May 27th, 2010
According to Jonathan McCalmont , Dead Space is The Shock Doctrine Gone Interplanetary:
The French intellectual and artist Jean Cocteau once said that for some, style is a simple way of saying complicated things. EA Redwood Shores’ Dead Space (2008) is a game that proves how much can be said with minute shifts of emphasis for while the game is ostensibly yet another title all about collecting money and killing monsters, Dead Space is a fiercely left wing game whose narrative constitutes a vicious critique of neoliberalism and the monetarist policies of Milton Friedman and the Chicago Boys. It is a game about the brutal economic dismemberment of developing economies in the name of Free Trade and how, finally, the world is starting to realise that you do not cure poverty with Shock Therapy as that only makes things worse. Much worse.
[...]
Indeed, the necromorphs are not alien interlopers into a natural process, but products of that process itself. This is an important distinction, as it chimes so well with the way in which Friedman talks about the free market. Indeed, one of the more intriguing tactics used during the rise of neoliberalism as a political doctrine is the idea of the free market being in some way natural, like a default setting. If this is true, then it follows that any intervention by the state in the market is a ‘distortion’ of the market and ‘unnatural’, but this is mere political rhetoric… the market is a human institution and, as such, it has no existence beyond that granted it by humans. Living in a state of bare-knuckle free market capitalism is no more natural than living in a Stalinist planned economy… and even if it was, it would not be clear what kind of moral or political authority ‘natural’ carries. It is not ‘natural’ to have a special room to defecate in, but it does not follow that we should all let it drop out the back like cart horses. Dead Space’s suggestion that the necromorphs’ presence is a result of the planet cracking suggests that the human costs of the market must be taken into account and not merely repressed with force. Indeed, the game’s final act sees Isaac Clarke desperately trying to mend fences with the hive mind by returning the marker to the planet. This also chimes intriguingly with the history of neoliberal thought…
You know, I think Jonathan might hve been slightly tongue in cheek here…
Categories: Art & Criticism, socialism
May 26th, 2010
So, to recap: last Saturday, at the end of the Right to Work Conference, coincidently held close to where British Airways was “negotiating” with the unions, several hundred or so people went from the conference to the negotiations to show their support for the airline workers and ended up shouting at BA boss Willy Walsh, with the union leaders looking on in annoyance, while . Cue much pearl clutching from Andy Newman and co, convienced that this would finally be the end of the SWP (joy!) but also mean the ultimate failure of the negotiations, union militacy in general, the socialist project and world revolution (oh noes!).
The whole controversy is remarkably silly, but to be expected from people for whom that bit from Life of Brian about the Judean People Front isn’t satire, but an instruction manual..
Back in the real world it’s clear this stunt didn’t matter much one way or another. It didn’t “disrupt” the negotiations as overblown rhetoeric had it immediately afterwards, but neither did it achieve anything else, other than provide a show of moral support that might have been better expressed differently. I do worry about the attitude of people who think a stunt like this is inherently wrong and counterproductive, or who worry too much about how “the rightwing media” or “the bosses” will spin this, or who get outraged at the “disrespect” shown to union bosses. It reminds me of those liberals who back in 2002/2003 were too good to join antiwar protests organised by giant puppet making hippies.
Categories: Activism, British left, Unions
Tags: Andy Newman, British Airways, SWP, Willy Wash
November 3rd, 2009
Most white collar workers are useless:
I’ve been fond of saying for a while now that one of our dirty economic secrets is how little actual work is done by the fairly well-paid, so-called white collar worker, myself included. IOZ talks about middle management, that layer of general ineptitude and uselessness one encounters virtually everywhere. But in my experience, large swaths of office workers have relatively little to do (whereas others, I am well aware, work very long hours indeed). Of course, this is because there is relatively little that really needs to be done. The jobs that most of us have are utterly unnecessary. But we have to be kept working, or at work, don’t we? Heaven forbid we have time to ourselves, without need to worry that someone is looking, and without need to worry that we’ll starve. Meanwhile, that work that is necessary (which is generally not found in an office) could easily be spread around, so that no one would be over-worked or under-compensated.
But surely office work must be necessary, as every civilisation seems to generate so much of it…
More to the point, that is one of the key points of socialism, isn’t it? The idea that “to each according to their needs, from each according to their abilities”, to make a honest, fair division of labour benefiting everybody by sharing the fruits of our shared labour while nobody has to be over or underworked. In our current capitalist society surplus labour is of course turned into profit:
More generally – Tronti and the workerists argued – capitalist development is parasitic on workers’ intelligence and creativity, which they use in the refusal of work. You get the job done with half an hour to spare and sneak off for a fag; your employer cuts your working day by half an hour and cuts your pay accordingly. Result: profit. You do eight hours’ work in six hours; your employer increases your workload by 33%. Result: profit.
