SPINOZA WAS RIGHT!

 

The human body is a body that thinks, a thinking body (Spinoza). Bodies do not have thought in the sense of owning a possession, any more than bodies have walking rather than doing walking. Human bodies act by thinking (amongst other things) which in fact they do all the time, even in sleep. Certain drugs may alter this activity just as an excess of alcohol will alter the action of walking. Human bodies are thinking ones just as they are walking ones, sitting-down ones and manually-using ones. Thinking indeed animates and accompanies all these, together with reflexes which involve the brain but function also to varying degrees below the consciousness of thinking.

          This consciousness of thinking, incorporating self-awareness, is a natural and social development out of a lengthy evolution. But there is no rigid or sharp division here between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom. Higher animals have memories and can reason beyond pure instincts, often learning by specific imitation, though they function largely by instinct, specialising in their reciprocations with their environments. Wild animals are tied to their natural habitats, a chief distinction from humans, who have learned to live in virtually all environments partly by altering them though some animals have – in some cases for millennia – thrived in big cities – one thinks immediately of various rodents, plus foxes and birds of prey, for example. But it was humans who built the cities in the first place and have largely altered countrysides by industrial means. Humans are not sufficiently biologically specialised to survive without making up societies developed through labour, commencing with the freeing-up of the hands through an upright posture and bipedalism. And so over a lengthy evolution (though in one phase not so lengthy: farming is only 10,000 years old) we have developed elaborated thinking, reasoning, imagining and all through necessary social co-operation and thought-sharing in speech, work, dance, ritual, art, writing and electronic communication – in the service of the reproduction of human social life.

          Just as there is no rigid division between humans and animals, so there is no such thing as ‘thought’ per se. There is always thought about something.  

          ‘Thought’ is not a spiritual ‘implant’ inside a corporeal human body. There is no division of an existential kind between a corporeal human body and his/her thoughts, for the thoughts as such are an activity of that body: something the body does rather than has.   

          ‘Thought’ in isolation is non-existent, an abstraction or reification. It is impossible to think ‘thought’ as such because as a mythical entity in isolation, thought does not exist and by itself is unimaginable. Only thinking exists, as a bodily extension.

          Thoughts are Nature thinking about itself. That is, because human beings are natural beings, a development of Nature itself through humanoid biological-social evolution. In our terms evolution in Nature tends to be slow, though with ‘qualitative leaps’. Biologically we are pretty much the same as our homo sapiens Stone Age ancestors. It is via a further tool-using sociality that we have developed far beyond them. And because all creatures and plants reciprocate with environments, more especially with humans thinking – being a social action and indeed storing social images when not directly socialising – mental activity is  manifested ‘out there’ as much as ‘in here’. Human beings as social beings are consciously purpose-driven, we live our lives by intending to get to work (and coming home again), by working out how to build a house (or reading the instructions), by deciding to sit in this chair rather than that one, by deciding to have children, or at any rate to deal with that situation whether intended or not. As classes emerge in human societies, or in the relations of production and reproduction of human life, so class-struggle is grounded in the natural needs of humans as natural beings, in a struggle over wherewithal in terms of shelter, food and other needs. Thus it is a perpetuation of Nature but in the human socio-political context of the inequalities that deprive the many and over-fulfil the few who rule over them. Class struggles have been endemic in societies of slavery, despotism, feudalism and capitalism. Categorising actions strictly in terms of whether they stem from emotions or from intellect or instincts is unhelpful because purpose towards something is the activity-driven impetus, even if it comes from no more than to relieve oneself of pain or the burden of excrement. The whole natural body is purpose-driven by means some of which are physiologically beyond our immediate control – hunger, contractions, infections, scabbing and so on; but in humans thinking is in overall charge, aided by the more advanced thinking of, say, medical practitioners, not to speak of chefs.

          Mental health has profound implications for thinking bodies, and mental illness is if anything more painful and terrifying for a thinking body than physical illness, something the mass of us even now are only just beginning to realise.

          It might have been better all round if Descartes, back in the 17^th century, had inaugurated modern philosophy by saying: ‘I am, therefore I think’ rather than ‘I think, therefore I am.’ Thinking was not prior to corporeal existence. But for Descartes the dilemma would then be how to posit a basic ‘I am’ without some sort of Divine postulate or intervention, outside a construction of rational thinking as such, Darwin not having been around in the 17^th century, pace Spinoza. Indeed Descartes resorted to Divine intervention to explain the conundrum of mind-body separation or dualism, (in humans only: dolphins, chimps and bonobos need not apply: Descartes thought of animals as automatons; evidently he had never seen a sleeping dog dreaming) which has bedevilled philosophy ever since. Thus dualism holds that consciousness and physicality are separate domains, but no one has figured out how the supposed corporeal domain and the incorporeal domain interact. The only possible answer seems to have been that God made it so, and you don’t go about questioning Him!

