EDWARD HOPPER (1882-1967)

Compartment C, Car 193 (1938)

oil on canvas 50.8 x 47.7 cm

Collection IBM Corporation

          I am fascinated by this picture, probably one that is no better- or lesser-known than most of his other works. It is initially the mystery that draws me into it.

          Here we have a young woman sitting in a night train (I’ll come to why I don’t think it is early morning). She is dressed in black with a wide-brimmed hat pulled down and almost obscuring her downcast eyes as she reads or leafs through unspecified reading matter. She could be dressed for a funeral but it seems more like business clothes, non-chic. She is middle-class, perhaps a secretary or personal assistant. She has a sensuality, characteristic of Hopper in his female portrayals, as marked out by her flaming hair under her sober hat, the shape of her breasts and her crossed legs revealing her knees. But she herself is indifferent to her allure and any sexiness originates solely in the male gaze. We can surmise a fair amount about her but as in all Hopper characterisations, we know virtually nothing about her, let alone what her thoughts may be. 

          Why does she sit one seat away from the window? Have other passengers vacated the compartment? The light cast upon her is the cold, chilling light from the aisle, yet there is a small wall-lamp above her that would make reading easier and cast a warmer glow over the scene, but she has not switched it on. The aisle seat itself is surely draftier than sitting next to the window would be. But how do we know that this woman is sitting with her back to the engine? There is nothing obvious to tell us in which direction the train is travelling. Most train passengers will opt to sit facing the engine and tend to choose vacant facing seats rather than sit out the journey riding backwards (though some feel ‘safer’ with their backs to the engine). In fact she occupies probably the worst seat in the compartment, apparently by choice. Somehow this travelling arrangement is all wrong.

          The scenery is by no means dull. Is the bridge a railroad bridge, and are we approaching it or coming away from it? Beyond that is a dark forest silhouetted by a blazing rising or setting sun. It’s really quite dramatic as scenery from a train goes. But it holds no interest for her. She seems to be reading casually rather than intensively: perhaps the material is travel brochures, like the material lying on the seat beside her. These tend not be exactly riveting. Is she informing herself on where she’s going?

          But how do we know that the train is moving towards rather than away from the setting or rising sun? The composition tells us as much, with a slanting, thrusting angle of the arrow-like windows aiming the train from left to right, in the direction of the twilight, not the opposite direction. If the woman is indifferent to the scenery, to the quality of the light, to the lesser comfort of an aisle seat, why should she not be indifferent to the direction in which the train is moving?

          Perhaps an answer lies in what is directly above her, for this is not a commuter train because of what appears to be a folded-in upper bunk bed. Either the compartment has not yet been prepared as a sleeper or it will not be for this particular compartment for one reason or another. We do not have to be familiar with American sleepers ourselves to know about these things if we have seen such films as ‘Some Like It Hot’ and ‘North By Northwest’, though the latter has a private stateroom: more expensive than convertible curtained-off sleepers though the latter were more expensive than a day-car only. (The much less comfortable French couchette is a rough equivalent.) Is she waiting for a porter to do the changeover from daytime to night-time use? This would prosaically explain why she is so indifferent to her present surroundings since they will be transformed shortly. And incidentally would tell us that this is an evening rather than early-morning train. (Today our American traveller would be going by a red-eye or short-haul flight.) So, she is not a commuter but going by express on a long or longish overnight journey. One is struck by the barrenness, the chill of the whole. As if she were dressed – for her own funeral. The closed upper bunk could be a metaphorical coffin. She is not facing the engine, looking forward to more life, but is being passively carried to her unknown ‘setting sun’ end, be it soon or much later. Passive lengthy travelling could be yet another Hopper take on isolation and solitariness – a deathly kind of depersonalisation, reached by killing time, which we do quite a lot of – that is, killing our own time. These days we have smartphones for the purpose.  

          Rene Magritte (1898-1967) painted with a meticulous realism of detail the better to create surrealist shocks, forcing us to question our visual assumptions in general. Hopper’s mature style of pictorial realism leads us in its deliberate but selective precision (the details of the paintwork are not ‘mysteries’ in themselves) into facing the essential ambiguity and mystery of other people whom we do not know and – in modern mass society – can never know. But although anonymous to us, and to everyone else, they do have lives, inner lives, of their own: lives that cannot be shared, which would seem to be a main part of living. As she travels along so indifferently and incongruously one feels it must be sad to die not having lived. With Hopper we are secure in what we are allowed to see but made the more unsettled when not unambiguously knowing what we ought to be able to see. This is another way of interpreting what Marx originally identified as alienation.

          (Compare with the more sententious and feel-good American realism of, say, Norman Rockwell.)

Mind Over Matter – Matter Over Mind?

 

          The so-called mind-body problem is one of the major philosophical old chestnuts. What is the ‘mind’, exactly? Where do thoughts come from and do they have some kind of ‘space’ of their own? Are dreams real portents or only caused by having had some cheese before bedtime?

          Religion is fundamentally based on the mind-body duality, or dualism: the mind is implanted by God and could be called another word for ‘soul’, which survives the body after death. Descartes, the great 17^th-century ‘father of modern philosophy’ thought that the mind resided in the pineal gland. (He also believed that only human beings had minds, or souls: animals were automatons of nature, like furry or scaled machines. So we need not mind about killing or maltreating them since they cannot think or even feel very much.)

          An equally great if much misunderstood philosopher of the 17^th century was Benedict de Spinoza, of Amsterdam. His view was entirely different from that of Descartes, and it is largely from Spinoza that the following is drawn. But any faults in the following are mine, not Spinoza’s – one of the greatest thinkers so far who ever lived.

          Thinking in relation to the brain might be considered in the light of an analogy with walking in relation to the legs. Legs are obviously made for walking (and kicking and running and jumping and stretching etc.) but walking as such is not in the legs. The product of walking is a certain distance covered, which is entirely outside the whole body of the legs that walked that distance. This product, or result, is quite outside the brain, outside the head and even outside the body of the walker.

          Spinoza wrote much of substance. Substance is everything material that there is. Thus substance, amongst other things, can think, because human beings are part of substance and they do indeed think: they are thinking substance, so far the only substance in the universe that we know that thinks. And what’s more humans think all the time, even in sleep, when they dream. There is no sharp division between thinking and a reflex action, but a gradating continuum between the two.

          The human brain is indeed the most complex organ or structure that we know of. It is hundreds of billions of times more powerful than the most advanced computer. Yet a minute physical examination of a human brain will not reveal a ‘thought’ residing inside it. You would look in vain for such a thing. And what could a thought possibly look like, even through the most powerful of microscopes?

          This would appear to make the act of thinking something miraculous, non-material, and so many believe that God or gods or spirits of one kind or another have something to do with it. In fact, a thought is a very material thing, which is not to say physical.

          There is no thought without content. Try thinking of nothing: it is impossible. Even a mental relaxation exercise that invites you to think of nothing usually suggests some kind of mental focus on a real or imagined object. You can’t think of nothing at all. Thought is materially determined by objects whether these be in front of you or whether they are recalled from the past or even conjured up by the imagination (itself relying a good deal on memory and past experience). In sleep the mind continues to think in various images, and not without logical progression – indeed, very much with logical progression even if the logic is Wonderland logic. Sensations in sleep derive from wish fulfilment, anxiety, past experience recent or distant or both, sexual desire and sexual antipathy, films or TV movies seen (or amalgams of them) or imagined scenes from literature, whether real literature or an imagined literature, myriad other sources. One thing is certain: dreams do not come from nothing at all.

          If you focus solely on ‘brain’ you get nowhere. If you focus solely on ‘mind’ you get nowhere. You only get somewhere if you see the one in terms of the other, inseparably.  The brain ‘does’ thinking just as the legs ‘do’ walking. But the thinking is focused constantly outside the physical person who thinks (we don’t normally and certainly not instinctively think of the internal workings of the brain itself whereby we do our thinking: everything has an outward focus). Thinking would atrophy and disappear altogether without a brain; likewise a brain that had no thoughts, however rudimentary (and connected, as suggested above, also to reflex actions) would be a dead brain. If the legs are never used, they too will atrophy and grow too weak for walking or much of anything else. And walking does not get done without legs to walk it. Such is the relationship between mind and brain that a usual question is: ‘What’s on your mind?’ not ‘What’s in your brain?’ That would be more for the neurosurgeon to query. And of course an impaired brain hampers thought just as a broken leg hampers leg exercise. But source and activity in both these examples are wholly and necessarily and constantly reciprocal.

