands of the richest 10%, while the poorest 20% share 0.8% of the wealth between them.

          The head of Oxfam’s UK programme, Rachael Orr: ‘While executive pay soars, one in five people live below the poverty line and struggle to pay their bills and put food on the table.’ According to the charity Global Justice Now, corporations make up 69% of the world’s richest entities. Walmart, for instance, is worth more than either Spain, the Netherlands or Australia. Three Chinese corporations are worth more than the entire economy of South Korea. (Morning Star 13.9.16) The top six wealthiest entities are: the USA, China, Germany, Japan, France and the UK, followed by Italy, Brazil and Canada. The 10^th wealthiest is Walmart. 14^th is China’s electricity monopoly, then China National Petroleum at 15^th and the Chinese (oil) Sinopec Group at 16^th. Royal Dutch Shell is 18^th, Exxon Mobile is 21^st, Volkswagen 22^nd, Toyota 23^rd and Apple a mere 26^th. The value of the top ten corporations, at $285 trillion, tops the combined worth, $280 trillion, of the bottom 180 of the world’s countries. Global Justice Now ‘blamed governments for bowing to pressure from multinational firms to promote business-friendly tax regimes above the needs of their citizens.’ UK government support for TTIP ‘is the latest example of government help to big business.’ (Guardian 13.9.16) Unite union general secretary Len McCluskey wrote in the Morning Star for 10.9.16: ‘[In] 2016 our children will be poorer than we are; housing need is just one of a number of material scandals; pay has yet to recover to its pre-crash value let alone rise; five million workers are termed self-employed; foodbanks are no longer an urgent response to an emerging problem but a vital part of our social fabric. Our NHS is in genuine crisis and all eyes are watching for government action on Brexit that will not see job prospects and workers’ rights worsen.’

          Things do not appear to be much better in the Land of Opportunity, according to The Guardian for 13.9.16: ‘Desperate US teenagers turn to sex to work to pay for food’: ‘A Washington-based thinktank, the Urban Institute, described girls “selling their body” or using “sex for money” to make ends meet. Boys desperate for food were said to shoplift and sell drugs.’ Boys and girls trying to avoid the stigma of prostitution provide sex in return for a hot meal, not for money as such. And food is stolen to feed whole families, not just the thief. All this information and more besides was drawn from 10 poor communities across the United States.

          But there is light at the end of the tunnel. According to data collected by Capita Assets Services, total dividends paid out by the UK’s listed companies since 2000 have passed £1 trillion, ‘outstripping both inflation and economic growth’. (‘UK dividends to pass £1 trillion mark’, Daily Telegraph 7.9.16.) Capita expects the £2 trillion mark ‘to be reached well within the next decade.’

          It’s good news like this that would appear to inspire the opening remarks by fundit and business editor Allister Heath when he writes: ‘Karl Marx was wrong: free markets are wonderful. They have delivered prosperity on an astonishing scale and helped bind the world together. But their greatest triumph has been their ability to turn workers into capitalists.’ (Daily Telegraph 28.8.16)

          I begin to fear that the 13 million people mentioned earlier will not fit easily into this ‘capitalist’ category, nor will workers in Britain in general, I hazard. They participate in capitalism, of course, and they are certainly the basis for all the wealth just described, but the nature of their participation is rather different from that of the ‘personifications of capital’ as such.  I wonder if Mr Heath is making in the above passage the same elision of ‘worker’ and ‘middle class’ that pertains in the United States, where the term ‘working class’ is verboten and everyone is, in fact, ‘middle class’. Whether living in a penthouse suite overlooking Central Park or in a cardboard box somewhere under Brooklyn Bridge.

          In another article (Daily Telegraph 15.9.16) Heath appears to have a clearer idea of distinction between the two classes in Britain when he writes of a welfare state ‘that has bailed out the poor’, but this suggests some shortcomings grasping the reality of any such bailing out (see above) as well as logical inconsistency: if the market was so ‘wonderful’ (on 28.8.16) why do we have any ‘poor’ at all? That is, in need of bailing out? (Which they aren’t being, anyhow.)