          There is a downside. Because thinking is so all-encompassing in human life it leads us to be the only creatures who are aware of the imminence of their deaths. Animals instinctively know the fear of danger but nothing of their own deaths, though higher animals will mourn the losses of their kind, most poignantly elephants with their exceptional memories. But we know that we ourselves are not exempt in a single instance from personal extinction – danger notwithstanding – and this may be hard to bear.

          What is harder to bear is the sheer nastiness, terror, pain and filth of much dying (not death itself) and the yearly deaths of hundreds of thousands of children across the world: truly shocking such that this essay is powerless to address it adequately. And then the cutting down of the youthful, still in their early prime, tragically and often violently.  All this for me, and I think most others – is much harder to bear than our personal extinction (at least until we are brought to realize the latter’s actual oncoming). Ironically death itself is easier to give thought to and respond to, and so it is this that we will focus on here. Death is piffling compared to dying.

          To meet this eventuality we have developed down the ages a ‘cure’ that might be considered worse than the ‘disease’: a belief in our individual immortality. Probably the majority of people even outside the church believe in a personal immortality of some sort. The irony of this is that it is the corporeal body that is ‘immortal’ (never mind souls) since matter even as transmuted into energy is inextinguishable.

          The living body is not a can of beans, vacuum-sealed and sufficient unto itself. It is continuously nourished and sustained by that which is outside it - including the air we breathe almost every second of our lives or die. The foci and objects of our hopes and fears, our plans, our images, our emotions and our actions – our minds, in short – are ‘out there’ not ‘in here’. Our brains are not the source but the instrument, the two-way transmitter. We, and all living organisms, are as much ‘out there’ as ‘in here’, and for humans this includes their thinking minds. Without ‘out there’, there would be no minds. Even purely mental, immaterial images – not viewable in brain scans – and however internalised, are not wholly internal but a response to the world we live in. And this includes the picturised, compulsive thinking we know as dreams, which may lack everyday logic but not sense, however ‘nonsensical’. Those who instinctively grasp our essential being-in-the-world are, I believe, the more inclined to give back what they take in, perhaps the more inclined to protest against air pollution because they know that ‘air’ is ‘us’ – us as much as our arms and legs and incredibly more vital. Those who are intent on emulating cans of beans will likely be complaisant over killing their own and other peoples’ children on this account. Meanwhile, I suggest, if I cannot prove, that those who give freely of themselves will give freely of their lives when their time comes. Death, this last act of rendering, giving up, can make sense to those who have ‘given’ all their lives. Even solitary artists know the intensity of giving, and the martyred saints of old gave up their lives not only for the bliss to come but also because they had been giving for all or much of their lives. But the need to give today does not require a fanaticism of the old kind, only a realistic assessment of where we and the world are presently heading if we continue to respond by feeding ourselves at the expense of feeding and freeing others.  The personal immortality alternative is not justifiable on virtually any grounds. That is no more than a patchwork of half-baked egoistic ideas needing ever more patching and mending to give (in our time) cover to narcissistic capitalism, itself upholding – in reality – only the immortality of money: the fetish twinned with idealised personal immortality. So twinned, they shore each other up.

Far from the older conservative values of a traditional and organic society, Tory ideology today is focussed on the belief in the self-achieving individual whose freedom is threatened by ‘collectivism’. We are all materially better-off (even the poor) than we used to be, but better-off as separated individuals, not in collective, environmental and social terms. Regardless of whether or not polar bears are on the brink of extinction through our efforts to warm up the globe, the higher and stouter the wall of protection around our house, large or small, the better. Even transport must be insanely individualised with results in our death-dealing pollution and five-mile tailbacks, not to speak of the material waste involved in a world of depleting resources. Unless we can successfully complete this individualist paradise with either an irrational dismissal of imminent personal death or the clinging to the shreds of a faith – long since abandoned otherwise – in a personal immortality, this solipsistic emphasis on extreme separated individualism  makes the thought of one’s own death horrifying in its inconceivability. What can ‘nothing’ mean to one who is ‘everything’ there is? The ‘cure’ of belief in a personal delivery through an inner immortal soul is worse than the ailment if the religion backing this up is not otherwise very robustly believed, and so contributes in its fragile way towards a rubbing raw of the knowledge of death. (Strictly speaking, the biblical Christian dogma is ‘the resurrection of the body’ on the Day of Judgment: see e.g. 1 Corinthians 15:52. As for Buddhist reincarnation, if there is no individuality in Buddhism, what is being ‘reincarnated’?)