          Thus half of your bodily existence is outside you. Your mind does not reside in the head, but in the head and in everything outside the head that causes thinking and includes such indispensably social things as languages. Language can only come into existence between and among human beings. If there was no one to communicate with there would be no language because of no use for it. And it is from the use of language invented for social reasons that we have learned to verbalise our internal thoughts: our thoughts are expressed, if silently, through words.  But the word is, if you like, a social organ. And so is your mind.  We would do well to reflect on the half-part of each of us that actually exists outside our bodies and in the world around, of things, people, ideas. These in turn are the necessary food for the mind operating through the body. Physically, 40% of the oxygen we take in goes to the brain, an enormously expensive organ to keep up. As we breathe air (which climate change deniers are in danger of forgetting when they declare their intention to burn down oxygen-producing rainforests) and die after only perhaps at most about a few minutes without it, so we ‘think’ what is around us and our thoughts contribute to that outer part of ourselves, in a reciprocal relationship.

          In view of the way much of the human world treats its children, who have growing brains and minds to feed, it is time that people were made more aware of how much we all live outside our physical bodies, in so many daily ways.

         

HA-JOON CHANG: Caveat Emptor!

 

          Known through his Guardian contributions but also for his bestseller 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism, Ha-Joon Chang is a lecturer in economics at Cambridge University. In terms of theory he would appear to be something of a Left Keynesian, believing that capitalism should be tempered by enlightened state intervention and brought towards a more equitable society. Meanwhile, he is an engaging writer well-suited to the task of providing Economics: The User’s Guide, a Pelican Introduction, for the layperson (2014).

Up to a point.

          Amongst those he thanks in his Acknowledgements are Leftwing and sometime fellow Guardian columnists Seumas Milne (now working to get Corbyn’s Labour elected) and Aditya Chakrabortty, as well as eminent Marxist economist and Leftwing Greek politician Costas Lapavitsas, author of Profiting Without Producing (2013).

          For all that, Ha-Joon Chang is surprisingly ill-informed about Marx and Marxism, one of his thumbnail sketches of all the various economic schools from Classic Political Economy to the Austrian School, Keynesianism and Neo-Classicism, etc. For each, he weighs up their various pros and cons. His verdict on Marxism: ‘Fatally flawed, but still useful: theories of the firm, work, and technological progress.’

          The worst flaw: ‘Above all, its prediction that capitalism will collapse under its own weight has not come true.’

          Marx was not in the habit of ‘predicting’ anything, and certainly not that any capitalist ‘collapse’ is inevitable. Capital will end with its expropriation from its owners by the proletariat, capital’s ‘gravediggers’, but this is more of a threat and rallying-cry than a prediction.  Otherwise capital as a system might linger over a long period of time, but the proletariat is the only class or factor that can destroy it. Marx was not a revolutionary activist for nothing. He saw history as class struggle, and in our time the only means by which socialism would come about. Marx did not predict when and where socialist revolution would come about. (In later life he became interested in the revolutionary potential of the Russian peasantry and even learned Russian from scratch to follow the literature more closely.) Meanwhile, the idea that capitalism can destroy itself without class intervention is contrary to Marx’s entire outlook. And such intervention is to be fought for, not ‘predicted’. His critique of the capital system was to enable workers to understand its workings in its entirety: to fight your enemy, you must know it.

          Chang: ‘The collapse of the socialist bloc has revealed that the Marxian theory of how the alternative to capitalism should be organised was highly inadequate. The list goes on.’ Not in this book. (All citations from 131-132.) Marx spurned utopians with their theories of how a future society should be created, keeping well away from such prognostications himself. It was up to the workers to self-organize a new society on the basis of ‘from each according to his abilities to each according to his needs’. Marx’s ‘theory’ here is indeed highly inadequate because it doesn’t exist and never did. Marx did not do fanciful system-building. 

          In any case the ‘socialist bloc’ was state capitalist, not socialist. That is, it was an exploitative system. Workers in Soviet Russia, like everywhere else, produced surplus value from unpaid labour-time which accrued to state enterprise as opposed to private. After the fall, in 1991, the transfer of state ownership to private was both swift and corrupt.

          Neither Lenin nor Trotsky had any illusions that they were creating socialism in Russia after 1917. They looked to impending Western socialist revolutions to give their own a kick start. When these failed to attain ascendancy, Lenin and the Bolsheviks had to improvise in a desperately isolated situation, the alternative being the anarchy of a power vacuum. It was Stalin who drove through industrialisation, at a furious pace, on the non-Marxist slogan of ‘socialism in one country’. At huge and tragic human cost it worked: Russia was modernised to the point where it would defeat Germany in World War II (and indeed send the first unmanned space vehicle, Sputnik I, into orbit in 1957 – not the first ‘manned’ one, as Chang writes on p. 95). But industrialisation was initially achieved on the basis of mass forced labour, whether ‘free’ or enslaved. It was never socialism, let alone Marxian socialism, whatever the ideology put forward.

          Chang is reasonably informative on some aspects of Marx’s contribution to ‘economics’ (though Marx's study remained within ‘political economy’, not the truncated form known to us as ‘economics’). But, just as the word ‘critique’ appears in the title of his major political economic writings, Marx was a forensic tearer-down of a system, not the builder of a new one. For him socialism would be what the triumph of a non-exploitative proletariat made it. And, to be frank, Chang’s conclusion on Marx’s ‘flaws’ is shoddy thinking: raising an old canard that is easily disposed of.

         

         

Socialism means never having to say you’re sorry…

                  (apologies to Erich Segal, Love Story, Hollywood 1970)

 

          Capital profit after sales is drawn from surplus value, that is, what remains when wages, production costs and obligations have been met. This in turn derives from how much value the workers produce which does not return to them in the form of wages for the whole time worked. Labour-power is the commodity a capitalist buys which increases value in production; raw materials and machines simply pass on their own value with nothing added (and machines depreciate). The value of labour-time is made up of the socially-necessary cost of the individual worker, including sustenance, shelter, clothing, transport, education etc. – and the raising of future workers. The worker works for say, ten hours but is paid back his or her value for, say, five of these hours. The value created during the rest of the hours goes to the employer. Because unpaid labour-power alone grows value in the production process, it is the basis of capitalist profit. Workers produce surplus value because of the difference between their wages and the value that their labour-power produces.

          To optimise the productivity of this effort, and to withstand competitors over – say – sale prices, productivity per worker is generally increased when supplied with ever-more efficient and up-to-date machines (means of production – ‘dead labour’ in Marx’s terminology) but this will likely reduce the number of workers needed unless there is a growth in output due to increased demand. Automation is feasible so long as there are areas within the economy as a whole which are not automated, and as long as we need human workers to build the robots. With total automation surplus value diminishes; such living workers that are left will be more drastically exploited therefore to maintain surplus value ( as at Amazon - more of this anon). To compete with rivals over market prices, capitalists are forced into ever-greater modernisation and automation to achieve higher speeds in greater output, and so to saw off the branch of the tree they are sitting on. And so expansion must be rampant, because one answer to a decline in surplus value-created profit is to increase the scale of the operation and either expand the market or expand the company’s share of the market, frequently by buying out rivals or creating mergers. There is also the profit in buying cheap and selling dear as found from foreign trade. Another means is to keep wages static or reduced so that more surplus value accrues to the capitalist, requiring perhaps the prohibition of strikes and/or unions, or by expanding production into the low-wage economies of developing countries or backward regions of one’s own. Many products we consume are made by poorly-paid women, as well as children: illegally in countries where child labour laws exist but are not enforced.  For example, Amazon’s supplier Foxconn exploits children in the manufacture of Alexa in China, a flouting of Chinese labour laws. (Guardian, 9^th August 2019).