          But in fact the bulk of our fundit’s 28.8.16 article is – gainsaying the optimism of its opening – pessimistic if not alarmist. For Mr Heath, it turns out, is worried about ‘savers’, who ‘are facing their greatest challenge since the 1970s.’ Indeed, his article is headlined ‘Cheap money is destroying all our futures and killing capitalism’!

          Of course it turns out to be our own fault, not capitalism’s, for the problem according to Heath is that today’s savers ‘now live longer’, which is a shame, really. If only people could continue to die out when they used to – in their sixties, say – then the final salary pension plus state aid would have remained sustainable. So individuals – it serves them right – now have to look to themselves for long-term survival, ‘and rightly so: the old paternalistic model was always an aberration, an unsustainable phase of early capitalism.’

          In other words, paternalistic capitalism was a hiccough between the era of the Industrial Revolution when workers’ self-sufficiency eventually put them in the workhouse, and the era of today when they have come to depend on foodbanks. A blip, a provision of basic care which according to our fundit was ‘an aberration’. Fortunately we have entrepreneurs today like Sir Philip Green to show us just how unsustainable the final salary pension can be, and indeed how successful late capitalism is.

          ‘The problem is,’ continues Heath, ‘that ultra-low interest rates are destroying the economics of wealth accumulation.’ This will be news to those great wealth accumulators like Sir Philip   and the even greater Warren Buffett and Carlos Slim. They and those of like magnitude seem to have no problem with ‘the economics of wealth accumulation’, as is suggested by the statistics already given, above.

          Yet the ‘savers’ whom our fundit is so worried about have been ‘the epitome of the responsible individualism that underpins all successful democracies.’ But democracy cannot it seems be all that successful; with ‘gilt yields of 0.5% and inflation at 0.6%, compounding is dead. Real returns are either zero or negative; time is no longer the saver’s friend.’ Result: ‘Britain’s wealth-owning majority [sic] will suddenly realise how hard it has become to make money from money.’ Well, hard for them. It doesn’t appear to trouble the bulk of hedge funds, which exist and prosper precisely out of making money from money.

          And as the ‘savers’ become aware of this, ‘pain and anger will set in, and there is nothing scarier than the middle classes on the warpath’. But before dialling 999 it’s worth noting that: ‘there won’t be a revolution, merely a gradual and dangerous rise in resentment.’ What a letdown. Suburbia will not go up in flames after all.

          Governments and central banks must, it seems, take much of the blame for low interest rates: ‘their obsession with pushing down the cost of borrowing has led to a monumental mispricing of money.’

          I am not quite sure how money can be ‘mispriced’, since it reflects social activity and is therefore ‘priced’ accordingly. Money by itself has no value at all, as the Germans of 1923 learned to their cost. The value of money is tied to and goes up and down with a host of conditions, national and international, political and economic.

          But Heath is on to something, since ultra-low interest rates have not of themselves increased borrowing and investing by very much. These low rates plus quantitative easing are having diminishing positive effects. On the other hand – as Heath’s fellow Telegraph fundit Jeremy Warner points out in another edition, the very threat of the Federal Reserve Board’s raising of rate of interest by even a tiny amount sends shockwaves throughout the world economies. The problem lies in the mountains of debt accumulated by governments, individuals, bankers, firms, for all of whom the slightest rise in the rate of interest would be catastrophic. Whatever the tenor of Heath’s remarks, the powers-that-be are not wilfully against ordinary ‘savers’. They’d love to help them. But in the current state of play such ‘savers’ are the (sometimes) useful idiots who can and must be – disregarded. In a more civilised way, they are to the capitalist system today what the richer peasants of 1930s Russia were to Stalin: a necessary sacrifice. Somebody had to go. ‘Savers’ are the least of the world’s problems in a world of heavy borrowers.