          To sum up. No neurologist has ever detected ‘thoughts’ in the brain. Neural firings are not themselves thoughts: the apprehended world (including other bodily functions) creates thoughts. Because we are purpose-driven (common at various levels to all organisms – even, so it seems, trees), our thinking applied to purpose (not found in other organisms except for rudiments in the higher animals and birds), known as ‘mind’, is ‘out there’ rather than ‘in here’. However secret or fanciful or mistaken thoughts may be, or in dreams during sleep, their existence is predicated on the outside world of objects and purposes to do with objects including other human objects, and our own body as an object. Remove all that, remove all stimulus of content and purpose, and there is no ‘thought’ at all. In that state one is either dead or deeply drugged or in a coma in which whole physical systems are shut down.

          In a new book The Spread Mind: Why Consciousness and the World Are One (2017) psychologist Riccardo Manzotti of the University of Milan (‘who has written 50 papers on the basis of consciousness’) considers that our consciousness is of the same stuff physically as the objects it encounters. I would go along with this inasmuch as air and all the rest of the ‘outside’ are integral to us as individual bodies. It is promising that Professor Manzotti mounts a comprehensive and vehement attack on Cartesian mind-body dualism, but despite protestations he cannot ultimately detach himself from the age-old materialist doctrine of physicalism, i.e. that the only real world is the physical world, (a doctrine diametrically opposed, like a fractious twin, to Bishop Berkeley’s theory that the world is immaterially engendered in us by God). Oddly, Manzotti comes to at least partially embrace his twin in the sense that his own doctrine appears to edge towards the Bishop’s view when logically worked out.

          Essentially this is because Manzotti’s focus is on a consciousness passively observing objects (in his case a red apple, so often cited throughout the text as to seem obsessional), just as with virtually all the conventional materialist philosophers.

          Here it is useful to bring in Marx and Theses on Feuerbach, viz.:

‘The chief defect of all previous materialism (including that of Feuerbach) is that things, reality, the sensible world, are conceived only in the form of objects of observation, but not as human sense activity, not as practical activity, not subjectively….’ (I)

‘The standpoint of the old type of materialism is civil society; the standpoint of the new materialism is human society or social humanity.’ (IX)

Or this from the 1844 Manuscripts:

‘Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life process.’

And this, from the German Ideology:

‘We begin with real, active men, and from their real life-process show the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life process. ..Life is not determined from consciousness but consciousness by life.’

          Deriving theses on consciousness from the peaceful contemplation of apples or anything else means ultimately reaching a dead end persisting in this frame of thinking.

Hence my stress on the modality of purpose-driven thinking social beings as the developers of consciousness as an actively-used tool, long ago commencing with the freed-up hands. It is in this active sense that as aspects of our material bodies,  our minds are as much ‘out there’ as ‘in here’. When we are released from purpose we will not think anyhow, and so death is nothing to worry about when we no longer have the means by which to worry. But if we have given out some good, at least enough to be missed and remembered to whatever extent, our ‘out there’ will survive us. Buddhists and Hindus would call this our karma, the sum total of all our actions when alive that survives us. I think this is perfectly reasonable in a humanist-materialist sense, as outlined in this blog. It is by this ‘karma’ that Mozart, Beethoven, Rembrandt, Jane Austen, Annie Jones, Steve Wilkinson and that sharp-minded old chap down the pub survive. Or if we’ve done more than our fair share of bad, our ‘out there’ will most likely be shunned, despised and figuratively spat upon. Or perhaps more likely  it will be a mixture of both. So: a heaven, a hell and a purgatory exist after all, though you need not concern yourself with them unless you want to! In this case it really is your survivors who agonise, not you.

 

 

         

 

“Whatever Happened to…?”

 

          It is no sin to be forgotten. Judging by a perusal of back-numbers of the Times Literary Supplement, nobody ever is.

          But there is a sense in which being largely forgotten is a kind of judgment. Forgottenness in the list below may have something to do (in many cases) with overblown pretensions, and with the hype of the time for which the subject may or may not have been chiefly responsible.

