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.

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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?

 

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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.