          And underlying all of this is the slackness in world demand for both capital and consumer goods. Read your Baltic Dry, Mr Heath. And this in turn comes down to the rich monopolising the funds thus freezing out the increasingly large majority of non-rich who, after all, must in one way or another buy back all that has been produced if the system is to re-energise and Mr Heath is able to restore any great confidence in the ‘wonderful’ market. But if the masses cannot, for purely economic reasons, buy all the stuff back then the answer is that they should own it already. Mr Heath as a fundit would obviously prefer another option: ‘It may be, in the end, that we will all [sic] have to contribute twice as much, saving up to 20 per cent of our incomes across our working life, while spending less on luxuries, and retiring even later.’ How much later, one wonders? And what does that do for younger-age-group employment? Indeed, if we save so much, holding back on ‘luxuries’ (i.e. purchases), where will investment and jobs be then, when nobody is spending much of anything on anything? At least the financial bods will do all right out of the pension side of this. As for saving 20%, what do we put it into before we need it? And who has or will have the 20% to spare?

          Our fundit has indeed picked up on a capitalist malaise of our time but to put his finger on its root cause – woeful but entirely characteristic and necessary inequality leading to overproduction and consequent lack of investment (an old, old story) - he would perforce have to be critical of the market system, which is ‘wonderful’ and of which he is one of its leading liaison officers. So, widen the appeal of the article (if not narrowing and sharpening the argument) by appealing to ‘all’ of us since his Britain is a mythical realm of sturdy small savers. Alas for him they are but a minority  and by no means the most important sector in the eyes of those trying to save the world economy – or these, from the Governor of the Bank of England on down – would have strained every muscle to do something for them long since. (And there are, after all, votes in it, at least for the Conservatives and the US Republicans.)

          Fundit Mr Heath seeks some sort of historical resonance for his ‘savers’. Again unfortunately for him the history of capitalism is littered with the bodies of the ‘little people’ whom, as Heath says, the Marxists refer to ‘disparagingly’ as the petty bourgeoisie. Their history is one of secular economic decline against the ever-greater forces of capital which favour the bigger over the smaller investor and businessman, a decline leading sooner or later into proletarianisation – and certainly that of their children, as we see today before our eyes. Fascism of one sort or another tends to be their protest of choice. Today we have millions masquerading as ‘self-employed’ because they cannot find jobs. Their situation is ultimately rather hopeless, so Mr Heath may be right in prognosticating a ‘warpath’ as a result. In that event, will the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mail and the evergreen Nigel Farage (and even Donald Trump) be enough to satisfy them?

BY THE WAY… (Revised)

          BLOGGER'S NOTE:  As the silly season draws to its close I give it a parting shot with this - so appropriately silly as to be vulnerable to hostile response. I am working on something rather major at the moment so what comes below could be called seeking some light relief, also known as playing the fool. You either like this sort of thing or you don't. All the material here has been drawn from my notes. 

          For years, as a music lover, I have had the radio on lowish in the background whilst working. But this gives rise to serious mishearings of front- and back-announcements which create visions in my mind that throw me off my work altogether, and so defeating the object.  I guess we have all misheard from time to time; things like the following:

          ‘Find out more about Dartmoor’s Mutilating Fund.’ (Classic FM ad.)

          These on Radio 3 at various times:

          ‘The BBC Singers, conducted by Susan Sequins.’ And a touch of the Priapic: 

          ‘The whole thing is an excuse for elaborate testicles!’ (Discussion programme.)

          ‘The programme is presented by J. Russell Flapdick.’

          The late Alan Keith was probably, in his nineties, the world’s oldest disc jockey with his long-running Sunday night Radio 2 programme Your Hundred Best Tunes. But dear old Alan was not immune to apparent verbal peculiarities. Like one night when I think I heard him say: ‘And it’s my pleasure to welcome you to another programme for your acquired enjoyment.’ And a favourite Keithism of mine: ‘…by the French composer Derriére…’  And ‘The accompanist was Liz Tomahawk.’ And I am sure we can all guess what I was really supposed to have heard here: ‘London Philharmonia Orchestra, conducted by Sir Adrian Goat.’ And this, about Fauré: It was written when he was twenty, and still stupid.’

          Of course on Radio 2 one could hardly avoid the regular news flashes, informing us for example that: ‘Three hundred sardine company troops landed in Haiti today’, suggesting over-fishing going on in the Caribbean. And this cynical ploy to capture the lower-statured electorate: ‘Both candidates appealed to undersized voters last night…’ Along with some suspicious-sounding reporters: ‘Here is our correspondent, Robert Bigot, with the details…’  Radio 3 also had its news oddities, such as: ‘Heavy rain has caused flooding in Plastic and Northwest Kent’, and so on.