          Being dead is no excuse. Where would history and biography be if persons became forgotten because they had died? Indeed, as in the case with artists, death often leads to enhanced reputations and escalating asset-values. I hasten to add that a number listed below are still very much alive.

          The list covers the public realm generally – authors, cultural pundits of the day, one-time radicals and experimentalists, thinkers and doers across a wide range of the social, cultural and political, philosophers, psychologists, economists, theologians. All or most were once widely followed with avidity, their next works looked forward to with baited breath, and argued over interminably. They were household names at least amongst the literati and often somewhat beyond. Some made headlines.

          I’ve deliberately left out popular/pop/rock stars, scandal figures and fashion icons – surely the most ephemeral? Not really. Mandy Rice-Davies and the late Christine Keeler are ever with us. John Profumo is the only member of Macmillan’s government anyone can recall, offhand. Cecil Beaton was a certain kind of high-fashion icon but is strangely immortal. So is Coco Chanel, amongst others. Buddy Holly never reached the 1960s. Mario Lanza never reached the Sixties either but still sells albums. This year Frank Sinatra would be 103. Elvis lives. These and others have a tendency towards permanency  denied all too many in ‘the higher culture’. As the saying goes: when in doubt go on tour. Even as a hologram.

          If some of the names listed below are entirely strange to you, they really have been forgotten. Others are ‘in the process of’, so to speak. Meanwhile aficionados are going to be furious…

(Sir) Richard Acland

John Arden

Hannah Arendt 1

(Sir) Isaiah Berlin

Brigid Brophy

Norman O Brown

Frank Buchman

Anthony Burgess 2

(Dame) Barbara Cartland

Carlos Castaneda

Daniel Cohn-Bendit

Regis Debray


John Dos Pasos

Laurence Durrell 3

HJ Eysenck

Francis Fukuyama

Buckminster Fuller 4


Anthony ('Third Way') Giddens

Graham Greene 5

Abby Hoffman

Ivan Illich

Eugene Ionesco 6

CEM Joad

James Jones

Alfred Kinsey 6

Hans Kung

Arthur Laffer

RD Laing


Harold Laski

Sinclair Lewis 7

Claude Levi-Strauss

Mary McCarthy

Marshall McLuhan

Herbert Marcuse

W Somerset Maugham

Henry Miller

Jonathan Miller

Malcolm Muggeridge

Lewis Mumford

Iris Murdoch

Timothy O’Leary

Vance Packard 6

Laurens van der Post

Anthony Powell 8

John Cowper Powys

Dorothy Richardson 9

Harold Robbins

Lionel (Lord) Robbins


Robert Ruark

Ken Russell

James Saunders

(Sir) CP Snow

Susan Sontag 10

Donald (Lord) Soper

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

DM Thomas

Paul Tillich

Arnold Wesker

Huw Wheldon

Angus Wilson

Colin Wilson

Boris Yeltsin

 

1. More recently a revival of interest in her thought.
2. Known now largely via association with the notoriety of Kubrick’s film of ‘A Clockwork Orange’.
3. Was my personal god when I was twenty.
4. We still have geodesic domes but the philosophy has been cast aside.
5. ‘The greatest novelist of his time’? Don’t worry: ‘We’ll always have Vienna – and the zither…’
6. Regrets in some cases. I rate Eugene Ionesco as one of the 20^th century’s most penetrating and disturbing playwrights but he refuses to be revived.  Ivan Illich in the 1960s was an inspired anarchist and teacher whose De-schooling Society, amongst other books, we yet have much to learn from. Alfred Kinsey statistically liberated us all in terms of sexual enlightenment only to be posthumously and disgracefully denigrated by his latter-day peers. Vance Packard in the 1950s and 60s did much to heighten our awareness of the insidious power of advertising. Alas, advertising survived him to go on to even greater triumph, riches and supremacy.
7. America’s first literature Nobel prizewinner. Both Babbit and Elmer Gantry prove to be far-seeing and relevant to today. His death in 1951 made the headlines and the radio news but he seems all but forgotten today.
8. A new biography may well revive public interest.
9. As a pathbreaking novelist stylistically, Richardson was once ranked alongside Virginia Woolf.
10. Has now made a comeback with a new book (2017) of reflective prose.

There are no set rules for being remembered, and the following are not necessarily relevant to all those just listed, but they might act as a sort of guide to the aspirant.

