Male Models

Good morning everybody. I should of course be marking…

OK, one of the things that caught my eye this week was Diane Abbott MP's claim that masculinity is in crisis, in a speech to think-tank Demos. Her central points were that men are being failed by economic and cultural conditions, leading to damaged men and damaged relationships with and attitudes towards women.

At this point, I'm tempted to upload a copy of my PhD thesis, originally entitled '"There's something wrong with us blokes": Constructions of Masculinity in Four 1930s Welsh Novels In English", though the quote was cut for archiving purposes. I've also written a piece recently called '"The Male Shoutings of Men": Masculinity and Fascist Epistemology in How Green Was My Valley'.

Stakhanov, the USSR's productivity pin-up

Soviet hero-workers

The point of both these pieces is that they explicitly say that capitalism both constructs and destructs masculinity, particularly in periods of economic crisis. In the books I write about, masculinity is entirely constructed through manual labour, primarily mining. Physical strength, the ability to provide for one's family, the camaraderie of all-male labour, socialisation and trades union/political activity created a society and society in which women were publicly invisible and masculinity seemed awesomely powerful.

However, while mining provided comprehensible models of masculinity, it also destroyed individual men. The harder one worked, the more broken the miner's body became. The diseases associated with mining and other manual labour rapidly turned the hero-worker into a battered hulk if it didn't kill him outright in an accident. The ability to provide for one's family became subject to the law of diminishing returns.

Then there's the relationship between capitalism and labour. How humanising is the requirement to sell your body to a corporation anyway? Less abstractly, if your masculinity is tied up in work and wages, what happens when there is no work? In some areas of South Wales, unemployment reached 100% for long periods. Men used to work, to bringing home the bacon and earning the respect of their families were forced to depend on the state, charity and the resourcefulness of their wives. Some adapted admirably: others did not, with a rise in domestic violence, alcoholism, depression and despair.

In the books about which I write, these contradictions and tensions are writ large. My argument is that this crisis of masculinity lead in many cases to the adoption of extreme politics. In the case of Lewis Jones's Cwmardy and other left novels, Communism was a most attractive creed. Apart from its obvious critique of capitalism's obvious failures, it lionised (as these images indicated), the Super Man. The latest edition of the novel features another Soviet propaganda piece without - I think - any irony at all:

Detail from John Hastings' 1935 The Worker of the Future Disrupting the Economic Chaos of the Present, mural at the Marx Memorial Library, London (thanks to Cath Feely for this attribution).

However, there's a lot more to the gender politics of Cwmardy than most commentators acknowledge. Firstly, the proto-feminism of Communist women is both admired and feared: Len's partner Mary loses humanity as she becomes an activist, culminating in her sending Len to his death in the Spanish Civil War. Len's father is the classic victim of capitalist masculinity. He's called Big Jim. He's a miner, a fighter, a soldier and a lover: yet all these things are taken away from him as the effects of a career below ground wreck his body and unemployment humbles him. Len is a classic failure of hegemonic capitalistic masculinity. He's thoughtful, depressive, sexually timid and physically weak. Unfitted for manual work and too shy for boisterous bouts of heavy drinking and singing, he eventually finds a solution in the arms of Communism, which dissolves individualism in another ideology of mass masculinity: solidarity with ones brothers and sister. Sadly, it's not enough to soothe Len's oddnesses, and accepting death in Spain (another, militaristic version of masculinity) is his solution. 

In another leftwing novel, Gwyn Thomas's Sorrow for thy Sons, three brothers are faced with twin crises of masculinity and capitalism. Herbert the shopkeeper opts to mimic middle-class feminised prissiness, yet it's clear that he's faking it and that economic change will destroy him. Alf – a miner until the mine closes – becomes a socially disruptive force, locked in battle with a corrupt female charity worker and sexually exploiting a woman with severe learning difficulties: without old or new versions of socially responsible masculinity (though the Party offers some hope), his masculine aggression becomes dangerous. The third brother, Hugh, educated out of his class, is aware that this is how hegemony works: his response is to refuse escape and to conduct affairs with the wives of capitalism's managerial class as a form of revenge. 

On the other side of the political divide, Fascism also valorised extreme forms of masculinity. While Communism was pro-feminist to some extent, Fascism required the separation of male and female spheres. Men were fighters, en masse and outside. Women belonged in the home. In Welsh literature, How Green Was My Valley opts for a Welsh Fascism with distinctly Nazi overtones as a solution to masculine and cultural decay. Mining is wrecked by the workers, seen as 'lice', 'pigs', 'monkeys' and 'dogs', subverted by Marxist agitators: there's no serious economic analysis. The hero, Huw, relocates masculinity in individual craft labour, chivalry, resistance to cultural and physical decay - fairly standard stuff. But then one day he gets his first erection, and life is very different. Sex with women is dangerous to him: 'soft', curvy, rounded women are a trap: young women in the novel are essentially whores (Ceinwen) or symbolic of Welsh cultural ruination, doomed to an early death. It's not sex that makes Huw a man - it's the masculine power that comes from puberty. Huw starts having visions, mostly modelled on Nazi art and rallies: men in armour, carrying flaming torches. He learns from these visions that 'real' men aren't miners, don't join unions. Real men are militaristic leaders, scourges of Jews, bankers, half-breeds, socialists and proletarians. Real men must be higher up and separate, looking down on the rabble from the mountains. 

It's easy to see the roots of fascism in male crisis, but we need to stress that the origins of all masculine failure are in capitalism. Masculinity in a capitalist system is about performing particular roles: worker and consumer. The same might be said of femininity: both concepts are constructed in particular ways to serve the needs of capitalism. But in the post-industrial condition in which Britain finds itself (read Christopher Meredith's Shifts), the male crisis is most pressing because working-class men have moved from mass employment to mass unemployment, or from manual labour to service industry and consumerism. There's no doubt that male mass society damaged men, women and relations between the sexes, but it provided some form of agency to men. 

Now, the children of miners and steelworkers are marooned. Many haven't adapted to the emancipation of women, and they're not helped by – as Abbott points out – capitalism's relentless objectification of the female body as a sales ploy. From Fairy Liquid ads which constantly portray women as house-bound, voluntary domestic slaves to popular culture's obsessive presentation of women as willing, available, compulsorily heterosexual unpaid prostitutes, men have no space in which to develop a secure, open, stable and progressive masculinity. The result is teenagers texting each other pictures of their female classmates in degrading sexual poses, widespread homophobia, emotional damage, failed family structures, violent crime and paranoid defensiveness. 

I don't think there ever was a golden age of masculine security, nor that there's a potential fixed form of masculinity that would suit everyone, for ever. Nor do I think that abolishing capitalism will solve all our problems in one fell swoop: all economic and ideological structures deform the individual, as Len finds in Cwmardy (something the novel's Stalinist fans do their best to ignore). Culture is hard to shake off, too. 