          We had overwrought Radio 3 concert pianists such as Anna Catalepsy and Bob van Aspirin, and other types (or species) of performer like ‘a promising young tortoise from Bath’, ‘…sung by Andrew Cockroach’, as well as utilitarian objects such as: ‘songs by Mahler sung by Diana Corkscrew’, ‘…British soprano Amanda Repro’, ‘Chopin’s Nocturne played by Anton Shoelace’, and vegetables or fruits like (a conductor, in fact): Avocado Skype. There were exotics straight out of WOMAD like ‘Poulenc’s Songs sung by the Bedouin Chamber Choir,’ and other ensembles: ‘”Shenandoah” sung by the Pillock Chamber Choir of Denmark.’  Speaking of singers, the American singer-songwriter Don McLean was once (by me) heard on Radio 2 saying: ‘Tomorrow is the day for Jewish hopes and call-girls.’ Was I going mad? But of course!  Mad with writer's block!

          And so it went on, with orchestras, conductors and composers. Also another from WOMAD, it would seem: ‘…played by the Taliban, sober.’ (I had assumed they always were, being Muslim.) Not to speak of the Kamikaze Orchestra (was it the 1812, with live-ammunition cannon?) And the composers: ‘Next on Radio 3, a new bionic symphony’ (Steve Reich or Philip Glass, no doubt); ‘Symphony on Paganini by Boris Blackout’, ‘Prokofiev’s Chapatti in E Minor’, and my favourite: ‘Shostakovich’s Étude in A Minor, the Suicidal.’  Shostakovich is wonderful but should probably not be relayed while you are waiting for a Samaritan to pick up the phone.

          Radio 3 trails should not be overlooked. My classic is this trail for a performance of Britten’s opera Gloriana: ‘Elizabeth I, a woman torn between her love for a traitor, and her duty to her puppies.’

          Seems more like another – erm -  to me, but – again – I may have mis-heard this. The late Terry Wogan used to mishear (?) pop lyrics like 'Mulligan's Tyres' and 'I wanna be a polar bear', and the country-and-western: 'Four hundred children and a crock in the field'. I believe Sir Terry was later told to shut up. Big money in that game. Half-listening can open up whole new (aural) vistas and images, rather as having one's eyes half-shut can also seem to offer hazy visions of the otherwise impossible
            Your advice? Turn up the  volume or get a hearing aid? I've since done both. 

IN PRAISE OF TEACHERS

          I didn’t mean for my memoir of loathing school (see last blog) to be slagging off teachers. Many of my teachers got me through by skill and tact within a system I hated, not them individually. They weren’t all inspiring by any means but then being John the Baptist or Joan of Arc was never a teaching qualification. Both my parents and my maternal grandparents were schoolteachers so I never even got the chance to nurture a festering hatred for the profession as a whole.

          Education has been bedevilled in England (I exclude Scotland from this discussion) by a top-down class system and the cyclical movements of political ideology nearer to the top or nearer to the bottom at one time or another. Grammar schools and 11-plus against comprehensives; academies and ‘free’ schools against state, etc. League tables and endless tests and exams exemplify an obsession over grades, as if grading made up for lack of educational strategy and vision. Another obsession amongst the English is the one over school uniforms, which most other European countries don’t appear to suffer. The Finns enjoy the highest educational standards in Europe with neither private schools nor uniforms. As someone wrote perceptively in a recent Letter to the Editor: uniforms are necessary for identifying certain personnel, such as police, security, medical and rescue workers, military and so on. Uniforms serving no such purpose have only one other: to internalise the conformism in the person who wears one, like a schoolchild, and to legitimate the control held over schoolchildren (or certain kinds of employee). Meanwhile teachers are leaving in droves exhausted and frustrated by time-consuming and endless bureaucratic procedures and the constant testing drive demanded by politicians. All made worse when a new set of politicians comes into power and turns the procedures around, though never reducing them. It turns out that Britain has no actual, conceptually consistent policy on education – or on pensions, prisons, hospitals, railways, and the environment for that matter.

