THE NEW DEVIL’S DICTIONARY

 

ADVERTISING – paid for in supermarkets.

 

AFFORDABLE HOUSING – to make property primarily unaffordable.

 

AMAZON – a tribe of fierce women who became the world’s biggest exploiters of cheap labour.

 

ANTI-SEMITISM – being opposed to Netanyahu and far-Right Israeli politics and illegal land seizures. In Jews, this opposition is called ‘self-hatred.’

 

BENEFIT SCROUNGERS – by no means all of the 800 or so who sit in the most bloated unelected parliamentary chamber in the world collecting £300 a day + expenses for doing nothing. Also a family I know of vaguely but whose name (if not income) momentarily escapes me.

 

BONFIRE OF THE RED TAPE – abolishing health and safety regulation and inspection of construction sites, factories, offices, tower blocks, schools, hospitals and on the road.

 

BREXIT – the spirit of 1940 when Britain ‘stood alone’ backed by Empire and nourished by Bovril. Nowadays will preside – when enacted – over a loss of trade by keeping out of the EU but of course still subsidising cheap rail tickets on the continent. Meanwhile, will seek 51^st statehood of the USA.

 

DEBT – someone else’s asset.

 

DICTATORSHIP – applies to Cuba and Venezuela but not to Azerbaijan, Turkey or Uzbekistan, which have popularly elective assemblies at all levels of government.

 

EMPLOYMENT – zero-hour contracts,   unlimited hours without overtime pay, stagnating and declining wages against inflation (often requiring ‘in-work’ benefits), insecure pensions, unsociable hours and mass mental depression.

 

FAKE NEWS – first inscribed on Assyrian monuments c. 2000 BCE.

 

FREE SCHOOLS – freedom for shareholders and CEOs to make a packet out of the substandard education of children. For a better and – in a special sense – richer Britain.

 

GROWTH – the world economy dies if it does not ‘grow’, until it absorbs the whole planet and then some. If ‘growth’ were the sole object of life, then the success of trees (say) would be that they never stopped growing. Another term for collective insanity. But steady-state capitalism is a contradiction in terms.

 

HATRED OF FREE SPEECH – anti-fascism.

 

IMMIGRANTS – these supply our food by picking and keep the NHS going while also buying up our football teams.

 

JOGGING – brings the computer into green open spaces, which are scarred with deep muddy grooves made by the same anti-social impulses fed in the first place by staring into computers.

 

LIFESTYLE – personalised selfishness.

 

LITTER – the triumph of free enterprise in all directions.

 

NANNY STATE – provides security for all in health and basic needs and so creates a ‘culture of dependency’.

 

PHILOSOPHY – the art of reducing humanity’s deepest and most searching questions to mumbo-jumbo. Scientists build on the success of past scientists; philosophers feed on the shortcomings of past philosophers.

 

PIECEMEAL SOCIAL ENGINEERING (‘Sir’ Karl Popper) – change without upsetting the powerful. A weasel phrase, one of this great philosopher’s best known.

 

POLITICAL MEMOIRS – prop doors open.

 

POLLUTION – the oxygen of modernity.

 

PROGRESS – enslavement.

 

RADICAL TERRORISTS – anti-frackers, especially anti-fracking grannies and blokes in wheelchairs.

 

REFORM/LIBERALISATION – reform of labour so that it can be more cheaply hired and more easily fired.  Advocates ‘labour flexibility’ and ‘labour mobility’ on these grounds.

 

ROLLING BACK THE STATE – once one has bon-fired the red tape, we get rid of social infrastructure including health care, education and public transport as well as day-to-day law and order.

 

RUNAWAY BESTSELLER – so over-hyped that, with any luck, it will be sold off in WH Smith’s at half-price within six months.

 

SPENDTHRIFT LABOUR – though not quite so spendthrift as the Tories, who have piled up the national debt higher than Labour ever did chiefly by giving tax-cuts to the better-off and allowing non-domiciled status to the seriously rich.

