THIS WAY UP

(Part Two of 'Everybody's Happy Nowadays', Part One here.)

”History has just begun”
- The Ex

“Let's change the future from here”
- Atari Teenage Riot

”Nobody will give you freedom, you have to take it”
- Meret Oppenheim

(The story so far: Back when our side fought the class war more acutely, we had near-universal benefits, pensions and healthcare, and better protection in the workplace. Now we're fighting less, and by a remarkable coincidence all of that's being eroded. But how did we come to be losing like this? And even then wasn’t it that we didn’t have it good, just less bad? How come we ever put up with this situation in the first place?) 

It’s notable how in practice people slip back and forth between saying “we live freely in a democracy” and “but you can’t ever touch the rich, why bother trying?”, despite them being so clearly contradictory. But the puzzle’s soon solved. It’s a matter of starting off with the obvious-sounding conclusion then going back to the working-out. Both assert nothing is to be done, so we might as well stay sitting where we are. Which takes us to the real question. Why the need for such ‘rationalisations’?

While the thing they’re busily not saying is “capitalism’, the thing they are busy saying is “human nature”. This is known as the naturalistic fallacy, the notion that if something is that’s proof in itself it out to be. To want to change things is to go against some fundamental order, like defying gravity.

In a classic example, in the film ‘Dr. Zhivago’ the revolutionary Pacha (played by Tom Courtney) curtly insists “people will be different after the revolution”. And if we’re presented at all in the mainstream media it’s usually as some form of this - equal parts fanatical and unworldly.

Yet there’s abundant evidence of mutual aid being practiced. What, for example, about food banks? Their spread is often taken as an inevitable consequence of hunger. Yet people must set them up, others must donate to them and still others volunteer in them. You could look at these examples and assume the truth’s the very opposite. We are not greedy, its just the greedy telling us we are. So our nature must not be bad but good.

But ultimately that just makes the same mistake the other way up. Yes, history shows there were those who risked their own lives to hide those in danger from Nazis. But it shows others grassing them up, even - in no small numbers - murdering them themselves, in order to take their property. It’s not enough to find a few surface examples, and then try to apply some universal rule.

When faced with such reductive simplicities we shouldn’t reverse but transcend them. We need to reject altogether the confining notion we are limited to some kind of “nature”. Nature is here being used as a synonym for essence, or set of inherent qualities, as if we’ve been made in a mould. In this sense it can only be applied to objects. Geologists classify rocks according to their structure, and the job’s done. Whereas even other animals have a culture, in that they can adapt or innovate, choose to do one thing or another.

But to go back to the Pacha quote, the thing is – he’s right. People would be different. After so seismic an event as a revolution, how could they not? ‘Human nature’ isn’t natural at all. It’s human, by definition. It is, and always has been, a social construct. We make our nature, by creating its conditions.

Our bodies are quite literally composed of what we consumed through our lives. An archaeologist can come across human remains and, by analysis of its bone and teeth, deduce where and how that person lived. Should our minds be any different? Isn’t our upbringing, the people we’ve met and our experiences of life, the best guide to understanding what makes us ourselves? Doesn’t that sound more credible than us being like sticks of seaside rock, with the same few words written right through us? And why should this not also apply collectively? History books talk freely of how, for example, life became different after the Second World War.

Zoologists how now effectively given up studying animals in captivity, as it’s so unconnected to their behaviour in the wild. Yet Sociology has done nothing but study humans in captivity since its inception. As Marx said “the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In reality, it is the ensemble of the social relations.”

Besides, isn’t there a bizarre twist to this? While it’s supposedly a foolish fancy to imagine we can “change human nature”, the existence of Capitalism itself proves the opposite. Capitalism replaced Feudalism, a quite different system of social organisation which required people to adopt a quite different “nature”. For the main argument it uses against us to be true, it couldn’t be here to make it in the first place.

So wage labourers under capitalism act and think as wage labourers, just as peasants think and act as peasants and tribespeople as tribespeople. Limited historical perspective can hide this truth from us, but once pointed out it becomes obvious. They call us hopeless idealists, when we’re the real materialists! 

So this mean a communist society would reshape us until we we’re all neat nuggets of altruism, slaving selflessly for the pubic good, scrubbed clean of any traces of individual identity? No of course it doesn’t! But then such a parodic notion was never anything to do with communism in the first place.

We need to ask, all this supposed individualism, but what’s in it for us? We want communism precisely because we are the ones who will benefit from it, because we will gain control of our lives not lose it. It’s your boss at work who tells you “there’s no I in team”, when he wants you to work harder for no more reward. It’s us who tell you there is an I in communism.

The legendary Pop Group liked to sing “only you can be your liberator”. And the way we live now, putting yourself at the centre of your life is in itself virtually a radical act. But you can’t carry out that act alone, you need to work in accord with others or you’ll be easily beaten down. It may sound a paradox. But it’s because we’ve always been told an inherent division exists, between ‘the individual’ and ‘society’, a chasm which we must leave to wise heads as something only they can manage. Might there be times conflicts can arise? Of course. Is it inherent? Effectively, the opposite. ‘The individual’ needs ‘society’, and vice versa.

Marx and Engels always insisted “the free development of each becomes the condition of the free development of all.” Bakunin was more eloquent still: “no tree ever brings forth two leaves that are exactly identical. How much more will this be true of men, men being much more complicated creatures than leaves. But such diversity, far from constituting an affliction is… one of the assets of mankind. Thanks to it, the human race is a collective whole wherein each human being complements the rest and has need of them; so that this infinite variation in human beings is the very cause and chief basis of their solidarity.”

And there’s a second way their argument is self-defeating. It may be true that none of us are selfless saints. But then what does that say about the wisdom of handing vast reserves of power and wealth over to a few individuals, in the hope they then use some of that back for the betterment of the rest of us? Or making some order-givers on the assumption they’ll legislate for the greater good?

The most infamous example of this is the orange goon Trump. Remember how every “sensible” political pontificator was telling us that first securing the nomination, then assuming the Presidency would lead him to become “more Presidential”, the burden of office straightening him out. Of course it was the opposite. Being born into such a position of power was the very thing which had made him such a grasping psychopath. So, strangely enough, granting him more power didn’t prove much of a cure. Its like saying the cure for alcoholism is more booze.

But as ever he’s just a more egregious example of a general rule. Power corrupts, we see the evidence all around us. It’s true to say that it couldn’t do so unless we were corruptible. But the sensible answer to that is - let’s minimise the chances of corruptibility!

Okay, you reply, but whose going to do the work?

The answer in brief is – who do you see doing it now?

You hear all the time people complaining against (real or, more commonly, imagined) “scroungers” and “shirkers”. They say they want to see these “idlers” getting a job, contributing to society, doing something useful. Yet if you ask the self-same people whether they feel they are contributing or doing something useful in their own jobs, you’re either met with a stupefied look or a diatribe over how much they hate the whole valueless experience. And that disconnection is the very point. Work is so awful for me, why should others get to escape it?