          The bedevilment of education in America is I think more down to civic graft and corruption, since the public education system is operated at city or county level. Years ago Ivan Illich, in De-Schooling Society, seized on statistics showing that US educational standards were declining against ever higher educational appropriations. Illich didn’t say so, but this would seem to point to largescale misappropriation of funds more than to inappropriate methods of teaching: graft works best at the lower and more local levels of governance where secrets are easier to keep. A high school principal cannot obtain necessary funding, say, for up-to-date textbooks because the city hall monies are appropriated along old-boy network lines. Teachers generally are not held in very high esteem by citizens especially of the more rural states anyhow, so their agitation is ignored and there are few votes in the advocacy of better public schooling with appropriate pay levels for teachers as a profession. George Bernard Shaw did a terrible thing when he said: ‘Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.’ Very witty. An iniquitous and untrue saying which has stuck with people who never heard of Shaw. Especially since teaching may be an even more challenging and demanding - indeed draining - line of work than brain surgery.  We pay loads to those who operate on brains but not so handsomely to those trying to put something in them. And so we have a US statistic apparently showing that 49% of all Americans believe Satan is a real person.

          Somehow teachers manage to carry on under whichever system. My best teacher ever, who taught me history, was a quiet and kindly encouraging mentor who certainly inspired me – the only teacher I really loved as a person. So one Saturday afternoon I go to the pictures to find him tearing tickets at the door in a movie usher’s uniform, replete with cheap epaulettes. We both had the grace not to recognise each other, he standing there gazing into the middle distance tearing tickets. I do not mean to denigrate theatre ushers, but this wonderful man had to endure the sniggering of pupils he taught as they streamed past, in order to secure a decent living by taking a second job. I was deeply ashamed for my town and its politicians who denied him a proper salary in his own profession. The seeds of socialism were sown.

          By contrast I was taught English grammar and literature by a terrifying ogre in his sixties, tall, distant, grey and gaunt, with a face as inviting as Eamonn de Valera’s (look up Eamonn in Google). Teaching had made him entirely cynical about young scholars though perhaps his cutting sarcasm – and he ruled by sarcasm in a drawling English accent – derived from what I later decided must have been a minor public boarding school education in England (‘public’ of course means ‘private’ in higher-class British education). He never actually banged his ruler down on anyone’s knuckles, which would have been beyond the pale at least in high school even in those years, but it seemed possible at any moment, for he maintained a constant presence of menace and malice. His pupils repaid him in their adoration by once setting fire to his front porch, which no doubt confirmed him in his opinion of them. Perversely, I was rather fond of him, which would have shocked him to the core if he’d ever known since his tactics would thus have failed, at least the once. His contempt, though more thoroughly soused in brine than my own, was a bracing corrective to all the optimism otherwise being showered on us. But the real reason for my liking was his inability to conceal a sharpness of mind and thorough grasp of his subject. He got me through 17^th- and 19^th-century sonnets and Shakespearean soliloquies and I never forgot how to parse a sentence. His sarcasm was worth listening to. And from him I learned something even more valuable: that life is a bum deal if the world is full of people like him in it.  It has held me in good stead ever since, as the world is indeed full of such people.

          His son, who taught maths in the same school, could scarcely have been more different: friendly, informal, with no hauteur and desperate to instil the humbler branches of mathematics into me which failed as my brain was and remained numbers-dead. From his infinite patience and kindness I learned that trigonometry would never be for me.

          An even more obliging teacher, in woodworking, was young Mr Anstey. Our class projects were the making of a coffee table of a wood surface with wrought-iron legs. I could no more have made a coffee table than skinned a goat. But Mr Anstey did not believe in failure. More to the point: he did not believe in his boys failing on him. I soon learned that if I asked him about anything he would show me by doing it for me. I asked him how to plane the boards so they would fit together, and he showed me by planing the boards. I asked about varnishing, so he varnished the boards, that is, after he’d glued them together and sanded them down. I didn’t even have to ask about the wrought-iron legs: he just took it all in hand without complaint. In the end I had a splendid table and got an A for it. I took it home to my father who was delighted at my newfound talent for craftsmanship. I never disabused him. As Kate Chopin wrote: ‘The storm passed and everybody was happy.’ From Mr Anstey I learned another thing: when in doubt, Always Ask.