Abbott says that markets produce

• A generation of British men without realistic heroes, who feel like they have been set up to fail.
• A ‘we’ve got nothing left to lose’ generation of British men.
• A nation of atomised, lonely, entrepreneurial boys, who often have lives without meaning.
• A society where British manhood is now shaped more by market expectations – often unachievable ones - than by fathers, family values, a sense of community spirit and perseverance.
• I believe we need to say loudly and clearly, that there is a powerful role for fathers. The truth is that just as loving fathers are a benefit to children, so loving families are a benefit to men.

I don't disagree. Men suffer under consumer capitalism just as women do, and often make things worse for themselves and women. I don't share her belief that there was or must have been a nice society formed by happy families in stable communities in which Daddy is strong and emotionally resilient (reading social history or discovering the sexual horrors of this and previous ages dispels this), but I think her analysis of the current problems are supported by cultural analysis. She carefully doesn't blame families or feral kids or whatever: we have a structural problem, which is something the Tories don't talk about. If you engineer mass unemployment, or a low-wage economy (I'm looking at you, too, New Labour), or demand that people leave London because housing benefit won't cover the costs, thus separating families from their communities, extended network of relations etc, then you get unfocussed anger and social decay.

Imagine being 20, male or female, unemployed and suddenly being dumped in Stoke. All your friends and family are in London. You have no social circle. No prospect of employment. Hostility from your new neighbours who are struggling themselves, and from the authorities who blame your unemployment on idleness rather than a national crisis. Result? You spend your time killing prostitutes on your X-Box, take up drink and drugs, and engage in antisocial behaviour. There's no chance of education, you can't find capital for your business ideas, you don't have a union or older role models: you're Alf of Sorrow for thy Sons and you're going to hurt yourself and those around you. You may become a parent but the odds are against you being a decent role model, however good your intentions. Without the opportunity to engage in the positive aspects of masculinity and femininity, people develop hyper-real versions of these things: with men, it's often violence and the sexual degradation of women. Or as Abbott puts it:

I’m particularly troubled by a culture of hyper-masculinity – a culture that exaggerates masculinity in the face of a perceived threat to it. We see it in our schools; in the culture of some of our big business financial institutions; in some of our in inner cities; and even on many student campuses. At its worst, it’s a celebration of heartlessness; a lack of respect for women’s autonomy; and the normalisation of homophobia. I fear it’s often crude individualism dressed up as modern manhood. 

Decent, fulfilling work may help men. Marx wavered between the Dignity of Labour and a vision of the Communist Future in which a small amount of work subsidised a life of leisure and intellectual fulfilment, but it's fairly clear that decent work is psychologically beneficial - and yet capitalism relies on reducing men and women to drones, and keeping a reserve army of desperate unemployed people on hand to depress wages and frighten the rest of us into obedience.  

What of women? Abbott talks, rightly I think, of porn culture's infection of everyday socialisation. Young, working-class and often highly-educated women have been persuaded that even the most degrading sexual activities and attitudes are 'empowering' – you may recall that I recently wrote about teaching Jilly Cooper's Riders and the way it depicts fellatio as a sexual adventure for women rather than one-way gratification of the abusive and cruel men in their lives. Porn is mainstream and it teaches men that their sexuality depends on progressively more demeaning use of women, rather than mutual pleasure. Fifty Shades of Grey is symptomatic of this: it presents female submission as somehow empowering, while uncritically idolising unearned capitalist success: Christian Grey is where sexual and economic violence come together (no pun intended). 

Abbott's solutions are clear and OK: better transmission between the generations of positive, emotionally-open masculinity. Stable, fulfilling work, and state provision of health and psychological services. But we need to go further. Banning porn or exploitative games or whatever aren't solutions: we need to end a culture which benefits from the consumption of goods which promote atomisation and antagonism. 

And that means ending capitalism as an economic structure and as a cultural condition. My 1930s Welsh authors knew this (well, the leftwing ones did). And now you do too. 

Conrad's Heart of Darkness

I come not to bury Conrad Black… nor to praise him.



Did you see this interview on Newsnight last week? My favourite bit was Conrad expressing a wish to smash Jeremy Paxman's face in. He also turned up to be interviewed on Sky by Adam Boulton: amidst the arrogance, he rather wonderfully paused to ask for Boulton's name - a slight which will have hurt that pompous presenter more than physical violence ever could.

If you're unsure who he is, Conrad, Lord Black of Crossharbour is a viciously rightwing Canadian newspaper magnate who quit the wide open prairies to own the Daily Telegraph and various other British and American newspapers, motivated by twin greeds for power and money. Citizen Kane-eh, if you like.

Being obsessive about free markets, it was somewhat of a surprise to find that when he sold his newspaper empire, he took 'non-compete' fees: essentially bribes not to start competitors to the publications he'd sold. Hardly free-market economics. He was convicted of several counts of fraud and dishonesty, some of which have been overturned on technicalities.

I rather like Conrad. He's rude, blustering, arrogant, entirely devoid of reflective qualities. He's nakedly greedy and incapable of considering anything objectively - and is therefore top quality copy. More importantly, I think he needs to be taken less seriously. He's been used, for the last few years, as a mini-Murdoch: a Capitalist Bogeyman with which to scare the kids. Don't be like Conrad, they'd say, with his silly fancy dress costumes and his Marie Antoinette wife and corporate jets. He's bad, mkay?

It's a distraction. Conrad's a pantomime baddy, the jester of corporate capitalism. He's the disciplinary model: if you're not behaving like him, you're OK, seems to be the message.

This is wrong. Conrad ripped off some other greedy scumbags and got caught. Paraded through the courts and interviews, we're all meant to boo and hiss, then return to our lives safe in the knowledge that the Bad Guys always get caught in the end.

Total bollocks, of course. The real bad guys don't nick the occasional private jet, or filch a few million here or there. The real bad guys don't need to break the law, because laws are made and unmade for them. They deal in multiples of billions and they don't wear fancy dress, at least not in public. They dress down and stay out of the papers. They trash entire countries and even global economies. They're bailed out by you and me, paid for by cuts in disabled children's welfare funds (true) and hospital closures. You'll never know their names and they'll never take responsibility.

So laugh at Conrad if you like, but while you do, the real heist is happening elsewhere.

In summary: the NHS

As you may have noticed, brevity is not one of my strong points. In my defence, the world's much more complicated than Tories and associated know-nothings believe, and so I require more space to explain why.

