Pink Fire Pointer February 2012

Musings and so forth...

There's a neat little article in today's Graun, OK so it's yet another article bemoaning the decline of rock and roll. In this case it is linked to the influence of gay culture on pop music, a fascinating story.

There's beginning of an understanding, I think, that rock music is the jazz of the 21st century. There will be many great records made, no doubt, but rock and roll will never occupy the same position it did, at the centre of pop culture, again. There's a flavour of that in the piece. But the article misses another crucial (and immediate) reason for the decline of rock and roll. Pop/rock/whatever is in decline because it is based on affluence - young people with disposable income and free time. Young people don't have these things anymore.

The article is also another interesting example of the strange conclusions people, ostensibly left-wing, can reach once they accept traditional notions of artistic value. Example:

Savage thinks rock's ongoing prosaicness is symptomatic of a wider cultural shift. "There's a current mode of solipsism, where you don't want to be challenged, you just want to have your own life reflected back at you. It's down to the way the internet has grown up, the whole apparent democratisation of the idea of skill – that skill and experience don't matter and that you're as good as anyone else. There's the disastrous impact of reality shows, the whole impulse to be famous, the idea that fame is the way to go."


Leave aside the obvious point about fame being a post-religious paradise on Earth; isn't it odd that we should regret the democratisation of culture? The author adds the caveat 'apparent'; 'apparent' is probably a twinge of doubt in the author's mind: do I really oppose democracy? Modern popular culture is, in the main, anti-democratic. This can't be stressed enough.

What is it actually about?

See below: this is what workfare means, the sacrfice of the young, the vulnerable and the sick to pointless, degrading toil and to almost ritual insults from managers and bureaucrats. Workfare is destroying talent, breaking spirits and wasting time; all to prop up big business profit margins.

Asa Dawson was made to work at Poundland’s Bridlington branch last October. He is 18 and has qualifications in IT support, but was told he had to do it.

“The jobcentre said once it was offered to me I didn’t have the choice to refuse it".

“They said it’s ‘voluntary’, but if you refuse they cut your jobseekers’ allowance. And I’m using that to pay my rent.”

Tim Knight-Hughes says his experience was similar when he was made to work unpaid for door-to-door sales firm JM Enterprise in Norwich.

“I was told it would be ‘minimum wage’ with ‘commission based bonuses’,” he said.

“It was a lie. After completing three rounds of interviews I had to sign a contract saying I would work for free for a trial period without a guaranteed prospect of a job.

“If I walked out in disgust it would threaten my benefits.”


This is workfare in a nutshell:

Tim says the vast majority of people who worked for free at the sales firm didn’t get jobs at the end of it either. “After the ‘trial period’ I complained to the jobcentre that this job wasn’t really a job at all".


If there is work to be done let it be done, fine, but let it be done for a wage.

This is the attitude of our overlords:

“I was reprimanded by the jobcentre manager—and told that ‘beggars can’t be choosers’.”


You are not a human being with talent, verve and energy, you are not entitled to help, to dignity or respect; you are a beggar, be grateful for your scraps.

Workfare is a menace, to the employed as well as the unemployed, as it depresses the job market at a time of recession. No wonder the government is afraid of a tiny band of gimlet-eyed dialecticians (insignificant yet strangely able to bring major corporations to their knees). If the government is willing to go this far to grind working people down, how far are working people going to go to shake them off? Who knows? It can't come too soon.

Waa!


You and Me vs the world

Or, let's be clear, the right-wing press. Socialism is trending on Twitter, apparently, thanks to a spasm of fear, the usual wave of panic anytime there's the possibility of a left-wing challenge to austerity; only this time it's not simple trade unionists (don't they seem tame now?) but The Reds, the real out and out Reds. Dun, dun, duh!

We might find it amusing to suddenly be the subject of the news but this is red-baiting going on, and red-baiting is bad news (remember: baiting does not succeed through logic or clarity but volume, and the Tory press has plenty of that). Though it's great to have the government on the back foot we should demure ever so slightly, not claim all the credit because: (1) many, many other people are campaigning against workfare slavery, not to mention many more are opposed it - it would be simply untrue to suggest socialists are behind it all (2) the government would like to suggest it's all part of the international communist conspiracy because it suits them to make people choose between the government and the SWP.

