Round and Round

Jeremy Corbyn is a decent man, and he’s closer to my viewpoint that just about anybody else in mainstream politics, but he’s still basically just a moderate Social Democrat.  The media buzz about him being “hard Left” is ludicrous nonsense.   It’s a sign of the media’s extreme Right-wing agenda/viewpoint, a centre-ground shifted to the Right beyond anything known since the early 20th century, and the widespread (and very consciously inculcated) political illiteracy that now pervades the UK like a plague.

I think Corbyn’s usefulness lies almost entirely in the opportunity he presents for us to push the conversation in certain ways.  I will push him over the other candidates, and I will support the good stuff he says and does as Labour leader (if elected) because it’d be insane to do anything else.  The opportunity for propaganda is itself reason to do this.  The subsequent opportunity for anti-reformist, anti-Labour propaganda when Corbyn sells out - because he will, make no mistake... they always do, the structural logic of the situation makes that inevitable - will be worth having too, speaking as a revolutionary.

The Labour Party will be relieved to learn that I have no intention of practicing entryism.  I will not be paying them £3 for the chance to vote for Corbyn.  I have no illusions about Corbyn, or the Labour Party, or what Corbyn can do with the Labour Party, or Labour’s chances of winning in 2020 whoever’s leading it.  The last thing Corbyn needs is people joining, voting for him, getting him elected, and then never getting further involved in activism, or in helping him push the party leftwards (which is what will happen with the new members). 

In many ways, Liz Kendall is a much better leadership prospect for the 'really-existing Labour Party'.  Corbyn is the candidate for people like Owen Jones, who have an essentially fantasy-based idea of what the Labour Party is.  It’s a machine for controlling and containing the Left and Social Democracy.  There's an idea out there that the Labour leaders are cowed into abandoning Left-wing principles by the media.  Bollocks.  You don't climb the Labour Party's internal greasy pole unless you are, in real terms, very very Right-wing indeed.  Labour is a thoroughly - even fanatically - neoliberal, atlanticist party which provides a kind of kennel for those elements who would otherwise be dangerously homeless.  Its main purpose it to sidetrack people who want Social Democratic policies, and channel them safely into a reformist project that is, essentially, a neverending roundalay.  Moderate the slogans to get elected.  Get elected.  Play it safe.  Get voted out when playing it safe lays you open to the vagaries of an unchallenged capitalist system.  Then play it safe to get elected again.  'Twas ever thus, to an extent, but especially since the Blair revolution, when the Labour Party was essentially remodelled into a slick, larger-membership, higher-profile version of the SDP.

I am so sick of the Labour Left’s delusions about what can be achieved with this rigged game.  In many ways I have more contempt for the so-called Labour Left than I do for good honest Blairites or Tories.

And I am so sick of the moral blackmail.  “We have to get the Tories out!  Get the Tories out at any cost!  Do anything to get the Tories out!  If you don’t support Labour, and support a moderate [i.e. Right-wing] Labour leader, you’re selling out the vulnerable people who’ll suffer under the Tories!”  Firstly, what about the vulnerable people who did suffer - and would suffer again - under Labour?  Labour pursued Tory policies, often with greater venom, vindictiveness and efficiency than the Tories.  Their specialty, from almost the very beginning.  Secondly, is this eternal fucking roundabout really the best we can do?  I mean, really?

I’ve been an implacable opponent of reformism since I read Rosa Luxemburg at college.  But even this year, at the election, I was saying “for god’s sake, vote against the Coalition, even if it means voting Labour, if you live somewhere where it might make a difference”.  I said it with no illusions, but as a stop-gap, a triage measure.  I was like someone with no faith in homeopathy, grasping at a homeopathic remedy to treat my cancer, because every other option is closed off and, after all, what harm could it do?  But that's the "We've got to do something?" logic of the panicked.  That's the same logic that makes otherwise sensible people think it might be a good idea to support NATO bombing Libya.

I begin to think that, as with what Oscar said about charity, electoral reformism is not only a trap but actually evil.  You perpetuate the disease by offering palliatives for the symptoms.  Lesser-evilism may be the greatest evil of all, even when practiced in the 'no illusions' way that I have sometimes practiced it.  It may sound cold, but maybe what we need is a few decades of undiluted Tory rule.  Maybe that would be an acceptable price to pay, if it meant stepping off that roundabout.  Because that roundabout is kind-of attached to an underground battery, and every time you spin it, you generate more charge that gets stored in the battery, and the battery keeps the whole fucking machine working.

I've never believed that suffering is good for you.  Never.  It's a pernicious lie our culture tells us.  But, y'know... hope isn't working terribly well lately, is it?   Palliatives don't cure diseases.  A vial of homeopathic remedy doesn't make a dent on the cancer cells... and, in any case, with Labour, a better analogy would probably be a vial of acid.

Suffering may not be good for you, but sometimes desperation can make you strong.

The working class movement is now so decimated that it makes less and less sense to think of Labour and the Unions as weapons in a struggle powered from below by working class activity. The old, standard logic used by people like me to justify engagement with reformists is falling apart, leaving us with some very bleak and stark choices to make.

I’m not sure that unremitting Tory rule might not be the only way to reinvigorate resistance from below.  I mean serious resistance by the way, not one-day strikes and marches and clicktivism.  I mean blood on the streets resistance - which is now pretty much the only way Austerity can ever be seriously challenged in the rigged game of the neoliberal millenium.  Even as it weakens the working class, Tory torture fuels their resentment and rage.  Better ten riots than no strikes.

The Tories want to take us back to the 19th century.  Maybe we should let them.  After all, there was no tradition of working class struggle before the working class invented it - and they did that in response to relentless, unaccountable pumelling from a system that represented them not at all, that gave them no outlet, that had no mercy for them, that locked them up for being destitute and let them die for the want of a bed.

Resistance and organisation came from despair, originally.  In the decayed and destroyed ruins of the tradition that used to give Labour any semblance of usefulness, maybe despair is the only thing we have going for us.  Let the fuckers burn it all down.  Then, maybe, we’ll get it together to burn them down in return.  What choice will we have?  You got any better ideas?  Any ideas that don't involve keeping on turning that fucking roundabout forever, charging up their batteries, and never getting anywhere?

Insider Trading

Remember Lance Parkin's Big Finish audio 'Davros'?  It's quite good, isn't it... if far too long.  But he does some interesting stuff with Davros' backstory, subverting your expectations a bit.  (It's got really good music too.)

Interesting stuff in it.  The Doctor is depicted as wanting to stop the fall of the corporations.  And, actually, I can see his point. At the moment, anyway.  And as long as we're talking about a sudden, instant fall.   