But on the NHS, Charlie Brooker sums up my feelings in one sweeping paragraph:

What is it about Lansley that makes human beings hate him so much? It might have something to do with the suspicion that he's hell-bent on turning the NHS into a commercial free-for-all, which for some reason isn't going down well at a time when terrifying nightly warnings about the worst excesses of capitalism are broadcast in the guise of news bulletins. The theory is that introducing an element of competition will improve the level of quality and range of choice for patients. And it doubtless would, if businesses behaved like selfless nuns, which they don't. Any business that wants to succeed has to cut corners somewhere to turn a profit. It also has to juggle a strange set of priorities, which means if you entrust your health to a corporation, the cost of your kidneys could end up being weighed against the spiralling cost of the CGI budgerigar voiced by Joan Collins they want for their new TV commercial.

'Choice' is a mirage. Nobody wants to dial 999 and be presented with a menu of ambulance companies, police services or hospitals. All we want is to know that the local hospital is excellent, and that our taxes are being spent on incontinence pads, NMRI scanners and nurses' salaries rather than off-shored bonuses. Introduce a profit motive and you'll be sitting opposite your doctor wondering if s/he's on commission for that particular drug, got a free holiday (sorry, 'conference trip') from that hip manufacturer, or is on a tight schedule to see X number of patients to make it all worthwhile. And that's before we worry about the masonic and old-boy networks rife in medicine (disclosure: both my parents were NHS doctors).

The other problem with 'choice' is that it can't be informed. Unless you happen to be an oncologist, you won't have a clue which cancer treatments are best, for example. It's bad enough for doctors: the pharmaceutical firms never publish negative results, always publish papers carefully drawn to accentuate often minor gains, and constantly fiddle with treatments not to innovate, but to renew copyrights: the professionals find it almost impossible to make clear judgements. So how the hell is Joe Fatbloke meant to 'choose' his doctor and medication?

What the Tories want is the American situation, in which pharmaceutical companies spend 13.3% of their turnover on research, and 25% of their cash on advertising: $35 billion, or $61,000 per doctor. Yes, you read that right. Money isn't in medical innovation, it's in sales. Which leads to this (and this is only a mild example):

The war against religion?

If you've read Baroness Warsi (Tory cabinet minister with no responsibilities, appointed to make David Cameron look non-sexist and non-racist), you might be under the impression that Christians are being lynched in the street or burned at the stake on a regular basis.

Britain is 'under threat' by the 'rising tide' of 'militant secularisation', she says, neatly implying that 'Britain' is a coherent concept which in some way requires religious belief, and that non-religious people are a security problem.

Only the last time I looked, most British people don't practice any form of religion, and yet appear to believe that they're both still British and non-threatening. On the other hand, virtually all the major crimes I can think of recently: 7/7, 9/11, Ulster loyalism and to a slightly lesser extent Irish Republicanism, Serbian aggression and a whole swathe of other atrocities were committed by religious people. It used to be states burning, hanging, drawing and quartering their citizens on religious grounds: now it's amateur groups. I could start listing the violent and intolerant sections of various religions' holy books, but that's just point-scoring. I'll content myself with pointing out that many religious groups - particularly the cruder ones which grab the headlines (not all: I've a soft spot for the Quakers for instance) -  insist as a matter of absolute fact that they're right and everybody else is wrong - and to an extent, fair enough: so why isn't the same respect extended to those of us who are atheists. There's little point having fundamental belief if you don't feel the need to convert or condemn the infidels - which is where religion threatens us all. (I'll exempt Judaism and Islam from this: they haven't tended to be proselytising faiths, though forced or voluntary conversions aren't unknown).

I just don't see the fabric or the security of this country being threatened by people calling a little more loudly for a science, education or morality based on evidence and humanist values: they imply respect for individuals' beliefs, while requiring a little more rigour in public policy.

Warsi sees it differently:

For me, one of the most worrying aspects about this militant secularisation is that at its core and in its instincts it is deeply intolerant. It demonstrates similar traits to totalitarian regimes – denying people the right to a religious identity because they were frightened of the concept of multiple identities.”

I just don't see it. Religion is - and has to be under circumstances - intolerant. If you're convinced that your way is the only way to heaven, surely you have to be militant if you want to keep for own group and possible converts out of hell. I can't see anything more militant in atheism than a few dyspeptic professors and frankly that's small beer compared with say Galileo's lifelong house arrest, the legal murder of Catholics under the Common Wealth, the ban on Catholicism lifted only in 1848, the genocidal campaigns against heretics in the Vendée and elsewhere, the Gordon Riots, the exclusion of Dissenters from public life… need I go on? Warsi's inventing a straw man by raising the spectre of 'totalitarian regimes': I can think of two deeply religious countries of the top of my head which regularly top the league table for oppression, intolerance and ruthless abuse of human rights: Saudi Arabia.

Is the British polity under attack from 'militant secularists'? It doesn't look like it from here. An Established church. Compulsory worship in all schools. Bishops in the House of Lords. Religious groups being handed control of schools with no oversight whatsoever. A Prime Minister officially defining Britain as a 'Christian country' (Warsi seems very confused about this: as a Muslim, she's calling for more Christianity).

Forget Warsi's shrill carping. There's something else going on here. Over in the United States, capitalism failed as long ago as the 1970s. The wages of the working class have declined since about 1973. America's heavy industries failed to invest and innovate, leaving massive swathes of the heartland destitute. The Democrats, stuck in Cold War narratives, refused to evince a leftwing agenda of state support and investment, for fear of being accused of Socialism. The Republicans, unable to challenge their economic orthodoxies (sound familiar, by the way?), decided that they needed a new way to attract working-class voters.

They hit on the 'culture wars'. Neither party had a leg to stand on when it came to economics, but the Republicans realised that the people could be distracted by social matters. So they constructed a new country, 'Real America', the bits between the (liberal, urban, socialist, Jewish) coastlines. Liberal America, they said, was going to take away your guns. Liberal America would force Real Americans to have abortions. Real Americans would be forced to abandon school prayers, the Pledge of Allegiance, SUVs and 'states' rights' (i.e. racist laws). Liberal America would turn your children gay and your wives into feminists. Real Americans want a theocracy: Liberal Americans want a Soviet Atheist dictatorship complete with Death Panels and schools which brainwash your kids. Liberal America would spend your taxes on Mexican-American History classes, immigrant rights and 'socialised healthcare', like Cuba. Real Americans supported Israel because the Bible said so: Liberal America supported burnoused Arab terrorists. Liberal America was Godless America. Real America believed in God and Guns.

