At Occupy London LSX

I managed to spend a couple of hours at St Paul’s, London last week visiting the #occupylsx camp that’s rocked up there.

Most of the occupiers are young, perhaps early 20s. Whilst there a call went around requesting help from anyone on site able to argue the case for economic reform with a visiting banker.

A crowd of occupiers listened politely to what the banker had to say. From time-to-time he was interrupted, not least by me, (to my liking he was listened to far too respectfully ) but the occupiers tossed perfectly reasonable arguments back in his direction.

‘The reason we’re all in so much debt is because governments – in particular the last Labour government - allowed banks to lend so much money.’ said the banker.

This struck me as a novel take on the coalition government’s austerity propaganda. The argument that asserts austerity is a consequence of profligate public spending in the past and not merely a conservative rendition of the same policy of neoliberalism but with slightly less public investment. Here the banker appeared to be claiming that the previous Labour government had somehow forced the banks to lend irresponsibly, against their wishes.

I asked the banker if he did not see any correlation between the rise in debt and the suppression of wages during the last 30 years. I might as well have been clicking and clacking like a dung beetle, so alien did the proposition appear to him.

A woman clutching a baby interjected with the perfectly reasonable argument that an economy ought to work towards human ends, meet human needs etc.

Responding the banker implied that she was ‘foolish’ to think the coat she wore, the shoes she stood in or the food she ate could exist without the largesse of banks. At a stroke he illustrated perfectly how far the bourgeois can become alienated from its humanity. How the capitalist, who benefits most from capitalism, is himself, enslaved to it.

The occupation’s achievement is worth many times that of the absent politicians who ought to be championing its cause (John McDonnell MP and a few others have tabled a Early Day Motion inParliament expressing solidarity with the occupiers). Although Lord Glasman, the Blue Labourite has recently found common cause withthe occupiers over the issue of the Corporation of London.

Whilst on site, I made a donation. I would have dragged bottles of butane (something the camp has been short on) or a truckload of wooden pallets (a secure base on which to site a tent in a windy public plaza). Instead I gave some money.  I hope they stay as long as they can and when I’m in London I will make sure I spend more time there.

'What has to be explained is not the fact that the man who is hungry steals or the man who is exploited strikes, but why the majority of those who are hungry don't steal and why the majority of those who are exploited don't strike.' - Wilhelm Reich

A month on from August’s unprecedented riots in England, we can begin to ask the host of

questions needed to uncover why they occurred and what they mean. Tim Newburn and

the LSE’s Department of Social Policy, together with the Guardian newspaper, the Joseph

Rowntree Foundation and the Open Society Foundation are beginning a three-month indepth study into the causes and consequences of the recent riots.

Ed Miliband's Values

‘Value’ was at the semiotic core of Ed Milliband’s 2011 Labour Conference speech. In an oration of some 5,880 words,‘values’ popped up more than any other, a staggering 45 times in all (although a leak from Conservative Central Office puts a much lower figure).

By contrast he mentioned ‘predators’ and ‘producers’ six times apiece. Workers (zero), bankers (zero) and capitalism (zero) propped up the semiotic table.

A Guardian editorial linked to a recent paper on ‘ethical socialism’ by Jon Cruddas and Jonathan Rutherford with the implication that this might provide some intellectual background to Miliband’s conference rhetoric.

Miliband’s speech was to my ear one of moral certainty.

He spoke of: ‘the true values of Britain…’ adding that these truths were self-evident to his audience, ‘You know what your values are.’ He said.

But there are pitfalls for politicians who rely on moral certainty, see John Major’s ‘back to basics’ policy of the early 90s,  or consider the conscientious but ultimately erroneous moral position adopted by Tony Blair in his decision to invade Iraq. Conscientious in the sense that he probably believed it was the right thing to do. Erroneous in the sense that an appeal to individual conscience is inherently difficult to assess. Such an appeal could be insincere, untrue or mistaken; and therefore arbitrary and capricious (see Donkey passim).

Moral certainty too often leads to the adoption of arbitrary, fixed and inflexible positions and it leaves the politician exposed to contradictions.

‘…the lesson I have learnt about this job and myself over the last twelve months.

To be true to myself…. My values.’

However, one reason why a politician like Ed Miliband would put morality at the core of his speech lies in the assumption that such ‘values’ are universal, or in the case of the speech in question, universal to Britain. In a liberal democracy, values are said to transcend categories like race, class, sex, occupation, they therefore they transcend political constituences. ‘Neutral’ appeals for greater ‘responsibility’ can in this way be aimed at the ‘benefit cheat’ and ‘bankster’ alike, all the easier to avoid the traps set by media and political opponents. This type of transcendence, it seems to me, might be crucial to triangulation , the tactical principle adopted by many politicians.