Simply remove capitalism at the touch of a button today and human civilisation as it stands would fall, and the human race might die out... for much the same reason that the animals in a battery farm would all die if you murdered all the farm workers and the crime went undiscovered for weeks. As bad as it is, it is currently how things work. The system doesn't function efficiently, or for human benefit, but it does basically function, and it relies upon keeping a sufficient number of people alive, and a sufficient level of social wellbeing going, simply because it lives off its human livestock. So it keeps the livestock alive by propping up the support systems that keep them alive, at least as a mass. 

On the other hand, isn't the continuation of capitalism itself a kind of slow-mo apocalypse?  Is the damage currently being wrought upon the planet's ecosystem not going to add up to the end of the world?  Does not the system as it stands condemn millions to death every year, and billions more to an alienated and impoverished living death?  There's a case for saying that quotidian reality itself is a crisis, that our day-to-day world is not only leading us to armageddon but that, even if we survive it, that would not automatically for the best?  Couldn't we reasonably say that the fall of the system, even in flames and mass-starvation, would not be inherently worse than allowing it to continue?

It's tempting to not only appreciate the aesthetics of apocalypse, but to go beyond such an appreciation as an asesthetic statement and turn it into a political one.  As cold-blooded as this sounds, isn't it possible to see the end of the world - millions of deaths and all - as a price worth paying for the end of capitalism?  The end of the world... I mean the end of the world as it stands economically, politically, culturally, structurally... would at least be general.  As the man said: "the thing about chaos is it's fair".  It could be seen as having greater moral integrity to say 'let it all come down' as opposed to 'prop it up at all costs until we can change it piecemeal and as peacefully as poss'.  Propping it up doesn't have such terrible consequences for me and a lot of other comfortable Western leftists and liberals.  I'm not personally all that harmed by day-to-day capitalism.  I don't like it, but my outrage is mainly on behalf of others, and on behalf of humanity generally.  It's abstract.  Meanwhile, billions of other people (people elsewhere; people usually darker skinned than me, etc) suffer very non-abstract grinding consequences from the limping along of the status quo.  Calling for the total, immediate, unconditional fall of capitalism however, would at least be bound to effect me negatively to some degree.  I'd take some hits from that.  I wouldn't be saying to the shanty-dwellers of the global south "yeah, I know it's bad, and I sympathise... but it could be worse for all of us, so you just stay where you are, and your kids too."  Exactly what have such people got to lose?  For a lot of them the best answer is probably 'only their chains'.  Well, isn't it selfish of me to moralise about the disastrous consequences of a conflagration that would melt those chains along with my laptop?

One of the hardest concepts to get people to come to terms with is the concept of structural violence.  The violence that the social superstructure does to us (to varying degrees according to who we are and where we are) every day.  People occasionally contact me to helpfully inform me that communism killed so many millions of people.  They tend to understand what I'm getting at if I point out the need to historicise such things, and if I point out that not everything that ever called itself 'communism' is neccesarily something I'd support, etc.  They don't agree but they understand what I'm saying.  The issue of the structural violence of capitalism, however, is almost never understood, even as a proposition.  Point out that capitalism as a historical epoch or mode of production has caused the deaths of far more people than all the political movements which called themselves 'communist' put together and you get head scratching, followed by accusations of goalpost-moving.  The idea that a historical mode of production might strucuturally cause genocide upon genocide (through generating war, colonialism, imperialism, poverty, back-breaking labour, stress, depression, racism, misogyny, etc etc etc, over centuries) is an encrypted anathema to most people.  And you can't really blame people.  From day one we are trained to view events like the Nazi holocaust as a random outgrowth of a fanatical ideology, rather than as a result of the imperialism of a capitalist state.  And 'our' own genocides are not even talked about, so we never need to ponder whether the Irish potato famine was an outgrowth of the fanatical ideology of free trade.

I'm working, by the way, on the assumption that we're talking about capitalism as the reigning global economic system rather than as an 'ethos' or a 'method' or anything like that.  (It's by no means clear from 'Davros' that Parkin sees things in this way, but that's by the by.)  I'm talking about, in the Marxist language, capitalism as a mode of production and as a world system.  The idea of capitalism as a historical mode entails a social superstructure built upon the economic base (we won't quibble here about exactly how this works).  The social superstructure includes the state.  Indeed, that's a way of putting it warrantable only as what scientists call a 'model', an explanatory simplification, akin to saying that a bird's wing is 'designed to be aerodynamic'.  The capitalist state isn't a 'thing' that sits somewhere in a framework of other 'things', all of which taken together constitute capitalist 'society'.  The state saturates every aspect of life for people who live in a modern capitalist productive mode.  The state is fundamentally a mode itself, a mode within a mode, rather than a 'bit' of capitalism.

Back on the subject of survival, the capitalist class is more than ready to tolerate and fund a 'strong state' in those areas where the market alone can't do the job of keeping survival going.  Capitalism doesn't always need everyone to survive, and at times it explicitly needs people to die, but it basically depends upon the survival and continuance of humanity and human social reproduction... I mean, it basically is a system of social reproduction, given that (in the Marxist view) the basis of the social is the economic!  By that I just mean that 'economic', in the Marxist sense, refers to the mode whereby societies make the things they need in order to reproduce.  (I'm straying into a forest of tautologies here, but some tautologies do need to be pointed out or people don't notice them.)

Capitalism, via the state or otherwise, is equally capable of managing the production of mass death, when it needs mass death instead.  It is also prepared - as we see with people like Ian Duncan Smith - to use the state for purposes of structural mass homicide within the confines of a domestic state apparatus... when such strategies are a) a side-effect of an austerity project, or b) a salutary warning of the consequences of unwillingness or even inability to conform to ideological discipline.

The state doesn't seem to exist in Parkin's picture of a future effectively run by corporations.  The corporations themselves seem to fill the gap left by the state.  I think this is pretty unlikely, just as I'm sceptical of the kind of rhetoric which sees Late Capitalism as trying to restructure the world along the lines of a kind of neo-feudalism.  But, of course, Parkin isn't involved in futurology or actual prognostication.  He's playing the age-old (and thoroughly venerable) game of commenting on the present by exaggerating characteristics of it in the notional narrative space of 'the future'.  But this leads us to another interesting irony: the story critiques capitalism while the literal meaning of the text is that capitalism will endure well into the future.  