JK Rowling is writing for adults... ooh-err!

On behalf of all adults (can you really say that, Roobin?) I'd just like to say, please don't. Honestly, we've got enough books already. They're really good ones too; Ulysses, Moby Dick, Nova Express, Heart of Darkness, Homage to Catalonia... all good (someone else might want to name some more). Just... you know... are you sure about this...?

Fantasy, abstraction and reality...


The age of electronic media has broken down linear, sequential space and, therefore, made linear, sequential thought obsolete. We live in an age of integral consciousness and to live integrally means to live mythically.

That is a rough summation of McLuhan-ism. We need not take it literally to see the value in the statement, value in terms of politics, culture and ideology. To explain:

Politics

The predicament of the bourgeois liberal outlook was summed up quite neatly by the philosopher, one F Mercury:

Is this the real life?
Is this just fantasy?
Caught in a landslide,
No escape from reality.


Which is not bad, I think. The reality we directly experience is alienated and atomised, a thin sliver of the general context. Yet we cannot understand even that smaller section of reality without access to the greater context. Any attempt to build up a picture of reality piece by piece might seem oh-so objective, but is of course doomed, by the restless changes in social context if by nothing else.

We have to think in terms of archetypes, in terms of abstractions. One of Marx’s most crucial insights was establishing through his critique of political economy the existence of objective points of view within capitalism. There are the bourgeois and proletarian points of view, and there are bourgeois and proletarians with points of view. One is measured against the other, the critical renovation of consciousness described by Gramsci.

Without this abstraction, this ‘myth’, we would lose our link with the greater context; reality becomes a landslide, something which happens to us.

Art ‘n’ stuff

One of the difficulties with direct realism in art is it's partial and one-sided, or else it’s unreal. The non-ideological work is merely the most ideological. Its assumptions are taken as self-evident. Fantasy, magic-realism, elastic reality (as it’s called in The Simpsons) are much more truthful, realistic methods.

Recent interest: the fascination with vampires. Vampires are strongly associated with aristocracy. They are also associated with sexuality. This has become much more pronounced in recent pop culture. Vampires are now pretty much benign. Take Edward Cullen from the Twilight series, or Bill Compton from True Blood: they are a strange combination of potency and rigid self-denial. Pop culture is trying to work out conflicted notions of sexuality through vampirism.

True Blood is an example of elastic reality at work. It is a magical melodrama. As well as vampires it has fairies, shape-shifters, maenads and such like, existing as if normal in the modern United States. This flexible reality is also a means of talking about civil rights, particularly LGBT and ethnic minority movements. It gets to the core of such subjects, I think, much more quickly and easily through fantasy than direct realism.

Lists - a triumphant return

Though this week it's a cover version, so to speak. Here is a list of people invited to the government summit on the destruction, sorry, reform of the NHS.

Royal College of Physicians (London)
Royal College of Surgeons of England
Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists
Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health
Royal College of Anaesthetists
NHS Confederation
Foundation Trust Network


Not invited

British Medical Association
Royal College of General Practitioners
Royal College of Nursing
Royal College of Midwives
Royal College of Pathologists
Royal College of Radiologists
Royal College of Psychiatrists
Royal College of Opthamologists
Chartered Society of Physiotherapy
Faculty of Public Health
British Association of Occupational Therapists and College of
Occupational Therapists
College of Emergency Medicine
Unison
Unite


There's defintely no connection between these names, no connection, no running theme, no sir, definitely not and you'd be a fool or a communist to make such a link.

Bourgeois adjudicator finds bourgeois advocate not guilty of anything - shock

So why are we circling round this story like a dog round some tasty vomit? Here's a clue.

Jeremy Clarkson prompted more than 30,000 complaints when he said on BBC1's The One Show that striking public sector workers should be shot. But media regulator Ofcom has cleared the programme of breaching broadcasting regulations, saying viewers should be familiar with the Top Gear presenter's "provocative and outspoken nature".


