The Political Significance of The Beatles

 

What was the political meaning of the Beatles? I realise this is a rather dilatory question to ask of a band that broke up in 1970. But fascination with them endures and the real answer to this question, is, in my opinion, utterly different from the ones that are usually put forward.

On the surface, the political significance of the Beatles is exactly that, superficial. The company they established, Apple, did not embody, in Paul McCartney’s description, “Western communism”, whatever that was supposed to mean. John Lennon’s utopian, anti-materialist song ‘Imagine’ undoubtedly had, and still has, influence but personally I can’t take seriously someone wondering if I’m able to “imagine no possessions” while playing a grand piano in his stately home (and employing a gardener, a cook, and an art advisor).

As political role models, the Beatles were terrible. They moaned about paying too much tax – which Lennon claimed made them “anti-establishment” – and expected the minions they employed to indulge their every wish. In 1969, their press officer, Derek Taylor, was prompted to wonder why on earth he worked for them:

Whatever the motivation the effect is slavery.  Whatever the Beatles ask is done. I mean, whatever the Beatles ask is tried. A poached egg on the Underground on the Bakerloo Line between Trafalgar Square and Charing Cross? Yes, Paul. A sock full of elephant shit on Otterspool Promenade? Give me ten minutes, Ringo. Two Turkish dwarfs dancing the Charleston on a sideboard? Male or female John? Pubic hair from Sonny Liston? It’s early closing, George (gulp), but give me until noon tomorrow. The only gig I would do after this is the Queen. Their staff are terrified of them, and not without reason. They have fired more people than any comparable employer unit in the world. They make Lord Beaverbrook* look like Jesus.

But despite the egotism, they managed, in their later years, to produce the most innovative, experimental and influential music in pop history, while remaining – to quote a phrase – more popular than Jesus. In April 1966, for example, they recorded this and in the same month this ‘song’. In a two month period spanning December 1966 and January 1967, they produced Strawberry Fields Forever and A Day in the Life, which no-one, to this day, has come close to imitating. In the summer of 1967, when a normal band would have been promoting their last ground-breaking album, released a few months before, they took a completely different tack. The following year, the sound changed again and again from month to month. In 1969, they could still knock out classic pop songs while increasing disliking each other. And they probably invented heavy metal, either in 1965 or 1968.

In 1967, they were warned by the press that the Maharishi, the Indian meditation teacher under whose spell they were falling, was “commercial”. To which, Lennon replied, “Well, that’s fine because we’re the most commercial band in the world”, or something like that.

And, in terms of sales and merchandise, they certainly were. But judged by the standard of our current definition of “commercial” – following established trends, playing it safe for maximum sales, not upsetting anyone – the Beatles were anything but.  That determination to innovate, to go against the grain, to not give a damn what anyone else thought – while successfully remaining  at least as popular as during Beatlemania in the early sixties  – is what makes the Beatles historically interesting and politically significant. Their last album, Abbey Road, sold more copies in America than Sgt Pepper which, in turn, sold vastly more copies than the early Beatlemania LPs.

Barry Miles, a friend of the band who, as owner of the Indica bookshop in London introduced them to underground books and trends, said something perceptive about them a few years back. “The interesting thing,” he noted, “is that the Beatles were not only the world’s most commercial band but, at that point, [1966] they were also the world’s most experimental band, which was very unusual”.

“Brian Epstein [their manager] was concerned that they were going too far ahead of their fanbase,” he added. “But they were always very sensible, they wanted to bring the fans along with them. They did want to become some wild, avant-garde band that only 150 people had heard of.”

Back in 2009, the late cultural theorist Mark Fisher spoke about the “cult of minimal variation” – the pervasive compulsion to produce cultural products that are almost indistinguishable from those already successful. But, said Fisher, this ignores what people instinctively desire which is “the strange, the unexpected, the weird”.

“These can only be supplied,” he went on, “by artists and media professionals who are prepared to give people something different from that which already satisfies them; by those, that is to say, prepared to take a certain kind of risk.”

This is precisely what the Beatles, devoted members of the cult of maximum variation, were determined to do, even when it was met with incomprehension or hostility.

