"I have in my hand a piece of paper," says Mr Stevens, CEO of Global Chemicals, echoing Chamberlain in unconscious admission that his promises of a profitable truce in the class war will turn out to be worthless, "which will mean a great deal to all of you. Wealth in our time!"
The ex-miners, crowded around the gates of the closed pit, are unimpressed.
"When the National Coal Board were forced to close the pit last year..." Stevens begins.
"It were a shame, that was!" heckles one of the workers, in Ignorant Yokel Speak.
"No, my friends," says Stevens chummily, presenting himself as one of them, "we must not be bitter. We must face the facts."
Note the 'we'; the most abused word in political discourse. As in 'we're all in this together'.
"Coal is a dying industry," asserts Stevens.
The miners shout "Rubbish! Rubbish!"
When it happens in reality, the idea that the mines had to shut because they were unprofitable will be rubbish. Mining was always subsidised.
"Oil is our future now and the government agrees with
me. They have not only given us the go-ahead for our plans,
they have promised us money for future expansion!" So the state is now subsidising a private company instead of nationalised coal and people's jobs. "I have it here in
black and white!"
There is general cheering. This story represents the working class, via the conduit of Welshness, as idiots. The feckless, changeable, easily-swayed mob - a trope that goes back a long way.
"Money for all of us! More jobs, more housing, more cars!" The promise of returned prosperity in the depths of the 70s.
In terms of when it was made, this is an odd scene. Miners were powerful and militant in 1973. They were unionised and they were winning. They weren't sacked, helpless, grumbling no-hopers, stuck on the sidelines.
In terms of the future, however, this scene is actually prescient. By the late-90s, British mining - together with so much manufacturing
industry - had been deliberately destroyed by the Tories, partly from a pure ideological objection to the idea of powerful workers and unions, partly as revenge for the miners bringing down Heath in '74 (the year after this story was broadcast). Huge numbers
of traditional working class jobs were annihilated by the Conservatives. Working class
communities were wrecked in the process. In many ways, the sight of a
crowd of workers, made redundant, closed out of their sold-off and
shut-down workplace, listening to speeches about how coal is dead, being
fraudulently told that their future lies in the trickle-down effect of
private profit, is a sight that predicts the result of Thatcherism.
And when Stevens says "oil is the future" he's only telling part of the truth. The future he really has in mind is one of the corporation as pure post-industrial power structure. Stevens is an administrator, a
manipulator of executive practices, PR, lobbying, influence, delegated
tasks, etc. This is, in its way, strangely prescient of the outward
features of neoliberalism... which was, after all, just getting started
roundabout 1973. The theory of post-industrialism is pretty specious, to be honest, but a lot of people believe in it, interpreting neoliberalism as a reorganisation of capital along lines of services and pure information, production being relegated to a quaint relic. This is largely bullshit, but it expresses something that a lot of people - some of them people like Stevens - believe: that capitalism can dispense with old-style workers, and all the dangers inherent in them, in favour of economies based on the shunting around of pure information. That this is Stevens' dream is expressed by the fact that his company is secretly run by an insane computer that is also his alter ego... or should that be, his 'alter id'. It's aim is to create "total efficiency" in society (which is explicitly stated to be equivalent to the business dominance of Global Chemicals) by sacking all workers, abandoning coal (i.e. production), turning industry into a 'post-industrial' wasteland, brainwashing all corporate executives and linking all computers in the world into itself, thus unifying all information.
Trouble is, Stevens and his 'B.O.S.S.' have reckoned without the gothic, that eternal bad conscience. The gothic brings ghosts out of the disused mine... in the form of giant maggots. They are definitely ghosts. Ghosts - in the sense of the ghost story as we know it - are modern things. Gothic Marxism (perhaps most especially in the insights of Christopher Caudwell) has identified the ghost story as a quintessentially modern phenomenon. It is the worm in the apple of modern rationalism. And it is a very material genre. The 'ghosts' of M.R. James - effective founder of what we call the 'ghost story' - are gothic in that they represent the return of the repressed, but also material in that they emerge from modernity (manufactured things like prints and sheets and train tickets and mass-reproduced patterns) and that the tend to be icky and hairy and chitinous.
Giant maggots which signify the repressed dark secrets of capitalist production, erupting out of a closed mine, are ghosts in this sense. In this story, oddly, they're the ghosts of the future.
ideas are icepickproof
Showing posts with label conservatives. Show all posts
Showing posts with label conservatives. Show all posts
Thursday, 21 November 2013
Sunday, 17 November 2013
18
Everyone is down a mine.
(Incidentally, it's funny how often Doctor Who in the 70s and 80s keeps coming back to mines. I'm sure it's nothing to do with the fact that coal mining was a key industry in British economic life during these decades, miners were among the most powerful unionised workers in the 70s, and the 80s saw the calculated destruction of the miners' unions and their industry by the Tory government. Oh ho no.)