Almost everybody knows the Marxist phrase that we’re “alienated from the means of production”. And of course it’s very true. The factory worker who tightens widgets all day, or the call centre operative who ceaselessly repeats their script, both feel disassociated from what they do. This remains the case even if they’re in one of the few remaining jobs which have an actual social value. We’re doing things not of our choosing, under conditions not of our making, simply so we can survive. How is that likely to make us feel?

But Marx didn’t stop there, where everybody thinks he did. He went on to describe how the situation also left the worker alienated from him or her self, was unable to interact with the world in a way they chose, was therefore unable to fulfil themself. We don’t just live in a world where the things we create and enable don’t belong to us. We live in a world where, in a material sense, we don’t belong to us either.

There’s a thing you have which you must sell, if you’re to get by in the world. And that thing you must sell is you. Ever seen a thing you used to own, disconnected from you, for sale in a shop window? Now imagine that thing is you. Estranged from even your own self, of course you come to feel estranged from others.

The paradox is almost unparalleled. We are the engine of it all, every day we are the fuel which obligingly pours itself in - and only then can the machine run. But we appear to ourselves as the passengers. It’s the backbreaking business of labour, combined with the passive feeling of being strapped in your seat.

As Malatesta commented: “Someone whose legs had been bound from birth but had managed nevertheless to walk as best he could, might attribute his ability to move to those very bonds which in fact serve only to weaken and paralyse the muscular energy of his legs…. Just imagine if the doctor were to expound… a theory, cleverly illustrated with a thousand invented cases to prove that if his legs were freed he would be unable to walk and would not live, then that man would ferociously defend his bonds and consider as his enemy anyone who tried to remove them.” That’s where we are.

Exploitation and alienation are the two fists that maintain the abusive relationship we endure with capital. Yet alienation has a particular twist. Alienation is simultaneously a form of psychological damage and the justification for that damage, the gaslighting voice that tells us this abusive relationship is all we have so we should cling to it.

Yet, as that great philosopher Homer Simpson said, “it’s a crummy system, but what you gonna do?”

The first step to overcome this alienation is to act for ourselves. A Reclaim The Streets flyer for an action in support of the (then striking) London Tube workers craftily modelled itself on the Tube map handouts. Under the header ‘Mind The Gap (Between What is Possible and What Capitalism Allows)’ they said:

“If we want another world we’ve got to stop maintaining this one through our action and inaction. The power of our rulers is based on the fact that they have separated us from each other, and we act as alienated individual workers and as passive consumers. By endlessly repeating the same patterns – paying our fares and bills, going to work, watching the world unfold on TV – we recreate the world every day. Today we attempt for a brief period to upset the normal pattern, to feel the power that we have when we act together… Workers can bring this world to a halt.” 

It’s a good first step. Yet life is more complicated and, unfortunately but inevitably, to talk about what communism is necessity compels us to start with what it isn’t. This goes beyond the inevitable distortions of black propagandists. The sad truth is that very few people alive today claim to be communists and very few people even know what communism is. And sometimes this seems particularly true among those who claim to be communists.

Mention the word and expect the Soviet Union to be thrown in your face. Even today, thirty-five years after its passing. There are those able to see the obvious truth that it wasn’t at all communist, some even able to grasp the more important point that it was capitalist. But mostly they still cling to the notion that ‘central planning’ becomes at some point antithetical to capitalism. Then, when you ask them where Marx says such a thing, they’ll hurriedly change the subject. This fixation with central control is what Bordiga called “the mistaken thesis”: 

“Constructing industrialism and mechanising things is supposedly the same as building socialism whenever central and ‘national’ plans are made… The difference between the employment of mechanical forces in a capitalist society and in a socialist one is not quantitative, it does not lie in the fact that technical and economic management passes from restricted circles to a complete circle. It is qualitative and consists in the total overthrow of the capitalist characteristics of the use of machines by human society, something much more thoroughgoing and which consists in a ‘relationship between men’ in opposition to the cursed ‘factory system’ and the social division of labour.”

And Marx himself said the very opposite to the words so often stuffed in his mouth: “To be radical is to grasp the root of the matter. But, for man, the root is man himself.” (Okay, “man” should be “human”, he was writing a while ago.) His conception of Communism was “a free association of producers under their own conscious and purposive control.”

The revolutionary subject is not the plan but ourselves. Inasmuch as there is such a thing as revolutionary plans, its because we make them. We make them ourselves and make them for ourselves. We are not ancillary or subservient to them. They are subservient to us.

But what would this free association of producers actually look like? How do these high-sounding ideas fare against reality?

Most people seem to assume there’s an intrinsic link between authority and organisation. Fascist societies might have been repressive, but you can’t deny they got things done. Whereas anyone who’s actually studied actual fascist societies knows they were effectively the opposite - fractious, chaotic and corrupt. The famous formulation that Mussolini made the trains run on time was a baseless propaganda line, still repeated now all these decades later. Whereas during the Spanish revolution, anarchist workers collectivised the Barcelona trams - and they did run on time.

This is George Orwell's description of the workers' militias he encountered during that time, as recounted in 'Homage To Catalonia':

“The essential point of the system was social equality between officers and men. Everyone from general to private drew the same pay, ate the same food, wore the same clothes, and mingled on terms of complete equality. If you wanted to slap the general commanding the division on the back and ask him for a cigarette, you could do so, and no one thought it curious…. each militia was a democracy and not a hierarchy. 

”…there was no military rank in the ordinary sense; no titles, no badges, no heel-clicking and saluting. They had attempted to produce within the militias a sort of temporary working model of the classless society....”

”Cynical people with no experience of handling men will say instantly that this would never 'work', but as a matter of fact it does 'work' in the long run… 'Revolutionary' discipline depends on political consciousness - on an understanding of why orders must be obeyed; it takes time to diffuse this, but it also takes time to drill a man into an automaton on the barrack-square.” 

”The journalists who sneered at the militia-system seldom remembered that the militias had to hold the line while the Popular Army was training in the rear. And it is a tribute to the strength of 'revolutionary' discipline that the militias stayed in the field at all. For... there was nothing to keep them there, except class loyalty. Individual deserters could be shot - were shot, occasionally - but if a thousand men had decided to walk out of the line together there was no force to stop them. A conscript army in the same circumstances - with its battle-police removed—would have melted away.”

A more nuts-and-bolts explanation of the working mechanisms of workers’ collectives in Spain states... 

“...the individual collective was based on a mass assembly of those who worked there. This assembly nominated administrative staff who were mandated to implement the decisions of the assembly and who had to report back to, and were accountable to, that assembly... So, in general, the industrial collectives were organised from the bottom-up, with policy in the hands of workers’ assemblies… [which] were widely attended and regularly held... if an administrator did something which the general assembly had not authorised, he was likely to be deposed at the next meeting.”

I’ve picked the Spanish revolution because it’s the best known example. But there’s frequent examples of such things throughout history, Wikipedia gives a brief list here. 

Let’s spell out clearly something which shouldn’t really need saying - this is not some magic cure-all which, as soon as unleashed, dispenses with all ills. The problems, issues and debates which came up in Spain and elsewhere have been widely discussed, should anyone want to read about them.