Again, this scenario is hardly an innovation on Parkin's part (I hope I don't sound like I'm snarking at him - that isn't my intention) so he can hardly be held responsible for it, as if it were a brand new technique which he pioneered for some new and unique purpose of his own.  It happens again and again in SF in general, and in Doctor Who in particular.  And why not?  As in 'Davros', it is a technique which can open up possibilities for critique ranging from the mild to the savage to the wistful.  'Davros' is fairly strong in its aesthetic contempt for corporations.  Parkin is especially strong on poking fun at corporate PR doublespeak and management jargon.  There are blissful scenes where Davros gets angry at being regaled with phrases like "blue skies initiative" and asks "Did you resurrect me merely to gibber at me?".  Meanwhile, the Doctor gets offered advice on corporate dress codes from an implant stuck in his ear which bullies him about protocol.  Hilariously, he is told (this is Six we're talking about, remember) that if he wishes to mark himself out as an individual within the office context he can choose from some pre-chosen novelty ties.  

But the point I was making was that the postulation of corporate capitalism as a triumphant and enduring system centuries hence, surviving to the point where corporations dominate human civilisation across a multi-planet galactic empire, actually bolsters capitalism more than it attacks it.  It buys into the lie of capitalism as a kind of transcendent and ahistorical plane of eternity.  It buys into the lie that the system, with all its iniquities, is so well adapted to 'human nature' that it will carry on as long as we remain fallen, selfish things.  It buys into the lie that capitalism can rid itself of crisis and reach eternal equilibrium.  Even the economic collapse that is threatened within the story comes from outside the system, from the extraordinary and malicious intervention of an ancient alien.  (He's also a fascist... remember what we were saying earlier about the systemic evils of capitalism being reframed as aberrant horrors caused by ideological fanatics?)  This isn't to say that simply depicting the survival of capitalism is a lie because it ignores crisis.  For all its inbuilt and inescapable systemic predisposition to crises, capitalism has survived.  Indeed, the crises are part of how it survives.  The expansions and contractions are like respiration.  It's quite true, I suspect, that capitalism (periodic crises and all) would probably be capable of maintaining itself as a system across different planetary societies.  It would be foolish indeed to set any kind of plausibility threshold on the capabilities of capitalism.  The system is incredibly hardy and dynamic, and is probably limited only by pre-existing material constraints.  Remove such constraints by opening up a new natural biosphere and I imagine capitalism would have a bloody good try at spreading into it.  However, it should now be clear to any thinking person that capitalism has set a very near date for its own fall simply because it is in the process of destroying the viability of what is currently its sole natural biosphere.  We're not anywhere near escaping this planet any time soon.  Meanwhile, the destruction wrought upon the natural environment by capitalist industry is inducing a terrifyingly near extinction event scenario.  I was saying earlier that capitalism basically keeps most of us alive because it needs us.  That's only a short term thing.  Capitalism (being an aggregation of competing capitals rather than a sentient group mind) is very bad at long terms.  It will exploit a buck today and fuck tomorrow.  Which is essentially what it has done to the entire planet and its ability to sustain human life.  Put plainly: we won't have time to colonize other worlds; we'll all die on this one first.

Sorry to bum you out, it's just that we do need, as a species, to get the grips with this truth.  And writing SF which satirises capitalism by setting stories about capitalism in the future really doesn't help.  It actually helps to push the idea that we'll survive our current environmental crisis and go out into the universe.  These stories help lull us into a false sense of security.  They're just one note in a symphony of false reassurance, but still.  There's a very real sense in which stories like 'Davros' (and 'The End of the World' and 'The Sun Makers', etc) contribute towards the likely destruction of all life on Earth.  Again I ask... is the instant and catastrophic fall really all that terrible a concept?

Also interesting to me is the way the audio play in question apparently believes - or at least portrays all its characters (including the Doctor) as believing - that the fluctuations of the market could (at least theoretically) be predicted with absolute precision with a sufficiently powerful bit of maths. This is not only reductionism and determinism of an extremely crude kind (a similar kind of crude reductionism and determinism to that which Davros is shown to indulge in when it comes to social Darwinism, etc) but also a form of commodity fetishism.  It imagines a social and man-made phenomenon like the market as working like natural, physical process such as fluid dynamics. Of course, it's by no means certain that this idea isn't just a chimera of Davros's diseased and reactionary brain, which the other characters credit because of his avowed intellectual power, or their own positionality within a corporate system.

Working on the assumption that the equation could successfully predict the stock market, it would presumably only give you a picture of what the stock market would do as long as you chose not to act on your foreknowledge.  I mean, that's kind of the inherent nature of all predictive calculations: to provide an ostensible snapshot of the future, based on the extrapolation of the present and past, with predictable interventions taken into account and sans any other unpredictable intervention which (by definition) can't be included as a variable.  If the prediction concerns a human organised system open to human intervention, the moment you act on your supposed foreknowledge you alter the state of the reality that has been predicted.  This would probably be more of a problem the more powerful the predictive modelling was.  The more exact its predictions, the more delicately balanced they are.  Of course, if only one person has possession of the equation, and this person alone intervenes, the model might well work for them.  They would be coming to the party late, so to speak.  Their interest in a certain sector of the market would effectively post-date the interest of other investors, even if the equation-user actually invested before the others.  There is a strange way in which the predictive equation (assuming it worked as well as Davros says it would) would actually warp the temporal sequence.  As perfect foreknowledge, it would be a little like time travel.  What this suggests to me is the irony of the Doctor's foreknowledge.  The Doctor has never, as far as we know, used his access to time travel to ascertain in advance the winning lottery numbers, or the winner of the Grand National, or the state of tommorrow's Dow Jones.  More the Monk's style, that one.  But he could do it, if he wanted to.  Effectively, the Doctor is already in possession of the power that Davros claims to wield in the form of his equation.  He could generalise future stock market knowledge obtained from voyages to the future, just as easily as Davros could generalise the equation.  According to this story, the Doctor has, and has always had, the power to bring down capitalism.

This may just be a restatement of something we pretty much knew anyway, but it does rather bring it into focus.  The Doctor is manifestly one of those comfortable people saying "sit tight and wait" to the people who have nothing to lose but their chains.  To his credit, however, and unlike many such people, he does actually get out there and help them make reforms and even revolutions from time to time.  There's also a case for saying that he, the eternal outsider, doesn't have the right to foist his solution upon us.  We should get to choose for ourselves if we want to cling to quotidian oppression in the hope of improvement, or to embrace the beautiful, beautiful, blood-splattered apocalyptic reset button.