Yes, folks, you could have expected Jeremy Clarkson to say something disgusting and right-wing about striking trade unionists, just as much as you'd expect the broadcasting establishment and press to back him to the hilt... but that's missing the point. Why should we expect it? Why should people have to put up with it? Jeremy Clarkson is a symptom, albeit a prominent symptom, of the coarsening of public life. Thanks to people like him public debate has become ever more scabrous and deceitful (e.g. Clarkson, in between calling for ironic death-squads, had the gall to describe public sector pensions as "gold-plated"... last year Clarkson earned more than £2 million).

What is going to be done about this decline in public debate? Clarkson certainly hasn't given pause for thought... why would he? We need to teach the upper class yahoos who rule us some manners... more strikes more frequently would help.

But there is another dimension to this. Jeremy Clarkson has provocative and outspoken views... really? So what? I have provocative and outspoken views. Many, many people have provocative and outspoken views. Why does a supporter of the hard-right English Democrats get a free pass when, for example, a Labour party councillor is suspended for liking rambunctious facebook statements regarding Margaret Thatcher and the IRA...? A rough example, but you get the picture.

In this world coarseness, prejudice and abuse is allowed, so long as its directed downwards.

Brave Kids

What is a revolutionary? A revolutionary is what a revolutionary does. If you want to be one you would do well to follow the example of the Egyptian Revolutionary Socialists. I have no idea who the author is but read here a glowing tribute to the brave kids of the RS:

The RS were the first to warn against the SCAF taking power on the very day Hosni Mubarak was ousted and when the Military Council was still viewed as the “protector of the revolution” for remaining neutral. Today their publications openly blame the ruling SCAF for much of the post-revolutionary violence and repression.

The RS are also known for their passionate defense of the working class, particularly when unions were accused of stubbornly refusing to back down on their demands for the sake of economic stability.

Since their inception, the RS have engaged in one battle after another, many of which appeared too big for the group to handle. In the late 1980s, their supporters saw them as “brave” for their principled positions on many issues, while they were regarded as “fools lacking political intelligence,” among much of the elite...

The RS inaugurated themselves as an organized group during the 1991 labor union elections, supporting the striking workers. Back then, members of the RS snuck inside the Iron and Steel Company in al-Tebbin, and raised a picture of a worker who was killed during a previous security raid.

They were the first to stand in solidarity with the workers of the 1994 Kafr al-Dawwar company strike, including forming student support groups to expose the repression of that strike, which ended in gunfire and attempts to burn down the factory.

In 1997, they supported the rural movement that rose up against new laws that sought to deny farmers land tenure and imposed short-term leases at market rates. It was the same year that the first public call for Mubarak to step down was initiated by Kamal Khalil, the godfather of revolutionary socialism in Egypt...

Despite their small size, the RS was also at the forefront of the movement against the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Tens of thousands of people gathered in Tahrir Square on May 20 and 21 for the first time during Mubarak’s reign to protest the invasion.

The resurgence of a workers’ movement at the end of 2006 – which continues to this day – opened up the opportunity for the RS to extend their influence among members of the working class.

In 2007, they were the first to call for independent unions, after spending cold winter nights in front of the finance ministry in support of striking property tax collectors. When the strike ended, the first independent syndicate in Egypt was established, which later became the Independent General Federation of Workers.


True heroes.

Jobs without wages... happy now?



Wages: JSA + expenses. Hours: TBC. Duration: permanent. Yes folks, we have slavery, legal slavery in Britain today. You happy, you fine with that?

Repent unto almighty Atheismo!

A funny thing happened to me on the way to Lenin's Tomb, I bumped across the Jesus and Mo controversy, which has escaped from Central London university campuses and into the national press, see here and here for example. The usual band of right-wing moonrakers and I'm-not-a-racist racists have jumped on board. According to the Wikinews report in the second link, and this is a quote, unsourced but a quote:

Atheists, secularists and supporters of free speech rallied in London today to protest what they feel is an "increased confidence of Islamists to censor free expression publicly".


Which is an incredible position to take, given the wall-to-wall racism and general odium aimed at Muslims by mainstream media and politics. The point about the cartoon itself, images from which were re-used on the Farcebook page of the UCL Atheist, Secularist and Humanist society, is explained rather neatly, I think, by the UCL SU statement:

"The atheist society has agreed they will take more consideration when drawing up publicity for future events.

"The society was asked to remove the image because UCLU aims to foster good relations between different groups of students and create a safe environment where all students can benefit from societies regardless of their religious or other beliefs."