Nevertheless, the examples above give widespread practical examples of something we’re always being told is an impossibility. It is, it might be argued, somewhat in the interests of those currently controlling our lives to tell us that we couldn’t do the job better ourselves. When, most of the time, we’d be harder pressed to do it worse.

But of course we no longer live in 1936. Historical accounts of this period may make for compelling narratives, but as guides for action today do they hold any real relevance? Accounts of the more recent anti-austerity movement in Spain inevitably focus on their negatives, or on their likely effect on electoral politics. Yet popular assemblies not only reappeared, arranged along broadly the same lines, but in the same neighbourhoods – for example at Madrid’s Puerta del Sol.

The CNT, a revolutionary union still in existence, said of these:

”The organizational formulas developed in these mobilizations prove the viability of direct participation through assemblies for taking decisions that channel our aspirations and demands and make us overcome individualism. We become protagonists, rather than spectators of a system based in representation and delegating authority, which erases our individuality. Assemblies, a rotating microphone, working groups, responsibility, capacity, organization, self-responsibility, coordination, involvement and visibility are the collective teeth that move our gears, capable of challenging the institutions… We continue to build at the same time as we disobey. The protest continues!”

Next time! Tune in for our final thrilling instalment...

EVERYBODY'S HAPPY NOWADAYS

What follows is a treatise on anti-capitalist politics, peppered with some pithy quotes and zippy illos in a vain bid to make it seem more enticing. The three parts deal with, in turn: where we are now, what we might do about that and where else we could be instead. After this I promise to shut up about this sort of thing. For a bit, anyway. 

1.YOU ARE HERE

”Can someone tell you at any time what to do and how to do it?”
- From an Inland Revenue leaflet on employment

“There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning.” 
- Warren Buffett

”You’re frettin’, you’re sweatin’, but did you notice you ain’t gettin’?” 
- The Clash

Let's start with a simple question. What kind of a place do we live in?

There's a well-rehearsed answer to that. We live in a democracy, where we have freedom of choice and equality before the law. If we don't like our government we can vote them out. If we don't like our job we can jack it in and find another. Things may not be perfect, perhaps. There may be problems, flaws in the system, exceptions to the rule. But overall, we have the best of what's possible. Other parts of the world, they’re the ones who have it bad.

Except we all really feel that's not true, don't we?

Doesn’t this sound more familiar? The main way most of us survive is by selling our labour. The majority of our waking hours are stolen from us by soulless jobs, doing things which for the most part we have no interest in, in conditions we have no control over. Where bigger and bigger slices are taken from our slender recompense by raised rent or mortgages, or by price-gouging utility bills. Smug, patronising politicians seem barely able to hide their derision about us as the rich grow ever-richer at our expense.

Perhaps a few of us still survive from paltry and ever-more-restricted benefits. But even that choice is being closed up, people not just forced into crappy low-paid jobs but forced to work for those self-same paltry benefits by workfare schemes.

One poll showed 80% of people in Britain feel they have little or no influence over decision-making, with a mere 2% thinking they have a “significant influence.” And should you not trust polls, ask the people around you. Or just ask yourself.

Given which it’s amusing to watch politicians and pundits ruminating sadly over people's “disenchantment with democracy”, as if it's some unfortunate prejudice of ours to be overcome, akin to racism or homophobia. The real reason people feel this is because they already know it to be true. They're reading the situation instinctively a lot of the time. But still accurately.

These homilies are absurdly inaccurate when held up against against the actuality of our lives, but that’s not the measure of them. They should be seen as the conjuror’s trick of misdirection. Because when we consider them, even when we consider how they fail us, we’re still not thinking about things more fundamental.

The first is capitalism. This is the thing we live under, which defines how we live. It decides that, for example, more and better housing be built for the rich while others go homeless, because there’s less profit in housing the homeless. Talking about contemporary society without talking about capitalism is like talking about the chassis of the car without looking at the engine, and concluding if it’s not moving it must be painted the wrong colour. Yet its apologists, at least of the popular variety, go to lengths to avoid any use of the c-word. Its similar to the way the Ancient Greeks had no word for religion, not because it was nowhere in their society but because it was everywhere.

And more, talking about capitalism without mentioning class is like talking about how the engine works without mentioning the petrol. Yet unfortunately this is what many do, including many self-professed radicals. They’ll talk about environmentalism, feminism, gay or trans rights (all important issues, of course) to the complete absence of class. The UK’s Equality Act of 2010 lists nine ‘protected characteristics’ which it’s illegal to discriminate against, race, sex and so on. Class, the main form of exploitation in the modern world, goes unmentioned.

We’re forever being told that working is “contributing to society”, so should leave us feeling “valued”. Yet its clear enough the main function of most jobs is making rich people richer. In a 2015 YouGov poll, 37% of UK respondents saw their job as making absolutely no meaningful contribution to the world.

As one example, take unpaid overtime. Under British law, no-one can be made to sign a work contract that demands this. And yet it happens all the time. The Trade Union Congress calculate that the average British employee works the equivalent of almost two months for free. In some workplaces this is even systemic, employees are laden down by workloads so onerous they can only ever be finished by exceeding your hours.

Of course, at this point apologists for exploitation indulge in their standard combination of individualisation and victim-blaming - “well if you couldn’t be bothered to get another job…” and all the rest. As ever, what’s telling is the selective use of these arguments. No-one ever tells victims of burglary to move. But regardless of the bad-faith nature on show, let’s ask why people don’t do that.

Okay, on a formal level we're no longer serfs, bonded into our labour. We could give notice in those jobs at any time. But where would we go? Don't we know in advance any other job would be essentially the same? Same shit, different hole. People instinctively recognise they’re better off suffering insult and injury if it at least results in some sort of a steady pay check. That when we sell our labour power we play against a loaded deck.

Right, so the day-job sucks. But at least we can vote, right? If we don’t like one lot of politicians, don’t trust their honesty or agree with the way they run things, we can be rid of them by crossing a box.

Yet parliamentary politics is just the same set of bad choices, part of the same class system. Politicians are more bosses, masquerading as public servants. A third of British MPs went to private school, and a quarter to Oxbridge. Almost none are from working class backgrounds. Inevitably, they manage things not to benefit our class but theirs.

It’s not that “they’re all the same”, that the main political parties are identical. It’s that the small and relatively trivial differences between them become redefined as ‘politics’, while any other ideas are cast as outside the pale.

But even if none of this were true, if we could somehow rid ourselves of the corrupt careerist gang that currently clog Parliament and replace them with hand-picked and high-minded idealists, it would change little. And even that little would mostly occur only in the short term. It is Parliament as an institution which is the problem. The sorry, self-serving nature of MPs is just a symptom, not the problem itself.

As an example, the Labour government are currently planning  further privatisation of the National Health service, despite the opposition of 75% of the British public. For a political party to win three-quarters of the vote in an election would be unprecedented.

In the last election many, unenchanted by Labour, turned to voting Green. But in countries where the Greens have become a significant force, they aways gained their place at the table by conforming to business as usual. The German Greens even ended their opposition to nuclear power, though that was essentially their core commitment.