          Eventually I landed a swell part-time job on the local newspaper with a weekly ‘school’ column saying what went on around the school, the athletic and sporting events and so on. I felt like Clark Kent - a real smartypants. My editor was a genial soul who knew many of the teachers well. So when he subbed my articles he would change my ‘Mr’ or ‘Mrs’ or ‘Miss’ for the teachers to their Christian names: ‘Sam,’ ‘George’, ‘Jimmy’ or ‘Rosie’. The articles were published under my own by-line and so suggested a chummy over-familiarity with my academic betters. One old biddy rounded on me in the corridor one morning for my daring to refer to her as ‘Nancy’ instead of ‘Miss’ Thingamajig. In vain did I try to explain to her in her fuming the ways of editors, and of this one who had beefed up my piece without my knowledge. It is horrible to go around knowing all the teachers hate you. Surely it’s meant to be the other way round? I laid low thereafter for a while. My ‘Eamonn’ had struck again.

          Teachers taught me, one way or another, far more than they ever knew, or I knew at the time.

          Another objection to my previous blogs might be to the fatuity of a Marxian socialist who can’t stand participating in organised or agenda-driven groups. But it’s okay to hate the water and still cheer on champion swimmers and divers and their teams! Or to follow Andy Murray or Roger Federer without having played a stroke of tennis in one’s life. Spectators, yes, but the champions need their cheerers as much as the other way round. I cheer on the socialist movement from my particular sidelines and I hope that in some way it helps things along. Better than keeping shtum altogether I’d say.

          Perhaps one day I will find myself marching shoulder to shoulder with others in an organised grouping – with or without pitchfork – as conditions worsen to prise me out of my splendid isolation. Once, while suffering from a very bad back, I took myself on my motorbike to the theatre. It was even painful to ease myself into my seat. Then – fortunately near the interval – I realised I had left the keys in the ignition. At the first opportunity I sprang from my seat and sprinted off through the streets to rescue my machine if I could. With relief I found nothing had happened and my keys still dangling there. But what had happened to my back pain?  Circumstances can alter all of us however ingrained the condition.

WHERE IS THIS LEADING? (Part 2)

          I’m not getting as far along with this blog series as I’d like to partly because I want to keep the instalments a bit shorter than other blogs have been till now. So I’m not tackling everything as promised at the end of the ‘Jeremy Corbyn’ blog, below. I am sure you are disappointed. Sorry.

          Ah yes, eunuchs. (Where is This Leading? Part 1). When I was a kid I was fascinated by religion. In my day boys went in for model trains or Airfix World War II or F-86 fighters. More serious brainboxes made stinks and blew themselves up in the advancing of the science of chemistry. I’m not saying that girls didn’t also do all this but girls in my time seemed to be keener on reading fiction and on sewing patterns.

          With me it was God and the Universe. Were they inside or outside each other? How did we humans relate to Him or to It? I didn’t pray a lot but I read the Bible to help find out. And the Koran. And the Analects. And the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads. And the Buddha. Not to speak of the Tao te Ching. I still have four English translations of the Tao te Ching and they are so different from one another as to be quite separate, distinct books. But I’ve ended up favouring Tao even though I have little idea how it’s practised in modern-day China. Nor indeed what it means, although with Tao that doesn’t seem to be the point. Which is quite reassuring, really.

          Encouraged by my liberal mother so long as I didn’t make her come with me, I went for a time to a different church service every week simply out of curiosity. The American town where we lived for some years provided plenty of scope. We had the Episcopalians, the Presbyterians, Lutherans, Methodists, Baptists, Congregationalists and even some Unitarians. We had Quakers, Pentacostals, African Episcopals,  Christian Science, Seventh-Day Adventists, Christadelphians, Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses. Not to speak, obviously, of the Roman Catholic Church. No Greek or Russian Orthodoxy so far as I was aware, and our town was of insufficient size to have enough Jews to form the congregation for a synagogue or temple, which I thought was a shame. And at that time there would have been no mosque or Sikh temple. Nor could I locate any Taoists. But then I never thought I would.