Don’t go in for false dawns. Choose your sunrises with some care.

Don’t make claims you can’t really substantiate.

Don’t confuse creative eclecticism with originality.

Be basically, not superficially, subversive.

Remember that our works are either symptoms or solutions. Too often  a proposed solution is really only a symptom of the problem or situation under consideration. Symptoms of a social era are rarely in a position to initiate big change of that of which they are such an intimate part.

Be lucky not to be taken up and hyped beyond the possibility of enthusing posterity.

Don’t watch this space for – Althusser, Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, Baudrillard, Kristeva et al. Better observers than I have been taking them apart for some years but not before too many university students were confusedly bedazzled.

     Then there are those who were virtually unknown until sometime after their deaths. Think of Copernicus. Or, in modern times, the late Hyman Minsky, these days very much ‘the man of the Moment’ in economics. Not to mention Jesus of Nazareth, who was not much ‘hyped’ when in the corporeal state.

 

Bootle’s Wand

 

          From ‘Defending bank chiefs’ profligate pay will just add fuel to Corbyn’s ire,’ Daily Telegraph Business 4^th December 2017 let Roger Bootle, chairman of Capital Economics, start us off:

A note last week from analysts at Morgan Stanley suggesting that the election of a Labour government could be a bigger risk to the City than Brexit has prompted Jeremy Corbyn to give a disarmingly direct response: “When they say we’re a threat they’re right. We’re a threat to a damaging and failed system that’s rigged for the few.”

 

Of course, according to Mr Bootle, Jeremy’s occupation of No. 10 would be an unmitigated disaster for all kinds of reasons,  more especially that he ‘misses many crucial points and pays scant regard to the consequences of proposed actions.’  Well, perhaps he has, perhaps he hasn’t. Mr Bootle is never very clear or precise. It could be that Jeremy Corbyn has indeed paid regard to ‘the consequences of proposed actions’  but they don’t weigh as heavily on him as they might on Mr Bootle’s particular readers.  But let that pass. For, stunningly, Mr Bootle concedes that ‘Yet he does have a point.’ Jeremy Corbyn has a point? What is going on here?

          It turns out to be a politically-charged point, since Jeremy also mentioned that the chief executive of Morgan Stanley, James Gorman, was paid (in sterling terms) £16.7 million in salary last year, which Roger Bootle accepts as true. This is dangerous territory we are getting into, and Mr Bootle is wary: ‘It may be difficult for senior bankers to comprehend this,’ he writes, ‘but there is a widespread feeling in society that they have not earned the huge sums of money that they are paid.’

          If you didn’t know this before, you read it here.

          What’s more, ‘Rage against bankers is not just a UK phenomenon.’ It seems that if anything Americans are even more splenetic over them. But there is an even wider problem: ‘The excesses of capitalism are by no means confined to banking.’ Has Bootle borrowed from a Morning Star editorial? (Our only Marxist daily here, for the uninitiated.) Roger Bootle qualifies this by stating that ‘the privatisation of large swathes of the British economy, first begun under Mrs Thatcher, and disparaged by Mr Corbyn, was an enormous success.’ Some might differ. How ‘successful’, other than in moneymaking terms, have the privatisations of electricity and gas, water and railways, public housing (hence our present desperate housing shortage) and schools actually been? Parents of schoolchildren, as well as probation and prison officers, the homeless and Southern Rail commuters might demur. Not much is left after all these. Bootle has the good sense to concede: ‘But not all privatisations were equally successful. In some cases, what is essentially a natural monopoly is now operated for the benefit of the senior executives and shareholders…This is not proper capitalism, which thrives on competition. This is the capitalism of the robber barons.’

          Odd. I always thought the old robber barons – Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt et. al – were intensely competitive, to the point of buying out or ruining all who stood in their way.

          Be that as it may, apparently the only proper capitalism is that which thrives on competition, including that of James Dyson and – Bill Gates, whose Microsoft has thrived on competition, surely not on acquired monopolistic patents. We admire them (and positively adore Rupert Murdoch) but not the likes of bankers, who have simply been making money out of money, not profiting productively. Though, Bootle says, a propos  something-or-other,  it is not the market’s fault that public bodies like the NHS and the BBC have been in effect hollowed out by capital. ‘This is surely for the public sector to sort out.’ Mr Bootle cannot be blind to the fact that such public bodies are publicly accountable, which means to whichever government is in power at Westminster. Perhaps he did not notice, for example, that it is the governments of New Labour and beyond that have forced PFI on public organisations, and Health Ministers who have imposed the ruinous costs on the NHS of internal private enterprise – meanwhile, of course, holding the purse-strings of all these organisations. So a bit of sleight of hand here, as we come to learn of Mr Bootle’s powers and pretentions as a magician.