 

SOCIAL MEDIA – to encourage anti-social behaviour. Amongst other things they promote the grooming, self-harm and suicides of children, and pay as little tax as they can get away with.

 

SOCIOLOGY – substantiates the mythology of ‘society’ as a reified object, like an idol.

 

TRADE UNION BARONS – to be distinguished from press barons, union barons salt union dues away in tax havens and tend to be non-domiciled for tax purposes.

 

TRICKLE-DOWN EFFECT – as the rich get richer the poor get poorer because the rich grab even larger proportions of the available money. What ‘trickles down’ is poverty.

 

VENTURE CAPITALISTS - buy up companies, suck them dry of capital and then sell them off to the lowest bidder, all in a spirit of daring adventure.

 

WEALTH CREATORS – those who steal and mortgage the future of the wealth created by others.

 

….My work here is done!

 

 

With due acknowledgements to Ambrose Bierce (1842-?1914) and his Devil’s Dictionary. He disappeared in Mexico in 1914. If you are still alive, Mr Bierce, preferably in a comfy little hacienda, thanks a lot.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Marxist at the Movies (4):

 

QUESTIONS OF MOVIES SPECTACLE

 

          Jon Boorstin’s The Hollywood Eye discusses the role and significance of ‘spectacle’ in Hollywood movies. Spectacle (such as large crowd scenes) is meant to impress the viewer with sheer size as well as create the overall context for the stories of the individual characters. And so we have, for example, the lengthy Italian-Mafia wedding which opens The Godfather, providing a ‘respectable’ social panorama as the setting for the unfolding gangland drama. Or scenes in which Los Angeles is being destroyed by volcano or alien invasion (a city that has probably been ‘destroyed’ more often than most), battle scenes, the Roman Triumph and Colosseum, a towering inferno etc. For Boorstin it is important not to allow the panoramic spectacle to take over the movie: it is at best a means of (relatively briefly) putting the main characters within the worlds they inhabit without showing us ‘the world’ the whole time.

          Spectacle is very much a Voyeur thing (see 2 in this series), satisfying the viewer’s curiosity and amazement about the world and aspects of it.

          This may be being seen as keeping the spectacular and the intimate apart (which is indeed how they are respectively shot in most practice) but Hollywood films with various spectacles are nonetheless required to relate them to the individual dramas being played out here. (Did I really hear the line: ‘I love you but that’s not important right now’ in The Towering Inferno? Something like that, spoken straight, and if I did hear it there it was a bathetic attempt by the scriptwriter to link the inferno with the love-interest as fast as the licking flames would allow.)

          Indeed the spectacle – including potential or actual airplane or shipping disasters – invariably serves as a medium for reconciliation when things turn out okay for the survivors. Father and warring daughter are reconciled; formerly quarrelling passengers embrace each other in tears; a boy learns to become ‘a man’ or a young woman realises empowerment.

          The 1950s film From Here to Eternity (starring, amongst others, Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr) seems to me to have flaws that stem from the original novel. The ‘spectacle’ in this case is going to be the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the setting for the film. But its central motif is the illicit love-affair between the US sergeant, Lancaster, and the genteel sex-starved wife of a superior officer, Kerr, culminating in the in-those-days-steamy moment on the beach when they are bathed in waves as they make love – parodied deliciously by Airplane! of 1980 when they are tangled up in kelp as well. There is some power in this slow-burning story of passion, and in other strands as well, for it is also amongst other things a boxing movie. The problem is that absolutely none of this has anything to do with what the dastardly Japanese are planning in faraway Tokyo. It is an ‘alien’ disaster that overtakes them all but it has little connection with the emotional gravity of the movie.  Viewers who knew that the bombing was coming (a well-known event to American audiences in the early 1950s) will have been counting time, as it were, against the big moment whatever Lancaster, Kerr, Montgomery Clift or Frank Sinatra were going through. The same might be said for the majority of classic and not-so-classic sci-fi movies involving either earthquakes, aliens or malevolent asteroids in which the ‘human interest’ or ‘love-interest’ is only rather tenuously or dubiously linked to the big happening. Or vice-versa: there is the Warren Beatty picture Reds – I owe this instance to Slavoj Zisek in his 2008 book In Defense of Lost Causes – about the true-life radical American reporter John Reed whose account of the Russian Revolution Ten Days That Sho0k the World is a key eye-witness one as well as a championing of the Bolshevik cause. Arguably, as Zizek says, ‘the most traumatic historical event of the twentieth century’, but:

How, exactly, is the October Revolution depicted in the film? The couple of John Reed and Louise Bryant are in a deep emotional crisis: their love is reignited when Louise watches John on a platform delivering an impassioned revolutionary speech. What then follows is their love-making, intersected with archetypal  scenes from the revolution, some of which reverberate in an all too patent manner with the love-making, say, when John penetrates Louise, there is a cut to a street where a dark crowd of demonstrating people envelops and stops a penetrating “phallic” tramway… all this against the background of the singing of “The Internationale” … Even the October Revolution is acceptable [‘acceptable’, so Zizek implies, to an American audience] if it serves the reconstitution of a couple.

In such manner, then, is spectacle provided to serve as mere background (or metaphor) for the all-important love-interest between a particular twosome. The effect is overblown bathos, but it is fully in line with how Boorstin would regard the proper use of spectacle in Hollywood feature films. (To be fair, Boorstin himself does not refer to this film.) That is, ordinary individuals come first: history must be portrayed to fit around them. We might well expect this to come from the Hollywood eye with its tacit embrace of liberal-conservative individualist values.

          For we might contrast Reds with two literary examples of the bringing together of the individual with the socio-political: Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution. Both these (fortuitously Russian) authors move easily between the doings of various featured individuals and the mass without any sense of an imposition of the individual over the mass. Rather, both are human exemplars of one overall crucial event: the fall-out from Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in the one instance and the lead-up to and outbreak of the October Revolution in the other. Both events swamped the lives of everyone high and low. War and revolution are humanity itself engaged in action in the mass even as individuals go about their own business, which is never only their own business at the time. As from the top to the bottom of British society during the Blitz of 1940-44.

          Consider (in terms of individuals-mass movement spectacle) such Soviet films as Battleship Potemkin, October, Mother etc. which match in celluloid what Trotsky achieved in historical ‘epic’ literature: masses as individual, individuals in themselves containing masses. Or, from another revolutionary perspective, Gance’s Napoleon. Hollywood’s depiction of the Blitz was – Mrs Miniver. A comedown in bourgoisified America from the more collectivist age of the silent era with its European immigrant audiences – and a significant number of immigrant directors, who made silent films the epitome of the integrated spectacle, that is, in the hands of Chaplin, von Stroheim, von Sternberg, Murnau, Mamoulian – together with the native-born Americans Griffith, King Vidor, Buster (The General) Keaton, de Mille etc.

          By contrast, no modern techno-CGI spectacle can save the bathos of Bill being reunited with Jean through the instrumentation of an asteroid. An American middle-class domestic drama played out like this renders the spectacle ultimately boring if indeed it does go on too long – while the spectacle does the same thing to the doings of Bill and Jean, because they can’t match it for spectacle and spectacle as such is not underpinned dramatically by – on their own – them. The Perfect Storm with George Clooney is a much better example of integrated spectacle-individual, tragic and universally relevant. But even Spielberg - of other films - never quite overcomes this problem.

          Thus does Boorstin’s belief in keeping a lid on spectacle say something about the fragility of an individualism whose ideology is threatened by mass happening and action, and in this position is (ironically enough) impoverished. In reality, the individual is the social being, not side-by-side ‘society.’

What’s Happening?

 

          I’m sorry to keep bringing it in, but the Daily Telegraph Business for 6^th November 2017 ran two front-page stories side-by-side which I find perplexing.

          In one, we find warnings being raised by leading financial think tanks that stocks are rising so high (the FTSE closed on Friday 3^rd November at 7,560.35 – a record high) that they are looking very much as they looked on the eve of the Dot.Com  crash of 2000, and – even more ominously – on the eve of Black Tuesday 1929.