          My favourite moment occurred when attending a small, austere and humble protestant church of one denomination or another. The preacher, a skinny, goaty little man, gave a powerful and lengthy if squeaky sermon from the pulpit. He ended with this resounding, conclusive climax: ‘And if you don’t believe me, just ask my wife!’

          Whereupon he turned and pointed a trembling bony finger at a grim-faced, grey-haired matron plumped down like granite in the front row of the church choir, the corners of her mouth thrust firmly downwards. There seemed little doubt that his missus knew exactly what was what. And then we went on to the final hymn. I have never since that moment thought the Christian Church to be unduly patriarchal.

          I just couldn’t take up with any of them. I became more fascinated by the class structure of the main denominations. Episcopalians  were the country-club nobs with pots of money, though obviously not entirely. The solid, substantial Presbyterians were next on the social scale. Further down in some sort of order were the Lutherans, the Methodists, the Congregationalists and the far more numerous Baptists. Every subtle gradation of social class seemed to have its own church, though the social mix was more fluid in the less orthodox communities, as was Roman Catholicism, which embraced the prosperous and the immigrant underclasses and office-cleaning Mexicans. In my town Sundays you had to pay to get into the local Catholic church. Perhaps because the fabulous display with its expensive upkeep brought uplift to poor people whose wherewithal was too uncertain to ensure an appropriate contribution from a voluntary pass-the-plate offering.

          So, religiously speaking, I was a kind of eunuch, fascinated by it all if unable to take part. I must have been approaching religion the wrong way for I was quite immune to its social attractions and practices. Except for certain moments in hymn singing or in thrall to a particular preacher of some charisma I felt no particular uplift, though that preacher’s missus did give me the shock of my life: if she was the repository of wisdom I was definitely afraid of approaching it. Some religions have gruesome idols to inspire fear as much as devotion but I was confronted that one time by a living one. I think she was alive though she never moved a muscle except when standing and in singing mode. And even then I was not sure which muscles were in use.

          I always revelled in informal camaraderie like our great little neighbourhood gang so I wasn’t as antisocial as all that. I joined the Scouts but soon found that camaraderie and semi-militaristic conformism didn’t mix. I was uninterested in square knots and I hated our horrible campfire food concoctions, not to speak of being advised to bash my underpants repeatedly against a tree trunk if there was no opportunity to wash them. The old gang with a girl or two or three was fine but this all-male junior honcho stuff showed up the unsavouriness (in more ways than one) of young malehood in organised and vaguely coercive circumstances, adhering to  some kind of group ethos that none of us really understood. All this brought out the rebel in me and I vowed the first thing I would do when I became a revolutionary would be to burn down the scout hut - preferably with a nest of scouts plus scoutmaster inside.

          I would never equate Marxism with religion and certainly not with scouting, but my approach to it has been as gingerly in some respects. Old habits and ways of thinking die hard. As I say, I love friendship and informal (including family) sociality, the informal seeming to have come about any old way. But formal and agenda-driven group sociality has always given me the willies. For some reason I find it embarrassing and even mildly oppressive. We’re all going to do this, or we’re all going to do that. I’m no neurotic individualist; I thrive in company far more than in myself. It is just organised company that I can’t deal with.

          Needless to say that away from the playground I mostly loathed school for all those terrible twelve years. It’s a wonder I got through into young adulthood and now I can’t really remember. Somehow I got to university and it all changed. Not only was the subject-matter more interesting but also I could opt in or out of sociality as I pleased and if I joined a small club of not much consequence it would be with like minds, similar to the old neighbourhood. And this is why I want unlimited access to university and similar higher education for all those who didn’t make the grade in school: it’s all so different, guys! The more you hated school the more you’ll love the next stage if you can ever get there. So if there’s a reinvention of the 11-plus let the ‘failures’ in before everybody else! Jolly unfair but as I learned some of those who excelled in school had a miserable time later in the more adult and less regimented atmosphere (and challenge) of higher education. They should really have left education while they were ahead! I shouldn’t think a single educational authority or expert would agree with me, but I know it’s true.

To be continued….