This looks to us like the normal, expected state of affairs because we’ve grown with it, never seeing the complexity of the system that makes this possible, let alone any alternative to it. Yet we did not always live this way, nor do we need to continue to do so.
Categories: Life under Capitalism, socialism
October 31st, 2009
Dave’s Part on an all too common occurrence, as three socialist parties will stand in the Glasgow North East by-election:
The picture was complicated in 2005, as former Labour MP Michael Martin sought election as Speaker of the House of Commons. In accordance with convention, the ballot paper did not describe him as Labour, and neither the Tories nor the Lib Dems ran against him.
To general astonishment, the Socialist Labour Party secured 14.2%, an all-time high for the Scargillites, almost certainly thanks to confusion on the part of the electorate. The SSP tally came to an additional 4.9%.
Nothing like this is expected to happen a week next Thursday. But what is disappointing is that of the 13 nominations confirmed today, three are from the far left. This time around, the SLP and SSP are joined by Tommy Sheridan on the Solidarity ticket.
[...]
But nothing can excuse the wilful display of light-mindedness the division flags up in neon lights to potentially sympathetic punters, just months ahead of a general election. Credible this is not.
The far left, both sides of the border, should remember that until it starts taking itself seriously, there is no reason why anyone else should do so.
That there will be three socialist parties with broadly the same ideology and policies standing in this by-election is silly, but it’s not the cause, nor even a sympton, of the socialist left’s irrelevance in UK politics. In fact, it’s the obsession with unity that shows how much the left has declined in the past three decades. Healthy parties do not bother with alliances and bpopular fronts; they rely on their own strengths. And as each of the various initiatives undertaken in the last ten years — Socialist Alliance, Respect, the Campaign for a New Workers Party etc — they don’t work: little electorial succes, no real gain in membership or activists and infighting soon ruining all of them. The most succesful of these projects is the SSP, which did go from an electorial alliance to being a real party, only to be nobbed by the whole Tommy Sheridan affair.
The differences on the left, between social democrats and socialists, socialists and communists, communists and trotskyists have alwas been there but didn’t matter when the left was healthy. If the left makes a turnaround it won’t be through desperate unity projects, but through hard slog and by confronting the realities of 21st century Britain. Some group or party will get it right, go their own way and become “the next Labour party” — maybe even the Labour party itself.
Categories: British left
September 15th, 2009
So I was wondering why the comment I left on Socialist Unity, linking to my post about the Bengali famine and who was responsible for it, seemed to have disappeared when I looked again on Sunday, but other matters interfered. It wasn’t until tonight that I learned that it hadn’t been an mistake on my part – - a comment left by Andy Newman on Louis Proyect’s blog reveals that I have been banned! Apparantly this ban is due to the “snide and destructive nature of [my] interventions” and has nothing to do with the comment I left, but rather with my “general impact on debate on the blog” — which is quite a compliment considering how rarely I actually commented there…
If it was true, that is. Because a Google search on my name at the Socialist Unity site reveals that my comment was posted and only removed afterwards, as there are several hits on “Martin Wisse on PERSONAL SLANDER SHOULD HAVE NO PLACE IN DEBATE”, which is the post I commented on…
Now I’m not going to cry censorship or something stupid like that, because it is Andy’s blog and he can do what he wants with it. But it does reveal a deep seated insecurity that you would ban somebody over a factual disagreement, then tell fibs about it when caught.
Categories: British left
Tags: Andy Newham, Socialist Unity
September 12th, 2009
So Andy “Socialist Unity” Newham and Louis “Unrepentant Marxist” Proyect have gotten in an online cat fight, after Louis objected to what he saw as Andy’s glorification of Winston Churchill. In Louis’ view, and I’m inclined to partially agree with him, Andy praised Churchill too much, gave him too much credit in what circumstances forced him to do and neglected to mention the dark side of how he led the war, as for example with the starvation in India:
When I brought up the topic of 6 to 8 million Bengalis dying because of British wartime policies that caused a famine, I was treated like a skunk at a garden party by Newman and his supporters, including Paul Fauvet, a signer of the Euston Manifesto who wrote: “Louis Proyect’s tactic is to change the subject. He doesn’t want to talk about Churchill’s role in World War II, so he talks about the Bengal famine instead.” Meanwhile, Newman also chastised me for “prioritising the entirely secondary issue of India…”
To which Andy responded angrily. I’m not so much interested in the wider disagreement between the two and whether or not Andy was slandered by Louis or is too defensive, but in the argument Andy makes in the comments about the Bengali famine:
The bengal famine actually killed roughly two million people. There is no mileage to be gained by exagerating.