And thus it came to pass: every defeat for Real America (such as the legalisation of abortion after Roe v Wade) was further proof that 'militant secularists' were on the march. Never mind their hero Reagan's genial lack of religious feeling (or the deism of the Founding Fathers) - this was not a reality-based struggle. While the rednecks out on the plains saw this as final apocalyptic battle for America's soul, the Republican leadership saw it as a magnificent way of locking in votes for ever, despite the overwhelming evidence that a vote for the Republicans was a vote for the military and corporate powers which destroyed middle America. It's a distraction technique, and a stroke of genius.

You can read up on this stuff: it forms the core of political speeches by Republican candidates even now: Gingrich, Santorum and co (as this Gary Younge piece explains. They believe in Small Government and Self-Reliance - except when it comes to the bedroom.

Warsi has clearly picked this stuff up, and I strongly suspect that the Tories are deliberately copying American political strategies: too much of this stuff is popping up in Tory political discourse in recent years. They're talking about Freedom from the state - education, healthcare - and creating a siege mentality amongst their core voters which isn't borne out by the facts. But as in America, we're not dealing with reality, they're attempting to create one.

Will it work? I doubt it. It's a core vote strategy, and it's clear that even up against the least popular Prime Minister of recent years, the Tories only managed a 35% share of the vote: there isn't a natural Tory majority out there. I also think that religious bullying of this kind doesn't play in most of Britain, thanks to the legacy of the Civil War. After the Restoration in 1660, the word 'Enthusiast' became a term of abuse in polite society, applied to anyone whose religious fervour threatened to return the country to civil war and the years of the stake. Despite occasional outbursts of state and popular intolerance, the UK gradually decided that religion was a private matter rather than a public flashpoint.

Why are the Tories suddenly banging this drum? Because, like the Republicans, they know that their cherished economic orthodoxes have failed. The Finance Tories (hardline free-marketeers, financial engineers, uninterested in social values) and the One Nation Tories (hunting, paternalism, jam and Jerusalem, social fabric) are in serious danger of parting company. Cameron's solution is the same as the Americans': wrap yourself in cross and flag, generate controversy, keep quiet about economics - that's for the big boys who read the FT, not the Mail-reading voters.

Cynical, no?

(Disclosure: I'm a Catholic Atheist. If you're one, you'll understand what I mean).

Update. I've been discussing this all day with @z_rose on Twitter. She objected to a couple of inaccuracies in my characterisation of religion, which I've corrected, and suggested that I've fallen into the trap of accepting dominant discourses around religion as genuinely representative. She makes the point that many religions and religious people aren't exclusive when it comes to truth, or oppositional, and that accepting the media's love of discord is to cede the ground for debate to extreme positions (implicitly mine as well as those of religious groups). I'll concede a lot of this, though I do think that massive swathes of American society are more Manichaean in approach than we acknowledge, and on the rare occasions I attend Mass I'm always surprised by the sermon's intolerance: Israel right, Palestine wrong; contraception evil etc. There are nice religious people, moral religious people and open-minded religious people - just as there on my atheist side.

She also says religion is a lived experience rather than a static thing: again, I agree up to a point. It drives me mad when the media present all Muslims as observant fundamentalists: plenty drink beer and don't pray, just as most 'Christians' don't darken the door of a church from one year to the next. But - the more text-based your practice is, the less tolerant it is: if you genuinely believe that God personally dictated a ban on gays and shellfish and that these rules still apply, you're bound to practice them.

What have I learned from today? Warsi's a dangerous, short-termist with evil intent, like all Tories. But also that I shouldn't blog off the top of my head. I need footnotes to keep me accurate, despite the fact that - having been retweeted by my idol Marcus Brigstocke to 101,000 followers - the less nuance, the more readers.

Cornish men are fishermen…

A Cornish song, famously turned into a graffiti challenge on a mine's wall, ran 'Cornish men are fishermen/Cornish men are miners too/When all the fish and tin are gone/What are Cornish men to do?'.

I thought of this last night while listening to Paul Uppal MP, Emma Reynolds MP, Ken Harris and Jane Nelson debate employability. They - and we - all support further education for all, apprenticeships, transferable skills and all the other current jargon. Emma, Ken and Jane also spoke up for the humanist values, very hearteningly.

But we still have a problem. Not everybody can be a web developer or a graphic designer. Economies can't run on serving each other coffee, cutting each other's hair and doing people's nails. I've found my personal solution: 4 degrees and I'm in the 12th (yes, 12th) year of temporary contracts. The current one expires in June. No contract, no mortgage, no planning for the future.

But I'll be OK. It's what used to be called the working class that's bothering me. What's the point of apprenticeships if there are no jobs out there? The UK abandoned investment in industry after WW2: no innovation, no specialisation, no energy efficiency - then affected to be shocked when the metal-bashing jobs went abroad, quickly followed by the highly-skilled manual jobs which could have replaced them. In recent years, the Labour government provided mass higher education, but didn't develop an economy to take advantage of these skills, leading to degree-holders colonising the jobs traditionally taken by the less-educated. It made HE look like a way of massaging the unemployment figures rather than a serious plan.

Some sections of society will be fine: bankers, hedge-fund traders, shareholders and especially the executives who've diverted what should go to shareholders into their own profits by way of bonuses and what they disgustingly term 'compensation' (for what?).

We have a problem. In the old days workers sold their labour, and owners profited from it by selling physical goods. The UK has abandoned goods in favour of intellectual work - rather than ripping stuff out of the ground, business monopolises the fruit of state education and workers' ingenuity. This makes executives rich, but it privatises intelligence and - more pressingly - leaves massive swathes of the country not just unemployed, but unemployable. What are they to do? In the boom times, taxes from the City covered the benefits payments and we left these people to a life of not-very-pleasant indolence. Now that cash has gone and the government's suddenly discovered that these people are 'benefit scroungers', feckless, idle people 'too comfortable on benefits' (as Uppal and one hysterical audience member claimed last night).

I don't think they are. The problem is that there are 60 million people in Britain and we've abandoned mass employment. They aren't unemployable because of their individual failings: they're unemployable because our economic structure is designed to exclude them. Capitalism relentlessly replaces workers with machines and - in the modern period - physical work with mental work. We used to pity those with arduous jobs: now millions of people envy those lucky enough to be struggling along on the minimum wage in some dead-end drudgery.

Governments used to be 'for' the people, at least in theory. Now they operate in the interests of capital without any qualms. They shrug their shoulders and point at China: how does the British worker compete with a billion people ready and willing to work harder, for longer and for massively lower pay? The government's answer, of course, is that we should join the race to the bottom: safe in the knowledge that the political class and their children will never have to suffer personally. It's ludicrous anyway. Those jobs aren't coming back. When the Chinese demand too much money, the British, American and European corporations which control industry will move the factories to somewhere willing to accept even less. The needs of the workers here and in China will be left far behind in the pursuit of even greater profit margins. We're used to thinking of unemployment as a temporary, shocking aberration which happens on a mass scale at moments of crisis: we need to start thinking of it as a permanent and necessary condition of successful capitalism. Lots of unemployed = ever lower wages. Increasing mechanisation = ever-increasing unemployment = permanently declining wages.