Anyway. As I say, everyone - the Doctor, Romana, K9, Adrasta, Organon and a giant green blob called Erato - is down a mine. And things are coming to a head. (Head. Pit-head. Geddit? Never mind. It doesn't really work anyway.)
Yes, so anyway... Erato is, as I say, a giant green blob.
"Erato came here fifteen years ago to propose a trading agreement," says the Doctor, while everyone else still reels from the revelation that the blob has a name, a mind and the ability to talk. "Tythonus is a planet rich in metallic ores and minerals...."
There's an interlude here where the Doctor and Adrasta have a little argument about the fact that the Doctor is checking his facts by asking an electric dog.
"...the Tythonions exist on ingesting chlorophyll," the Doctor continues, "Large quantities of it, judging by their size. Now, there's a superabundance of planet life on Chloris, so..."
"So Erato came here to offer you metal in return for chlorophyll!" finishes Romana.
"Right. But who was the first person he met?"
"The person who held the monopoly of metal here," supplies Organon in response to the Doctor's rhetorical question.
He means Adrasta, by the way.
"Right," agrees the Doctor, "And did she put the welfare of her struggling people above her own petty power? No. She tipped the ambassador into a pit and threw astrologers at him."
If you don't know what that last bit means, well I'm sorry... I have limited space and no inclination to explain. What are you doing reading this blog anyway, if you're not the sort of person who has already seen the DVD at least 412 times?
What Erato didn't reckon on was the fact that he was a character in a story being written in Britain in the late 70s, when British society was laying to rest the last vestiges of the leftover radicalism of the 60s and just starting to be transformed by the crumbling of the post-war social democratic consensus and the rise of neoliberalism... By coming to a feudal society that existed in such a story, Erato was coming to a place where feudalism was a stand-in for protectionism and backwardness and all sorts of other Bad Things that hindered free trade. So Bad Things were likely to happen to him.
The funny thing is... this story actually sort-of tallies with the Marxist view of history. Marxism thinks historical change happens for all sorts of reasons, but one fundamental reason is the moment when the developing forces of production (how societies reproduce themselves by making what they need) come into conflict with the social superstructure (how relationships in society are arranged). Revolutions happen when the existing social relationships become a drag factor holding back the development of the productive forces.
To give a very crude illustration:
An opportunity comes along for a society short on metal to get lots more metal (I mean LOTS more) by entering into a trading agreement with someone who has lots of metal. If that metal-short society gets lots more metal, it can have more of the things it needs to produce stuff (like, say, farming implements... and perhaps even more complex machinery). But the society is dominated by a powerful person or layer of people - say, a feudal ruling class - whose power depends upon their near-monopoly on metal, i.e upon their ownership of the only mine. That person - let's imagine it's one person and she's a woman - is, as stated, very powerful, and is thus in a position to stymie the deal. Sometimes such a person will actually retard their own economic interests in order to cling on to older social structures that benefit them.
Adrasta - and, by extension, the whole of feudal system on Chloris - is caught in such a contradiction. The 'free trade monster' comes to develop the productive forces and she has to lock him away in her mine. This is like the decadent feudal aristocracy fighting the oncoming revolution to a bourgeois mode of production. Look also at how the story associates the downfall of Adrasta with the end of the "dark ages". Everyone will be happier once the new social order changes the economic base!
The final proof that this story is about the rise of capitalism can be found in the fact that everyone on Chloris is deperate to get their hands on metal... and yet, it doesn't seem to be valuable to them in itself. Presumably, they want to trade the metal to those who have none. Metal has become a commodity, the ur-commodity, the commodity that signifies all others and realises their value. The universal equivalent. It has become, in short, capitalist money.
Of course, as I say, this is also a story from and about the rise of neoliberalism. So it's about the road out of serfdom in two senses: the sense of the original historical transition to capitalism and the rising ideology of neoliberalism. Hayekian class war, in the form of Thatcherism and Reaganomics, was (in rhetoric if not always in practice) about supposedly liberating money and trade from the protectionism and monopoly of an old system.
From that semi-rational but increasingly hegemonic standpoint, Adrasta isn't a fedual seigneur... she's Jim Callaghan.
(Incidentally, it's funny how often Doctor Who in the 70s and 80s keeps coming back to mines. I'm sure it's nothing to do with the fact that coal mining was a key industry in British economic life during these decades, miners were among the most powerful unionised workers in the 70s, and the 80s saw the calculated destruction of the miners' unions and their industry by the Tory government. Oh ho no.)
Anyway. As I say, everyone - the Doctor, Romana, K9, Adrasta, Organon and a giant green blob called Erato - is down a mine. And things are coming to a head. (Head. Pit-head. Geddit? Never mind. It doesn't really work anyway.)
Yes, so anyway... Erato is, as I say, a giant green blob.