Whoever it is who makes the original cartoons does so, I presume, privately, at their own risk and responsibility. I should say no more, not having read them.

Universities are, or should be, an environment, where young people from varied backgrounds can come together to learn about the world and about each other, safely and respectfully, in a spirit of equality. Asking a society to remove certain pictures from its websites does not amount to censorship. The Atheist, Secularist and Humanist society still exists, still meets, still expresses its opinions, for the sake of good relations it has to moderate its interaction with the rest of the student body.

That said, what a depressing state atheism has reached. I am an atheist, yet when I see most declared atheists go about their business I shudder. The kind of atheism that's peddled today is not the rejection of belief in the existence of deities but a crude statement: militant atheists are more-enlightened-than-thou. It is a matter of asserting superiority, usually of white people over the dark, lurking masses (and their muslamic rayguns). This alleged-militant atheism makes things all the more difficult when the likes of Cameron and co use religious unction to lubricate their crimes.

Even taken at face value, the blank assertion of the obvious contradictions in different religious doctrines does not relieve people of the burden of religious belief (or religious bigotry). Man made god in his own image. You have to look at why people make gods in order to start overcoming religion.

From now on we should refer to Atheist, Secularist and Humanist societies as Big and Clever societies, because that's what they are.

Mo' Culture etc...


In this week's SW Tim Sanders celebrates the Simpsons 500th episode with a neat summation of why the programme is so well loved and influential. As if to labour the point, I picked up on the observation:

It [the Simpsons] pokes fun at the rich and powerful, it undermines faith in authority and the status quo—and yet makes shedloads of cash for its owner Rupert Murdoch. On one level this is a classic case of biting the hand that feeds.


It's clear from this the quid pro quo for biting the hand that feeds is feeding the mouth that bites... well, something like that. The Fox Channel, the fair and balanced Fox Channel that has become a by-word for lunatic demagoguery, may never have got off the ground without the profits flowing from the Simpsons. Radical subversion through popular culture is a utopia, though it can make for great TV.

That nazi moment - 2012


They're coming thick and fast too. Join the army, see the world, get exotic sexual diseases, shoot brown people and... whoa! Is that the SS flag behind you? Apparently it's not a reference to Hitler's Schutzstaffel but the scout snipers... and if you believe that you probably swallowed the one about weapons of mass destruction.

Who've have thought inciting people to torture, maim and kill people from another country would have led to this? Dun, dun, duh!

Space is the place


From space you can truly see what a marvel our world is. Here is a short gallery of photographs taken by ESA and NASA satellites in today's Graun. Take this picture, Greater London at night. Marshall McLuhan noted how electronic media were in effect extensions of our nervous systems. Here you can see the collective neuron, splayed out across the surface of the Earth.

Right-wing rock

An interesting feature was broadcast last night on Jarvis Cocker’s BBC6 show about right-wing rock and roll. The argument was hung on rather lightweight, anecdotal examples (interesting examples mind you: the Tories Songs for Swinging Voters, Radio Caroline broadcasting Tory propaganda, worst of all Pete Townsend's shameful shilling for the USAF in 1967... I heard the US airforce was quite busy in those days). I think the point was still clear and valid.

The illusion of the 60s and 70s countercultures* blinds us to what rock music is, and what the music industry is. The rock scene may be described as aristocratic, an elite legion of gods on earth. The similarity between area gigs and nazi rallies has long been noted. Dance music on the other hand is run on thoroughly capitalist line, Fordist composition, sampling, assembling music often from prefabricated parts. With manufactured pop it couldn’t be more explicit; Berry Gordy, Robert Stigwood, Simon Cowell. All of them are examples of musical capitalists, CEOs.

They are a jumble of observations but the more you think about it the more it becomes clear popular music is not a democratic pastime.

Marxists must bear in mind Walter Benjamin’s warning: “concepts, such as creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery – concepts whose uncontrolled application… lead to a processing of data in the Fascist sense”. A rather hot statement, but then he was writing in 1936, and you can still see the sense of the statement. Creativity, genius, eternal value and mystery are all prized, especially in rock music. We need to look at culture from a different angle.