Of course, in order to see the Doctor this way, you do have to buy into Davros' assertion that generalising the equation would bring down capitalism.  Firstly, as noted, this involves accepting his rampant reductionism and determinism.  Secondly, a stock market in which everybody has the ability to always predict what the stock market is going to do is very different from the kind of stock market the equation was designed to predict.  The equation's own effect, if generalised sufficiently widely, would cancel out its own power as a predictive tool.  The equation cannot possibly have the effect it supposedly threatens to have, even if - for the sake of argument - perfect mathematical predictions of random and socially contingent outcomes were even possible (which they aren't).  It simply must be an insane delusion on Davros' part, which everyone else is silly enough to believe because they're not economists. Or, more likely, because they are economists.  Mainstream neoclassical economics is about as intellectually and empirically secure as Creationism... and criticising Creationism is, as we know, like shooting fish in a barrel.  (Or rather, shooting fish that've grown legs and climbed out of a barrel.)

Now, this actually works! Corporate drones, CEOs, academics, liberal activists... none of them could be trusted not to credit the market with the ability to do, or be, the impossible.  But it's a little upsetting to see the Doctor going in for this kind of fetishizing of the market.  Especially when, by the logic of this same story, he manifestly has the power to destroy it.  The Doctor is caught in a paradox here.  If he fetishizes the market then he also has the power to destroy it.  If he refuses to fetishize the market, there's nothing he can do about it.  This is just the kind of paradox that capitalism generates and traps all of us in all the time.

Secret Reality

Spoilers



The last episode of The Blacklist was hilarious.  Red describes an international cabal - comprised of people in government and the private sector - who run the world behind the scenes, start wars, control the media, kill to protect their power, etc.  It’s supposed to be so edgy.  Dark, terrifying conspiracy.  He has to get loads of investigate journos to attend his briefing in secret.  They’re all stunned by what he says.  But… he’s just describing the ruling class!  Seriously, the ‘Cabal’ is just the capitalist military-industrial-media-government complex.  But we’re supposed to be shocked by the existence of this group.  Once informed about it, the Washington Post runs a front page story telling everyone of the breaking news.  SHOCK NEW REVELATION: SMALL NUMBER OF POWERFUL PEOPLE ARE POWERFUL AND GET UP TO STUFF FURTHERING THEIR OWN POWER WITHOUT TELLING US!  The evil director of the CIA looks at the paper in horror, like he’s thinking “oh no, now everyone knows!”  It’s like structuring the big, dramatic denouement of a drama series around the astonishing revelation that water is wet, and having all your characters suddenly back away in terror from any rivers or taps they happen to be standing next to.

On the other hand, I can't help thinking this is still more charged than a story in which such facts of life are ignored.  Even presented as an outlandish, shocking revelation, it's still presented.  Even framed as a surprise, it's still there.  

Reminds me of the best Bond film ever, Quantum of Solace, in which a bunch of corporations, eco-businesses, military hardmen and Western politicians are presented as members of a secret criminal cartel who are trying to take over Bolivia's water reserves.  Now this basically happened in the real world.  The film depicts it as an evil secret conspiracy that MI6 wants to stop.  It also depicts Quantum as sneakily damming up loads of water to create an artificial shortage.  But it basically connects with the real world, albeit distantly.  It's far more connected to the real world than anything in the follow-up movie Skyfall (which is total shit, by the way, both politically and as entertainment).  Quantum of Solace also connects with the idea that powerful Western interests are behind politically-motivated Right-wing coups in South America... which is just one of those things that any sensible person takes for granted as an established historical truth, but which the mainstream media treats as a bizarre revelation.  But Quantum of Solace at least acknowledges it.  The movie puts the evil secret conspiratorial organisation behind such things rather than, y'know, the CIA and the US government... though it does have the CIA complicit in Quantum's machinations, even if it is because one CIA guy is a rotten apple.

Is this subversive?  Of course not.  It's gatekeeping.  It acknowledges things about the real world that people either know about or strongly suspect.  It then packages them in the classic methods of containment of such incendiary truths.  Bad Apple Theory.  Conspiracy Theory (which works either way - either as instant dismissal or as an obfuscation of the structural and legal nature of most real conspiratorial shenanigans).  Etc, etc.

On the other hand, I think the capitalist culture industries may underestimate the potential ultimate result of such things.  When such things become common knowledge, something that people all take for granted, even in a watered-down and ideologically-neutered form, that tells us something.  Loss of any confidence in the current state of the world may not start any fires, but it does erode. This isn't what the capitalist culture industries want to do.  It's something they have to do in order to appear even superficially plausible.

As I say, it's gatekeeping.  But the thing about gatekeeping is that it constitutes an acknowledgement that the gate is somewhat insecure, and that there are people who want to break through it.

Also, James Spader kicks it.

Yay for voting! Ain't democracy just peaches!

Off out to vote today on who runs the civil service... oh, no, hang about, we're not allowed to do that are we?

Off out to vote today on who runs the police... oh, no, hang about, we're not allowed to do that are we?

Off out to vote today on who runs the army... oh, no, hang about, we're not allowed to do that are we?

Off out to vote today on who runs the corporations... oh, no, hang about, we're not allowed to do that are we?

Off out to vote today on who owns and runs the media... oh, no, hang about, we're not allowed to do that are we?

Off out to vote today on who runs the BBC... oh, no, hang about, we're not allowed to do that are we?

Off out to vote today for a non neoliberal party with a chance of winning... oh, no, hang about, we're not allowed to do that are we?

Off out to vote today for a big party staunchly opposed to imperialist warmongering... oh, no, hang about, there aren't any are there?

Off out to vote today for a big party committed to saving us from environmental disaster... oh, no, hang about, there aren't any are there?

Off out to vote today for someone who represents my relation to production... oh, no, hang about, we vote in geographical blocs, don't we?

Off out to vote today on who runs the judiciary... oh, no, hang about, we're not allowed to do that are we?

Off out to vote today on who owns most of the land and property in the UK... oh, no, hang about, we're not allowed to do that are we?

Off out to vote today on who owns and runs the banks... oh, no, hang about, we're not allowed to do that are we?

Off out to vote today on who gets to use economic clout to lobby politicians... oh, no, hang about, we're not allowed to do that are we?

Yay, every four or five years I get to participate - very indirectly, if I'm lucky - in an electoral system rigged against the expression of unified working class interests! 

I get a tiny, very occasional say in choosing which team of essentially identical managers cares for neoliberalism under a vastly unaccountable government system hugely influenced by private interests!  

I get to slightly influence one lever of power, while almost every other lever of power in the system is nearly entirely undemocratic and unaccountable!  

This is what the Chartists fought and died for!  [It isn't.]

Yay for democracy!

Remember, if you don't vote, you've got no right to complain.

This Irregularity Has Been Recorded

Doctor Who frequently did stories which critiqued capitalism to one degree or another.  But there's an interesting dialectical twist to this, which is that it usually cloaked such critiques in the aesthetics of (for want of a better term) 'totalitarianism'.