"Erato came here fifteen years ago to propose a trading agreement," says the Doctor, while everyone else still reels from the revelation that the blob has a name, a mind and the ability to talk. "Tythonus is a planet rich in metallic ores and minerals...."
There's an interlude here where the Doctor and Adrasta have a little argument about the fact that the Doctor is checking his facts by asking an electric dog.
"...the Tythonions exist on ingesting chlorophyll," the Doctor continues, "Large quantities of it, judging by their size. Now, there's a superabundance of planet life on Chloris, so..."
"So Erato came here to offer you metal in return for chlorophyll!" finishes Romana.
"Right. But who was the first person he met?"
"The person who held the monopoly of metal here," supplies Organon in response to the Doctor's rhetorical question.
He means Adrasta, by the way.
"Right," agrees the Doctor, "And did she put the welfare of her struggling people above her own petty power? No. She tipped the ambassador into a pit and threw astrologers at him."
If you don't know what that last bit means, well I'm sorry... I have limited space and no inclination to explain. What are you doing reading this blog anyway, if you're not the sort of person who has already seen the DVD at least 412 times?
What Erato didn't reckon on was the fact that he was a character in a story being written in Britain in the late 70s, when British society was laying to rest the last vestiges of the leftover radicalism of the 60s and just starting to be transformed by the crumbling of the post-war social democratic consensus and the rise of neoliberalism... By coming to a feudal society that existed in such a story, Erato was coming to a place where feudalism was a stand-in for protectionism and backwardness and all sorts of other Bad Things that hindered free trade. So Bad Things were likely to happen to him.
The funny thing is... this story actually sort-of tallies with the Marxist view of history. Marxism thinks historical change happens for all sorts of reasons, but one fundamental reason is the moment when the developing forces of production (how societies reproduce themselves by making what they need) come into conflict with the social superstructure (how relationships in society are arranged). Revolutions happen when the existing social relationships become a drag factor holding back the development of the productive forces.
To give a very crude illustration:
An opportunity comes along for a society short on metal to get lots more metal (I mean LOTS more) by entering into a trading agreement with someone who has lots of metal. If that metal-short society gets lots more metal, it can have more of the things it needs to produce stuff (like, say, farming implements... and perhaps even more complex machinery). But the society is dominated by a powerful person or layer of people - say, a feudal ruling class - whose power depends upon their near-monopoly on metal, i.e upon their ownership of the only mine. That person - let's imagine it's one person and she's a woman - is, as stated, very powerful, and is thus in a position to stymie the deal. Sometimes such a person will actually retard their own economic interests in order to cling on to older social structures that benefit them.
Adrasta - and, by extension, the whole of feudal system on Chloris - is caught in such a contradiction. The 'free trade monster' comes to develop the productive forces and she has to lock him away in her mine. This is like the decadent feudal aristocracy fighting the oncoming revolution to a bourgeois mode of production. Look also at how the story associates the downfall of Adrasta with the end of the "dark ages". Everyone will be happier once the new social order changes the economic base!
The final proof that this story is about the rise of capitalism can be found in the fact that everyone on Chloris is deperate to get their hands on metal... and yet, it doesn't seem to be valuable to them in itself. Presumably, they want to trade the metal to those who have none. Metal has become a commodity, the ur-commodity, the commodity that signifies all others and realises their value. The universal equivalent. It has become, in short, capitalist money.
Of course, as I say, this is also a story from and about the rise of neoliberalism. So it's about the road out of serfdom in two senses: the sense of the original historical transition to capitalism and the rising ideology of neoliberalism. Hayekian class war, in the form of Thatcherism and Reaganomics, was (in rhetoric if not always in practice) about supposedly liberating money and trade from the protectionism and monopoly of an old system.
From that semi-rational but increasingly hegemonic standpoint, Adrasta isn't a fedual seigneur... she's Jim Callaghan.
Tuesday, 12 November 2013
31
John offers the Doctor some sugar for his tea. John is a black man with a Caribbean accent.
"Ah," says the Doctor ruminatively, regarding his sugarless tea, "A decision. Would it make any difference?"
"It would make your tea sweet," says John, humouring this strange customer.
"Yes, but beyond the confines of my tastebuds, would it make any difference?"
"Not really."
"But..."
John is suddenly strangely interested. "Yeah?" he prompts, wanting to hear more. (I used to think of John as a manifestation of the 'magical negro' stereotype... but actually he's just an ordinary Londoner who meets a magical Scotsman. As such he's one of the better examples of the Cartmel era representing black people. Sadly, those years often saw black men cast simply because the character was a rapper or a blues musician.)
"What if I could control people's tastebuds?" suggests the Doctor, "What if I decided that no one would take sugar? That'd make a difference to those who sell the sugar and those who cut the cane."
One person making a little decision doesn't change much. Lots and lots of people making lots and lots of little decisions, however...
"My father, he was a cane cutter," says John.
"Exactly. Now, if no one had used sugar, your father wouldn't have been a cane cutter, would he?"