But what should we do? Is there meaningful, non-exploitative work to be done? I think there is: our infrastructure is, you may have noticed, knackered. The problem is that nobody wants to pay for it. The corporations which depend on the transport, education and health system to provide decent staff (this is how they privatise the common wisdom or what Marx called the 'general intellect') spend their time exporting jobs and hiding profits from the taxman, while citizens have been encouraged to see taxation as extortion rather than the subscription we pay to join a civilised society. The Greeks bought off their middle classes with massive state employment - and now the bond markets are taking their revenge. In the meantime, billions of people sit around, unwanted. In first world countries, contraception slowly reduces their numbers, but that's a very long-term and quite sinister solution. In developing countries, poor health care, high mortality and manual labour encourages large families - reducing the chance of developing an educated society in a vicious circle of deprivation.

The logic of this is the total abolition of international proletarian solidarity, and the dissolution of national solidarity too: the upper classes are walling themselves into gated communities, living off their bonuses and share options, hating and fearing the not-wanted-on-voyage poor: many of whom have been educated just enough to understand what's been done to them. This is of course quite useful: as Paul Mason frequently points out, the conditions of revolution require a vanguard which is educated, articulate and excluded - all those graduates suddenly finding that they're poorer than their parents.

How the state buys off these potential revolutionaries is as yet unclear. Apprenticeships and internships might help a tiny minority, but the fervent hope of the ruling classes is that the education system is so dedicated to the maintenance of the hegemonic elite that the disenfranchised youth won't have the tools to elucidate their situation. I disagree: it will take a long time, but consciousness will return.

National Unemployed Workers' Movement

What seriously depresses me is the passivity of the long-term unemployed. In the 30s, across the US and Europe, militancy rose quickly and gloriously - perhaps because unionisation was prevalent, and because the workers knew that mass employment was the normal condition in industrial societies. Now, mass unemployment is a fundamental element of the capitalist structure. They've got used to it, and nobody has any trust in governments any more: the state works for the banks and the City, everybody can see that.

The working poor aren't going to strike - it's been made legally difficult and self-harming. When the university staff went on strike recently, virtually all the picket-line crossers were the lowest-paid: cleaners, caterers, security guards. Why? Because they're desperate to retain the tiny stake they have in society, however oppressive. They're all on zero-hours contracts: sackable in an instant. During the academic holidays, they're left to fend for themselves, unpaid. We teachers, conversely, have pensions and contracts (however temporary): we're not yet proletarianised and we're fighting desperately to stay that way. For the cleaners, the battle's over and they've lost. If a university can't treat its staff properly, what hope for contract cleaners at merchant banks or supermarkets? The militant student isn't fighting alongside the ex-working class: s/he's fighting to avoid joining it. When the underclass does revolt - as in the riots last August - the mode is one which horrifies or baffles the rest of us. Smashing up Snappy Snaps and nicking water bottles might seem stupid to us, but it's a mark of the depoliticisation and dissolution of a class which in the 1930s was capable of sophisticated analysis and concerted action.

Instead of meaningful work, we've become the willing servants of the information economy: every time I blog, and every time you add something to Facebook, we're handing over a free product to be sold to advertisers and corporate interests. They know that information is a commodity: we haven't yet caught on. The old solution was to kick out the bourgeoisie and circulate the profits of industry amongst the actual workers: now there's no work and the profit is in intangible, low-employment activity. I suppose we could all work in Farmville or playing MMORPGS to generate online goods like magic swords for sale to talentless rich kids (as featured in Ready Player One) but it's a minority pursuit and not good for social cohesion.

I don't know what to do about the millions who would have once made things. We're in the process of taking away the benefits designed to keep them calm and obedient: is the government sure it knows what to do when these people start to lash out?

For my less political readers

I'm not all about the political LULZ. As a favour to those of you more interested in the cultural sphere, I have a special treat for you.

I was reading today about the history of newspaper corrections and readers' editors (this constitutes excitement in my life), and found myself reading about one of the most famous corrections in the New York Times, a great newspaper, but also one of the most boring, visually unattractive and pompous publications since Pharaohs dictated their own obituary hieroglyphs.

The correction in question was on the subject of My Little Pony, not a cultural scene to which the NYT has hitherto paid much attention:

An article on Monday about Jack Robison and Kirsten Lindsmith, two college students with Asperger syndrome who are navigating the perils of an intimate relationship, misidentified the character from the animated children’s TV show “My Little Pony” that Ms. Lindsmith said she visualized to cheer herself up. It is Twilight Sparkle, the nerdy intellectual, not Fluttershy, the kind animal lover.

This lead to the author's discussion of Ponygate (as I'm calling it), which contained the revelation that there's a massive underground My Little Pony scene, presumably amongst the kind of hipster who when I'm in charge, will be reassigned to night soil collection duties. There's even a music scene based on My Little Pony remixes, known as Dubtrot. Here's a sample, though if you're wise, you won't play it.



Is this just hipster foolishness? Only if you habitually use the word 'just' in reference to cultural phenomena. Deserving of painful deaths though they are, hipsters are a feature of late modern capitalism and as such deserve cultural deconstruction. I think they're part of the Western capitalist extension of childhood, alongside adults and BMXs and skateboards, computer gaming and a range of other leisure activities which require adults to maintain their consumption and collection habits from their childhoods. Assigning emotional value to lowest-common-denominator artefacts like My Little Pony is a natural extension of the market. You no longer need to 'grow out' of forms of play: the economy demands that toys become 'collectibles', that you find supposedly subversive, ironic or countercultural meanings in items and activities which once you would have discarded. Once, growing up meant getting a job and earning money to spend on adult leisure activities. But in the US, getting a job is a) hard, b) badly-paid (American working and middle class salaries are no higher than they were in the mid-1970s and c) leaves little leisure time: Yanks work long hours and have on average 2 weeks' holiday per year.

This means of course that leisure must be intellectually unchallenging - these people are tired - cheap, and provide an instant emotional hit at a low cost. Hence the appeal of remixing ripped cartoons and watching The A-Team film. Adult life isn't profitable for the corporations, but childhood is because parents indulge their children. If you extend childhood beyond the traditional limits (the way parents interfere with their children's progress at university implies that we're now well into the 20s), you open up new opportunities for profit.

In this sense, My Little Pony is no different from Hollywood's obsession with remakes: the people running the studios are the fat kids who spent their lives in front of the TV, and have no concept of quality. Instead, they have a keen marketer's understanding of the value of nostalgia.