But it reasonable to question if such statements really are neutral and not in reality a reflection of a ruling set of values. One way to find out would be to subject such statements to a test. Habermas’s Discourse Ethics is helpful here in providing a set of discourse ethical rules of moral argumentation a corrolary of which is the highlighting of the ideological content of apparently neutral statements.

It is not uncommon to hear people talk of the run up to 2008 as a morally debased period, during which greed was said to have become a good. And whilst attitudes like this are rarely trumpted on live TV I sincerely doubt that greed has been vanquished.

What of the ‘enlightened self-interest’ advocated by Adam Smith deemed a necessary oil to the proper functioning of a capitalist society? In the Grundrisse, Marx re-phrased enlightened self-interest as ‘generalised selfishness’.

Call it what we may, enlightened self-interest / generalised selfishness can be viewed as a normalised social relation between individuals forced to compete in a capitalist society. Greed, selfishness and inequality seem to be hardwired into such societies.

Miliband’s position is probably that we should not seek to rid society of these selfish norms, but that we should tame them.

It will be interesting to see how specific policy proposals are value-audited in the future.

Adam Curtis and the Independent Commission on Banking

BBC producer Adam Curtis has posted a typically idiosyncratic piece about the influence of lobbyists and think tanks in the UK.

This was timely, since it coincided with the report of the Independent Commission on Banking about reforming financial capitalism (aka the Vickers report), a report that even commentators at the FT think was neutered by lobbyists.

Now some find the documentaries of Adam Curtis problematic. Although employed by the BBC, he is not an archetypal Reithian to the extent that his films seem deliberately to eschew balance. The Curtis technique is  rather to openly impose a narrative on to the fragmented film cuts that he sloshes around in the bowels of the BBC archive. Curtis imposes a particular interpretation on to the mass of propaganda churned out by an institution which itself is central to British self-understanding and to how Britain is perceived. I imagine there are many, particularly those who are fond of Reithian ideals, who find this approach to documentary unnerving, even propagandist. His blog on the role of lobbyists and think tanks is a vintage example particularly since it feels like the UK state’s attempt to find a re-accommodation with financial capitalism has been heavily influenced by lobbying.

Banks don’t do PR. They don't seem to be particularly interested in justifying their work. Bank CEOs do not answer questions on the Today programme and when they do appear in public sessions, such as select committees, they rarely give a good account of themselves.We never see hedge fund CEOs defending their reputation on the TV, nor are the directors of derivative trading companies keen to stand in the media spotlight.

The exception among the UK financial class is probably Angela Knight, head of the British Bankers Association, a former right wing MP, who’s job it is to defend the banks’ reputation. Listen to this great exchange between Knight and the Liberal Democrat Peer, Lord Oakshott on the BBC's Today programme earlier this year. Knight is on the phone from a ski resort, perhaps aware of the dubious message this might send to an audience that is deeply sceptical about the financial sector. Never one to miss an opportunity for hyperbole, Lord Oakshott takes the chance to wind up her for deigning to take time ‘off piste’ and talk banking reform.

I suppose if there is a ‘lesson to be learned’ (since 'learning a lesson' is the default, abstract and contentless position adopted by all organisations when they are publicly crticised in the media) is that it is bad PR to try to defend the financial classes down the line from Klosters.

On the other hand, as the Vickers report and Adam Curtis’s documentary confirm, it probably doesn't matter anyway. Banks don’t do PR, because they don’t need to, instead it seems they influence policy behind the scenes, through ‘lobbyists’ or ‘public affairs’: an industry that increasingly embodies a form of instrumentalized class warfare.

'Why oh why oh why oh why....'

Endemic anti-social behaviour among the [feral] proletariat; moral decline; race; and poverty are a selection of justifications used to ‘explain’ the August riots in England.

For the political elites and the BBC the debate mostly focusses on the idea of moral decline – as if crises within liberal democracy hadn’t always brought forth examples of immorality .
Racists have chipped with a strained line of doublethink that presupposes the culpability of black culture whilst concurrently transmogrifying skin colour… or failing that, blaming Jews.
Another commentator takes a narrowly discursive approach in arguing that the riotous underclass can barely talk nevermind develop a coherent set of reasons to justify their rioting.
Meanwhile, when it’s not whipping up vigilantism among the petit bourgeoise of Green Lanes, or mobilising fascists in Eltham, parts of the media draw subtle distinctions between ‘anarchist’ student riots (‘articulate, but silly’) and ‘mindless’ underlcass riots (‘just mindless’).
Zizek puts the riots’ lack of a political message within the context of the Badouist notion of ‘worldessness’. From this perspective we can understand the rioters’ political inarticulacy as the product of a neoliberal world that has transcended politics and become ‘non-ideological’.  A world in which technical ‘solutions’ for social ills are distilled into instrumental soundbites such as ‘what works is what’s best’.  A world in which, rather than encouraging political dispute, we are told that ‘ideology is dead’:  itself a statement with ideological meaning.
So, in response to the disturbances, all the mainstream political parties stick to a broadly similar narrative. It’s a narrative that reinforces the idea that there is nothing, even narrowly, political to be discussed about it.  It’s a world in which even a commonsense attempt to publicly think through what’s going on is drowned out by the performative/simulated rage of people like Michael Gove. Still, in his eye-bulging rant about  plasma screens and Boxfresh trainiers, Gove did at least name check an object that transcended most of the distubances: the commodity.
The media focussed on two types of riotous act that were, although not exclusive, almost universal across the disturbances in Tottenham, Peckham, Manchester and Solihull. These acts consisted of:
1 – the unlawful appropriation of commodities; and
2 – their destruction.
The commodity was a material witness to these riots, an always looming embodiment of human labour power, so why not summon it as part of this post mortem? Along Marxist lines, I wonder if the commodity, the genetic building block of capitalist society, might be a worthwhile object of study in these disturbances and I am not talking here about an Adbusters-style condemnation of ‘consumerism’.
I’m thinking about socially necessary labour and its ‘phantom-like’ existence in the:

• window smashed at Starbucks;
• the doughnut stolen from a Manchester confectionery;
• among the plundered designer gear, flatscreens and smartphones; and
• the machine gun used to kill Mark Duggan

'It's Adam Smith Wot Won It'

The lack of self-awareness in this pathetic broadhseet ‘opinion’ piece would be funny but for its concomitant perniciousness.

Mindfucked by Negri

Johann Hari’s claim that he writes ‘long intellectual profiles’ is for me the most absurd manifestation to emerge from the recent brouhaha about his work. Perhaps Hari wanted us to imagine him as a kind of impressionist reporter-artist (his keyboard clenched between his teeth; thumb and forefinger cocked at 90 degrees) when he framed the Marxist subject sat opposite him at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts in 2004?

The only truth to Hari’s artistic metaphor attaches to the word ‘long’ the remainder of his claim to write ‘intellectual profiles’ is bullshit,  or if you like, a crit unworthy of a Fine Art undergraduate. Deterritorial Support Group highlighted how a string of quotes from Hari’s 2004 interview with Antonio Negri for the Independent had in fact been ‘lifted’ from a book ‘Negri on Negri’ by Anne Dufourmentelle published in 2003.
DSG’s analysis forced Hari to admit that he has a taste for the technique of collage, the cutting and pasting of other people’s words into his own ‘interviews’. Whilst admitting the charge, he argued that this was not plagiarism, nor churnalism, Naomi Klein claimed it amounted to the lesser crime of ‘poor attribution’ (‘yes yes, but is it art?’ I wonder to myself).
The truth is that DSG is on the mark in describing the interview as nothing more than an attempted ‘take down’.
Hari’s ‘profiles’ are far from intellectual, a fact manifest in the quality of his work. The quality of Hari’s work (the ramblings of an ignorant liberal) is his downfall, in this case his open ignorance of Negri qua theorist. Apparently this point was brought to his newspaper’s attention in a letter by respected academics Alberto Toscano and Matteo Mandarini and Negri’s publisher, Rowan Wilson, shortly after Hari published his piece. The Independent failed to print the letter, a copy of which subsequently turned up on the comments thread at the Guardian CIF (scroll down to a comment by 'notwaving'). In the letter the authors allude to Hari’s ‘proud’ ignorance.

Mindfucked
Hari himself talks of his aversion to Negri’s: ‘impossibly dense thickets of sociological prose', and his difficulty understanding Negri’s ‘unreadable gibber.’ The letter also cites what I will charitably refer to as the ‘hyperbole’ of our hysterical columnist when he confesses to having been mindfucked by Negri.

‘After 400 pages of this, I feel like I have been raped by a dictionary of sociology’, Hari tells us.
How can one embark upon a critical intellectual profile  worthy of the name whilst concurrently knowing nothing of the intellect that is the target of said critique?

Well I suppose one could always fall back on the vulgarisations of liberal ideology… oh hang on a minute.

‘I try to think of a polite way to remind him [Negri] of the fact that every communist revolution of the 20th century lead to tyranny and mass murder. And a nice way to say that communism was a betrayal of the democratic values of the left.’
“‘These communist regimes are waiting for a historical revision. They may not be seen so negatively in the next century," he [Negri] says, as though this was perfectly obvious.
‘I can't take it any more. None of the world's real problems - from poverty to tyranny to climate change - are discussed in Negri's work, except to claim that the poor are "more alive", and the citizens of liberal democracies are living under the "real tyranny", and... oh, I give up. It's not just that this preacher of Empire has no clothes; he is living in an intellectual nudist colony. There are some important anti-globalisation writers, such as Monbiot and Joseph Stiglitz. But Negri is trying to keep alive a patient - Marxism - whose heart stopped beating long ago.’