"If this sugar thing had never started," says John, "my great-grandfather wouldn't have been kidnapped, chained up, and sold in Kingston in the first place. I'd be a African."
In British Jamaica, as in Brazil and French San Domingue, slavery was at its most brutal. Slaves were literally worked to death. The horrors of Caribbean slavery - virtually unrepresented by the mainstream capitalist culture industries - equal anything seen in the Nazi camps (which are endlessly dramatized and documented in popular culture as a warning against ideological extremism and a foil for the moral courage of the British and the Americans). The connection between these horrors - that both were caused by capitalist empires grabbing land and profiting from racialised slavery - is still less often made.
John is lucky to exist at all. For a long period, death rates for slaves in Jamaica were considerably higher than birth rates.
Slavery is not only one of the foundations of capitalism, funding and propping it up in the lands of the free, but it is also the origin of modern racism. 'Race' is a fundamentally unreal concept when it comes to humans; a social construct... and a relatively recent one in its current form. 'Races' were made socially. It was, for instance, far from clear to the dominant 'Anglo-Saxon' culture in 18th-19th Century America that the Irish or the Poles were 'white'. The idea that 'negroes' were an inferior 'race' arose with the need for millions of people who could be used as farm machinery in the plantations of the 'New World'. It was a get-out clause against the universalising promises of the bourgeois revolutions. The American Declaration of Independence stated "all men are created equal". There needed to be footnotes to that so that the gentelmen who wrote and signed it could keep their wealth and privilege. But it was only with the rise of a new society that such footnotes become necessary. The Tsars never had to justify why some were serfs and some were not: that was just the way of the world. Skin-colour was a handy marker for the modern, bourgeois Tsars; the Tsars of Liberty. It was a justification. It divided some workers from others. It was an unremovable mark. Pigment became a serial number. The toxic effects of this still deform the world.
It's quite rare to see any connection made in popular culture between racism (which is what this story - with its racially warring Daleks and its 'No Coloureds' signs and its little group of British fascists - is about) and slavery. Still more rare to see slavery and racism talked about - even obliquely - as direct results of market forces. In this scene, slavery is something you consume. Do you want some slavery in your tea? Of course, there is also the question of where the tea comes from.
John doubtless gets stick from some white Londoners for being an immigrant, but he's descended from people who were given no choice but to be 'immigrants' to Jamaica. He probably came here to fill one of those situations vacant that Britain had after the war. As before, there was work that Whitey needed doing.
This scene is happening in November 1963. The previous year, the Conservative government passed the Commonwealth Immigrants Act, restricting the right of Commonwealth people to move to Britain. Leader of the Opposition High Gaitskill called this "cruel and brutal anti-colour legislation". The following year, amidst a Labour General Election victory, the Tories ran a successful campaign in Smethwick for Peter Griffiths featuring the slogan (if you'll pardon my repeating it): "If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Liberal or Labour". Harold Wilson called for Griffiths to be treated as an untouchable in Parliament. Of course, by 1968, Wilson's Labour government was introducing (with Tory support) a new Act which further restricted the right of Commonwealth citizens to move to Britain. That's just what Labour does: talk the talk of moral outrage when in opposition, then out-racist the racists once in power.
Boulders. Lakes. Ripples.
"Ah," says the Doctor ruminatively, regarding his sugarless tea, "A decision. Would it make any difference?"
"It would make your tea sweet," says John, humouring this strange customer.
"Yes, but beyond the confines of my tastebuds, would it make any difference?"
"Not really."
"But..."
John is suddenly strangely interested. "Yeah?" he prompts, wanting to hear more. (I used to think of John as a manifestation of the 'magical negro' stereotype... but actually he's just an ordinary Londoner who meets a magical Scotsman. As such he's one of the better examples of the Cartmel era representing black people. Sadly, those years often saw black men cast simply because the character was a rapper or a blues musician.)
"What if I could control people's tastebuds?" suggests the Doctor, "What if I decided that no one would take sugar? That'd make a difference to those who sell the sugar and those who cut the cane."
One person making a little decision doesn't change much. Lots and lots of people making lots and lots of little decisions, however...
"My father, he was a cane cutter," says John.
"Exactly. Now, if no one had used sugar, your father wouldn't have been a cane cutter, would he?"
"If this sugar thing had never started," says John, "my great-grandfather wouldn't have been kidnapped, chained up, and sold in Kingston in the first place. I'd be a African."
In British Jamaica, as in Brazil and French San Domingue, slavery was at its most brutal. Slaves were literally worked to death. The horrors of Caribbean slavery - virtually unrepresented by the mainstream capitalist culture industries - equal anything seen in the Nazi camps (which are endlessly dramatized and documented in popular culture as a warning against ideological extremism and a foil for the moral courage of the British and the Americans). The connection between these horrors - that both were caused by capitalist empires grabbing land and profiting from racialised slavery - is still less often made.