Don't buy it. Send My Little Pony to the knacker's yard.

What's wrong with you people?

Fintan O'Toole, a great economics and politics thinker, poses the question of why Ireland's population isn't out on the street. After all, a corrupt and greedy bunch of crooks hijacked the government, the legal system, the economic structure, business, the media: the entire public sphere, in fact. They bankrupted the entire country and have got away with it, leaving a highly-educated and articulate population to suffer. But there's very little public display of anger.

The answer, of course, is that Ireland emerged from a ruralist, conservative and conformist post-colonial situation too fast and too enthusiastically: the emerging generation of the 1980s hated politics, collectivism and self-sacrifice. They wanted Porsches and property: indvidualism in its rawest form. Being next to Britain didn't help: there's no way to acquire the trappings of one of the world's largest economies in a short period of time except through greed, ruthlessness and criminality. So Ireland was transformed from rural backwater to cowboy capitalism in a very short time - result: disaster. The problem now is that although Ireland's got a proud history of rebellion, it's always been focussed around colonialism and religion: there's very little class-consciousness to draw on for the present day. Instead, the passionate ones emigrate: Ireland's safety valve.

Although I said that a bunch of crooks hijacked the country, I've been thinking about collective responsibility recently. The Icelanders voted last week not to pay Britain and the Netherlands £3.5bn they lent Iceland to cover bank losses: their case is that the people didn't lose the cash, the banks did. I'm torn on this: it's true, but Iceland as a nation decided to pursue this insane form of hyper-capitalism, to deregulate the banks and gamble. They might not have been an informed public, but they did repeatedly vote in rightwing governments. It's the same in Ireland. Everybody kept voting for the rightwing parties, investing imaginary money in property at home and abroad, and buying new BMW SUVs as though the party would never end. At the other end, the Germans are refusing to forgive some of the corporate debt Ireland's government has underwritten as though they're the innocent victims, and not the enthusiastic peddlers of insane financial products.

There has to be a degree of responsibility: the German, Irish, Icelandic and British people weren't mugged: they dived into the world of speculation with abandon, and have paid the price. On the other hand, as usual, the people who couldn't afford to gamble are the first to suffer: the young, the old, the poor and the sick, while the people who dreamed up these schemes and sold them to governments and populations alike, have got away scot free.

The Icelanders, I think, have it right, despite pretending that the system just appeared by magic:

 Iceland did two remarkable things. First, it let the banks go under: foreign financiers who had lent to Reykjavik institutions at their own risk didn't get a single krona back. Second, officials imposed capital controls, making it harder for hot-money merchants to pull their cash out of the country.

When the credit crunch came to Dublin, the government decided to underwrite the entire banking industry – including tens of billions of euros of loans made by foreign investors. That landed the country with a debt worth something like €80,000 for every household – a debt that effectively bankrupted the country.

"A reverse Robin Hood – taking money from the poor and giving to the rich," is how Anne Sibert, a member of the Central Bank of Iceland's monetary policy committee, describes the Irish policy. But Dublin was merely following the old free-market tradition that rules governments should never break faith with financiers.

Populations aren't rational consumers: none of us ever have the full facts available to make good decisions (the tuition fees scandal pretends that teenagers are rational consumers too) - this is how capitalism works, by selling junk to the misled. We should be on the streets, and it's heartening to see UK Uncut, for instance, getting the hang of it. Let's hope the Irish get out there too - but let's remember that these shysters were knocking at an open door and have a little shame about the way we all fell for the credit-driven consumer lifestyle without a thought for tomorrow.

Greenmail

I feel like I have been robbed today - by 'green' capitalists.

I got this e-mail from Ecotricity, from whom I buy my energy. I pay extra to receive 100% renewable energy, which I think is important. Ecotricity generates a larger amount of renewable energy each year, and supports this with power from the non-renewable grid. Paying extra means that a proportion of the renewable energy is assigned to me.

As you may have seen in the press, npower are increasing their prices in January.

Our policy, and our promise, is to match the standard price of your regional supplier and so we need to raise our own prices.

But this is not just a matter of policy and we won’t be adding to our profits from this. Wholesale electricity prices have been rising for some time and this move by npower is in response to that. We also need to raise our prices to match these increased costs.  

We’ve set out our new price below, alongside the old one for easy reference.

Just to be clear, our price is exactly matched to npower in your region.

We price match them in order to offer a fair price to our customers, knowing that we will for sure make a smaller margin than them (they have economies of scale) and at the same time dedicating the money that we do make to a green outcome – in this case the building of new sources of green energy in the UK.

We think price matched electricity with a real green outcome is something worth having. We hope you feel the same way of course.

That doesn't mean, however, that they aren't thieving capitalist bastards. Their letter is disingenuous and misleading at best. I certainly wasn't aware that they'd 'promised' to match another company's price. As far as I can see, power costs are going up all the time, so this 'promise' is simply a promise to always increase prices - despite the claim that deregulated, privatised utilities lead to competition and reduced prices. In this case, Ecotricity is deliberately removing the competitive element.

Even more nonsensically, my electricity can't be costing more: it's generated from renewable sources, so unless the wind and waves have started billing Ecotricity, the cost hasn't changed. In fact, it should be going down as more - and more efficient - capacity goes online. So the claim that the profit margin isn't increasing must be a lie. My electricity isn't bought on the wholesale market: that's the whole point of the '100% renewable' claim.

That's why I'm looking for a new supplier.

Old media vampires

Bloggers who quote from Associated Press material (the guys who really write the news articles which appear in newspapers under someone else's name) are meant to pay a fee.

So you'd think that bloggers quoted by Associated Press would be… paid a fee!

You'd be wrong. They just steal it. I wouldn't mind at all if the relationship was mutual, but hey-ho, that's capitalism in a nutshell.

W00t has sent them a witty bill. Wonder if they'll pay.

Hail to the Thief

Neal and I went to see Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story last night. As you'd expect, it was witty, entertaining, thought-provoking (the Goldman Sachs coup is stunning) but not entirely ideologically or economically sound - plus the usual lazy scenes of making fun of security guards. That said, it was the closest a modern American will ever come to promoting socialism.



The most striking elements were the revelations about Dead Peasant insurance: your employer may take out life insurance on you, based on actuarial calculations of employee mortality rates so that early deaths will make them a profit. 'Dead Peasants' is the term used in the industry. The other revelation was the sheer insulated arrogance of bankers, depicted by quotations from this Citigroup document (part 2 here) which exults in the replacement of democracy with 'plutocracy': rule of a nation by and for the super-rich.

Some choice quotations:

The US, UK and Canada are the key plutonomies - economies powered by the wealthy. Continental Europe (ex-Italy) and Japan are in the egalitarian bloc.