          Anything could happen to destabilise the lot at any time: high interest rates could trigger a crash, while ‘unreasonably’ low rates could create a bubble followed by a bust. A crunch in China’s debt markets is only one of any number of things that could also ‘set off shock waves across the world and into US stocks’. (A Donald Trump-tweeted declaration of world war is not mentioned.)

          Time to stuff your mattress?

          Meanwhile, side-by-side with this: ‘Theresa May will today urge business to look to the next decade with “rational optimism” as part of a new chapter for Britain’s economy.’ Apparently Britain is going for ‘a stronger, fairer, better balanced economy…which builds on its strengths and can compete in the world.’ Never mind that the Tories have already had seven years of power presumably to do just this. The response of Mrs May’s CBI audience was lukewarm. Perhaps she reminded one or two there of Herbert Hoover – the US President who kept saying ‘the business of the country is basically sound’ and ‘prosperity is just around the corner’ in response to a Crash which had indeed already taken place.  Is Theresa May the new Hoover? It is her sunny, optimistically vague outlook that gives me the willies more than any dire warnings from the NIESR and BNP Paribas. And with Jeremy Corbyn waiting in the wings as the UK version of the next Roosevelt. (The New Deal wasn’t that bad for business, under the circumstances.)

          When, oh when, will we go for the true ‘rational optimism’ of socialism? The present stock markets suggest more ‘irrational optimism’ than anything else. If only the ‘hidden hand’ of the market had been possessed of a brain.

          On the one hand if you prognosticate disaster you help it along by creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. If, on the other, you stamp out pessimism disaster happens anyhow behind your back. Better to be complicit, or a fool? Thus are financial experts caught in this bind. Meanwhile they are finally earning their money by the sweat of their brows (Mrs May, by contrast, only ‘perspires’), coming up with such formulations as that the economy is looking great but is heading for a crash of monstrous proportions, or that the figures are ambiguous showing that while we are heading for a fall off the cliff, the global economy has never looked better. A Great Depression to come with greater prosperity for all. The best they seem to be able to do these days by way of ideologically preserving the system (which is their job) is to send out ‘mixed messages’. It would be better for them to throw down some bones for a more intellectually-rigorous look into the future: as we know, astrologers and medicine-men are never wrong.

SPIVVY BANKS

 

          This blog picks up from the last one, ‘Owen Jones and Banks’.

          It’s derived in part from Observer financial columnist Phillip Inman (‘All hail British banks: self-absorbed, short-termist and spivvy’, Observer 29^th October 2017). Mr Inman draws from a new report issued by the IPPR Commission on Social Justice: ‘Financing investment: Reforming Finance Markets for the Long Term’. The Commission includes business leaders, people from the charity Citizens UK, the Archbishop of Canterbury and various academics. Let’s look at salient facts cited by Mr Inman:

          Loans to UK businesses account for just 5% of total UK bank assets (compared to 11% in France, 12% in Germany and a 14% average across the Eurozone).

          Property loans to businesses and individuals in the UK account for more than 78% of all loans to individuals and non-financial businesses.       Strip away real estate, and loans to UK businesses account for just 3% of all banking assets.

          Hedge funds are just as bad. These plus high-frequency traders collectively make up 72% of trades on the London market. The IPPR accuses them of ‘paying themselves on performance against rivals and over short time-scales, “not long-term value-creation”’.

          What is Inman’s context for this? ‘Britain is in the midst of an investment crisis, a productivity crisis, an income crisis and an inequality crisis – and all are so entrenched that they are beyond policies that tinker or No. 10’s “nudge unit”.’  So do something about it! Line all the bankers and hedge-funders up against the wall facing certain death by firing squad until they beef up their 'long-term value creation'!