John is lucky to exist at all. For a long period, death rates for slaves in Jamaica were considerably higher than birth rates.
Slavery is not only one of the foundations of capitalism, funding and propping it up in the lands of the free, but it is also the origin of modern racism. 'Race' is a fundamentally unreal concept when it comes to humans; a social construct... and a relatively recent one in its current form. 'Races' were made socially. It was, for instance, far from clear to the dominant 'Anglo-Saxon' culture in 18th-19th Century America that the Irish or the Poles were 'white'. The idea that 'negroes' were an inferior 'race' arose with the need for millions of people who could be used as farm machinery in the plantations of the 'New World'. It was a get-out clause against the universalising promises of the bourgeois revolutions. The American Declaration of Independence stated "all men are created equal". There needed to be footnotes to that so that the gentelmen who wrote and signed it could keep their wealth and privilege. But it was only with the rise of a new society that such footnotes become necessary. The Tsars never had to justify why some were serfs and some were not: that was just the way of the world. Skin-colour was a handy marker for the modern, bourgeois Tsars; the Tsars of Liberty. It was a justification. It divided some workers from others. It was an unremovable mark. Pigment became a serial number. The toxic effects of this still deform the world.
It's quite rare to see any connection made in popular culture between racism (which is what this story - with its racially warring Daleks and its 'No Coloureds' signs and its little group of British fascists - is about) and slavery. Still more rare to see slavery and racism talked about - even obliquely - as direct results of market forces. In this scene, slavery is something you consume. Do you want some slavery in your tea? Of course, there is also the question of where the tea comes from.
John doubtless gets stick from some white Londoners for being an immigrant, but he's descended from people who were given no choice but to be 'immigrants' to Jamaica. He probably came here to fill one of those situations vacant that Britain had after the war. As before, there was work that Whitey needed doing.
This scene is happening in November 1963. The previous year, the Conservative government passed the Commonwealth Immigrants Act, restricting the right of Commonwealth people to move to Britain. Leader of the Opposition High Gaitskill called this "cruel and brutal anti-colour legislation". The following year, amidst a Labour General Election victory, the Tories ran a successful campaign in Smethwick for Peter Griffiths featuring the slogan (if you'll pardon my repeating it): "If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Liberal or Labour". Harold Wilson called for Griffiths to be treated as an untouchable in Parliament. Of course, by 1968, Wilson's Labour government was introducing (with Tory support) a new Act which further restricted the right of Commonwealth citizens to move to Britain. That's just what Labour does: talk the talk of moral outrage when in opposition, then out-racist the racists once in power.
Boulders. Lakes. Ripples.
Tuesday, 15 January 2013
Review: 'The Reactionary Mind' by Corey Robin
The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin by Corey RobinMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
Superb.
As an historian of ideas, Robin concentrates on the patterns of thinking within conservatism, but never seems to say that conservative actions and policies stem entirely from ideology. Indeed, he frequently points out the ruptures between theory and practice... yet he can usually find hidden resonances within the conservative idea/s that are consistent in ironic, unexpected ways, ways that often make seemingly paradoxical dissonances between theory and practice seem much more explicable.
Disjointed, of necessity (since this is a compilation of previously published essays on a variety of subjects), there are still clear and original linking ideas which are spelled out mostly in the new introduction. Conservatism is fundamentally a reaction to the loss of privilege, or the challenge to privilege from the oppressed. Conservatism is much less enamoured of stasis, familiarity etc than it thinks it is. Conservatism is much more depressive and melancholy than many people think. It is dependant upon left-wing ideas to provide it with negative stimulus. It is animated by a preoccupation with violence. It is more revolutionary than it pretends, being often as critical of ancient regimes as of radical challenges. Etc.
Robin delineates these ideas with a selection of profiles and intellectual traceries, hunting down the lineages of certain preoccupations through history. The most entertaining chapter is probably his thorough and brief (it need not be extensive to be thorough) takedown of that malignant mediocrity Ayn Rand. The most piercing is probably his analysis of the malaise that afflicted and spurred on conservatives after the supposedly-desired triumph over communism. The analysis of conservatism as an ever-changing yet essentially consistent range of ideas that prize the retention of privilege is tested and found highly persuasive as he charts conservative disillusion with capitalism triumphant after the end of the Cold War.
It's hard to imagine anybody interested in modern politics coming away from this book without a lot more to think about.
View all my reviews
Tuesday, 8 February 2011
Life and Taxes
Here is George Monbiot, on possibly the most scandalous domestic story of the year (which, in the age of the ConDems, is really saying something). Please read this. In a sane country, this issue would trigger an Egypt-style revolt. It's essentially a government conspiracy to help massive corporations and banks (you remember how helpful they've been to the world in recent years?) defraud the country of perhaps unprecedentedly vast amounts of money. It may even amount to the effective abolition of taxation upon the wealthiest organisations in society.