In Eastern Europe tens of millions of people died due to the war, including widespread famine.
To select one incident of famine being used as a deliberate wespon of murder, remember that in 1944 the Nazis deliberatly blocked all foodstuffs being transported to Western Holland as a form of collective punishment for a rail strike, and this left some 18000 dead.
The Bengal famine was not deliberate, but the result of callous incompetence, and an inaccurate model of economic understanding. Small consolation to the dead, but an important moral and political difference. My own maternal grandmother died of malnutrition in England in 1936, due to similar faulty economic theories. She was 26 years old. That dodn’t mean that the British tory government was as bad as Hitler, although I am sure it seemed like it to my granddad, my mum and her siblings.
Nor is it as straight forward as you make out in your simplistic statement that the rice went to British soldiers.
There was the loss of Burma to Japan, which had been a major rice exporter to Bengal, and then a major cyclone, and an outbreak of a disease in the rice plants. The crop was down, and there were less imports.
The British and Indian armies did buy a lot of rice, but the main cause of the famine seems to have been an unregulated market, so that the percieved drop of rice availability led to hoarding, price rises, putting rice out of reach of the poorest. the hoarding was mainly carried out by more prosperous bengalis.
There was undoubtedly racism and incompetence in the government that led to a slow administrative response; but the famine was arguably more due to faulty economic theory, which made the government slow to intervene to lower prices.
In the post itself Andy had justified his own omittance of the famine by saying that well respected histories of the Second World War, including Angus Calder’s, The People’s War often omit it as well, which doesn’t strike me as a particularly strong argument. That at the time people in England rarely cared or thought much about India is understandable, but more than sixty years onward and in the context of the war as a “People’s War”, things like the Bengali famine need to be mentioned and evaluated, as it shows how some peoples mattered more than others.
Moving on to the meat of Andy’s argument about the famine itself, what struck me was that, while he agrees with Louis on the reality of it (though not its importance, as mentioned), he (unconsciously) seems to want to lessen the crime of it, by coming up with all sorts of reasons as to why it wasn’t a crime as much as an accident. He compares it to deliberate acts of nazi terrorism (though the famine in Holland was due more to the liberation of most of its agrarian parts before the densely population of western Holland than to deliberate starvation), worse tragedies in Eastern Europe and finally argues it was caused by “callous incompetence” and “faulty economic theories” rather than design. These phrases may sound harsh, but their main effect is still to remove responsibility for the famine from those who administered Bengal and those who profited from the panic.
This idea that atrocities like the Bengali famine taking place under (imperialistic) capitalism are unintended side effects for which nobody can be held responsible is a widely used excuse for the crimes of capitalism, which are not tolerated when used to diminish responsibility for similar atrocities taking place under Stalinism, say. The famine in Bengal is like the famines in the Ukraine in the thirties, a foreseeable consequence of deliberate policies introduced without the consent of the people they affected; at best both these atrocities were treated as acceptable costs, at worst these were the intended outcomes of these policies. Let’s not forget that part of English colonial rule in India was the deliberate destruction of the old local, village based support networks that used to prevent or alliviate famine earlier and its replacement by a nation wide free market. It was in this context that the deliberate decision was made by the government to divert part of the harvest to English soldiers, to not interfere in the free market and let speculation continue that priced what was available out of reach of much of the population. The famine was not a tragic accident, but the unavoidable outcome of these decisions and hence as much a crime as if these people had been gunned down instead.
Capitalism as a system has avoided much of the guilt for its crimes because we are trained to only look at the goals the bosses in business and government want to achieve and to see the negative consequences of achieving those goals either as a natural part of the system or at worst as regrettable accidents. What we need to realise instead is that these consequences cannot be decoupled. If a water company is privatised and then raises its prices beyond the reach of the poorest third of the population, this means that deaths due to cholera caused by drinking unsafe water are as much a goal of the company as the increased profits, as the latter is not realisable without the former. Socialists should know this and not make excuses.
Categories: British left, Life under Capitalism, socialism
Tags: Andy Newham, Bengali famine, Louis Proyect