          The capitalist paradox is that the goods made or services produced have to be sold to a plenitude of buyers on the market, by and large the selfsame workers who, in a Western country like the UK, make up about 80% of the population. The capitalist needs to beat down wages as best he or she can, but at the same time relies on the beaten to buy the goods, otherwise the capitalist is likely to be ruined. Gluts appear when unsold goods lie piled up in factories or warehouses, or airline tickets cannot be sold. Indeed, with the resulting unemployment, the remaining workers have no bargaining position and so the embattled capitalist must cut their wages further. Or, what amounts to the same economic result, we have usually temporary full employment through sub-low wages, no fringe benefits or pensions, and insecure contracts, with fragmentation of the workforce.

          The ‘answer’ to ‘under-consumption’ lies in easy credit for workers to enable them to carry on purchasing. Consumption is a form of production, producing the ‘demand’ for the goods and services created by the workers themselves. But the usury involved can be merciless, perhaps up to £1000% p.a. – another form of ‘production’ exploitation by the merchant-capital end of capitalism, which pre-dates industrial capital. But recourse to ‘easy credit’ has a limited lifespan before towering debts set in. The collapse of the sub-prime mortgages in the USA which led to the near-collapse of the financial system in 2008 is a good example of this. And sub-primes are back!

An alternative is a more generous public social and health provision which would put steady purchasing within the workers’ reach. But capitalist gain from healthier market sales as a result is nullified by the state’s taxes needed to pay for it. From the capitalist point of view, this is Peter (the capitalist) being robbed to pay Paul (the worker). The bulk of taxes needed to fund this provision – if one includes corporation tax – falls on the employer class. Of individuals, 43% of adults in the UK pay no income taxes (up from 38% in 2010), while individual adults in the top 1% pay 27% of the whole income tax revenue. (Daily Telegraph, 6th August 2019). Of course poll taxes like National Insurance and VAT on commodities and services hit all classes but most adversely the low-paid.

Public incursion into the economy has wider implications. State profits from public enterprises are ploughed back into the state coffers, unavailable to private investment. When the East Coast Line was returned to public ownership, the service became more efficient and the Treasury was the recipient of the profits, having previously been the loser in making over enormous subsidies to private investors. It worked well as a public railway, but the point was that it shut out the private investor, which made the East Coast Line’s return to private ownership as soon after the mess from previous privatisations had been cleared up absolutely necessary from the capitalist viewpoint. With the long-term decline in the overall rate of profit, state funding of railways, health, social services, housing and so on is seen as the competitor for dwindling private investment opportunities.

At one time – for example with civic ‘gas and water socialism’ from the so-called Progressive Era in turn-of-the-20^th-century America and the urgent need for vast infrastructural repair in post-World-War-II Britain – the state took on production activities beyond the investment capabilities of private capital, and indeed was a necessary supplier to the latter in terms of cheap energy (business, as in pre-privatising Britain, usually gained lower rates for energy supplies from the state suppliers than did domestic users) while mass cheap public transport was necessary if the workforce were to arrive at the factories and shops on time! But in time, as traditional areas of private investment failed to soak up increasing capital accumulations, new opportunities had to be found, at home and abroad; at home they presented themselves as the already-formed and functioning (and often profitable) state-run facilities. ‘State’ capitalism becomes absorbed by actual private capital, with the added advantage that taxes can be appropriated as ‘subsidies’ to privatised companies from the state after their privatisation, and so less ‘wasted’ on social goods and services. ‘Subsidies’ also include elaborate legal forms of tax avoidance.

Meanwhile, capitalist expansion and the world market in the post-war years were sufficient to bring in a higher rate of profit than today’s, even though the highest tax-rate in the three decades after the war was the equivalent of 93 pence in the pound in Britain and similar to the dollar in the USA! Now capitalism in both countries can barely struggle along, it seems, on a top tax rate of 40%.

          In this context, Labour’s aim to bring back – at least in part – the socialism of Attlee’s Labour (1945-51) looks quixotic or cranky to today’s neoliberal world – and dangerous. Social wealth is not necessarily capital wealth, except where for example council housebuilding is undertaken by private contractors. A public park or playing-field is absolutely valueless because the land is not being monetised for production, private housing or even privately-run fairgrounds. Capital must therefore buy up as much green space as possible for investment purposes. Everything ultimately should be privately owned, if publicly subsidised – even the Houses of Parliament if this were ever to be pushed through (for say, luxury apartments). For capitalists social-democratic Labour’s present plans represent the thin edge of the wedge for a larger demonetisation, which spells doom for capital and capitalism. The present Right-wing urgency to monetise everything in sight is propelled by capital’s now-chronic fall in overall rate of profit. Capital survives by expansion and ever-further exploitation: so Labour has got to be steamrollered over (for a programme that looks mild by comparison to the post-World War II Labour agenda) or else Labour must itself reverse the trend to monetisation by turning demonetisation into the new ‘trend’. This it can only do if it is genuinely a mass movement of colossal proportions.

*  * *

          The 1% plus the rest of the better-off 20% might indeed save capitalism as the growth in minority wealth (especially at the higher end of this category) provides expansion in luxury production. This turns out yachts, private jets, helicopters, luxury cars, expensive properties, precious gems, private schools, hospitals and clinics, wines at £100 and £1000 a bottle, prestigiously-labelled cosmetics, accessories and clothes, exclusive resorts, clubs, restaurants and hotels, etc. A certain amount of this may be viewed in TV advertising today. This side of the market could conceivably keep capitalism going forever, whatever the penury of the many. However, tensions appear within the higher classes. Billionaires (growing in numbers if not profusely) can swallow up skilled labour and force up prices that millionaires can no longer access and afford, while those on £100,000 a year will begin to feel themselves pauperised not to speak of those on a mere £60,000 or so. What about army generals, US senators, top-grade civil servants and judges who can no longer access what they had been used to accessing due to the shock-effects of the ever-greater purchasing powers of the seriously rich?  How many revolutions and coups have been instigated around the world by malcontent colonels? What about fascism drawing from the resentments of a middle-class that feels ‘cheated’ out of what it believes are rightfully its own? If I were a millionaire as opposed to how I am presently placed I feel sure I would resent billionaires much more than in fact I do, because billionaires can arrogate to themselves what millionaires felt was within their grasp, or almost. Who is content with the second-best thing when the first-best seems so nearly reachable? Who will never live in ‘Millionaires Row’ in Kensington because it has become exclusively ‘Billionaires Row’? What happens when trillionaires come on the scene? Disputes over property development in high-class neighbourhoods show what happens when the richer neighbour attempts to flaunt what is his by means of seemingly outrageous development. Land is certainly not increasing even if private wealth amongst the 0.01% of the 1% is - exponentially. And with climate change we will see areas such as coastal regions and cities flooded by rising sea levels, which means even less land than now for the accumulated billionaire wealth to get its claws into, at the expense of everyone else. Indeed, true wealth is best characterised by the amount of fossil-fuel consumption it uses per capita. So we should be expropriating our billionaires before they expropriate all of us.  And before the trillionaires arrive.

* * *

     Findings of the Peterson Institute (Washington DC) have shown Phillip Inman that ‘wage stagnation in the US (and therefore probably the UK too) is more likely to be caused by technology hollowing out the market for skilled blue- and white-collar jobs rather than competition with China and the Far East. This tells us there are fundamental issues to confront aside from the loss of access to our biggest trading partner, the EU’. (Observer, August 4^th 2019.)

     I’d suggest that automation poses an existential threat to capitalism in general because it diminishes the profit-side of surplus value, the basis for the enrichment of a system deriving its profit from working human beings. A robot transfers its value to the product but does not make the operation more profitable as a result because a robot cannot be exploited. Those who make them can be, but not after robots start producing themselves. Robots are just one more machine cost. ‘Wage stagnation’ for existing US workers shows this: that there isn’t enough in the kitty to pay proper living wages and show a profit at the same time. Automation is ideal for socialism because it can eliminate soul-destroying work without a need for a profit as a result. The ‘profit’ comes in the form of life fulfilment through creative activities and caring opportunities.  But without socialism an outdated, outmoded capitalist system will become ever more desperately repressive and oppressive in a semi-automated and then more fully automated society. Perhaps the ‘hand-made’ luxury industries might hold out but they could not carry on in a non-capitalist wider context. The system is total or it is not at all. And faced with the need to ‘blow the expense’ in saving the world from burning up, we must socialise all production while democratising how we are to govern ourselves, and we must do this now.