          Alas, banks and hedgers do not create value. ‘Long-term’ value comes from workers in the employ of production bosses, not from the likes of these, who are only financial intermediaries. The financial sector functions (ideally) to circulate existing value more efficiently, not to make value abracadabra-style.  Bankers are likely to reply that business is not approaching them to any great extent, let alone an optimal one. Banks loan to those who borrow in order to make investments, but what happens if (outside of property) borrowing itself has fallen off? It’s not as if banks were inherently anti-business. But they can’t force businesses to borrow. As we know it is a sound principle that one never borrows from a bank if one cannot afford to. In contrast to smaller businesses (and ‘zombie’ ones) that may be staring at the possibility or likelihood of insolvency, larger corporations are sitting on piles of their own cash as it is. It would seem likely, on this account, that we are witnessing what JM Keynes long ago railed against as the enemy of any capitalist economy: hoarding.

          Here is a big problem with money: money is a circulating medium, to be sure, but due to its own fetishistic existence money can also be withdrawn from circulation altogether and still retain its fetish-value. If it is safer to hoard money than to invest it, this is what capitalists will do – as they did in the Great Depression of the 1930s. Indeed if they hoard enough cash less money will be in circulation, which neatly avoids hyper-inflation, since ‘too-much-money’ here isn’t doing anything! Capitalist economies that run out of things to invest in either safely or profitably or preferably both can revert to a kind of Aladdin’s Cave economics: but all they require, unlike the misers of old, is money itself, not necessarily  in the form of gold and precious jewels, though perhaps with the odd Rembrandt. Heavy taxation on hoarding will not de-fetishize money itself.

          So – hoarding works!

          But hoarding – as with its opposite, potential insolvency – is certainly the antithesis of banking, which is grounded in making profit through borrowing and lending for investment, i.e. the circulation of money as capital.

          The Right will chime in here to say that it is the fault of trade unions, red agitators, Remainers, Jeremy Corbyn & Co. who so disrupt business confidence that substantial business withdraws into its various Aladdin’s Caves. The true culprits in all this are not banks but red agitators (some in Remainer disguise) poisoning the minds of the populace! But decently-functioning capitalism is predicated upon endless investment, endless growth, regardless of either actual buying-power or a finite planetary environment. The Great Recession of 2007-08 was not caused by red agitators but by – and this is an invariable cause of crises – more and more money chasing fewer and fewer reliable or affordable prospects until it went for unreliable ones. Banks to be sure were heavily implicated for having spread the results of the disaster all around the world, but were not the root cause, which was a misfiring of investment in unreliable dealings. Banks facilitate deals but do not create growth of themselves. Banks certainly have not helped themselves in terms of exoneration, but this is fundamentally due to their essential powerlessness in given situations, for they are middlemen, not drivers. They do not make attractive martyrs and never have. But it turns out that lambasting banks – as lambasting red agitators – is an ideological safety-valve for the whole system. In the 1930s both financiers and reds were widely held to be to blame for the Depression, a unifying thesis then being an anti-Semitism that saw a world conspiracy hatched between them. (The anti-Semitism is not present in today’s scenario. In its place we have Muslims and immigrants in general, who are at least in position to be blamed for everyone else’s woes.)

          Let me wind up first with a quote from Istvan Meszaros’ seminal work Social Structure and Forms of Consciousness vol. I (p. 52):

          The only rationality that capital needs – and, of course, also dictates and successfully enforces – is precisely the “strictly economic” and operational rationality of the individuals engaged in the process of its enlarged reproduction regardless of the consequences.

Yet – amusingly enough, to some of us – our capitalists apparently these days don’t even stick to pure operational rationality in order that the whole system be reproductively enlarged. Let me quote again from Inman:

          This spivvy trading arena has the knock-on effect of making short-term demands on the boards of listed companies. Such is the pressure to avoid being caught in traders’ headlights that in a survey of more than 400 executives, some 75% said they “would sacrifice positive economic outcomes” if it helped smooth their profit figures from one quarter to the next.

This does not look like a banking problem – except in the sense that banks aren’t getting the business. And it looks less like capital’s operational rationality and more like a fish swallowing its own tail. Of course Meszaros’ fundamental contention – as opposed to the ‘laws’  of ‘marginal utility’ economics - is that the capital system as such is essentially irrational. This might equally be said of many if not all suicides.