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...
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