     Meanwhile capitalists are becoming so anomalous that right now it would be in their best interests to turn into Luddites, their worst working-class enemies 200 years ago: smash the machines, before they smash you! 

 

SUMMER ANNOUNCEMENT

 

Just to say that there will be a bit of a break from blogging over this period -  in any case we have to go through a hiatus as Boris Johnson, who won the premiership of Britain with an overwhelming mandate from the (Conservative) people takes us round the houses, promises everybody everything and gears up to win the expected general election. With persistent undermining, from within and without, of Jeremy Corbyn, we may find ourselves without a Labour spearhead just when we need one, though one hopes this doesn't happen. A letter in one of yesterday’s papers put forward Sir Keir Starmer as a likely and worthy successor to Corbyn and more likely to beat Boris Johnson than anyone else. Sir Keir has many admirable qualities but he is about as charismatic as a telegraph pole. By mere coincidence he also happens to be on the Right in the Labour Party.

 

Labour is right to keep the options open as between Remain and Leave. Opinion polls are notoriously treacherous and no more so than in febrile times like ours now. If they look like anything, they look like a public being wilfully confused over what to think about anything. This does not amount to a ‘mandate’.  But it is likely that the world systemic crisis involving economies, politics, societies and warfare is deepening together with the ever-underlying (and not so underlying) imminence of global warming. This allows nihilist ‘leaders’, either intentionally or unintentionally funny, to caper about in Britain, the USA, Italy, Ukraine, Turkey, Israel with no need to resort to consistency, truth, realism, strategy (except by backroom boys) so long as they can keep the plates spinning. This is unstable; in history the truth will always will out. That is why for Hegel the true was the real: that is, real by dint of being the real outcome to movement of events. It is also necessary, because it is there. The truth in the real outcome has unmasked (nearly) every charlatan in modern history. But, alas, too late to prevent the damage being done.

          When the only possible leaders turn out to be fools and/or charlatans, then it is time for us masses to demolish the leadership principle altogether. And with it the structures that rely on leadership in the form of single-person ‘charismatic’ rule. Corbyn in this sense is way ahead of Johnson: he has no wish to be a ‘leader’ in the charismatic, individualist/egoist sense, and this is what shows up the obsolescence of the leadership principle, a principle that Johnson and Trump embody for our times.

SNIPPETS

 

          Assistant commissioner of the London Metropolitan Police, Neil Nasu, has raised a stink especially among newspaper editors and politicians over his claim that publishing the contents of leaked government documents could be ‘a criminal matter’. Boris Johnson said: prosecution ‘would amount to an infringement on press freedom and have a chilling effect on public debate’. Indeed if leaks could not be disseminated without prosecution (especially if that includes social media) then surely there would be no more leaks? If no one outside the government had access to the material, why leak it?  We could have leak-free government, thus keeping the press and so on minding their manners. Anyhow it seems unfair for Julian Assange, likely to be dragged off to the United States, of which he is not a citizen, to be tried for ‘treason’ and most likely executed, while allowing those writers and editors of, for example, the Guardian in London, to be let off scott-free after having disseminated what Assange supplied them with. Is there no way we can get the large bulk of the Guardian editorial staff shipped off to America on treason charges as well? The present situation has no logic at all, let alone justice, and it seems apparent from Neil Basu’s statements that he is nothing if not logical and justice-minded.

****

A celebration of the wise virtues of white racist President Trump was flourished across the Letters page of this week’s Mail on Sunday (July 14^th,2019)  which led me to look into similar letters written to the German newspapers in the 1930s, of which the following is a representative example:

Dear Sir: I am outraged by the vituperative and even obscene remarks made by irresponsible journalists and politicians around the world about our Chancellor and Fuhrer Adolf Hitler. Since he came to power with Germany First in mind, our divisive politics has been swept away, the economy is on the rise with full employment after years of unemployment misery. The future of motoring is bright as we see the construction of a whole network of autobahns, and the Fuhrer has even promised a cheap affordable People’s Car that will place motoring in the hands of millions who could never aspire to it before. The Jewish problem is all but solved and we will no longer find homosexuals able to mingle freely with us and corrupting our children. He has brought self-respect to the German nation and people with his aim to arm Germany in a manner befitting a great land but at the same time has declared ‘I have no further territorial demands to make in Europe’, so we have peace with honour. Why don’t the foreigners come to terms with Adolf Hitler’s stunning achievements?

 

*****

According to the Morning Star for July 13^th, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu welcomed the visiting head of the Ukrainian Radical Party, Oleh Lyashko, a member of the party’s delegation to Jerusalem. In 2015 Mr Lyashko attacked Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko ‘over his apology for the actions of nazi collaborators during the Holocaust, branding it a “humiliation”.’ The party itself is openly fascist. Like Jeremy Corbyn, Mr Netanyahu has been criticised for not doing enough to tackle anti-Semitism. Hardly surprising when in 2015 Mr Netanyahu stated that Hitler had had no intention of exterminating Europe’s Jews ‘until a Palestinian persuaded him to do it’. 

Who was this mysterious Palestinian with access to the Fuhrer’s ear in Nazi Germany? A gardener at Berchtesgaden perhaps?

So why was a fascist Ukrainian party visiting Jerusalem and meeting with Mr Netanyahu at all? Why had Mr Netanyahu been at pains to exonerate Hitler? ~Why is he so friendly with the anti-Semitic President Orben of Hungary? And, for that matter, if Labour is so riddled with anti-Semites, why has no official Labour party delegation been invited to Israel? Or is Mr Netanyahu not entirely convinced of Mr Corbyn’s anti-Semitic credentials?

THE MENACE


(corrected)

 

          As an American boy in a Midwestern US junior high school I could not have been less than a million cultural miles from Rugby public school in 1830s England, yet when I came across quite by chance an old copy of Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1856) by Thomas Hughes, I was transfixed. Apart from the fact that the boys wore waistcoats and top hats and drank porter (no Kool-Aid back then) which was exotic in itself, there was one aspect of the story that gripped and terrified me. Bullying. I saw myself as young Tom facing the evil and seemingly invincible Flashman. Because I knew bullying. My life seemed to be made up of escape-routes from the pimply bullies two years’ my senior who went round in gangs scaring the pants off us. I was never actually roughed up by them, if coming close, but the threat was there. Later when I reached 14 I was knocked down in the street by two boys as one pulled a switchblade on me while they said obscene things about my mother. My mother was a teacher at their school, a different one from mine. They left me on the pavement vowing to cut out my liver if they ever saw me again. Yes, I took Tom Brown’s Schooldays to heart. Life was pretty good on the whole but for this undercurrent of menace.

          Social media bullying must be equally terrifying and demoralising, for both boys and girls. And perhaps the mobile makes it seem virtually omnipotent. At least I had escape routes: there is no escape from social media. But though the technology is there now, the impulse or threat is the same as when we didn’t have smartphones. Are social media the ‘cause’ of bullying? Bullying was always there and may always be there: it just has newer, different methods of malice.

          Some months after that last incident I went to live in western Canada and to an entirely different sort of high school, a country school. Gone was the seething tension I had experienced in American school life. We had naughty boys of course but no one seemed very interested in promoting a reign of terror. It was wonderfully laid-back and peaceable. Perhaps because we were mainly country youngsters – and perhaps it had something to do with school sports. In American  high school sports are (or were) viciously competitive: I remember even the school’s best athlete being reduced to tears by a barbaric ex-Marine of a coach – a brute with black hair sprouting all around his T-shirt collar. None of that up north. Boys in the Canadian school were more focussed on skating, skiing, swimming and fishing than on competitive games, which were played indifferently under tolerant coaches. In my part of Canada only hockey was taken seriously but my school never went in for it. So in the world of sport, where my ex-Marine-assault-course coach in America was a macho figure in that school, bullying may well have been in part a kind of emulation.