Here's a sample:
I simply cannot help thinking about 'The Sun Makers' when I read this. One of the most hilarious myths in Who fan culture is that 'Sun Makers' is a right-wing allegory about the horrors of the big state and punitive taxation. This is to misunderstand the story but also, more important, it is to buy into one of the centrepieces of reactionary ideological bullshit pervading our culture: the idea that conservative politics is about the liberty of the individual while socialist politics is about the power of the state.
The truth is, conservatism needs the state. It loves the state. The core of conservatism is the ideological commitment to using the state to further the direct interests of big capital. Conservatism understands, even if many so-called socialists don't, that the state is theirs. It's an emanation from the capitalist system. Law, order, the courts, the police, the government... they're there to protect private property, to guard the people who own it all from the people who own relatively nothing. It's an apparatus of force and coercion, built to enforce the dominance of the people who own and control the means of production.
Liberals and professional Labourists are eager enough to use the state to enforce the rule of the capitalists, to promote the interests of business, etc. But conservatism sees this as its sacred mission... and, since the age of neoliberalism was ushered into practice by Pinochet and Reagan and Thatcher, they see it as the very least they can do. Conservatives now, and our own government is an example par excellence, wants to wage all-out class war on behalf of the very biggest and the very richest. They are engaged in smash and grab policies, designed to sell off everything that isn't nailed down... and then prize up the nails.
In 'The Sun Makers', Robert Holmes is not just satirising "the UK tax system", as fan guidebooks usually inform us. He's satirisng the symbiotic link between the state and big business. Yes, the Collector's personal guard are called the "Inner Retinue" (which sounds a bit like "Inland Revenue"... thus implying that the Vat man is a bit of a brutal thug, geddit???) and there are are corridors called the P45, etc. But all this occurs under the absolute domination of an organisation called "The Company", run by a guy in a pinstriped suit, who is clearly doing this for the profits. Where do the profits come from? From the ludicrously exorbitant taxes (i.e. "breathing tax") paid by the population to the Gatherer, who is the ultimate state official but is grovellingly subservient to his corporate master. So, the state gathers and the Company collects. Really, how much clearer could this possibly be?
It's sometimes objected that the society in the story is more like a Stalinist dictatorship... because it's got torture chambers, prison camps, a news service that broadcasts government propaganda and lots of bureaucrats. Well, the capitalist world has torture chambers, prison camps, utterly subservient news and bureaucrats aplenty. (Our leaders are currently trying to lever a torturer into power in Egypt who's been complicit with them in rendition flights, all in the name of stability.) Indeed, corporations themselves function on bureaucracy, misinformation, propaganda and absolutist pyramidal power structures. They are themselves command economies. Many of them are now bigger, in terms of GDP, that some nation states. And then there's the fact that Nazi Germany was a capitalist country (albeit one with heavy state involvement). And then we have endless examples of capitalists being more than happy to do lucrative business with brutal, repressive regimes... IBM in Nazi Germany, Murdoch in China, etc.
Neoliberalism uses the state as a way of distributing largesse from the poor and from ordinary working people to the rich and the corporations. That's our current government's project. One way of doing this is through taxation. Put very crudely, you raise taxes on the ordinary schmoes and lower them for the rich, or simply fail to collect them. Meanwhile, the government splurges money on protecting the interests of banks and big business, with bail outs from the treasury when they totter, or by selling off the public sector to them at knockdown prices and then continuing to use taxpayer money to prop things up when business ruins them.
This is what has happened in 'The Sun Makers'. The Company has, effectively, bought out the government... or merged with it to the point where they have become one... though, of course, the Collector reveals their intention to simply leave the humans in the lurch once they've made as much profit out of them as they can. They artificial suns will run down without Company maintenance and the humans will die. "We're all in it togther" in a nutshell. In the meantime, the humans work to provide the Company with surplus. They work in factories and foundries (obviously making stuff, which must then be sold on the intergalactic market) and, if they get sent to the Correction Centre for defying the Company, they end up working for free... a bit like the denizens of America's system of privatised slave gulags stuffed with the (mostly black) poor.
Of course tax is unfair and places a burden on 'the little guy', restricting her or his freedom. But don't join the Tea Party in protest. The problem is in capitalism itself, particularly now in its neoliberal phase. Regressive taxation is an inherent part of the capitalist state, and the capitalist state is now (more than ever before) being consciously turned into a system for providing the very richest, most powerful, least accountable private tyrannies on Earth with staggering largesse, all at the expense of you and me. And our kids. And our forests and climate and public services. At the expense of the poor, the vulnerable, the disabled, the depressed, the women who've been raped or are trapped in abusive marriages. At the expense of the drudges, the guys who work their lives away and, in the end, haven't saved enough to pay for a decent funeral. 'The Sun Makers' realises this. Perhaps Holmes was looking at New York City or Chile. Who knows.