To this day, some Beatles fans complain that eight minutes of the White Album is taken up with ‘Revolution No 9’, a non-song consisting of noises and snatches of conversations aimed to paint in sound, in Lennon’s words, “a picture of revolution”.

Whether he succeeded or not (he later thought it was “anti-revolution”), Revolution No 9 became, in author Ian Macdonald’s description, “the world’s most widely distributed avant-garde artefact”. The track was “one of the most striking instances of the communicative power of pop”. Rather than remaining “the preserve of the modernist intelligentsia, Lennon’s sortie into sonic chance was packaged for a mainstream audience which had never heard of its progenitors, let alone been confronted by their work.”

The point is not whether the Beatles experimental work was good or bad (half a century on, I think the jury’s decided that most of it, maybe not ‘Revolution No 9’, was extremely good) but that, in stark contrast to today, they were able to produce it whilst remaining wildly popular. What the Beatles had, in fact, was an out of control popularity, which is why powerful people (like Nixon’s future Vice President Spiro Agnew or the anti-communist John Birch Society) were always trying to ban their songs, often for exceedingly dumb reasons.

Music aside, the Beatles’ influence – popularising meditation, promoting LSD or inspiring Charles Manson – was questionable but it certainly existed as a force and they knew it did. This is why Lennon spent the Beatles’ dying days planting acorns and singing about peace while sitting in bed – because he knew the media would report whatever he did because of who he was.

And there is something inherently subversive about uncontrollable popularity, whether it is used wisely or not. This is while the elites that have power within western societies are fixated on controlling popular opinion. They’ve realised there’s no need to ban radical manifestoes, uncomfortable facts, or avant-garde expression but just make sure that only fringe minorities are exposed to them. Usually this works quite efficiently.

But when elites lose control of the narrative most people consume, that’s when they get desperate. The ‘shock’ 2017 General Election campaign – in which the left-wing, anti-imperialist Jeremy Corbyn got 41% of the vote in reactionary old England – happened in large part because the broadcast media were suddenly legally obliged to report what the socialist Labour party was actually saying, rather than just amplifying smears from the billionaire-owned right-wing (and liberal) press. Everything that has happened since – the blatant lying, the purges, the establishment arrogation of the liberal media, the mysterious algorithm changes, has been about regaining control.

This multi-fanged operation has undoubtedly been successful, at least temporarily. But the genocide in Gaza has revealed that controlling the narrative is more difficult to sustain in era when people have alternatives to legacy media at their fingertips. And the desire to control popular reaction is leading to outright repression, even in esteemed liberal democracies. Whether this impulse will be ratcheted up is a distinct possibility. The Hague Invasion Act, authorising the US President to invade the Netherlands should the International Criminal Court put any of its citizens on trial was passed in 2002 under George Bush but has now been extended to Israel.

Whether faced with overt authoritarianism or the manipulation of opinion (or, as is likely, a combination of the two), the only ‘cure’ is reform of the media to ensure that diverse opinions reach the mass of people: ‘cure’ in the sense that the patient may die in a nuclear conflagration, or endure the slow death of global warming, if this course is not followed. But because of what it will lead to, it will be fought tooth and nail.

In this future conflict, what the Beatles said politically or explicitly represented is really not interesting at all. It’s a total blind alley. What is interesting is that they were able to experiment and reach hundreds of millions of people directly while remaining beyond the grasp of their detractors and conservatives of all stripes. That is the most precious form of power of all.

 

*Beaverbrook (Max Aitken), a sort of proto-Rupert Murdoch, was the owner of the Daily Express (in addition to being a government minister in Britain in the two world wars) and was famous for sacking journalists whose output was not to his satisfaction.

Why does British society generate so much mental illness?

If a list were to be made of the recent British government policies responsible for inflicting the greatest suffering on the domestic population, the Work Capability Assessment (WCA) would surely emerge as undisputed table-topper. The tick-box test, introduced by the last Labour government in 2008, to determine whether people are ‘fit for work’ and thus eligible for benefit or not, has spread an atmosphere of dread among the sick and disabled people subjected to it.