          Because of experiencing such complete contrasts I came to believe when quite young that bullying belonged to something wider, something to do with the stresses and strains of a relentlessly competitive culture. I would thus not be surprised if it were mooted that bullying has got worse in Britain  than ever before (leaving 1830s Rugby to one side) because times in this run-up to Brexit are more nervy and in a class-war that if anything is tending towards greater harshness. Children and teenagers are as much a part of society as any other group, feeling the tensions their own parents may not even suspect they harbour. To me social media may not always be all that edifying, let alone ‘social’, but I don’t think they are at the root of the problems of their alleged victims.

          A propos, I once likened the moral panic that the almost universal use of social media has engendered to moral panics of the past: the evil influence of comic books (Dr Frederick Werth in 1950s America), of TV’s immoral effects (Mrs Mary Whitehouse, UK 1960s+), of rock ‘n roll and Elvis the Pelvis, of video amusement arcades, and now of widespread accessibility of pornography to the young. (The grainy black-and-white porn in my day was flashed about in the boys’ loo.) Children it seems are so in the grip of games and social media that they sit up all night with their smartphones, unable to communicate with others in the flesh in the daytime, with cognising difficulties and inability to concentrate on anything more than for a few seconds.

          But there has not till now been anything like conclusive scientific evidence to do with any of these moral panic allegations, only anecdotal stuff, blown up out of all proportion in the popular press, which even has child psychologists and educationists believing it. But now there is a glimmer of hope in the form of real substantiated evidence: this is provided through publication in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Amy Orben (lecturer in psychology at Queen’s College, Oxford) and Andrew Przybylski (director of research at the Oxford Internet Institute). The aim of the study was not to focus on the technology so much as on ‘how social media and life satisfaction influence each other and to do so over time’. They focussed on ‘a sample of more than 10,000 preteens and teens, analysing nearly a decade of longitudinal data from British adolescents’. Perhaps the most thorough and comprehensive study of its kind made to date.

          It would not be true to say that they came up with precisely zilch. In more than half of those they tested they found nothing but ‘random statistical noise’, and in the remainder ‘some small trends over time – these were mostly clustered in data provided by teenage girls’. ‘But it’s not an exaggeration to say that these effects were miniscule by the standards of science and trivial if you want to inform personal parenting decisions. Our results indicated that 99.6% of the variability in adolescent girls’ satisfaction with life had nothing to do with how much they used social media.’ (Observer, London, 7 July 2019.)

          I would go further and say that while children may act instinctively (much like the rest of us, if truth be known) they are not stupid. They are, let’s face it, entering the cyberworld of our time, and are equipping themselves for it, whether they know this or not. Employment is centring on the use of computer and smartphone; so is much of everyday life. For them not to be engaged at ever-earlier ages would bind them to losing out one way or another by the time they reached adult life and responsibility. The problem is one of balance: of engaging with real things like books and art galleries and outdoor physical activities, and of joining in sociality with real friends as well as ‘cyber’ friends. The evidence so far provided by Orben and Prszybylski does not suggest that through social media we are turning out recluses and hermits.

          In any case I have great faith in the human capacity to be bored or jaded, especially – that is – among the present-day and more privileged part of the human race. There is a craze for something everybody’s doing, but crazes either die out in time or become relegated to just another aspect of life’s routine. There’s always something else, something new. Recently by chance when channel-hopping I came across an item on Blue Peter (CBBC) in which a little boy was proudly showing off his new discovery: a typewriter! He demonstrated to an apparently astonished young presenter that you can actually type real letters on to a piece of paper with this gadget!

          Meanwhile we have the deeper problem of a society that appears to be losing both cohesion and the promise of security for the many. In response, the social medium has its political uses too. Has it not been instrumental in informing children about, for example, Greta Thunberg, and thus encouraging them to join her in the worldwide crusade to save the planet? Frankly, the fewer mainstream newspapers young people might read on this topic the better.

          But perhaps a sinisterly relevant kind of bullying is what Britain’s schoolchildren are actually going through: I mean bullying by the State. In a poll taken of NEU (teachers’ union) primary schoolteachers, no less than 97% proclaim themselves opposed to the SATS exam system and to their children being driven nuts by wave after wave of exams (instead of learning anything). (E.g. Guardian 9 July 2019.) In the bad old days of childhood oppression when I was a lad I don’t recall a single exam from my elementary/primary schooldays. We only started taking exams at Big School. If young kids look haunted and anxious to you these days it may not be down to social media!

THE BANKRUPTCY OF CAPITAL?

 

A pertinent recent article is by the excellent Phillip Inman in the Observer (London) for 23^rd June 2019:

‘Investors’ demand for dividends will push us further to disaster’

His query: why – when investment is so low – are companies ‘borrowing like never before?’

          Where is the money going? It’s not going into a vast stockpiling of raw materials and equipment to off-set a likely no-deal Brexit. It’s not going into R & D. (And it almost goes without saying that it is not going into substantially higher workers’ wages across the board. – MM) The majority of companies are in fact ‘acting as cash machines and shovelling money into the greedy mouths of the sovereign wealth funds, money managers and desperate pension savers that own so much of the stock market.’

          Despite mediocre demand, UK companies have been dishing out record dividends ‘reaching £19.7 billion in the first quarter of this year…a rise of more than 15%’ compared to the first quarter of 2018.

          Inman concludes that the blame for the present state of the economy lies not so much with Donald Trump’s trade wars or the slowdown of Chinese manufacturing: ‘…the real culprit is that voracious animal with the unlimited appetite – the shareholder’. Why is one not falling about in surprise?

          Moving on from Phillip Inman, I might add that it has been common practice for big corporations to use money supposedly aimed at investment in operations (which is what Quantitative Easing or QE was for) to buy back their own shares on the stock market in order to inflate the value of those shares.  Meanwhile, money is being borrowed in order to feed the voracious appetite for dividends and huge CEO remunerations.  It looks suspiciously like a gigantic Ponzi scheme.

          This wheeze is attributed to one Charles Ponzi, who – in the 1920s – paid back his investors with money he was taking from incoming investors, a great idea (though it could never last) brought to perfection ninety years’ later by the staggering billions that Bernie Madoff creamed off from his gullible clients among the rich and famous without so much as investing a single one of their dollars on the New York Stock Exchange, or any other exchange. Madoff had to confess as the influx of new clients failed to keep pace with promises made to his existing ones. (A miraculous 12%.) This kind of operation goes on all over the world all the time on a smaller scale and more legit basis because mention of ‘the stock market’ is never brought into the pitch – though people buying into such a scheme for any great length of time usually lose their cash anyhow. One operation I know of offered an ultimate pay-off after a period of regular modest monthly contributions of £81,000.00, which concluded the deal. Meanwhile you were encouraged to get your friends to join the scheme, which of course you would have to since only more and more clients would keep the whole thing afloat. This one typically sank long before the great day: the existing ‘clients’ were not repaid what they’d put in. Madoff and the original Ponzi broke the law by posing as real stock market traders making real investments, which landed them both in prison in time. Madoff is presently serving a life and afterlife sentence of 150 years. I trust the sentence is not part of his inheritable estate.

          What Inman is discussing is technically legal but essentially Ponzi in robbing Peter to pay Paul: companies borrowing astronomic sums to pay out astronomic dividends to keep shareholders happy, not to speak of CEOs.