I wish more people outside fandom were familiar with this story (why is it one of the few Tom Baker stories still not out on DVD?). It really is, despite its jokiness and shlockiness, quite a powerful diagnosis of where we are and where we're headed. It's not "anti-tax", it's anti regressive taxation, taxation that leaves the Company untouched while filling its coffers with the fruits of the labour of the many. It's against the state that stifles individual liberty, not by failing to reward enterprise and initiative, but by forcing people to pay through the nose for the privilege of not starving to death because no corporation will stoop to buying their labour. It's against a system that can build mini-suns but can't (or won't) give working people a decent standard of living. It's against a system that asks you to "Praise the Company!" as though its a deity or a force of nature. It's implicitly against Cameron and his band of zealous market fundie class warriors.
The problem with tax is not that it hinders wealth creation by punishing those whose dynamism breeds success. (Is any theory in human history now more discredited than "the trickle down effect"?) The problem with tax is that it constitutes a system of exploitation within a system of exploitation. It nickels and dimes everybody who isn't vastly wealthy in order to fund states that then feed the rich who sit with their mouths open like baby birds in a nest. And the rich are usually rich in the first place on the profits from industry (i.e. value created by workers) or from speculation with hallucinatory money that exists only in financial markets. You can't reform that away. Ed Labour, if it gets in, will just be a slightly kinder version of the same thing. Surely, nobody can doubt this... what with Tony Blair still poncing around the globe, spending his blood money and backing New Labour suits like Ed's brother?
In other words, the way to tackle the outrageous business going on in that Monbiot article is not tut about this bunch in government and try to curb them (though I don't discourage you from doing so). We need to take a leaf out of Citizen Cordo's book. Let's not jump. Let's have a jelly baby instead. And then lets remember that, as the Doctor says, "human beings always have to fight for their freedom" and we have "only our claims" to lose.
Here's a sample:
At the moment tax law ensures that companies based here, with branches in other countries, don't get taxed twice on the same money. They have to pay only the difference between our rate and that of the other country. If, for example, Dirty Oil plc pays 10% corporation tax on its profits in Oblivia, then shifts the money over here, it should pay a further 18% in the UK, to match our rate of 28%. But under the new proposals, companies will pay nothing at all in this country on money made by their foreign branches.Now, being an utter nerd, there's always a little bit of my brain at the back (not as little or as far back as it should be) that is thinking about some film or TV series or book with monsters in it.
Foreign means anywhere. If these proposals go ahead, the UK will be only the second country in the world to allow money that has passed through tax havens to remain untaxed when it gets here. The other is Switzerland. The exemption applies solely to "large and medium companies": it is not available for smaller firms. The government says it expects "large financial services companies to make the greatest use of the exemption regime". The main beneficiaries, in other words, will be the banks.
But that's not the end of it. While big business will be exempt from tax on its foreign branch earnings, it will, amazingly, still be able to claim the expense of funding its foreign branches against tax it pays in the UK. No other country does this. The new measures will, as we already know, accompany a rapid reduction in the official rate of corporation tax: from 28% to 24% by 2014. This, a Treasury minister has boasted, will be the lowest rate "of any major western economy". By the time this government is done, we'll be lucky if the banks and corporations pay anything at all.
I simply cannot help thinking about 'The Sun Makers' when I read this. One of the most hilarious myths in Who fan culture is that 'Sun Makers' is a right-wing allegory about the horrors of the big state and punitive taxation. This is to misunderstand the story but also, more important, it is to buy into one of the centrepieces of reactionary ideological bullshit pervading our culture: the idea that conservative politics is about the liberty of the individual while socialist politics is about the power of the state.
The truth is, conservatism needs the state. It loves the state. The core of conservatism is the ideological commitment to using the state to further the direct interests of big capital. Conservatism understands, even if many so-called socialists don't, that the state is theirs. It's an emanation from the capitalist system. Law, order, the courts, the police, the government... they're there to protect private property, to guard the people who own it all from the people who own relatively nothing. It's an apparatus of force and coercion, built to enforce the dominance of the people who own and control the means of production.
Liberals and professional Labourists are eager enough to use the state to enforce the rule of the capitalists, to promote the interests of business, etc. But conservatism sees this as its sacred mission... and, since the age of neoliberalism was ushered into practice by Pinochet and Reagan and Thatcher, they see it as the very least they can do. Conservatives now, and our own government is an example par excellence, wants to wage all-out class war on behalf of the very biggest and the very richest. They are engaged in smash and grab policies, designed to sell off everything that isn't nailed down... and then prize up the nails.
In 'The Sun Makers', Robert Holmes is not just satirising "the UK tax system", as fan guidebooks usually inform us. He's satirisng the symbiotic link between the state and big business. Yes, the Collector's personal guard are called the "Inner Retinue" (which sounds a bit like "Inland Revenue"... thus implying that the Vat man is a bit of a brutal thug, geddit???) and there are are corridors called the P45, etc. But all this occurs under the absolute domination of an organisation called "The Company", run by a guy in a pinstriped suit, who is clearly doing this for the profits. Where do the profits come from? From the ludicrously exorbitant taxes (i.e. "breathing tax") paid by the population to the Gatherer, who is the ultimate state official but is grovellingly subservient to his corporate master. So, the state gathers and the Company collects. Really, how much clearer could this possibly be?