In plutonomies the rich absorb a disproportionate chunk of the economy and have a massive impact on reported aggregate numbers, like savings rates, current account deficits, consumption levels, etc. This imbalance in inequality expresses itself in the standard scary 'global imbalances'. We worry less.

We project that the plutonomies… will likely see even more income inequality, disproportionately feeding off a further rise in the profit share in their economies, capitalist-friendly governments, more technology-driven profitability, and globalization.

The earth is being held up by the muscular arms of its entrepreneur plutocrats, like it or not.

It gets better (or worse, depending on your political stripe) - the top 1% of households account for 40% of financial net worth, more than the bottom 95% of households put together. [2000 statistics]. The rich in the US went from coupon clipping, dividend-receiving rentiers to a Managerial Aristocracy indulged by their shareholders.

Society and governments need to be amenable to disproportionately allow/encourage the few to retain that fatter profit share. The Managerial Aristocracy… needs to commandeer a vast chunk of that rising profit share, either through capital income, or simply paying itself a lot. 

When the rich take a very high share of overall income, the national household savings rate drops, and vice versa. The behavior of the exceptionally rich drives the national numbers… We want to spend little time worrying about these (non)issues…

At the heart of plutonomy is income inequality. Societies that are willing to tolerate/endorse income inequality, are willing to tolerate/endorse plutonomy.

…the fruits of those profits could be taxes… we struggle to find examples of this happening. Indeed, in the U.S., the current administration's attempts to change the estate tax code and make permanent dividend tax cuts, plays directly into the hands of the plutonomy. 

The wave of globalization that the world is currently surfing, is clearly to the benefit of global capitalists… it is to the disadvantage of developed market labor, especially at the lower end of the food chain. There are periodic attempts by countries to redress this imbalance… But in general, on-going globalization is making it easier for companies to either outsource manufacturing… or "offshore" manufacturing.

Problems

Low-end developed market labor might not have much economic power, but it does have equal voting power with the rich. We see plenty of examples of the outsourcing of labor being attacked as 'unpatriotic' or plain unfair. Perhaps one reason that societies allow plutonomy, is because enough of the electorate believe they have a chance of becoming a Pluto-participant. Why kill it off, if you can join it? In a sense, this is the embodiment of the "American Dream". But if voters feel they cannot participate, they are more likely to divide up the wealth pie, rather than aspire to being truly rich. There are signs around the world that society is unhappy with plutonomy… But as yet, there seems little political fight. 

The rest of the document explains that democracy is a side issue, and advises its super-rich clients to 'play plutonomy' by buying shares in 'companies that make the toys that the Plutonomists enjoy'. There's no concern for the lives of the workers in any economy - simply advice on how to maintain the plutocratic system - sometimes by buying off the workers and suborning government - and how to reinforce it. The activities of the rich, it says, actively damage the lives of the others: and they like it this way. They don't even care about their countries any more: 'there are rich consumers and the rest, the rich are getting richer… and they dominate consumption', wherever they are ('Surely, then, it is the collapse of plutonomy, rather than the collapse of the US dollar, that we should worry about… If plutonomy continues, which we think it will, if income inequality is allowed to persist and widen, the plutonomy basket should continue to do very well')

the richest 10% of Americans account for 43% of income, and 57% of net worth… The rich are in great shape, financially. We think the rich are likely to get even wealthier in the coming years'. 

…we think that global capitalists are going to be getting an even greater share of the wealth pie over the next few years, as capitalists benefit disproportionately from globalization and the productivity boom, at the relative expense of labor. 

'What could go wrong? Whilst the rich are getting a greater share of the wealth, and the poor a lesser share, political enfranchisement remains as was - one person, one vote (in the plutonomies). At some point it is likely that labor will fight back… and there will be a political backlash… We don't see this happening yet…

So there you have it. In the US, UK and Canada, the mega-rich are to be admired and encouraged. The major problem is democracy: the idea that the poor have an equal vote. What's the solution for people like you and I? I'm moving to Scandinavia. They're rich countries which spread the wealth - they don't play 'beggar thy neighbour'. Oh, and don't vote Tory (or New Labour). They're the mouthpieces for Murdoch, Branson, hedge fund traders, Bob Diamond and associated scum, despite recent platitudes about fairness.

These guys, according to these documents need you to stay poor and they're not afraid to say so.

Oh god, I'm so depressed.

H2Oh no

Love and Money

Intelliwench (who is both) is seeking a mate. She's also not very impressed with corporate America - read her very funny adventures in the Dow Jones.

Order of the Vole: Ronan Tynan

Dermot Desmond, a businessman of the most revolting kind (tax exile, brash, selfish capitalist, asset-stripper, financial conjuror: exactly the breed who sunk Ireland's economy) has proposed a 'global university of the arts' to revive Ireland's fortunes.

All well and good you might think. However, The Kerrywoman has sent me a letter from the Irish Times which nails Desmond's twisting duplicity (and that of the political class which encouraged these chisellers) perfectly:

Madam, – Dermot Desmond, when making his proposal for “a global university of culture and the arts” suggests that the unique Irish spirit is “undefeatable”; and while I agree with the latter, I regret he did not add if we all put our shoulder to the wheel (Front page, December 5th).

In case Mr Desmond, as one of the country’s leading tax exiles, has not noticed, we already have a number of potentially world-class cultural institutions, and they all share one thing in common – they have sustained, and are about to sustain further brutal cutbacks in State funds because of the collapse in tax revenue. The best thing he could do at the moment if he wants Ireland to reach its full potential in this area is to start paying tax like the rest of us.

Indeed, what was even more depressing about his proposal is that it reminds us that we live in a country where paying tax for the super rich is optional, with the first of the 163 published names he wrote to being Bono and U2, who also, coincidentally, moved the core of their empire out of Ireland to reduce their tax bills.

But should anyone have the right to become an “exile” in their own country for tax purposes? More to the point, with our country virtually bankrupt, does any member of the super rich have a right to hold an Irish passport if their families are living here, and they are claiming to be “exiles” for tax purposes, when they are in the papers more frequently than their peers, who are paying tax?

Surely the culture that makes such anti-social behaviour possible has contributed massively to the horrendous financial mess we find ourselves in at the moment? In the budget, the Minister for Finance must address this scandal. – Yours, etc,

RONAN TYNAN,

Blackrock,

Co Dublin.

Ronan Tynan: you sir, are The Plashing Vole's Hero of the Week.

Trapped in a Ballardian wonderland

Quick break for a wander, a pee, a tea and a photo. The architecture here is modelled on the Airport ideal: glossy surfaces, bland artwork and a definite sense of First Class: the most stylishly bland space is For MBA Students ONLY! So much for the democratisation of ideas… wouldn't want the high-fee capitalists having their ears contaminated by destabilising notions of the kind we're dealing with. It's kind of fun subverting hegemony from within one of its bastions (a Business School in A Rival Institution - we wish).