          From the beginning of capitalism shareholding was usually essential in order for the capital to be raised to fund a venture until the profits came in. Naturally, of course, the shareholders would not get their dividends until the company in question had paid off its obligations and to beef up the technology and the research behind it to keep one jump ahead on its competitors – usually by making the goods cheaper for the same-quality commodities than the competitors could manage (until the latter caught up, of course). It was quite traditional for shareholders to have to pass up a dividend in a particular year because the company was going through a thin patch that would soon be got over. But with the long boom of c. 1945-1975 and beyond, dividends were considered par for the course. And in the 1980s – with a rough time for capitalism in the later 1970s - there was the stunning success of the ideology of ‘shareholder value’: shareholders goaded by the takeover merchants used their power over the company concerned to demand being at the head of the queue for share-outs from the profits. What concerned them was to be in the money in case of some general collapse of the economy. The overall rate of profit had meanwhile been in decline since the end of the 1960s, and has never reached the earlier figures, except for a brief fillip in the 1990s. At the same time productivity (output per worker, the basis for surplus value) is entering something of an alarming downturn. The rich need more money – ready money – than they have ever felt they needed before because capital taken as a whole is becoming riskier. But giving lavish pay-outs to the undeserving instead of reinvesting in the development of production efficiencies and improvements is in fact making things even riskier. (Of  course the ‘undeserving’ includes those modest pensioners with money in the big pension funds who – with niggardly State Pensions – actually do need the money through no fault of their own.) In the 1930s Great Depression the prolongation of hard times was due to rich investors sitting on their ‘insurance’ against the self-same hard times they were perpetuating by not investing in new factories and jobs. Thus the present apparent anomaly of companies being in huge debt and awash with cash at the same time. (Meanwhile the IMF has reported that some $13 trillion is actually missing from the world economy altogether: presumably laundered away or resting in untouchable tax havens.)

          Of course whether you are a mortgagee or a company borrowing on a large scale, the spectre is interest rates. At present they are low – so, okay if not for savers, or for disappearing bank branches once dependent on paying reasonable interest to their depositors. But raise the rate of interest by as little as 1-2% and the whole system will come tumbling down in terms of stranded and failed debtor companies. No wonder that when the US Federal Reserve mooted the possibility a few months ago of raising interest rates by modest 1% or so the uproar was so great that the plan was put back in the desk drawer: but sooner or later it will have to be pulled out again. It is precisely because interest rates are so low that borrowing is so rampant, but this state of affairs is unstable. The Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, does not seem mindful of the Ponzi Effect or disappearing high street banks when he advocates even lower interest rates than today’s on the grounds that this will stimulate overall economic recovery. The central bankers’ bank, the Bank for International Settlements, says otherwise: ‘Rate cuts driving perilous addiction to debt, says BIS’. – Daily Telegraph Business, 1 July 2019. The system is in deep do-do when even the central bankers can’t agree on what should be done. But by far the worst impact from unravelling company finances is even now being felt by millions of workers.

          Workers suffer as companies pay them less than what should be the going rate for the job: recent small rises in wages do not make up for wage stagnation since about 1980 – plus the gradual erosion of company pension schemes, payment for overtime, holiday and sickness pay: in short the gradual erosion of terms of work that went with permanent employment – often lifelong – in individual companies. That is, in favour of for example zero-hour contracts and the break-up of a workforce into the bogusly ‘self-employed’, which makes each worker responsible for his and her own pension, sickness benefit and so on. And meanwhile we have deaths, ambulance call-outs and workers on the job being denied toilet-breaks in such paradise environments as Amazon warehouses (or do I mean workhouses?) I leave out of account poverty wages for women and children in factories around the world Hundreds of thousands of families in this country, with both partners at work, are surviving on personal debt, foodbanks and ‘in-work’ benefits: a scandal that such benefits would even be necessary – a huge state subsidy of business. A common sight in my neighbourhood in the daytime is that of toddlers and infants being walked by rather elderly ‘parents’ – read grandparents – because the actual parents are both working their socks off. Our government now boasts ‘near-full employment’ under these conditions. Impoverishment in-work is the way it is achieved.

          In fact, unions for self-employed have sprung up around the world to meet a need for solidarity and action but I suspect the borrowing businesses that over-exploit their workforces do so as much out of panic as greed. As in: ‘When will interest rates go up?’  Fortunately that is not a problem for those who can’t afford a mortgage anyhow. Their problem is the size of the rent.

          Meanwhile immigrants from poor countries in the throes of murderous turmoil due in the main to massive exports of their capital to rich ones (far more capital is exported from the developing to the developed world than the other way round) are desperate for work when they arrive in a strange land and likely to take anything going, surreptitiously welcomed by the bosses. They are perceived as a ‘threat’ by native white workers, which the fascists play upon: the fault is the immigrants’!  Send them back where they came from! Divide-and-rule over all workers is the classic ploy that fascists exacerbate. Racism is not only morally reprehensible: for workers it is economically self-defeating. Do those on the Left emphasise this sufficiently to workers? Or do they base their opposition to racism solely on moral identity politics?  That is instead of focussing more than ever on class economic interest through solidarity – worldwide? (You won’t see many ‘Labour moderates’ engaged in this kind of agitation.)

          The fear we can dispel is that amongst those who work and are exploited: ‘Get organised!’  Far more difficult to deal with is the fear of those who economically rule us because materially they have so much more to lose than we do if things get really serious. Why, indeed, is Marx vilified so fiercely if he died way back in 1883? It is the vilification of fear.

         

STEPHEN GLOVER STRIKES AGAIN

 

          With reference to Stephen Glover’s Daily Mail column for 13^th June 2019: ‘I fear Mrs May’s plan for a green legacy is as doomed as her lost Brexit deal’: I have reasons for agreeing with Mr Glover’s scepticism but from a wholly opposite viewpoint.

          ‘Yesterday,’ he writes, ‘she announced that Britain’s greenhouse gas emissions will be reduced to zero, or almost zero, by 2050 – an undertaking that has not so far been matched by any other developed country.’

          Of course Mrs May was also going to rehouse the victims of the Grenfell disaster within three months – and they are still waiting after two years. So one takes her ‘green legacy’ with a pinch of salt.

          No: Glover’s argument is that Britain’s emissions are a tiny ‘1.2 per cent – and falling’ of total world emissions. That is, compared to China’s 27 per cent (22 times as much as the British) and those emissions from a rapidly growing India of ‘about 6.5 per cent’. Glover really ought to mention a third country here, the United States of America, which is third largest in population after India and China, if by a long way. But the USA uses up some 25% of the world’s energy with a consumption per capita far outweighing that of the average Indian or Chinese. Moreover its government under President Trump has eschewed the whole idea of world climate change as he rips up environmental protection laws thereby forcing individual states to take their own action - for self-protection, as it were. If things deteriorate this could lead to the worst separation of powers clash in the history of the Republic. But perhaps best not to mention Uncle Sam here, who is Britain’s closest ally.

          ‘My point,’ says Glover, ‘is that nothing we do in this country by way of reducing our emissions – which have already gone down by 44 per cent since 1990, a barely equalled performance, is going to have a discernible influence on the overall situation.’ Never mind that this barely equalled performance was brought about by the barely equalled performance of the decimation of British industry in the Tory years under Thatcher and co. which saw manufacturing reduced to a present 13% of the British economy, giving way to our present predominating services, finance and investment, insurance, entertainment – with irreparable loss in, for example, the north of England, and in Wales. Fifth or sixth-largest economy in the world Britain may be but it is not now an especially important manufacturing economy. The reduction in emissions may be a good thing but it was not brought about by all-wise British social planning.

          The really important point here is that  Britain’s reduced level of emissions is paralleled and dwarfed by British overseas investment in, amongst other activities, mining, fracking and oil drilling, drivers of emissions on a gigantic scale, most of these in the developing world. Britain’s power is capital, not loads of machine goods and services, except financial services. That is why climate activists are demonstrating against BP, not because of its emissions inside Britain but because of its massive polluting all around the world, in the company of others such as Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon and so on – as well as Glencore and other mining conglomerates. Mrs May’s pronouncement and Stephen Glover’s response to it are entirely beside the point. What Britain doesn’t do at home it activates abroad – and both at home and abroad once the gigantic expansion of Heathrow Airport gets underway, around its now waved-through third runway and all the masses of new aircraft discharging emissions wherever they fly, take off and land.

          Speaking of which, I am against Glover inasmuch as it is obvious that Britain is domestically polluted in the cities and in the countryside, which is doing our people, our children (inexcusable asthma disease and deaths amongst the latter due to exhaust fumes) and our wildlife no good at all. We have far too many cars, vans and heavy lorries while rail freight potential lies neglected; we have a potential for tidal power also ignored, at the same time as we are faced with enormous, deadly and increasing methane emissions from more herds of bovines than ever before, within the worldwide growth of what is now referred to as McDonaldisation: vast herds around the globe whose sole purpose is to supply cheeseburgers, and not only to President Trump, would you believe. Even if petrol and diesel are replaced by electric in our transport, who has decided what is to be done about the heavy atmospheric poison emitted by enhanced battery manufacture?