The WCA has generated a morbid parade of destroyed lives and the disappearance of hundreds of  thousands of people, estimated to be 30% of those found’ fit for work’, into the netherworld of not working, or claiming any benefits. Destitution, in plain language.

One group, though, have proved particularly vulnerable – those with mental health problems. Around half of those subject to a WCA have a mental health condition. Last month, researchers linked the WCA, or simply the threat of it, to 590 suicides and more than 700,000 anti-depressant prescriptions. Psychiatrists have blamed the test for causing relapses in patients with severe mental health problems. Even ‘passing’ a WCA and being declared ‘unfit for work’ doesn’t stop people being hounded. There has been 668% rise in the last three years in Employment and Support Allowance claimants (i.e. those considered too ill to work) with a mental health condition being sanctioned.

But quietly unnoticed is that the WCA is not working even under its own brutal terms. The test was an example of ‘austerity, before austerity’. In the 2006 green paper on welfare reform, then work and pensions secretary, John Hutton, promised the WCA would save taxpayers up to £7 billion a year. Despite seven years of culling and sanctioning, this hasn’t materialised. The Office of Budget Responsibility estimates that spending on incapacity benefits will rise from £13.4 billion in 2013/14 to £14.5 billion in 2018/19. Overall, ‘welfare’ spending is also set to increase, says the OBR.

Mental illness epidemic

But amid a benefits systems that seems to be doing its level best to make mental health problems worse rather than better, we need to ask a simple, though easily overlooked question – why is this society, British society, generating so much mental illness in the first place?

Because as fast as the DWP can declare people fit for work or sanction them, new claims are made. According to the OECD, 40% of new disability benefit claims in Britain are because of mental health problems, the highest proportion among all 34 member countries. The latest figures indicate that 48% of Employment and Support Allowance claims are for ‘behavioural and mental disorders’.

It is a question our political rulers are oblivious to. The Conservatives respond to the mental illness epidemic by mooting forced treatment. The opposition parties espouse a more compassionate approach but settle on superficial ‘talking cures’ such as cognitive behavioural therapy. And they still cling to the Work Capability Assessment*, which has caused so much suffering and distress. In the case of the Liberal Democrats and non-Corbyn Labour, they also still cling to austerity.

Austerity and social security cuts are a production line for the very mental health problems the political class claims it wants to reduce. The Centre for Welfare Reform has blamed policies such as the bedroom tax for ‘savaging’ people’s mental health. The group ‘Psychologists Against Austerity’ has identified ‘austerity ailments’, such as humiliation, insecurity and powerlessness; all experiences that “lead to mental distress”.

Even the staid OECD have concluded you have to look deeper in order to stem the torrent of mental illness. According to the OECD’s Shruti Singh, ‘job strain’, bad line managers and long hours’ are all “detrimental to workers’ mental health”.

But far from being alleviated, ‘job strain’ is being intensified. In 2014, researchers from Cambridge University found zero hour contracts were just the ‘tip of the iceberg’ of flexible employment practices causing widespread anxiety, stress and ‘depressed mental states’.

Extreme part-time contracts, where workers must work overtime to survive, ‘flexi-contracts’ which don’t provide sufficient hours to make a living, and key-time contracts where employees are given limited core hours and forced to state additional hours they can work, are inflicting suffering on ‘huge numbers’ of workers, researchers from the university’s department of sociology said.

These are “all experienced as a form of job insecurity that causes untold stress for thousands of employees and their families,” they concluded.

Evidence is conclusive that job insecurity and lack of job control is lethal to both physical and mental health. Research featured in the 2009 book The Spirit Level that tracked Whitehall civil servants of varying grades demonstrated how low job status was related to heart disease, cancer, gastrointestinal disease as well as depression, suicide and sickness absence from work.

Mental distress is socially caused

It is here that a deliberate blindness on the part of ruling elites needs to be exploited. As the writer Mark Fisher has argued, the dominant way of thinking simply cannot concede the social causation of mental illness. Debate is strictly limited to a fight between ‘hawks’ who want to crack down on the financial burden of the psychologically distressed claiming state benefits and ‘doves’ who wish to reduce stigma and increase access to alleged therapies such as CBT. The extreme prevalence of mental illness is assumed to be an unfortunate accident of individual brain chemistry and genetics.