It seems clear enough that political parties don’t make policies to appeal to the public. So who are they aiming at? The answer is big money. A public NHS which just treats sick people offers no financial opportunities for them, open it up to profit-making and it does. In short, Labour are willing to ditch a sure-fire vote winner to chase cash.

And there’s two overlapping reasons for this. First, political parties need funding to operate, which (fairly obviously) needs to come from those with funds. And if they mange to become the government they need to manage the economy, which mostly means appeasing the capitalist class. Political parties will even compete to be the most “pro-business”, proclaiming loudly who they see as their real customers.

Policies which aren’t “pro-business” are regularly labelled as extremist, however popular they actually are. It was John Dewey who said: “As long as politics is the shadow cast on society by big business, the attenuation of the shadow will not change the substance.”

People often respond to this “well okay, maybe the system is flawed.” But it isn’t. This is what the system we have does. And, as ever, what a system does is its actual purpose, however much it might profess otherwise.

More fundamentally, a vote will never be enough. What we need is a say. Electoralism is sold as a means to express political choice, but in reality is itself a political choice. One which implies atomised citizens, individualised consumers shopping for pre-packaged items in the 'marketplace of ideas'. Which resembles any other marketplace, ostensibly an arena which allows the best and most innovative goods to reach us, in actuality a cartel where the shoddiest of products often go on to sell the most.

And we see the same doublethink over electoralism as we do work. It’s quite common for people to proclaim that if we can vote we must be free, by definition, then tell you in the very next second that they’ve never voted themselves, that they despise all politicians, that the system’s rigged and so on. Political parties know this, which is why their advertising is always negative. A Tory face on a poster means it’s for Labour, and vice versa.

Okay, but then - if things are really so bad, why do people put up with them? If there’s such a pressing need for fundamental change, why hasn’t it happened already?

When wondering why someone might go along with a set-up against all their own interests, never underestimate the evidence of brute force. It’s a widely observed police tactic to very visibly arrest a few people on protests, as a warning to the others. People have been mass arrested, assaulted or at times killed for being simply in the vicinity of a demo. Though each individual instance is counter-spun at the time it happens, the evidence is so readily available that people have to consciously look the other way not to see it.

But, though some feign to pretend otherwise, there’s no real evidence that police provoke dissent in order to slap it down. Their preference is for demonstrations to be meek and orderly, or better still not happen at all. Besides, the vast majority of people never go on demonstrations in the first place. So, if not the handcuffs and side-handled baton, what holds us in place?

Remember capitalism likes to do things the cheapest. Why use actual violence when the threat of violence is normally enough to get your way? And the threat of violence has become instinctively imbued in us, to the point we don’t notice it any more – even as we respond to it. It isn’t too much hyperbole to compare the situation to being trapped in an abusive relationship, where abuse has become so much a fact of your life you stop picturing something outside of it. As feminist writer Laurie Penny pointed out: “Anyone who has survived an abusive relationship knows that drawing attention to violence is a sure way of provoking more of it.”

But just as force is the smaller part of the threat of force, the threat of force is the smaller part of our oppression. So if the riot cop is merely a last resort, does that mean the media is more central in perpetuating this world? Partly, yes. Chomsky was right to say “propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.”

In the central sequence of the 1988 John Carpenter film 'They Live' the hero finds special sunglasses, which when put on reveal the billboards and magazines are broadcasting subliminal messages – 'Consume', 'Obey', 'No Independent Thought’, and so on.

It's a bravura sequence, entertaining to watch. But, as an explanation of how our society works, it isn’t one. It’s more the perspective of the hipster outsider, donning his special cool shades, indulgently imagining he sees things others can’t. True, the aliens are intended as a metaphor, this isn’t Ickean pyschobabble. But it still contains many of the hallmarks of conspiracy theories, a conscious plot foisted on the bewildered sheeple while a few bold outsiders… you know the rest.

Of course the vast majority of the British press is in the hands of a few multi-millionaires, who use their megaphone to push an agenda that suits them. It’s not terribly surprising that, for example, Murdoch’s rags devote more time to demonising disabled people as “scroungers” than it does to recounting their own boss’s tax dodging. And it’s nauseating to hear hypocritical tabloid hacks, the paid shills of the super-rich, gushing sycophantically about “the free press”.

Yet are things really the way they are due to the cunning manipulation of signs? What if we could wrangle it that all this media onslaught was somehow switched off one day? Would the masses arise as if from slumber, shake those imposed thoughts from their heads and take to the streets? Anyone picturing that?

And besides, if the mind control model is how it works, why doesn’t it always work? The Poll Tax, the invasion of Iraq, genocide in Gaza and many other events were by and large supported by the popular press, but failed to win over the population.

Try a related question. In the United States, the ultra-exploitative Wal-Mart expect their employees to start the work day with a ludicrous chant in which they spell out the company name, jiggling their arses to stand in for that silly hyphen. Are they so deluded they imagine their staff will cheerfully embrace this? Of course not. If they were that stupid, they wouldn’t be so rich. What they’re hoping is that sheer repetition will internalise the message. ‘Their’ workers will initially resent, then grudgingly get used to, then almost stop noticing they’re doing it. And that’s the lifecycle of any work task. Catholicism expected its subjects to go to Church a lot. Advanced capitalism expects us to to go to work a lot, and largely for the same reason.

Economic power inevitably leads to political and ideological power. But it’s more than that. Economic power includes the power to hire and fire in a world where we need to get hired so long as we still need to eat. Naturally, we learn early to agree with the boss when the boss is talking. And the boss gets to talk a lot. Pretty soon, by sheer force of repetition, we find ourselves repeating those words inside our head when the boss isn’t even around.

That’s closer to it. But it’s more than that. 

It’s effectively a banality to say that politicians, bosses and media barons lie. They do it frequently, audaciously and with practiced ease. But the system they preside over isn’t a lie we’ve all somehow become convinced of, like the ‘inside jobs’ insisted on by conspiracy theorists. We do live under a system where we must sell our labour power to survive. Cops and courts will assault and imprison us if they consider we’re stepping out of line. We cannot think our way out of this situation. Power doesn’t obligingly lose its power over us when we put on a pair of magic sunglasses. It’s no less than the world we live in. To change our experience of the world, we need to change the world.

Let's look at it from one remove. When we look back at past eras, how do we see them? When for example the peasant laboured in the fields for the landlord, he and his buddy the Priest said it was God’s will and part of the natural order. People gathered on Sunday to sing hymns confirming this. It seems absurd to us now that people couldn’t see through such a paper-thin, self-serving justification. We put it down to their being uneducated or parochial, above all to their being not like us. And yet of course we accept the economic realities of our time just as much as they did theirs, and pretty much for the same reasons.

As Gilles Dauve has said “Seemingly normal facts: that an individual has nothing but his labour power, that he must sell it to an enterprise to be able to live, that everything is a commodity, that social relations revolve around exchange, are the result of a long and violent process.”

But we encounter them at the end of that long and violent process, by which time they have come to seem self-evident. Phrases such as “a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay” thereby take on the character of truisms, unarguably self-evident. As Orwell put it, “to see what’s right in front of you needs a constant struggle.”