Shocked to discover that Ireland are losing the rugby to South Africa 6-10, but it's early days. Stoke are drawing against Blackburn, but that's OK. We'll lead until the 85th minute, ship and equalizer, then the ref will find 8 minutes extra time, during which Rovers will bundle in an ugly goal.

What a very exciting evening too!

Last night, Emma and I met at the German Market. While she scowled at my carnivorous ways, I purchased lots of meat products and some lebkuchen. We drank delicious mulled wine (especially the blueberry one) and fine schwarzbier, chatted to a stunningly self-centred young lady who thought that a recession is the perfect time to set up a company offering personal shopping and concierge services to footballers' wives and yummy mummys. She didn't intend to do any of the work, you understand - apparently the profits will be so huge that she can move to New Zealand and spend her time skiing while employees actually run the business. I shouldn't mock though - she has a degree in Forensic Science and her friend has one in Business Studies so she's sorted and I'm a cynical old lefty.

Then back to The Dark Place, where we met colleagues for a drink. This turned into a bit of a disaster - we ended up looking after and escorting home a distressed young lady who was clearly having a terrible time generally, and who had been abandoned by her boyfriend and friends: they denied knowing her as they left, though the bar staff told me a different story. Aren't people bastards? I was so emotionally overcome that I required pints of something called 'beer' to calm down again.

You've got Mail

If you read Metro or one of the other rightwing papers (which ones aren't, these days?), all you'll have seen about the upcoming potential postal strike is that posties are lazy bastards who constantly skive and con their managers.

Anita the Lurker has kindly sent me this article from the London Review of Books (very good - subscribe today) which explains in some detail how the Mail is being made to look inefficient and obsolete, and how managerial culture is destroying this iconic lifeline. Funnily enough, posties are being treated in the same way we academics are - as blockages to some imaginary 'income stream' or 'repositioning' or whatever buzzword's current.

This is not a reusable learning object

I've just been to my union's negotiating committee (and landed yet another job…). We're facing bad practice, management incompetence and a refusal to accept responsibility. Instead, 250 jobs are being cut, courses are being culled, modules withdrawn and class sizes increasing.

Thankfully, the proles are stirring. We're going to campaign hard, and campaign cleverly. It's an obvious case. Just like the banking crisis has led to public services suffering to pay for saving capitalism (Naomi Klein predicted all this in The Shock Doctrine, which Cameron et al. seem to have taken as a user's guide to economics), the university is going to punish the workers for its own failures and we're not going to take it. Redundancy will overload those who stay, it will lead to even bigger classes, more marking, less contact time for students, less time for the intellectual exchanges that constitute education (management think it's all about marks) and ultimately, less enlightenment. How will I be able to argue the toss with a student on the interpretation of a line of poetry, or the implications for the public sphere of BBC cuts, for instance, if there are 45 other people in seminar group all wanting their say? How will I learn names, find time to chat, sort out problems, plan classes, do research and get to know individual students?

I know that these concerns are embarrassingly old-fashioned, non-customer-oriented, not business-focussed, but they are the kind of things about which real teachers actually give a damn. We're not automatons delivering packaged material - that's not education. Having meaningful relationships with individual, contrary, contradictory, demanding students constitutes real education and folks, it's messy, untidy, expensive, sometimes not measurable and brilliant. Grab it while it lasts… the suits and their anti-pedagogical pets are on the warpath.

(Reusable learning objects are apparently things like online presentations, much beloved of our employers because then they can divorce teaching from the scruffy contrarians who actually know about stuff. Y'know, experts. Instead, some poor kid can be paid minimum wage to turn on the projector and leave the students to it, or students can sit at home and be fooled into thinking that education is just memorising bullet points).

Some dreadful political puns

I haven't moaned about politicians for a few days. Why is Hazel Blears still employed, even though non-Ministers have been suspended from the Party for doing the same thing? Perhaps because he'd have to sack several other ministers too, and perhaps because she's vindictive enough to devote the rest of her career to undermining the Labour Party.

Have you noticed that the more rightwing the MPs are, the more corrupt they are? Rob Marris (though by my standards he's quite rightwing): innocent. Paul Flynn: innocent. Dennis Skinner: innocent. Hazel Blears, Geoff Hoon, Tories who charged us for 'duck islands' and moat cleaning: GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY.

There's a simple ideological reason for this. Being rightwing means privileging individualism. The appeal of the Tories and of New Labour is this: do whatever you can to get ahead, and we'll reward you. Everybody else is a loser. So naturally, corner-cutting and fraud is admirable under this system.

Socialism said: there's plenty to go round, so if we work together and look after each other, all our lives will improve.

So socialists don't steal from the citizens and capitalists do.

Pun time. The full details of MPs expenses aren't out yet. Did Bill Cash in? What did Ken Purchase? Did David Borrow? Did Liam Fox his constituents? Is Joan Humble? Were Greg Hands in the till? Does Sir Michael Lord it over us? Is Paddy Tipping a racist sport? When it came to negotiating with the fees office, did Jon Trickett? If so, did Derek Twigg? Was there a Steve Webb of deceit? Finally, was Tony Wright? Feel free to add more…

Genuine art masterpieces

If you're stuck for presents for that difficult person who has everything, how about a photographic print on canvas of a daytime TV presenter. I kid you not, they're on Amazon and the customer base is, well, sarcastic, judging by the brilliant comments. (Hat tip to Phil).

How capitalism works pt. 324

Dell Computers have decided to pull out of Ireland and build their PCs in Poland. Fair enough, you might think. They've taken an economic decision to relocate in a cheaper country. 

Except that the Irish government subsidised these carpetbaggers, and got suckered into basing their economy on bigger and bigger payouts for mobile industries who could then push off to an even cheaper country at the drop of a massive cheque. Dell, according to Slugger, have accepted a Polish offer of €52 million to leave Ireland in the lurch. Off goes another multinational, having been paid to open up, forgiven the taxes due by local companies… The Poles know that Dell won't stay once they actually have to invest in the factory - no doubt they'll end up in Burkina Faso, Somalia or Haiti if they can find a skilled workforce which will work for food. The Irish government knew the score too - but considered that a good photo-op and headlines about major corporations coming to Ireland more than made up politically for the hit to the exchequer. 

What really annoys me is that Ireland and Poland are seriously pro-capitalist states, doing business with dyed-in-the-wool capitalist companies, but they're all happy to operate socialist economies with regards to corporate entities at the same time as rejecting socialist solutions for the actual citizens.