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….

                   

         

JEREMY CORBYN

          In my previous blog ‘A Crisis in Ideology’ I stood up for Jeremy Corbyn and his popular movement against the machinations of the Labour bureaucracy attempting to destabilise them by arbitrary means of cancelling the voting rights of some and kicking out a large number of others and refusing to give any reasons for either action. Clearly they don’t want Jeremy to win the leadership again and just as clearly they perceive that Owen Smith is a hopeless candidate. The best they can realistically achieve is a drastic purge of as many suspected Corbyn supporters as possible.

This is not clean politics and indeed not politics at all but backroom bossism. Who before Jeremy was elected leader suspected that the Labour Party machinery had become Tammany Hall? However, elements in the Labour establishment realise they have a lot to lose if Corbyn’s position as leader is strengthened by a renewed and perhaps much larger popular vote than before. They are entirely correct, I believe, to assume that should there be an election before 2020 Labour will lose disastrously (the precedent is the calamitous 1983 election result with the Leftwing Michael Foot as leader, by no means due solely to Falklands War jingoism), and this is something that the Party establishment know they will have held much responsibility for bringing about through their divisive and unprincipled plotting. In this case both Corbyn supporters and Corbyn enemies are aiming at the same thing: a Labour defeat in their mutual struggle over Party principles, or ‘aims and values’. Defeat is likely to mean the downfall of Corbyn as leader. For those on the Right of the Party it means a respite and a chance to re-group and make a renewed bid (futile if Theresa May sustains a hold over the Shires and the middle-ground voters) to claim the Centre as in the good old Blair days.  But for those on the Left who support Jeremy, it may mean a stronger consolidation of Leftwing forces in the Party especially when the voters see that any Tory victors will be likely to do themselves little credit when their power is extended, while a Rightist Labour will seem – ‘rightly’ – as entirely superfluous politically. Corbyn support amongst the ‘general public’ is relatively low but many of the policies Corbyn puts forward are highly popular. If the Conservatives don’t transform themselves into de facto legislative Corbynites when in power then the chances of their long-term success after the next election are dim.

But although we may want a Corbyn victory in the leadership now as being the only glimmer of hope for a better politics to come, the outcome of his winning all the way to Number 10 Downing Street is quite likely to be dismal.

Let us suppose that Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell are successful all that way and end up in No. 10 and No. 11 respectively. Of course they will do their best to initiate a new government policy based on Corbyn’s ten-point plan, a sort of Keynesian wish-list of All the Things You Ever Wanted But Were Afraid to Ask. And of course a genuine attempt by a forceful government administration will do its utmost to see that these points – the result of much research into people’s needs and wishes – are put on the statute books.

But government finances – not only in Britain but also around the world – are hardly in a state to distribute Keynesian largesse being as they are deeply mired in debt, whatever the taxes Corbyn hopes to claw back from the biggies to support his programme: that alone could be mired in negotiating and legal battling for several years.  And something even more critical: the day Jeremy Corbyn is confirmed as prime minister will be the day of a massive capital strike. It usually happens to some extent whenever a Labour government is installed that capital flees the country in search of investment elsewhere. With Jeremy at the helm this would be a money Exodus of biblical proportions. There would be a flight of capital the like of which you would never have seen before. And watch out also for all kinds of international sanctions against a Corbyn Britain if people in other countries have not elected their own Jeremy Corbyns.

A Corbyn government might well dig its heels in in such a situation: by nationalising all the fundamental industries; by nationalising the Bank of England; by instituting credit and currency controls; by a higher tax-rate for the rich and for the big corporations. The results might well mean a burgeoning black market, rationing and queuing in the streets (some aged survivors of the postwar period will experience déjà vu), ‘digging for victory’,  and high utility and transport costs, as Britain is turned, in effect, into a garrison state. Such would probably not be the socialism that many would have been hoping to see.

And in any case it is unlikely that such a state of affairs could continue for long without the government being toppled (one way or another) and the ushering in of a crushing capitalist triumphalism that amongst other things would set back wages and working conditions a century, if not longer. And it might be another century still before a socialist movement could dare to look above the parapet.  Jeremy and his Keynesianism are impossible for a capitalism on  life support, and trying to bring it about would lead us to something worse than we knew when we first voted for him.

One thing seems certain: Jeremy could never bring about a major transformation or revolution when ensconced within a political party and overall set-up specifically designed to avert it. (Labour doesn’t even support proportional representation!)

Transformation can only come about from within the mass of the people themselves, co-operating with each other to bring it about. (Leaving aside the 20% made up of the minions of the 1%.) Not from within a compromised political and parliamentary party with a huge stake in preserving the status quo: that is, a system resting on the sole value of - capital, i.e. wage-labour-time under the time-punch-card-clock of capital. It is people who make and do the things that give society its existence and make it run, and it is people who must sooner or later co-operate with each other to control their own efforts and derive their own benefits, shared out with those unable to be active whether old or young or in challenging circumstances of one kind or another. Only the people can enact a people’s society. Serious distortions will crop up from the start if the whole process of revolution is directed by an exclusive political group, let alone a politburo of such a group, however apparently enlightened. Socialism has to start as socialism means to go on. Do we honestly expect that social transformation could occur from within a Party that runs a Stalinist bureaucracy to purge its own members in a time when comparatively little (that is, compared to the future) is at stake? Indeed, one day the purges could become real, in the bloody sense.

And are we so dependent on capital that we cannot face down - in the mass - a capital strike? But if we didn’t, the result would be the disintegration of the Corbyn government (assuming it ever came into power in the first place) and its immediate replacement by the grossest reaction seen in modern times. You don’t have to be in Brazil to have a Brazilian-style outcome. Not these days. And certainly not after Corbyn victories of one sort or another set the ball rolling.  But we are in a genuine epoch of revolution. Revolution is not something in the future: it is in the inescapable now, that is, at an early stage. Even if we ditch Corbyn and company for the political pinheads the resulting governing catastrophe will bring on more obviously revolutionary-type struggle in any case.

One way of facing a capital strike under a Corbyn government would be to bring his government down by revolutionary means, thus pre-empting the flight of capital by – ironically – abolishing capital! Certainly there will never been a genuine revolution but always class society as long as capital itself exists. ‘Capitalism’ can, after all, be government capitalism if the government owns all the capital instead of private corporations and individuals. That is the power that Joseph Stalin enjoyed.

Is all this pure fantasy? Futurology has something of fantasy about it by definition since the future contains so little of substance. But – as in the best science or political fiction – a reasonably acute futurology, for all the fantasy, may still point to the identification of very real possibilities.

I will be dealing critically with further points arising from my previous blog, while linking up also with ‘Where Is This Leading? (Part 1)’. This will be done in my next blog, ‘Where is This Leading? (Part Two)’.