To take one example, it’s common in these times for workers to be told their bosses “cannot afford” inflation-matching pay rises, and will often impose direct cuts to workers’ pay or pension provision. Which seems an unarguable fact of life, like it getting colder in the winter. While it seems equally unarguable that the workers cannot go on to make the same argument themselves, cannot show up at the supermarket and say that’s all they can afford for this week’s shopping so the cashier’s just going to have to accept it.

We call this ideology, a form of thinking deficient of any actual thinking. It’s the assumptions you make without noticing, before your thinking even starts. As Slavov Zizek said: “The problem with ideology is not that its a falsehood of which we might be persuaded, but because it is a truth that we already accept without knowing it.”

And this point is underlined by the way capitalism can shift mode swiftly, with it’s newly imposed realities getting accepted very quickly. The greater part of my life was lived under the post-war consensus, which was a kind of managed capitalism. The unemployed could rely on benefits, the old on state pensions, the poor on social housing, the sick on treatment and so on. This ameliorated the “worst excesses” of capitalism, and maintained a kind of class truce.

But all of this was to be rolled back, to be replaced by neoliberalism. And in surprisingly short order what had once seemed integral came to be impossible. How, for example, could you possibly expect to have housing for all? Clearly this was unsustainable, the stuff of hopeless idealism!

The triumph of neoliberalism is commonly portrayed as the counter-weight to the collapse of the Soviet Union, one waxing as the other waned. Yet this makes no sense. The Thatcher and the Reagan victories, commonly considered the starting gun of neoliberalism, came a full decade earlier. And initially brought on a spike in Cold War politics. (The Eighties is sometimes called the Second Cold War.)

A more pertinent cause was shifts in the balance of class forces. For various reasons, from the mid-Eighties onwards the rich once more came to gain the upper hand. So the concessions they had made in the post-war consensus no longer seemed necessary. The result was a radical redistribution of wealth – towards the wealthy. As the wealth gap increased massively, this was initially papered over by the increased availability of credit, plus advances in technology which made once luxury items mainstream. During this period most people thought they were better off, rather than worse. This also had the effect of making society more individualised, less in fact like a society.

As the journalist George Monbiot said "So pervasive has neoliberalism become that we seldom even recognise it as an ideology. We appear to accept the proposition that this utopian, millenarian faith describes a neutral force; a kind of biological law, like Darwin’s theory of evolution.” (No debate please over whether Monbiot could be considered a radical. He isn’t. The point is whether he is right here.)

Now, nothing in nature is held to be beyond our reach. Those opposing for example fracking, nuclear power or genetic engineering are held to be ‘Luddites’, irrationally and hopelessly fearing progress. Yet at the same time the market - something which is a human construct – is held to be outside human control, to be tampered with at our peril. As in Margaret Thatcher’s famous phrase, “you can’t buck the markets”.

So deeply has this ideology penetrated that even the global financial crash, which scuppered every promise of prosperity neoliberalism had ever made, was itself made into an argument for ‘austerity’ - which simply meant more neoliberalism. Politicians repeatedly employ the phrase “no magic money tree” as a manta for the impossibility of reversing neoliberalism. Yet of course a magic money tree had been the very cause of the problem. The deregulated financial sector had been able to lend money they didn’t own, which didn’t necessarily even exist, in the expectation if it wasn’t repaid they could pass the parcel of debt to some other schmuck. Libor, the inter-bank rate of borrowing, was consistently rigged to disguise this. 

At the time, many assumed the financial crisis would spell the end of neoliberalism. Instead, it cemented it. It could just get up again, bill us for the money it had lost, and continue as normal When public figures are found to be up to something dodgy, they’re often considered too important and well-connected to be investigated, so someone of lesser standing is made their patsy. Similarly, the public sector, the institution which actually bailed the banks out to stop them going bankrupt, was held to blame for the whole thing.

Not only was there a collective refusal to see financial deregulation as the problem, with ultimate chutzpah it was even presented as the solution. It was like catching an arsonist after he’d burnt down half the town and making him Fire Chief because he’d promised to safeguard the other half.

It’s therefore mistaken to attack neoliberalism through its ideas. In fact when it failed in each and every one of its promises, the result was that its ideology was embraced all the harder. Those ideas still seem strong simply because their adherents remain strong, because the capitalist class currently has the upper hand in the class war.
But there’s something wider. To quote ’The Usual Suspects’ “the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” At a time when class divisions are more acute than they’ve been for decades, when social mobility… at least upward social mobility is so rare as to be statistically non-existent, where each new generation gets more saddled with debt than the last, awareness of class has almost disappeared from popular consciousness. As cartoonist Martin Rowson put it “social mobility can go down as well as up”.

So we get something like right wing rentagob Herman Cain saying "Don't blame Wall Street, don't blame the big banks, if you don't have a job and you're not rich, blame yourself!” As if the cause of poverty is the poor. Cain is of course an idiot. But for us he's a useful idiot, carelessly blurting out and thereby exposing what might be more convincing if left implicit. We’re frequently told that if we didn’t rise to the top we can’t have tried hard enough. And we’re told that tale by those born in penthouses.

More next time...

THE CROSSROADS OF INFINITY (LUCID FRENZY PLAYLIST)

Click here for a playlist of longer, spacier and less vocal-based tracks.

Kicking off with Popul Vuh chanting their way out of consensus reality, then working upwards. Also achieving orbit are one but two numbers from Godspeed stablemates, Esmerine taking on a Turkish sound and HRSTA making Morse-code riffs happen. Swans go surprisingly ambient after falling into the good company of improvising Australian trio the Necks. Manchester nosiemonsters Gnod… well, make some noise, as is their wont. And then there’s Lankum. Because you can never have enough existential Irish folk, am I right?

The title and illo’s from a Jack Kirby ‘Fantastic Four’ strip. No, I’ve no idea what it means either. But it felt appropriate.

Popol Vuh : Agape-Agape
Esmerine: Translator’s Clos
HRSTA: Swallow’s Tail
Labradford: New Listening
Swans (with the Necks): The Nub
Gnod: 5th Sun (Chaudelande Version)
Hey Colossus: Lagos Atom
Lankum: The Pride Of Petravore

“Secrets behind the grading
Vortex in the ether
Voices crackle in the air”

‘THE SHAPE OF THINGS: STILL LIFE IN BRITAIN’

Pallant House Gallery, Chichester

The State of Things Back Then

Still lives, we’re soon told, had traditionally been pushed to the bottom in the hierarchy of the arts. Laid out in rank order, these were - Historical scenes, Portraiture, Genre painting, Landscapes and (as you may have guessed) Still Life. That slightly oddly named “genre painting” meant everyday scenes. So what this came down to was Important People Doing Important Things, Important People Looking Important, Unimportant People (Possibly Doing Things), No People But Big and Not People Not Even Big. You can see the thinking. They weren’t educational or morally instructive, they were just of things. 

So what was any self-respecting Modernist to do? Upend the hierarchy, of course. Pull the bottom level out to collapse the thing, like a Jenga tower.