But curiosity in this regard can be subversive. We need to vastly expand our horizon of what engenders mental health and the factors that lead to its opposite. A genuine attempt to reduce mental health problems needs to start by fundamentally de-stressing the workplace, enhancing the condition and stability of housing and removing the ever-present dread of income being snatched away.

This is just a start. Successfully combating mental ill-health is dependent on creating a less unequal, more socially just and less stressful society. Radical political changes such as worker self-directed enterprises, a basic income and a huge expansion of social housing, need to come to the fore. Coincidentally, these are precisely the political directions we should be going in anyway.

In the 1950s, the famous German psychoanalyst, Erich Fromm, advocated concentrating our energies on creating a ‘sane society’. It is an aspiration that needs reviving.

*The Work Capability Assessment is a classic example of the extremism of the political centre. The WCA was created by the Labour party in 2008, and, in fact, the proportion of people left destitute after being found ‘fit for work’ following an assessment was higher under Labour - 55% - than under the subsequent Conservative/Lib Dem coalition, when it was estimated to stand at 30%. The Conservatives, upon assuming power in 2010, embraced the WCA with gusto and extended it to existing Incapacity Benefit claimants. Under Labour it was had merely been used on new claimants but had Labour won the 2010 election, they, too, would have extended it in the same fashion. The Liberal Democrats, as dutiful coalition partners, supported the WCA.

These actions were all undertaken by political parties scrambling to be regarded as centrist. Labour, under Blair and Brown, coveted the fabled ‘centre ground’ of politics. George Osborne claimed in October that the Conservatives had created a ‘new centre ground’. The Lib Dems, have always presented themselves as neither Left nor Right, but centrist.

Still, none of the main political parties have come out against the WCA. The Conservatives swear by it, the Lib Dems promised a review at this year’s general election, and Labour, under Corbyn, has so far only committed itself to a ‘complete overhaul’, not abolition. Likewise the SNP went into the last election pledging an overhaul of the WCA. Although a working group established by the Scottish government did recommend the WCA be scrapped in an independent Scotland.

The only parties firmly committed to abolishing the WCA are outside the mainstream – the Greens, and even UKIP, yes them, amazingly enough.

You are set free, there are no conditions

Some thoughts on Basic Income

 I wanted to look more deeply into the idea of a basic income because, although the idea of giving everyone an income unconditionally has broken into public consciousness in recent months, the concept is still swathed in uncertainty, speculation and myth. So in hopes of casting more illumination:

Why is a basic income needed now?

The case for a basic income can, I think, be distilled into five elements. That it will give security to people for whom steady, secure employment is an unreachable aspiration; that it will enhance individual freedom; that it will act as a counter-weight to the all-pervasive influence of the market on society; that it will enable a more responsible attitude to the environment to become a reality. And because of galloping technological change rendering human labour redundant, that it is, in any case, a practical necessity.

Professor Guy Standing, one of the advocates of a basic income, argues that the global labour market has quadrupled in size since the 1980s. The result has been a decline in real wages. A primary victim of this development has been, what Standing terms, the ‘precariat’. This is a class comprising millions of people for whom insecure, temporary, short-term or self, employment has become the norm. They possess nothing that can be likened to a career and merely exist to serve the interests of employers – to whom they are simply disposable labour costs. This ‘precariat’ class is mushrooming in Britain, at present, where under-employment is double its pre-recession level, 38% of the workforce is part-time and 15% self-employed. “We need a new system of income distribution,” says Standing, “in which people have a right to basic security to exist as a human being in modern society.”

Here is a Belgian documentary about basic income:

The one smirking, the other timid

Basic income has been described as “freedom income” and I believe one of its effects would be to finally bring an end to the condition of ‘wage slavery’. This term, which was widely used by the Left in the 19th and early 20^th centuries, connotes the dependence of most people on their usefulness to employers. They have to sell themselves in some way. If they cannot, they are denied the means to exist. With the decline of the welfare state in the UK, and the rise of food banks, ‘wage slavery’ has become a palpable reality for millions.