          Apparently we should be complacent about our pollution on the grounds that Britain produces so little of it: but (a) it produces quite enough to poison a not-very-big country, and (b) its overseas investments ensure that the rest of humanity is to be poisoned as well, perhaps at the very least on the same scale as India’s and maybe in time China’s.

          Meanwhile, too, our climate protesters are labelled and treated as ‘terrorists’ and Greta Thunberg – who has the temerity to argue in favour of the interests of our children – being vilified by journalists and others as only, perhaps, a 16-year-old girl with Asperger’s should be. Mr Glover ought to be working, if he can, to persuade his Daily Mail to reverse its position towards being in favour of humanity, not to speak of a beautiful blue planet, the only one we know.

         

OUT OF FINLAND…

 

          I was brought up on classical music because my parents were into it and I had no rebellious siblings to persuade me otherwise. I listened to my parents’ recordings long before I bought my own; I took piano lessons and later gained a modest competence on the clarinet (long since abandoned, alas). I never aspired to a musical career.

          Should one have a favourite style or composer, or does this indicate musical partiality and thus deafness to classical music taken as a whole? Shouldn’t real classics lovers show a willingness to listen to all or most musical idioms, ancient (or medieval) to modern and postmodern? Certainly a professional musician should be open to playing (nearly) all, though players of the older music tend to be specialists.

          But then the emotions come into it. In my experience composers either induce or fit moods. There are Bach, Mozart, Beethoven moods. Chopin moods. Gershwin moods. Vivaldi moods. For instance when I was going through a lovelorn period I could listen to no one but Faure – such a tenderly melodious grasp of the human heart! (Sob! Sob!...)

          The composer who got to me through many more phases than most was: Jean (Johan) Sibelius (1865-1957). For long a concert classic Sibelius needs no help from me! Yet appreciation is not set in stone; Mozart and Beethoven are secure of course; but as we draw nearer to the present we have to sustain the nearer reputations more deliberately. Sibelius is not a controversial composer now but there may be a danger that he will be relegated to a particular niche – partly through the overplaying of certain works at concerts to the complete neglect of others – that belies the sheer dimensions of his achievement. And this at a time when, at least outside Finland and Scandinavia, a large number of his works are being heard by many for the first time that have as much a claim on our attention as those already known. His is such a unique idiom that it deserves a renewed wider interest. (Elgar was long neglected as the Edwardian composer of, say, Pomp and Circumstance No. 2 before a major public rediscovery of his music  opened up from about the 1960s in which Jacqueline du Pre and Ken Russell for BBC Television Arts had a particular hand.) For reasons I’ll come to I believe Sibelius is on the way to finding a whole new audience for a much wider spectrum of his work, already celebrated in his part of the world. (Meanwhile, the commentary for the Naxos CD of Sibelius’s piano music states that Sibelius ‘was not a great piano composer’, and indeed states this twice. What we hear on the CD in question might not disabuse us of this view. But Sibelius at the hands of Glenn Gould for Columbia is another matter altogether. Gould’s interpretation – suitable for a foremost interpreter of Bach on the piano – is precise, steely and at times explosive, rendering the Three Sonatines and ‘Kyllikki’ extraordinarily. It is as if the music opens to Gould like a flower opening to rain. It is fully up to taking on his commanding approach as he is up to its interpretation.)

          When as a young man I was exposed to his 3^rd and 5^th Symphonies and not having heard his music before, I had this strange sensation that I was composing the music myself, as it moved along. No other composer has ever had that effect on me. Perhaps it was a melodic artlessness with the sorts of progressions and transitions, subtle or sudden, that seemed so natural, as if they were the patterns of my own thought processes. Nor is this music light or trite or predictable. On the contrary, these – and other symphonies and tone poems, for example – are seemingly, idiosyncratically  odd, peculiar stuff. But their very peculiarity made them so very personal to me. It seemed that Sibelius was writing music to please solely himself, not only to follow musical conventions as such, and its appeal to him made Sibelius take it anywhere it wanted him to go. Not that it is whimsical or merely crowd pleasing. Nothing very whimsical about Jean Sibelius, though he knew how to please crowds – quite a lot of Sibelius’s pieces were written (apart from anything else to bolster his shaky finances) for the dramatic stage and for the salon - but first to please himself. Sometimes he wasn’t pleased. In which case he suppressed or destroyed or ruthlessly worked over the composition again. Composers do this, of course. But two major symphonies? Apart from his most popular symphony, the 5^th, which he revised twice after its two ‘premieres’ because he knew it was a going concern that needed to be got right, his first symphony (as he decided it was) was not his official 1^st but a massive work for orchestra, choir and soloists – Kullervo Op. 7 – which was his first big success in Finland. After that (note: not a failure with the public!) Sibelius ordered that it should never be performed again. To my knowledge it was never published in his lifetime though performed since; in retrospect it sounds ‘Sibelian’ in parts though I find it turgid. Evidently, (do I give myself airs?) so did he. At the other end of his creative life the same thing happened again. His ‘final’ 7^th Symphony – something just over 20 minutes’ long and regarded by many as no less than the greatest symphony of the 20^th century - was not, in fact, his last though it was the last one anybody ever heard. For some years thereafter he laboured mightily on an 8^th but eventually gave up the struggle and later burned the manuscript in his garden. He lived on till death at 91 in 1957, but he ceased publishing after 1926 when still only 60. Perhaps only then did he feel financially secure, but it seems he stopped working on anything major or original when he ceased being pleased altogether. His muse always sounded a bit erratic and wilful, which is part of his unique attraction as a composer. When he was young it took him down a path he didn’t want to follow, and became an intolerable companion when he was old.

          An unexpected thing to learn about Sibelius is that he wasn’t incredibly Finnish. Of course he was Finnish, born in Finland, but he had difficulties with spoken Finnish because his own tongue was Swedish. And Finnish is about as much like Swedish as Welsh is like English – from entirely different linguistic roots. Sibelius was the progeny of a long-time exodus of Swedes into Finland, for between 1157 and 1809 Finland was ruled by Sweden. He grew up in a Swedish-Finnish family and milieu. Swedes in the main dominated Finnish business and government. Finland was ceded to Russia in 1809 whereupon it became an ‘autonomous’  Grand Duchy of the Russian Empire, with the Tsar as Grand Duke. This state of affairs lasted till the Bolshevik Revolution in Petrograd in 1917, after which Finland finally gained its independence. This means that Sibelius was a Russian subject until he was 52. He is often lined up with ‘national’ composers putting their national idioms at the forefront of classical music: Grieg, Dvorak, Smetana, da Falla, Rodrigo, Enescu, Vaughan-Williams, Dohnanyi and Bartok – a composer much admired by Sibelius who painstakingly researched Hungarian folk idioms which found their way into his greatest music. But, as Sibelius himself said, there is not a single note of Finnish folk music in his own work: he composed everything himself. In this sense it may be difficult to label him a ‘Finnish’ composer, and almost irrelevant in his case.

          But not quite. Though there were class tensions between Swedes and Finns in Finland, Russian rule, hardening in the 1880s and 90s,  brought Finns together whatever their origins. The young Sibelius was passionate for Finnish independence. His Karelia music was sensed by his countrymen as a gesture of defiance. Later, his Finlandia was an anthem for a nation not yet in existence. It ranks with La Marseillaise and The Internationale as one of the most popular anthems in the world. Born into Lutheranism with its long musical heritage (think Bach, for example, and Martin Luther himself) Sibelius was a dab hand at the secular anthem and hymn-like tune: it can be found throughout his music. In his old age he arranged actual Lutheran hymns.