Yet in one way this can seem counter-intuitive, for we think of Modernism as being about creating newly dynamic art for a newly dynamic age. But it also, in general not just in art, took against the grand historical sweep and took to the close focus. The most clear-cut example must be Joyce’s ’Ulysses’ (1920), reworking the Odyssey into a single day of a quite regular life. At the time physics turned its gaze from stars and planets to particles.

Perhaps the ranking wasn’t all that surprising. We are egocentric creatures who are primed to see reflections of ourselves, and in no place less than our art. In fact, it can sometimes feel like we invented the thing just so we could make ourselves a flattering mirror. And as always, taking something out can create its own form of presence. When not sated our innate egoism doesn’t go away but into overdrive. Denied the desired sight of human beings we carry on looking for it anyway. And this can be put to use, in different ways…

How often, for example, have you seen a scene such as the one above? Solid-looking furniture before an open log fire, accumulated and exotic objects, clearly a mansion of some kind. But instead of the tweed-wearing Lord, in ’Amaryllis’ (1951) Stanley Spencer has placed a plant. (The plant of the title, in fact.) Pushing itself front and centre, running almost the full length of the frame, occupying the space art normally reserves for humans, it grabs at your attention. While the plant has more than one flower, one is firmly turned to face us, accentuating the anthropomorphism. You’re soon ascribing some form of sentience to it, just from context and positioning. (‘Day Of The Triffids’ was published the same year. Coincidence? Yes, probably.)

Whereas William Nicholson’s ’The Silver Casket and The Red Leather Box’ (1920, above) hints at a helmeted human figure. Intentional or otherwise, you cannot not see it there. Pushing this implication further is the silhouette of, presumably, the artist reflected in the casket.

But there’s as many approaches to still lives as there are in any other genre. Edward Wadsworth’s ’Bright Intervals’ (1928, above) places together a clutch of objects. Now objects should be simple, functional things, instruments for our use. And we immediately see they’re all related to the sea, and are painted in a vivid but limited palette, almost like a striped flag. (It was painted in tempura.) The title emphasises both these at once.

So its a work which should surely be easy to parse, yet somehow its not. Its like a sentence made up of words you know, which seems to follow grammatical order, but gives up no sense. I suspect its concerned with the distinction between the ideal world, represented by the objects in the foreground and the real word beyond, represented by the sea. The curve of the blueprints is echoed by the prow of the ship. It has the deep blue we associate to the sea, which is here rendered green. A barrier (a wall, a window?) lies between the two. The territory never matches the map.

Yet of course the whole point here is that we don’t understand, that these simple objects elude us. How did such a thing come about?

Prior to Modernism, many works were tableaus. They were painted via models holding stilted poses for long periods, while the artist debilitated and laboured. And for the most part they looked it. Their purpose being to convey a point (the Nativity, victory in a battle and so on), naturalism wasn’t strived for. So, while ostensibly of people, they were stiff and rigid. Art stilled life. Still lifes such as this essentially reverse things, painting inanimate objects as an arrangement of elements, but in a manner which feels elusive.

But there’s another, more oblique, influence. Edwaert Collier’s work above is titled ’Vanitas Still Life’ (1694) and Vanitas was often used as a name for this Dutch genre. “They sought,” the show says, “to convey the transience of life through arrangements of inanimate symbolic objects.”

(We’re also told that from the Seventeenth century these were imported. I confess to not being sure how we’re supposed to take this. This is a show devoted to, in its own words, “Modern and Contemporary British artists”. Had the snobbery over still lives been stopped a good couple of centuries before Modernism began? Or were they considered exceptions to the rule, before Modernism came along to take them up? But no matter. Let’s focus on what they did, and how they were received.)

The stillness of them feels foregrounded, creating an eerie calm. It’s like breaking into the room of a person long dead, their possessions lying as they are. We become aware what has happened to them will come to us. We are transient, our things will outlast us.

At this point I’ll take a guess. My guess is that this was not how they were received, at least not at this point, the early days of British Modernism. Some of the symbols used are effectively universal, the widely repeated skull to stand for death scarcely needing much interpretation. But many were specific to another time and place, a shared understanding gone. (In the way that one work here uses roast beef to represent England.) They arrived to British Modernists inscrutable and mysterious, devoid of a code book. Which of course made them enticing. So why not do the same to someone else?

And this leads to works such as Mark Gertler’s ’The Dutch Doll’ (1926, above) which possess a sinister, suggested animism, lurking near the surface without emerging. If you looked away and back, would things have moved? As the show says, ‘Still Life’ is “a contradictory name”, why not play that up?

The doll, placed centre where the human figure would normally go, is a clear enough source of this. As children we imbue dolls with life, a habit we never absolutely break from. But the picture is full of such suggestions. The flowers are of course painted, but on their vase is a painting of flowers. The playing cards also perform a picture-within-a-picture function. While the plant to the left seems to be composed of moving tendrils, enhanced by the sharp painting style. And the red curtain to the right suggests we’re looking at a stage, which makes everything on it props but also actors.

Outside this show, elsewhere in the gallery, Claire Rudland is quoted as saying: “There is more than what we see, there is something other.” She’s describing her own work. Yet it’s as fitting for this and many other works in the show.

Ask Not What, Ask Instead How

Objects, then, can be both present and elusive. But there’s also other approaches. One is to paint not just still lives but the same few objects over and over. With familiarity they fade from your attention, which instead falls on *how* they’re depicted. Which is perhaps Modernism in essence. Questions of how can never be disentangled from questions of why. (Cubism played a similar trick.) And from there, you’re free to take any route you want.

In ’The Cup And Saucer’ (1915, above), Harold Gillman homes in and fills the surround, so the title objects contain almost the only white in the composition. But rather than give them a smooth coat as would befit china, the paint is crusted thickly and in varying shades. Rather than something dull and solid, they seem to radiate and shimmer before you. (Who could have guessed a cup and saucer could be made into something so vivid?)

John Duncan Fergusson’s *’The Blue Lamp’* (1920, above) bears some compositional similarity - close-cropped, and centred around a white object. But its made up of bright, solid blocks of colour, held within thick red outlines, to the degree it could almost be a screenprint. The elements act almost like notes in a composition. In style, the two works are worlds apart.

While Winnifred Gill’s ‘Still Life With Glass Jar and Silver Box’ (1914) keeps the heavy outlines, then makes the colours beneath them shift around and recur. Gunmetal grey seems reserved for shadows, but the two shades of brown dart around the composition. (The restrictions of the First World War already in place, Gill used a tea chest lid for a canvas.)

The Path To Abstraction Is Paved By Things

As artists were mostly interested in cups or fruit not in their own right but for their formal qualities, this meant still lifes played a prominent role in the path to abstraction. You can see the timeline over several Ben Nicholson works in the show. The first step is to make them into symbols. With ’Striped Jug and Flowers’ (1928, above) you don’t imagine grasping that jug by the handle. It’s an image of a jug, flattened into a representation, abstracted from any environment. Even as the flowers seem more three-dimensional.

Then eighteen years later, the almost fully abstract ’Still Life, Cerulean’ (1946, above) retains the lines of the jug handle at upper right.