It begins, arguably, with 'The Macra Terror'... though so much of what that story does 'first' is actually just being done openly and consciously for the first time.  Other examples include (most graphically) 'The Sun Makers', 'Vengeance on Varos', and 'The Happiness Patrol'.  I'd argue for a few others to go on the list, but these are the most obvious examples.  'The Beast Below' carried on the tradition, as did 'Gridlock' before it (albeit mutedly).  Yet many of these stories have been subject to readings which interpret them as right-wing and/or libertarian attacks on aspects of socialism and/or statism (often assumed to be synonymous).  I might even (overall) support such a reading in some cases.  'The Beast Below', for example, is a story which critiques aspects of the capitalist world, but which (to my mind) ends up supplying more alibis than indictments - partially through its use of totalitarian/statist tropes.  I think the thing that leaves them open to such readings is their 'totalitarian' aesthetic.  The (myopic, ideologically-distorted) view of socialism which sees it as inherently coercive and statist can grab hold of the aesthetically magnified symbols of statism which litter these stories.

I think this tendency to wrap critiques of capitalism in totalitarian aesthetics comes from the influence of the Nigel Kneale / Rudolph Cartier TV version of Nineteen Eighty-Four, which starred Peter Cushing.

 Stylistically, this production appears to have been deeply influential to the rising generation of programme-makers who would write and design Doctor Who in the 60s.  The totalitarian affect pioneered visually in that production gets embedded in Doctor Who's internal semiotic repertoire as a stock way of expressing worries about social freedom.

This isn't surprising at all, since the aesthetics of totalitarianism have proven a popular and enduring way of expressing such worries in the wider culture, as the proliferation of SF dystopias has shown.  They're now almost a basic, fallback position for YA books and films.

But we need to do more than just gesture to a particularly influential production.  That's not enough.  It's not an explanation.  You can't just say 'this production here was influential'.  That's just begging the question.  The real question is: why was it influential?  What was it about it that made its aesthetics stick so hard?

I think the answer actually lies back in the book.  Much of the horror of the book is the everyday horror of squalor - whether it be the squalor of coldness and dirt and forced 'healthiness', or the moral squalor of everyday ideological management.  Orwell gets the former from his experiences of public school (which he wrote about elsewhere with loathing) and the latter from his experiences of working within the BBC.  Even Newspeak is derived from work he did for the BBC World Service in India.  The book is also obsessed with the horror of poverty, whether it be the relative poverty of the lower middle classes scraping by in an austere world of rations and shortages, or the more absolute poverty of the proletariat.

Oceania is a howl of disgust at the world Orwell came from as much as it's a parodic howl of fear at the rise of totalitarianism.  In his gorge, he felt the nauseating similarity of the collectivist oligarchies of public school, British imperial police, BBC, and Stalinist Party.  Indeed, part of how he was able to speculate so accurately about what it was like to live in Stalinist societies is owing to his experiences of living within hierarchical structures of coercion within his own society.  He sees the sanctimonious regulation of life within totalitarian structures like the Stalinist Party clearly because they chime with his experiences of public school and bourgeois middle-class life.  Exactly the resonance which attracted so many British middle-class intellectuals to Stalinist organisation repelled Orwell.  He runs like fuck while they happily reintegrate... and yet he is irresistibly drawn to write about it.  (A powerful psychological substrata in Orwell's work is a feeling of irrisistible attraction to things that horrify.)

It's not hard to see how the kinds of neurotic feelings of attraction/repulsion which animated Orwell might also animate a later generation of educated, British BBC men, usually from some level of the middle class, and often themselves public school educated.

Robert Holmes in particular (writer of, most pertinently for this essay, 'The Krotons', 'The Sun Makers','The Deadly Assassin' and 'The Caves of Androzani') has peculiar echoes of Orwell.  He was in Burma during the war and was then a policeman before he worked for the BBC.  Orwell was a colonial policeman in Burma before he worked for the BBC.  I don't know if Holmes went to public school (nobody - not even his biographer - seems to know where he went to school), but he certainly endured army life and Hendon Police College.

Ian Stuart Black, author of 'The Macra Terror', attended Daniel Stewart's College in Edinburgh.

He then joined the RAF at the outbreak of World War II and worked in intelligence in the Middle East.

I'm not saying Black loathed public school and the RAF.  I don't know how he felt about them.  What I'm saying is that he's an example of a BBC man of that generation, and he lived in hierarchical structures similar to the ones Orwell lived in, owing to their similar class positions and careers.

But we need to go a little deeper still.

Why does Nineteen Eighty-Four, when rendered as a TV show by the BBC, come to wield such influence?  It must be more than the fact that the book's depiction of cold showers, hectoring compulsary P.E., pious sanctimony, and ideologically-drenched clerical work, resonated with a bunch of the corporation's talented hacks.

On a superficial level, it's because the Kneale script subtly tweaks the story to make it more like SF than Orwell's more Swiftian approach. On a less superficial level - and this is what I really wanted to get to - it's because totalitarian societies are also capitalist.

It could hardly be otherwise.  Totalitarianism (not a word I'm fond of, but it'll do for now as a placeholder to denote something we all recognise) depends upon the industrial, economic and political developments of capitalism to exist.  It depends upon modern industry, classes divided by their relation to production, the bourgeois family, the standing army, imperialism, a standing police force, bureaucracy, a strong state, central government, etc.

The workers' state would also depend upon such things, but as a springboard rather than a prop.  The workers' state would pull itself up on top of such things the better to bury them.  The Stalinist state was a failed workers' state.  It was unable to transcend the bourgeois mode owing to the undeveloped nature of the Russian forces of production, relative scarcity, outside attack, a devastating civil war (started as a war of aggression by the Western powers), and isolation after the failure of the German Revolution.  By contrast, the fascist states in both Germany and Italy (and in a more mediated way in Spain) arose as direct reactions against more-or-less revolutionary threats to unstable national capitalisms.  (This is why I don't really like the term 'totalitarian' as it pays too much attention to superficial aesthetic similarities at the expense of embracing an ahistorical narrative.  The 'fascists' in Russia were the West-sponsored White counter-revolutionaries.)  The Nazis arose in Germany as a form of class collaboration between those bourgeois forces which felt threatened by Communism and the insurgent German working class.  The failure of German workers and socialists to pre-empt or defeat this reaction is a huge part of what led to the isolation of the workers' state in Russia and its subsequent degeneration into Stalinism.  The people who made the Russian Revolution knew full well they would be doomed to fail if world revolution didn't spread to more-developed allies.