          Even more importantly, Sibelius communed with nature for his inspiration as have others such as, for example, Messiaen and Villa-Lobos. When still relatively young and requiring absolute silence as a prerequisite for composition, he built a house for self and family in proximity to forests and lakes, and within a small community of artists, fairly isolated. When not composing he took long walks in the forest, observing, listening and being inspired by what was the Finnish landscape and wildlife. His ‘Finland’ is the physical Finland itself. This includes its gods and legends – beliefs long before conjured up from the vast, mysterious wilderness. Though Sibelius was no pagan and no mere scene-painter. He draws from nature’s special form of ‘silence’ in the sense meant by Ralph Waldo Emerson in Emerson’s The American Scholar (1838): that the Book of Nature is the fount of knowledge, wisdom and inspiration, far more than all the libraries in the world. And Sibelius was no more a mere naturalist than was Wordsworth, who drew his inspiration also from nature but in the service of Romantic poetry and philosophy.

          However granite-like the Sibelian image may be, no human being is a Rock of Gibraltar. Sibelius was intermittently an alcoholic with long periods of sobriety. On the eve of the premiere of his Violin Concerto in 1903, the work was still unfinished. A search-party was sent out and tracked him down to somewhere in Helsinki in order to sober him up sufficiently to put the finishing touches on what may be the greatest of modern concertos for the violin (his own instrument). In 1923 he was too drunk to conduct the premiere of his 6^th Symphony and had to be led off the podium in the middle of the first movement. He may have communed with nature but his wife had to put up with his occasional departures to the city for heroic binges, with male companions, perhaps for days at a time. Benjamin Britten said cattily that Sibelius must have written the 6^th Symphony when he was drunk. I wouldn’t have thought Sibelius was Britten’s cup of tea anyhow, and this may have been no more than a snide remark about the symphony, but he was right about the premiere.

          The 6^th is Sibelius’s least-known major work but there are those who consider it his finest. I didn’t understand it much when I first played it, the puzzling thing being   that it gave me a craving to keep playing it until I did. It is a subtle distillation of his maturest expression: like the 4^th denying the listener the satisfaction of mighty climaxes and resolutions. And deliberately so. He announced himself that while other composers offered up ‘exotic cocktails’ his 6^th was a glass of ‘cold, clear spring water’. One would like to think this was what he drank while composing it.

          Sibelius keeps a tension or balance between the classical and the romantic in his music: romantic in range of expression, classical in regard to form and concision. In contrast to Mahler, for example, Sibelius’s symphonies grew shorter as he progressed, after the 2^nd.

          Sibelius came to have a high reputation on the European continent. In 1907 he and Gustav Mahler conversed on the nature of the symphony on equal terms when Mahler was visiting Helsinki. Later, World War I intervened with Germany and Austro-Hungary on the opposing side, as it were. Sibelius’s reputation plummeted in Mitteleuropa. German critics referred to his tone poems as ‘film music’. What cheek! As if any movie could survive under Lemminkainen or Tapiola! By contrast his music found favour in the Anglo-American world. I hazard Americans would have liked  his ‘wide open spaces’ approach while the more withdrawn Brits might respond to his lack of embarrassing sentimentality (ironically, while Elgar’s music is nothing if not nostalgic, there is no nostalgia in Sibelius at all that I can find) – he is emotional, naturally, but not drippy. A favourite contemporary of his was the ‘cool’ Debussy. I have already said that his piano music responds wonderfully to the ‘Bachian’ Glenn Gould. Consider swans. Tchaikovsky’s swans are dancing human beings.  Saint-Saens’s ‘The Swan’ from his charming Carnival of the Animals is romantically conceived, enough for it to be danced as ‘The Dying Swan’ by Pavlova. By contrast Sibelius’s Swan of Tuonela, one of his most popular works, is no more and no less than a swan. Swans may have emotions but not human emotions. Swan-language is not human language and none but other swans understand it (if ‘understand’ is the right word). It is the sheer beauty and majesty of the swan itself, gliding along on an impenetrably gloomy lake, that is so moving, for the swan is itself, non-human, the Other in nature.  I turn to Sibelius with relief when I find myself having had a surfeit of (self-pitying?) late Romantic classical music. One responds to the expansiveness of the outer and inner worlds that he expresses with tears if one is so inclined; but they are not tears brought on by the frettings and sufferings of the ego. In the 1950s the charismatic Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic were influential in restoring Sibelius’s reputation on the continent. A later successor to von Karajan was Sir Simon Rattle, astonished to find that some of his German musicians still considered Sibelius ‘an amateur’. They were put right when exposed to his profoundly moving effect on their audiences! By contrast a musician friend of mine in London had a framed portrait on his piano that I assumed was his father or grandfather. It was Sibelius.

          Sibelius was no amateur moonstruck naif wandering the woods. Musically he was thoroughly cosmopolitan, trained by outstanding teachers in Berlin and Vienna and whose musical antecedents included amongst others Beethoven (of course); Wagner and his Leitmotif; Liszt in turning the young man’s attention to tone poems more than opera; the uncompromising, towering Bruckner; and Tchaikovsky – the last one especially significant in the germination of Sibelius’s 1^st Symphony of 1899. It’s sort of amazing to realize that Sibelius died in 1957 yet had been a contemporary of Tchaikovsky’s for nearly thirty years till the latter’s death in 1893. Since copyright runs out seventy years after the death of the progenitor it means Sibelius will not be in the public domain until 2028! Meanwhile he features in concerts as a classic amongst classics, be they Bach, Beethoven or Brahms. He was entirely familiar with the work of his contemporaries in the European mainstream. His almost-exact contemporary Richard Strauss said of him; ‘I have more skill but he is greater.’

          Subjecting his (‘non-salon’) works to musicological analysis is tricky since he scarcely follows the conventional sonata form of first subject, second subject, recapitulation and so on. Much of the time it’s difficult to know where he’s going in terms of structure; in some cases one has to hear the work in question two or three times before one grasps how he has achieved its unity. But even on first hearing the climactic endings are often powerfully convincing, while individual strokes have an insidious way of sticking in the memory. Not unlike following the plot of one of Raymond Chandler’s detective stories! Or predicting the course of the Mississippi River across a decade. The nature analogy is deliberate. With the discovery of DNA we learned that nature is ordered ‘logically’, intricately and sublimely in its fundamentals or ‘building blocks’ – but look at the diversity and unpredictability of the results!  Unlike one who writes scores for natural history TV programmes, Sibelius is not a purely descriptive or imitative ‘nature’ composer: he is himself a force of nature in the way he uses musical structure to produce seemingly spontaneous effects. No wonder in writing of his major work musicologists so frequently fall into usage of the word ‘organic’ to describe it, that is in the way he generates different themes growing out of each other that form a whole. The 7^th Symphony brings this to perfection. God hurled His creation to the ground, said Sibelius, whereupon it shattered into myriad small fragments. It had been his own destiny  to piece them together again to make a new wholeness.

          Sibelius’s works are apparently so artless and spontaneous that we may fail – at least on first listening – to realise how tightly structured they really are. The structure that conceals structure. The overall effect is to create a kind of ‘miraculous’ aura about them; listeners are often quite mystified as to quite why a particular work had such a powerful effect on them. For that matter, why is nature so beautiful when one really looks at it? It is surprisingly difficult to say, in so many words.

          It may seem strange for Sibelius to appear on a socialist blog: unconventional he was, and hopeless over his finances. But he was bourgeois to the core, even as a believer in national independence. He lived, and outlived, both in his life and in his music, within and beyond the high bourgeois musical culture of his youth and early heyday.  His legacy transcends his own times, a mark of his greatness.

          No, I’m not hi-jacking Sibelius for socialism but we need him now as much as the Finns needed him to help them realise their identity and celebrate their liberty. I think we can appreciate through his music much more about ourselves vis-à-vis nature and the nature in ourselves than we might have done otherwise. Sibelius weaponised to save the planet? The idea would certainly never have occurred to him. But it’s worth realising that the wilderness that inspired him (however literally or otherwise) is elsewhere being concreted over, ploughed under, or poisoned beyond regeneration. Even swans die when gobbling up bits of plastic.

          A postscript. Sibelius was outwardly taciturn but really quite genial and humorous.   Both these facets are caught in my favourite Sibelian saying:

          ‘No one ever erected a statue to a critic.’

          With a likeness indeed captured in stone, this stern-looking figure is immensely reassuring in all sorts of ways. Right on, Johan, as I would never have said to his face.

          No one, at least till now, has erected a statue to a fracker.