…all of which may be true. But you cannot help feel the show overplay this a little, in order to fit it to their theme. The *’Expressionists’* show at the Tate (currently still running) demonstrates the same thing happening with landscape art. (Yes, one whole rung up the Academy’s hierarchy of genres!) At this time, all roads non-figurative led to abstraction - and sometimes figurative too.

Things During Wartime

Remember how we came in? The still lifes which inspired all this conveyed the transience of life by depicting the relative permanence of things? And how British Modernists instead created works which were dazzling and brilliant?

Then it seems something came along to burst this bubble. Around the year 1939, should you need a clue. And so we arrive at a room called the jolly 'Death, Decay and Post-War Austerity’. Skulls were back in a big way.

One of the best works is Edward Burra’s ’Still Life With Teeth’ (1946, above), precisely because it eschews such standard images and instead manages to make a fruit bowl menacing. The objects aren’t just pushed to the foreground but monstrously oversized. And other apparently domestic objects are also infused with lurking threat, the show talks of how the cutlery is imbued with “the sinister allure of weapons”.

The teeth and shoe are the only signs of human life, save a tiny figure fleeing the scene, long-shadowed in a de Chirico boulevard. Our misadventures have borne these monstrous fruits, which now dominate and push their creators from the frame. This is life thrown out of balance, as hallucinogenic as Dali yet more intimate. (This would be a good time to remember that the Pallant House once had a great show dedicated to Burra.) 

Things - Not What They Used To Be

Then, after that final twist, things lost their lustre. Modernism had essentially won its battles, nobody was really talking about the hierarchy of genres any more, and so  still lifes had little use. But it's natural enough. Nothing is useful forever, not even things. 

Alas the show, which has up to now been enthralling, doesn’t work out this is the time to stop. Instead it progresses into Pop Art. Which does something entirely different. The representation of things, which had once been central, was no longer a question. Now the closer you could make the representation to the things themselves, the better. In a time of mass production, make art which looked like product. Airbrush. Or screnprint. Collage. Or just take the objects themselves and use them.

And what does this change? It changes everything! Pop Art appropriates, takes and recombines. (This is particularly daft when the Pallant House has already had a Pop Art show, which laid out all of this.)

Though one work which both belongs in context and is worth seeing is John Bratby’s (rather splendidly named) ’Still life With Chip Fryer’ (1954, above). As translucent doesn’t work well in painting, you can by tradition use white for glass. Here Bratby uses pure white not just for glasses and bottles but a whole bunch of objects, including a sieve. Others are bright blue.

Products include brand names, which might seem classic Pop Art. But all this is amassed together onto a drab brown table with drab wooden chairs in a drab room of bare floorboards. It looks like a collision, a clash of reality systems, a foreign invasion, almost like the Science Fiction device of sticking alien spaceships in Trafalgar Square. Its a fifties were the Forties and Sixties were struggling for control. (Regular reminder - great artists weren’t always great people. Bratby was an abuser.)

But let’s end there before we run into Rachel Whiteread. If this show loses its way later on, art did too. So let’s look to its successes. Early Modernists had a slightly paradoxical relationship to the still life. They saw a life in things which loftier-minded artists had missed. While at the same time they saw a nailed-down subject which allowed them to focus on questions of how. The result is works on what might seem the dryest and dullest of subjects, which are full of life. 

'ALIEN: ROMULUS' (A MINI REVIEW)

Some while ago now, I said “the Alien films all have to feature Ripley, just like you couldn't make a Dalek film without the Doctor.”

I like to think I’m big enough to admit it when I’m wrong.

She hasn’t shown up in the last two (not counting that one) and ’Alien: Romulus’ even finds ways to turn this deficiency to its advantage. First, where later sequels had become wrapped up in their own continuity this allows for a reset. (In internal chronology, it comes straight after the first film.) Also, this allows a new, young cast to blunder blind into the Alien universe and make their own mistakes. We shout helplessly at the screen “get out of there, it ’s got one of those in it?”. But how are they to know?

Of course in a standard horror film this would just be the teens visiting the haunted house. But here its a course correct, that takes us further back to where we were before then where we were before.

Furthermore, I am won't to complain that contemporary culture insists our protagonists must always be The Special One. (I blame Neoliberalism for this, typically enough, as it means our heroes have to represent not us but me who is not like all the others, not really. I expect you’ve heard me.) Happily, this series has in effect gone the other way. Ripley was not military but she was a capable Warrant Officer. While in ’Covenant’, Daniels was a coloniser. But Rain, our protagonist here, a young wage labourer, the nearest yet to some regular Jo.

And who is our regular Jo set against? I also said “the Alien may be the adversary but the Company are effectively the villain.” And this film is smart enough to get that. Some have complained it starts too slow, but this is info it needs to get over. We’re in a future dystopia, like now only more so. The scenario is ‘the maze and the Minotaur’ in which the Corporation has provided both. The characters become trapped between the Alien’s law-of-fang-and-claw and the demands of rapacious capitalism. (The films tend to exploit Social Darwinism for drama, rather than critique it.)

Plotwise, this is most epitomised by the two Andys. The de rigeur android has two settings; there’s a kind of special needs version who has his skills but also needs looking after himself (not far from the cat in the original), and there’s the other - highly effective but not at all on their side.

But of course, as ever, its most epitomised visually - by the two clashing aesthetics, industrial gothic against the weirdly alien. There’s an effective scene where the corridor they’re about to getaway through is found to be covered in alien… whatever that stuff is. (That industrial gothic look has become almost enhanced by the passage of time. We’re now aware what a mechanical world it is, of chains, metal hatches and grille gates. Monitor screens are analogue and flickery. A retro future.)

’Alien: Romulus’ is rarely lss than involving. You can’t help but get drawn in, feel the tension, jump at the right moments. See it. You won’t be bored.

But the second and third instalments (perhaps even the fourth, to a lesser extent) took all this and took it somewhere new. This is much more more than it is new. It follows the two rules of sequels, ‘bigger’ and ‘faster’. *Aliens’* had already gone for armies of Aliens, so this throws swarms of facehuggers at us, like mobs of spiders. And with this the remorseless inevitability of the first film is, unsurprisingly, gone. Aliens now seem able to not just gestate but grow full size in mere minutes. (I grew hopeless confused as to whether their arrival had let the facehuggers out, or whether the ships had already been overrun.)

The commercial and critical failure of ’Prometheus’ has certainly bounced the series into this more crowd-pleasing direction. (“Less cosmic pontificating, more chest-bursting” read the memo.) So is the result any more than ‘effective franchise instalment’? Not much. Even ’Covenant’, with its Medievalism and bestiaries, had more that was its own.

Added to which, the main place it does innovate doesn’t necessarily work…

(PLOT SPOILERS in next para)

We discover the Corporation have tried to bring capitalism and monster together, thinking to build the strongest creature of all, the best (in their minds) of both worlds. Here the title comes in, they have two spacecraft named after the Rome-founding twins famously raised by wild wolves. That didn’t end well for Remus, and it doesn’t here. But this feels like the film’s own failing, obliged to come up with a new monster variant for the finale, which it then projects onto the Corporation. (I may just object to lanky monsters. Personal reasons.)