It's sometimes objected that the society in the story is more like a Stalinist dictatorship... because it's got torture chambers, prison camps, a news service that broadcasts government propaganda and lots of bureaucrats. Well, the capitalist world has torture chambers, prison camps, utterly subservient news and bureaucrats aplenty. (Our leaders are currently trying to lever a torturer into power in Egypt who's been complicit with them in rendition flights, all in the name of stability.) Indeed, corporations themselves function on bureaucracy, misinformation, propaganda and absolutist pyramidal power structures. They are themselves command economies. Many of them are now bigger, in terms of GDP, that some nation states. And then there's the fact that Nazi Germany was a capitalist country (albeit one with heavy state involvement). And then we have endless examples of capitalists being more than happy to do lucrative business with brutal, repressive regimes... IBM in Nazi Germany, Murdoch in China, etc.
Neoliberalism uses the state as a way of distributing largesse from the poor and from ordinary working people to the rich and the corporations. That's our current government's project. One way of doing this is through taxation. Put very crudely, you raise taxes on the ordinary schmoes and lower them for the rich, or simply fail to collect them. Meanwhile, the government splurges money on protecting the interests of banks and big business, with bail outs from the treasury when they totter, or by selling off the public sector to them at knockdown prices and then continuing to use taxpayer money to prop things up when business ruins them.
This is what has happened in 'The Sun Makers'. The Company has, effectively, bought out the government... or merged with it to the point where they have become one... though, of course, the Collector reveals their intention to simply leave the humans in the lurch once they've made as much profit out of them as they can. They artificial suns will run down without Company maintenance and the humans will die. "We're all in it togther" in a nutshell. In the meantime, the humans work to provide the Company with surplus. They work in factories and foundries (obviously making stuff, which must then be sold on the intergalactic market) and, if they get sent to the Correction Centre for defying the Company, they end up working for free... a bit like the denizens of America's system of privatised slave gulags stuffed with the (mostly black) poor.
Of course tax is unfair and places a burden on 'the little guy', restricting her or his freedom. But don't join the Tea Party in protest. The problem is in capitalism itself, particularly now in its neoliberal phase. Regressive taxation is an inherent part of the capitalist state, and the capitalist state is now (more than ever before) being consciously turned into a system for providing the very richest, most powerful, least accountable private tyrannies on Earth with staggering largesse, all at the expense of you and me. And our kids. And our forests and climate and public services. At the expense of the poor, the vulnerable, the disabled, the depressed, the women who've been raped or are trapped in abusive marriages. At the expense of the drudges, the guys who work their lives away and, in the end, haven't saved enough to pay for a decent funeral. 'The Sun Makers' realises this. Perhaps Holmes was looking at New York City or Chile. Who knows.
I wish more people outside fandom were familiar with this story (why is it one of the few Tom Baker stories still not out on DVD?). It really is, despite its jokiness and shlockiness, quite a powerful diagnosis of where we are and where we're headed. It's not "anti-tax", it's anti regressive taxation, taxation that leaves the Company untouched while filling its coffers with the fruits of the labour of the many. It's against the state that stifles individual liberty, not by failing to reward enterprise and initiative, but by forcing people to pay through the nose for the privilege of not starving to death because no corporation will stoop to buying their labour. It's against a system that can build mini-suns but can't (or won't) give working people a decent standard of living. It's against a system that asks you to "Praise the Company!" as though its a deity or a force of nature. It's implicitly against Cameron and his band of zealous market fundie class warriors.
The problem with tax is not that it hinders wealth creation by punishing those whose dynamism breeds success. (Is any theory in human history now more discredited than "the trickle down effect"?) The problem with tax is that it constitutes a system of exploitation within a system of exploitation. It nickels and dimes everybody who isn't vastly wealthy in order to fund states that then feed the rich who sit with their mouths open like baby birds in a nest. And the rich are usually rich in the first place on the profits from industry (i.e. value created by workers) or from speculation with hallucinatory money that exists only in financial markets. You can't reform that away. Ed Labour, if it gets in, will just be a slightly kinder version of the same thing. Surely, nobody can doubt this... what with Tony Blair still poncing around the globe, spending his blood money and backing New Labour suits like Ed's brother?
In other words, the way to tackle the outrageous business going on in that Monbiot article is not tut about this bunch in government and try to curb them (though I don't discourage you from doing so). We need to take a leaf out of Citizen Cordo's book. Let's not jump. Let's have a jelly baby instead. And then lets remember that, as the Doctor says, "human beings always have to fight for their freedom" and we have "only our claims" to lose.
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