Stalinist Russia was state capitalist.  It never became socialist or communist in the Marxist sense.  It was a workers' state which degenerated into an extreme form of state capitalism through historical contingency - isolation, attack, civil war, the rise of a bureaucratic layer following the near-elimination of the working class, etc.  (I was never a member of the now deservedly self-ruined SWP, but I broadly accept their theoretical standpoint on state capitalism.)

Thing is... all capitalist states are state capitalist to some degree.  This sounds like an obvious tautology, but you'd be amazed how many people buy the idea that capitalism is something fundamentally seperate from the state, capable (at least theoretically) of subsisting without it.  Much as the ideologues of capitalism like to pretend that individual freedom is the essence of capitalism, the truth is that capitalism is actually impossible without massive state intervention and support.

This has never been more true than now, in the age of neoliberalism when the state has supposedly been rolled back.  The state works tirelessly to keep the peace and order of capitalist social systems, to manufacture ideological and material complicity, and to redistribute wealth upwards from the working class and into the hands of private capital.  That's what Austerity is, for instance: another form of neoliberal praxis for creating the trickle-up-effect.

The state and society are not seperate things, the latter superimposed upon the former, or squatting on top of it like some kind of malevolent succubus - a mistake made commonly by libertarians, liberals and some varieties of anarchist.  The state is part of society.  It is a superstructural emanation.  It is that part of class society which coercively regulates the order, reproduction and stability of the system.  It positions itself and discourses about itself as something above and seperate from society, yet morally responsive and responsible to it.  The truth is the exact opposite.

You can see the crucial role of the state very clearly by looking at the state now, but you can perhaps get even more clarity via historical distance, which thins out at least some of the ideolgical fug.  When you look at the capitalist states in and around the era of the Great Depression, you see an intense process of increasingly conscious and sophisticated state fusion with capital (this, of course, is the essence of capitalist imperialism... and so is hardly unrelated to the outbreak of World War).

The Nazi state utilised heavy state control and investment, even as it allied with and supported national bourgeois class allies, in order to stimulate the economy and build up imperial capability.  The Stalinist state was a state involved in breakneck industrialisation.  That's why its horrors are so intense and drastic - they concertina the horrors of primitive accumulation, industrial revolution and early imperialist acquisition (all of which happened in Europe during the rise of capitalism) down into a compressed few decades of frenzied misery.  You see it in America, perhaps most clearly when the US state stepped in to keep the tottering economic and financial sytem going, and to divert popular anger and resistance into state-funded stimulus packages (ie the 'New Deal'... which, incidentally, did much less to solve the Depression than arms spending and monopolisation). 

Orwell was not a theoretically sophisticated thinker, and he certainly wasn't a neo-Trot avant la lettre.  But he did understand (as Homage to Catalonia makes clear) that Stalinism and fascism were actually both forms of state capitalism... or, at least, of exploitative hierarchy with oppressed working classes.  Nineteen Eighty-Four makes it clear that the working classes still exist and their labour is still exploited, very much as it always was.  Part of the point of the book is that nowhere near as much has changed as the Party says has changed.  One of the neglected subplots involves Winston trying to question 'Proles' about whether life is really different now.  The indications are that they don't think so.

I think this is why the SF-inflected version of Nineteen Eighty-Four turned out to be so useful to Doctor Who.   It's SF, so the show can co-opt it.  And it's based on a fundamental recognition of the similarity of oppression in capitalist and 'totalitarian' systems, the difference being one of degree.

This is the deep cultural reason why the aesthetics of Nineteen Eighty-Four (via Kneale and Cartier when it comes to Doctor Who) get utilised in so many subsequent texts which employ the dystopian mode to express anxieties about social freedom.  The story provides a logic that can express the essential syngergy of two supposedly inimical systems.  This surfaces in 60s Doctor Who - perhaps most explicitly in 'The Macra Terror' - because of the cultural context of the times.  Because of protestors beaten and tear-gassed by Western police forces who look worryingly like the Thought Police.  Because of the seeping in of ideas originated by people like Eric Fromm and Herbert Marcuse... and yes, even by Trotsky and the New Left.  It's important to remember that Fromm - a Marxist (on the whole) and a critic of both Western capitalism and Soviet Communism - was a bestselling writer a decade before 'Macra' was written.  Fromm stresses alienation whereas Marcuse - also a trendy big-selling theorist - stresses control, but the cornerstone of Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man is his articulation of paralells between Western capitalist culture and the culture of the Soviet Union, and his critique of bureaucratic management in both systems.  It was published in 1964.

There is much to be said about both these thinkers, and I would not endorse either of them without heavy caveats (to say the least), but the point here is that from a position of popular as well as academic fame, thinkers and ideas such as these were seeping into the wider mainstream culture of an increasingly uneasy post-war capitalism.  This capitalism dwelt under the shadow of malaise, Vietnam, nuclear bombs, the revolt of colonised peoples against Western oppression, civil rights protests against institutionalised racism, popular rebellion amongst the young against war, and authoritarian police repression.

As 'The Macra Terror' understands, cognitive dissonance is a powerful thing.  People in 'free' societies increasingly saw, at least on some level, the tesselation between what happened under so-called Communism and what happened at home.

People always talk about The Prisoner in relation to 'The Macra Terror', and that's probably because both feature systems of repression cloaked in... or rather structurally identical with... some kind of holiday resort aesthetic.  The Village is a more middle class resort whereas the Colony is - as is well understood - a sort of working class holiday camp.  But the deep connection between the two - beyond the material connection of Ian Stuart Black and Patrick McGoohan - is that the kitsch quasi-authoritarianism of structured leisure chimes with the kitsch actual-authoritarianism of repressive regimes, which include state-designed and state-monitored forms of entertainment.  This happens because private capitalist forms of leisure which cater to the working classes in 'democratic' societies are as integrated into hierarchy as entertainment in 'totalitarian' societies, if less officially.  Both feature forms of regimentation and containment appropriate to the organisation of the social lives of workers, with the appropriateness determined in an essentially inhuman method derived from the need to keep psychological discipline.  At the risk of sounding paranoid and conspiratorial (because I think this happens largely as a self-organising, emergent property of hegemony), holiday camps were the way they were because they catered for people who needed to be happy to go back to work and follow orders again once the holiday was over.

As with Marcuse and Fromm, I wouldn't want to endorse Patrick McGoohan as a thinker without heavy caveats (one of the pleasures of writing this particular blog is that I can write sentences like that) but I will mention one scene from The Prisoner.  It's the scene where Leo McKern's Number 2 tells Number 6 that he sees the whole world becoming (in the phrase 6 supplies for him) "as the Village".  2 says it will happen when the "two sides" (of the Cold War) "look across at each other and realise they are both looking into a mirror".