          So we shall get a Corbyn-led administration, which will virtually destroy the economy. (It’s in great shape now, of course.) but ‘If this happens, it will be largely the fault of the Conservative Party.’

So far, Jeremy Corbyn has been playing the best tunes. This Government needs to make the case for capitalism, including banking, making clear how beneficial it is for the living standards of ordinary people, while highlighting the disastrous performance of most, if not all, socialist governments abroad and most Labour governments here at home.

In other words, better spin like Tony used to do.

          I wish Bootle had been more specific. What does he mean by saying that ‘most, if not all socialist governments abroad’ have performed disastrously? Are we supposed to conjure up Gerhard Schroeder, Mao Zedong, Julius Nyerere, Hugo Chavez, Deng Xiaoping, Franklin Roosevelt, Leonid Brezhnev or Francois Mitterand? Which of these and possibly other ‘not alls’ were the successes? Can socialism in any guise ever have been successful? Surely not in the Daily Telegraph! What, according to Bootle is socialism?  As for ‘most Labour governments’, which are the ‘not alls’ that succeeded? Did the administrations of MacDonald, Attlee, Wilson-Callaghan and Blair-Brown not all end in disaster? (For God’s sake don’t mention Anthony Eden, Alec Douglas-Home, Ted Heath, John Major or David Cameron!) If not which succeeded? We don’t know. Bootle won’t tell us.

          What Bootle pleads for is making the case for an enlightened capitalism which still allows decent, hardworking rich people to make a lot of money provided ‘they obey the law and pay their taxes’.  (Though they can avoid doing the latter if they choose to be non-domiciled, and if they wait around long enough the highest tax-rates will continue to be lowered.) So here is the solution:

The promotion of capitalism includes restructuring the system to minimise abuses and excesses. Ensuring effective competition holds the key. Unless the Conservatives find a way of pulling this off then we may be destined to appreciate the merits of capitalism only by experiencing its demise.

And that’s it. I can imagine an email winging its way to Roger Bootle from Downing Street: ‘Er, Rog, could you maybe give us some idea of how we could go about this? The Party would be broke without donations from bankers and hedge funds, and from your “robber barons”.’  For Mr Bootle has provided no solution whatever except the magic wand that seems to be passed about from one Telegraph columnist to another.

          And so the best Roger Bootle can offer is that the Conservatives ‘find a way of pulling this off.’ Thanks for nothing, Tories might reply. In any case the government interference of ‘restructuring the system’ sounds a bit socialist to me. What Mr Bootle proposes in generalities looks much like the rather more detailed Labour Party programme which has already been announced and publicised.  Why not take this further?

          Thus I can see now the Tory posters for the next election: ‘Vote Labour, for strong and stable government!’

          This isn’t so silly. During Jeremy Corbyn’s first contest for the Labour Party leadership, the Daily Telegraph mischievously advised Conservatives to sign up for Labour by paying the £3 entry fee in order to vote for Jeremy and so help install an unelectable Labour leader. All they need do now is forget their worries, vote for Jeremy again and then let a victorious Prime Minister Corbyn take the blame for everything that happens subsequently. Much easier than rallying to a clapped-out ideology and cheaper than trying to get the Tory Party elected in these increasingly unelectable times for it. That’s how I would ‘pull this off’!

 

 

 

         

 

 

THE NEW DEVIL’S DICTIONARY

 

ADVERTISING – paid for in supermarkets.

 

AFFORDABLE HOUSING – to make property primarily unaffordable.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

DEBT – someone else’s asset.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

HATRED OF FREE SPEECH – anti-fascism.

 

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

 

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

 

LIFESTYLE – personalised selfishness.

 

LITTER – the triumph of free enterprise in all directions.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

POLITICAL MEMOIRS – prop doors open.

 

POLLUTION – the oxygen of modernity.

 

PROGRESS – enslavement.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

….My work here is done!

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Marxist at the Movies (4):

 

QUESTIONS OF MOVIES SPECTACLE

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s Happening?

 

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

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

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

          Time to stuff your mattress?

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

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

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

SPIVVY BANKS

 

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

          So – hoarding works!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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