But beyond that there are flickers. Trapped in mining jobs on a planet that never sees day is not a bad metaphor for the ceaseless demands of wage labour. Our young team escaping to bathe in sunlight for the first time is a striking moment. (Science Fiction often works best when it shows not the unfamiliar but the familiar from an unexpected angle.) And the zero gravity trick is neat. So… few admittedly, but there. Quite possibly this came out better than might have been expected.

POSTSCRIPT: TIME IS NOW

('Intensify The Contradictions', my deep dive into Post-Punk and New Pop via Simon Reynolds' 'Rip It Up', which started over there, ends here.)

“I had high ideals and crazy dreams, 
And they came to this.”
- Mark Stewart & the Mafia, ‘High Ideals and Crazy Dreams’

“Now it’s your turn!”
- The Desperate Bicycles

Reynolds concludes by commenting on the rise of a new wave of Post-Punk sound, which was emerging whilst he was writing this book. (It was first published in ’05.) Yet, as we’ve seen, it had arisen in quite a specific context, and ended with unusual neatness when that context was over. So this might seem strange, maybe even suspicious. While some of the original bands have reformed in the wake of this (such as Gang of Four), others have been more dismissive of such nostalgism.

Mark E Smith said, “I see a lot of bands influenced by us but I don’t see them getting the core spirit of it… there’s no belief in what they’re doing. The motives are suspicious. It’s like they just want a career in music.” He’s right, of course. History repeats itself, but only as farce. It’s notable for example that the new groups are rarely as political and still less tend to any anti-rockist sentiment.

Hang on, is he right? Of course what he’s saying should be right, in that it’s the most appropriate thing for Post-Punk’s self-mythologising. But isn’t the real point that we’re now in a very different era to then? Say the same thing in a different context and it’s like you said something else. Just like Dada, Post-Punk was a product of and response to its era, and attempts to reproduce its strategies and devices outside of that will only make for museum pieces. Make a collage today out of old bus tickets in order to be ‘anti-bourgeois’ and you’ll be a laughing stock. (The same thing goes for fanzines and ransom lettering, though alas it doesn’t stop them.) If Post-Punk’s sound has long since been reduced to mere music, why not play it as music? Wouldn’t it be worse if all that rhetoric were reproduced faithfully but emptily?

If in 1978 Rock felt stale, anti-Rock was something fresh and challenging. The insistence that bands were but business entities operating within an entertainment industry was meant as part-provocation, part-warning. Nowadays Rock (even Punk rock) is fully mainstream, selling more to the middle-aged than the young and even the Fall have their music set to car adverts. For a decade from 1997, Britain was presided over by a Prime Minister who (in between sending young men out to die in money-grabbing wars) boasted of having been in bands and revelled in being photographed with rock stars. Buying records and going to gigs and doesn’t change the world. To say it now is a banality, an exercise in the obvious.

Post-Punk’s “resolutely modernist obsess[ion] with innovation” and clamour for constant change, once unshackled from the original debate with the paleo-Punks, soon soured not just into Pop’s insatiable need for novelty but also Blair’s sound-bite crusades against “forces of conservatism”. Similarly Gang of Four’s alienation devices sound different when even adverts take on an ironic ‘metafictional’ tone (“don’t ask me, I’m just an actor!”) in an attempt to butter up their audience through flattering their intelligence.

Perhaps you could even argue that Post-Punk, which sought to liberate us from the confines of music, actually liberated music itself. The concept of music as the default medium of dissidence was once deeply ingrained, to the point where it hard to imagine a defiant youth doing anything else. Maybe music needed to free itself of such cultural baggage, to get back to just being itself. Being anti-rockist freed Rock of rockism.

You can list the way something similar has happened to all other Post-Punk strategies... In a push-button internet age, Industrial’s fixation with the ‘transgressive’ has long since become just another consumer option. The TV is forever showing seasons of the ‘banned’, ‘extreme’ or ‘forbidden’, in ever-escalating hyperbole in order to bring in viewers. In the late Seventies the first mass-produced plug-in-and-play synthesizers were only just becoming available, and their liberating effects carried the shock of the new. This has since been blunted by our celebrity-obsessed culture, which no longer even pretends that stars get their status from actually doing anything.

Not just the internet but the wider rock media have also infected Post-Punk’s focus on de-mystification. Music used to arrive in mysteriously symbolic covers, with scant information. It might stretch to a track listing, if you were lucky tell you who was in the band. Nowadays there’s a website, a magazine feature and a booklet with the CD reissue to spell out all the lyrics, detail the recording process, provide demo tracks and alternate versions, and sport a couple of dozen explanations of what it might ‘all mean’. Music has been historicised, catalogued - and with it neutered. These days a more meaningful plan might be to put all that mysticism back in…

More widely, it has often amused me how marginal figures see their ideas taken up by the mainstream, and assume they must have been so threatening they must now be defused - like some cultural bomb squad at work. Of course its often opposite. The mainstream needs the fringes and alternatives to incubate the concepts it could never think of itself. The alternative to this is to imagine corporate executives somehow coming up with their own ideas. See the problem there?

A classic example of this is Post-Punks’ interest in film and multi-media. As Reynolds shows, not only did this pioneer video but led to bands like Devo and Talking Heads fuelling MTV and using it as their platform – at the time the channel had little else to show, making it “almost inadvertently radical.” But of course, the accompanying video soon became a stock component of the pop release, and MTV very thankfully showed Devo the door. (Similarly, Sontag’s theories of syanethesis have been absorbed into the cross-marketing campaigns of corporations, where films must now also have video games, single tie-ins and other memorabilia.)

However, as the earlier quote from Stuart Home made clear, this doesn’t mean the inevitable fate of any idea is corporate take-up. Any form of radical art, unleashed upon a money economy, will in some form, at some point, become mere product. But a large part of the appeal of Post-Punk was that it never suggested differently. Instead of claiming authenticity it deliberately intensified, exposed and projected the contradictions of ‘militant entertainment’.

Simultaneously, even genuinely radical movements can only be absorbed by first smashing their homogeneity into digestible pieces. This happened to Post-Punk but over time, and as less favourable social conditions came along to make its inner glue less durable. If the money economy is always present, this does not mean its presence is always uncontested. 

In short, if Post-Punk’s strategies no longer work as the best way to ask awkward questions that doesn’t mean that no workable strategies exist. Reynolds wrote his book largely against the dismissive notion that the Punk spirit ended abruptly in ’78, so how absurd and futile would it be to just fast-forward this date by a few more years? Those who constantly bemoan the fact that Punk hasn’t “happened again” miss the most basic and vital point of Post-Punk, that it went ahead and did something new. 

It’s participants had no magic powers which allowed them to do this, any more than we live today under some sinister spell that prevents us. In fact the opposite is true, their struggles and experiments empower us by providing lessons from which we can learn. But we should take from Post-Punk what they took from Dub. We might appreciate the thing in and of itself. But we mustn’t mimic, we need to appropriate for what works in our own circumstances.

“So flower power failed,” said Lennon, early in the Seventies. “So what? We start again.”

Is it time to rip it up and start again?

That’s always the time.