Be seeing you.

Public Service

Might as well put this up too...


Been watching a PBS documentary about the Scottsboro Boys.  The narration does everything it can to infantilise the Communists who got involved, to downplay their contribution, to chalk it up to cynical opportunism, to suggest their involvement did more harm than good, etc. 

The basically accurate account of events makes it clear, however, that it was the involvement of communists (and other people who got involved because communists made the case an issue) which ultimately led to the Scottsboro defendants getting even the meagre amount of justice and freedom they did. 

Towards the end, the narration says “not protests or marches or newspaper articles but simply time itself” brought Alabama to free most of the defendants… which, if you stop to think about it, is an absolutely out-fucking-rageous thing to say.  As if just waiting for a while would’ve freed the defendants by itself.  As if the Alabama ‘justice system’ would’ve seen the light eventually even if nobody had ever kicked up a ruckus about it.  As if the Alabama racists didn’t need to be opposed and fought and exhausted and embarassed into submission.

The message is clear: don’t fight injustice, or protest about it, or write about it, or do anything that could be considered political agitation.  That’ll just make you a cynical opportunist doing more harm than good - like the Communists.  Just shut up and wait.  Time and the system will heal all problems.  Then we can look back on it all nostalgically, with a sense of our own modern-day superiority, and call what happened a ‘tragedy’ (the title of the documentary is ‘Scottsboro - An American Tragedy’).

Also been looking at another PBS documentary about what a humanitarian Herbert Hoover was.  This is the guy who basically tricked loads of people into contributing to a charity scam.  People donated to his fund to relieve starvation in wartime Belgium.  But he charged the Belgians for the food and denied relief to areas that couldn't pay. 

He pulled a similar trick with the Russian famine after the Civil War.  The documentary refers to this as a natural disaster exacerbated by the policies of the Bolsheviks.  Of course.  But the famine was the big deal it was, and the Bolsheviks were forced to take some of the measures they did (some of which were disastrous) because the famine came after (and partly as a result of) the Russian Civil War, which was basically a West-sponsored attempt to unseat the new Bolshevik government.  The Americans and the British (largely owing to the agitation of Winston Churchill... who was rather fond of using famines as political tools) not only invaded Russia themselves, but also sponsored the invasion of Russia by a bunch of counter-revolutionaries who were essentially proto-fascists.  They rampaged through Russia using tactics that put the much-more-talked-about 'Red Terror' (which was defensive) in the shade. 

Hoover took advantage of the famine to attack Bolshevik Russia.  He hated the new regime because it had cancelled deals he had planned in Tsarist Russia (along with a British capitalist partner) which would have made him one of the richest men on Earth.  His relief went largely to areas under the control of the White armies.  Even as they massacred Bolshevik-sympathisers, Jews (or just anyone who happened to, in their opinion, need to be made an example of) in horrific pogroms, Hoover's 'humanitarian' aid kept them going.  Hoover's aid sustained the Polish invasion of Russia.

Later, during the Depression, Hoover refused aid to starving Americans, and ordered MacArthur to send in troops against marchers, with deadly results.  Hoover, the great humanitarian, was motivated not only by his private business interests but also by a hatred of socialism (he equated any government aid with creeping socialism) and a fanatical devotion to capitalism.  He once said that the purpose of government was to create conditions favourable to free enterprise.

Fuck you, PBS.

An Ageing System

It's always puzzled me, this thing about people getting right-wing as they get older.  You'd think that the opposite would happen.

I mean, as you get older, you notice that the world keeps having the same problems, and that they tend to have the same underlying causes, and that nothing is ever done about them.  You notice more and more of the same kinds of scandals reoccurring over the years, time and again, and always based upon imbalances of power, and upon powerful people being unaccountable.  You're more likely to have a mortgage and debts, the older you are.  You're more likely to owe lots of money to banks and credit agencies, and to be crippled by these debts.  You're more likely to have health problems, and thus to need medical care, and thus to see that the Health Service is underfunded and overstretched.  You're more likely to realise that your investments and savings (if you have any) don't pay off in anything like the way you're told they will when you're younger.  You're more likely to worry about how you will look after yourself and your partner in old age.  You're more likely to notice your retirement receding into the distance.  You're more likely to find yourself paying through the nose for medications that go with age, medications your parents didn't have to pay through the nose for.  You're more likely to meet more and more people of different 'races' and nationalities, and thus to notice that they're not too different to you.  You're more likely to have been mistreated at work, or sacked, or been forced to find second jobs or third jobs.  You're more likely to have seen talentless people around you rising while you stay still, simply because they were born with advantages you never had.  You're more likely to have lived through several wars and recessions instead of just one or two.  You're more likely to have observed the way the world's weather systems have catastrophically changed even in the last few decades.  You're more likely to have seen friends' lives ruined by discrimination or depression or stress.  You're more likely to have seen your parents face an uncertain and neglected old age.  And you're more likely to have kids and grandkids, and to see all the challenges they face.  A restricted job market, more and more pressure on them to work harder to have a chance of being employed one day, the escalating cost of further and higher education, more debt earlier in life, less chance of being able to afford to buy a house or even move out of their parents' home, spiraling costs of living, less social safety nets, a squeezed education system.  And on and on it goes.

Decades of life means decades of observing the world getting worse, and the so-called solutions never working, and the so-called progressive parties always selling people out, and the persistence of poverty and corruption never being addressed, and inequality and injustice always being at the root of the problems.  And it means becoming more and more vulnerable, as an individual or as part of a family, to the insecurity and hardships capitalism causes and relies upon.

Basically, the saying "you get more right-wing as you get older" is something only applicable to people who are already economically and socially privileged.  Such people can afford to dabble with being left-wing when they're young, if they feel like it.  They can rely on rich parents to bankroll such flirtations with leftiness.  When they're young and cushioned, it costs them nothing.  Principles are always easier if they cost you nothing.  Then, as they get older, they take their place in the system of privilege that was always waiting to welcome them.  They see their savings and investments rising (because, generally, the more you have the more you make from it), their property becoming more and more valuable, their financial situation getting comfier and more secure every day.  At the very least, they see themselves comparatively insulated.  Their parents enjoy a luxurious old-age and then die, leaving them more property and investments and savings.  Their own children and grandchildren don't have to worry about the deficiencies of state education, or the deficiencies of the NHS, or the debts accrued during further and higher education, or the uncertainties of the job market.  Jobs wait for them.  Economic security is built into life for such people and their families.  Like all people with privilege, their primary focus is to hold onto it ferociously.  We all know that privilege causes people to feel aggrieved by the faintest suggestion of a challenge to their privilege.  This is at the root of much misogyny.  Patriarchy causes men think of women as appliances.  How angry would you be if your vacuum cleaner suddenly refused to work?  I dunno about you, but when things like that happen to me I swear at the errant machine and feel pretty damned aggrieved.  Men extend the same logic to women who don't want to be treated as equipment.  And Corey Robin, a historian of ideas, has done some very good work describing how modern conservatism is, at bottom, the ideological expression of the struggle to retain privilege.