Modern culture is owned by the capitalist class, run by them for them and is generally about them. That’s not to deny the brilliance of any particular work of art, nor its value to society or the joy it may bring to experience it. Any culture for the working class is won from the bourgeoisie. It has to be hung onto. But we must not invest the products of capitalism with qualities they do not have. If you wear a V mask you are endorsing a Wachowski Brothers film, a capitalist endeavour not anti-capitalism. If you fetishise culture you give a part of yourself back to the commodity system, you start to lose the very thing you want keep hold of.

* Note as well the anti-capitalist outlook had to be fought for. Without socialists intervening in the British punk scene, which was wearing swastikas to nightclubs to begin with, the punk scene might have gone in a very different, very ugly direction.

Countdown to disappointment...?


The University and Colleges Union has called off industrial action over pensions, what's the odds now that the NUT will do the same? I sincerely hope they don't but, there's that word... hope. What's left except the hope that the British organised working class will actually do something to defend itself (and by extension the rest of the working class)?

We've tried and tried and we will keep trying to rouse people. If you don't fight you will lose. At what point do you conclude they just aren't going to listen? How long are the trade unions going to insist on being terrorised by the ghost of Margaret Thatcher and the Miners Strike? Are we really heading into a new dark-age of right-wing ascendancy? If it's a possibility we have to consider it.

Question Time

"If we want them to tap dance then they will tap dance"


So said a Whitehall mandarin apparently, referring to the government plans for the sick and unemployed. True or not (or a combination of the two) nothing better sums up the malicious glee of our Tory Overlords: at last the poor are going to get what's coming to them, the bastards! Our surplus humanity will tap dance for their alms? Well, these must be dancing lessons.

In a classroom upstairs, an 18-year-old man with red acne scars and a powerful stammer, who has been unemployed since he left school with no GCSEs and whose parents have never worked, is sitting with a 33-year-old father of six, who hasn't worked since his plastering job, helping renovate the Travelodge hotel, finished two years ago. They're being taken through an induction programme by a man who introduces himself as a multifunctional trainer and who tells them (reading from a script) that: "Through a range of activities, we integrate your vocational, social, personal development needs with your work aspirations."

"We want to share your brilliance with the rest of society," he tells them. The teenager looks at his fingernails and the older man's brow wrinkles with polite scepticism.

The trainer spends a long time taking them through the "You and I Charter", which he reads with hushed reverence, as if it were poetry. "You and I need to always be on time... You and I need to sustain an understanding of what we are together aiming to achieve. You and I need to be proactive. You and I need to just be… You and Me." The older man nods agreeably, the teenager bites his lower lip.


There's more.

Later there is another induction session upstairs for people who are claiming employment and support allowance. These three men, all in their late 50s and early 60s, have been tested and provisionally found too unwell to work for the moment, but put into a "work-related activity group", which means that they have to perform some work-related activities (such as attending this meeting) in order to continue getting their benefits.

Although they do not have to sign up for two years of the work programme, they are obliged to turn up to the Pertemps office in central Hull, and sit through this meeting for an hour. On a flipchart at the front of the room, there is a picture of a smiling shop assistant drawn in blue marker pen, left over from a retail skills class, annotated with lines pointing to positive aspects of his appearance: an approving arrow points to a tie, another line points to his armpit, and is marked "good hygiene".

None of the men in this room look like they would be obvious employees at the flashy new shopping centre that has opened next to the railway station, full of not very full Top Shops, Zara and H&M.

"Why should you join the work programme?" the instructor asks. "It will give you increased quality of life, better health, increased independence, increased confidence, improved finances, improved social life and increased ability to be a role model for future generations."

One yellow-faced, grey-stubbled man says nothing until the instructor asks if he is all right, and he replies that he is on morphine because he is recovering from an operation to remove two-thirds of his pancreas and bits of his spleen. "I'm a bit drowsy, from my medication. That's why I don't think I will get a job."

He is 53, and before this illness has been working without break since he was 16.

Sitting opposite him, a 57-year-old ex-British Aerospace employee, who was made redundant two and a half years ago, decides he won't be signing up, not least because he is suffering from prostate cancer, has just finished a course of radiation and is undergoing hormone therapy "I feel shocking," he says.


There you are, there's just that little bit more misery, despair and deprivation in the world... happy now?