This pattern is most pronounced in the very rich, of course.  But it used to hold pretty reliably (if scaled down) for the moderately rich, and down to the middle classes.  (It even used to hold for a certain extent to the working classes during the long post-war boom, which looks like a utopia of economic justice, job security and progressive welfarism compared to where we are now.)  However, like many old cultural certainties of capitalism, this pattern is breaking up - with increasing speed.  (Capitalism does this.)  The middle classes and petty bourgeoisie are more and more squeezed, more and more threatened by uncertainty.  The iron law of neoliberalism is the redistribution of wealth upwards - and this is really just a variation on what always happens in capitalism during its built-in periodic crises.  And, the bottom looking increasingly drained, neoliberalism - especially now in this era of crisis and austerity - is feeding on the middle.

Of course, the people in the middle can't be expected to draw left-wing conclusions from all this.  Such people generally drift to... da daaa!... the populist far-right (i.e. UKIP, BNP, the Tea Party, various European equivalents).  And, in the absence of organised organs of workers' struggle, the people at the bottom will often drift that way too.  Especially when you factor in the massive effort neoliberal capitalism puts into pushing and sustaining ideological disorientation.

Neoliberal capitalism itself is getting more ideologically right-wing as it gets older.  The only sane response is to go in the other direction.

But it's not easy.  Because, with that lifetime of confronting the horrors there also comes a lifetime of getting entangled in the very hard work and stress it takes to navigate them, and the fatalism of seeing nothing ever getting better, and the pessimism of constant defeats, and the confusion sewn by decades of 'There Is No Alternative'.  That's why the only thing that has a chance of fundamentally altering this downward spiral is a resurgence in working class organisation, in the teeth of the longstanding and hugely-successful neoliberal project of destroying the power of unions. 

That's why every success for the left, however compromised, however embedded in reformist politics and parliamentarianism, has to be seized upon. 

Because the dialectic of change has to start somewhere.

Build High

Some tumblr jottings, curated with pictures.


Modernism.  The International Style.  Mies Van Der Rohe, Le Corbusier, etc. 

A clean, white world of clean white buildings and glass boxes.  Machines for living in.  Born of the utopian hopes of early Modernism.  Destined to become the opulent apartment blocks and corporate skyscrapers of Chicago capitalism. 

Based on a dream of optimised people in an optimised world.  You had to be perfect to live in a glass box.  And the glass boxes were going to make people better, cleaner, fitter, healthier, more productive, and now this sentence is (tellingly) becoming the lyrics from that Radiohead song.  Because that’s where that kind of top-down utopianism ended up; the dream of Modernism became the malaise of late-C20th/C21st modernity. 

Prora, the elephantine Strength Through Joy holiday camp.  Nazi Butlins.

Whatever the admirable radicalism - and there is much admirable radicalism in Modernism - it culminated in a convergence with the Nazi fantasies of order and hygiene (even as the Modernists were hated and driven out by the Nazis) and, in the end, with the corporate capitalist fantasies of perfect and rational utility.  The skyscraper as a machine for doing business in.


In both iterations of the same anti-human and elitist reactionary fantasy, the individual becomes a cog, to be permitted as long as they play their role within the machine, as long as they do not disgrace the gleaming interior of the glass box.

It found its way into another iteration: C20th century elitist reformism, the provision of rational living units for the drones, the erection of housing estates and tower blocks.  Look at those 60s constructions - built along the same elitist/top-down/utopian lines as all Modernist architecture - and today they seem like ugly sinkholes (the vile word used to describe them), but at the time they were supposed to be clean, ordered, rational, humane and utopian.

So, in 'Paradise Towers', the tower block becomes the once-hopeful/now-decaying symbol of entropic utopianism.  Social democracy, with its aesthetic roots in Modernism, falling apart in the neglect and ruin of the dawning neoliberal age.  Inside, of course, are trapped the archetypes (in parodic form) of Thatcher’s Britain.  Feral kids, Daily Mail readers, the Police.

And the roving, murdering cleaners are clearing up the “human garbage” to make way for the return of Kroagnon’s anti-human and authoritarian vision of cleanliness and order.  The dark side of the Modernist dream returns from the gothic basement of repression to take revenge on the last remnants of Modernism’s own light side.  The authoritarian variant tries to reconquer the self-defeated social-democratic variant.
And Kroagnon’s shocktroops the cleaners are clean, white constructions in straight lines.  They are miniature, mobile buildings in the International Style of high, early Modernism. 

They are like Corbusier houses crossbred with Mies skyscrapers, come alive and on the attack. 

Corbusier was friendly with a fascist sympathiser, Pierre Winter.  They both joined the right-wing Faisceau Party.

Fascism lurks within the utopianism of Modernism, which lurks within the utopianism of social democracy.  As Benjamin might say, fascism lurks within the entire C20th.

*
 

Also, 'Paradise Towers' - written, like so many of the stories of this era, according to a folk memory of the show from the 70s - sees the echo of the semiotic connection which developed in the show during the 70s between capitalism and tentacles.  'Paradise Towers' is recognisably a capitalist world in decline.  Thatcher’s Britain.  Post-industrial (a myth but a powerful one).  Social-democratic capitalism falling to wrack and ruin.  Rusting machines that still vend fizzy pop.  And there are the faintest echoes of tentacles.  Octopus creatures are mentioned at the start.  The original idea was apparently to have a tentacled monster in the basement which could extend its tentacles anywhere in the building via ducts and vents and (of course) waste disposal shutes.  The cleaners grab you by the neck and pull you along… obviously something originally envisaged as death by grasping tentacle.  Phil Sandifer reminded me about the conversation Andrew Cartmel recounts: "we went to see John and said, 'What about tentacles? They could come out through the ventilation grilles'. And he said 'Tentacles are difficult', spoken with the knowing manner of a man who's tried tentacles before."  (Which has to be, as Phil says, one of the great quotes of all time.)

In 'Paradise Towers', as in the 80s DWM comic strip ‘Profits of Doom’, the old capitalism/tentacles connection still lurks, largely abandoned and almost forgotten.