Basic income will abolish this dependence. Employers and potential employees will encounter each other as equals. The fundamental deception of which Karl Marx famously spoke, of treating people as commodities but leaving them powerless to negotiate their full worth when they negotiate their sale as commodities in the labour market, will cease. Enno Schmidt, one of the organisers of the Swiss group Generation Basic Income, says a basic income gives people the power to ‘say no to a bad deal’. With a level of unconditional income in place, for the first time in history, he says, a genuine free market situation will exist between prospective employees and employers. This change in the balance of power will likely give a spurt to the automation of poorly paid, repetitive jobs, an area of the economy that is currently the kernel of economic ‘recovery’ in the UK and elsewhere.

The society of the market

 But although it will give power to the commodity known as ‘labour’ (people, in other words), basic income also has the potential to diminish the reach of market relations into society. It is becoming apparent to quite mainstream thinkers, such as Michael Sandel for instance, that we don’t just live in a market economy, but, increasingly a market society. That such an insight was originally made by leftist thinkers, like Murray Bookchin in the 1970s, does not negate the fact that the process of ‘marketisation’ is speeding up.

This is evident from a cursory look at what has happened to housing, healthcare, education and public services in the last two decades or so.  Basic income cannot, of itself, impede these developments, but it can, in my opinion, generate an opposing force. With the decline of the welfare state, people’s time, if they are not in full-time employment, is dominated by the need to find new ways of making money. Witness the astonishing growth of self-employment in the UK, for which there is no corresponding demand for self-employed services. A basic income, if set at a reasonable level, can liberate people to pursue activities that generate little or no profit, and, most significantly, for which profit is not the overriding intent. “Imagine the creativity, innovation and enterprise that would be unleashed if every citizen were guaranteed a living,” says Australian union organiser, Godfrey Moase. “Social enterprises, cooperatives and small businesses could be started without participants worrying where the next pay cheque would come from. Artists and musicians could focus on their work. More of us would be freed to volunteer our time for the public good.”

As the English social critic, Mark Fisher, has noted, the domination of free market capitalism, the putative incubator of risk and change, has resulted in its mirror opposite – cultural stagnation and conformity. The emotions thus generated, he writes, do not inspire “entrepreneurial leaps” but “the turning out of products that very closely resemble those that are already successful.” Maybe a basic income, if it frees people from the compulsion to seek immediate financial reward, can reinvent the society of risk, and enable ‘cultural leaps’.

The free time potentially enabled by a basic income would also make democratic self-management a realisable option for the first time in history. The hurried, time-pressed society in which we live makes rule by elites, private and public, all but a certainty. But with less time swallowed by work, democratic rule through citizen assemblies, participatory budgeting, worker self-directed enterprises and other forms of direct democracy, becomes possible.

Environmental blackmail

A basic income, believes Enno Schmidt, means that no-one can be “blackmailed with their existence” to do work they don’t wish to do. This ‘situational logic’ is, currently, an unerring feature of capitalism and leads to the paradoxical situation of the economic system producing effects, such as global warming, which few people actually desire but are nonetheless consequences of its successful functioning, an outcome that is also desired by most people. Such tyranny of immediate self-interest seems an inescapable bind which traps the vast majority of people. But a basic income, if set at a high enough level, could offer a way out.

Naomi Klein, in her climate change book, This Changes Everything, laments “the paucity of good choices” that lead Louisiana fishermen to reluctantly take work from BP cleaning up the same Deepwater Horizon oil spill that destroyed their livelihoods. Indigenous communities, she writes, who own the land coveted by mining and oil companies, face a similar choice between jobs and training in the short-term and the inevitable long-term come-back represented by the effects of climate change. Basic income could render this job blackmail impotent. 

We, Robot

But looming over these reasons why a basic income is desirable, is another urgent justification. That it is becoming a necessity as human labour is rapidly superseded by technology. According to two Oxford university economists, 47% of current employment might disappear in the next two decades because of automation. The common reaction to this is that massive technological advances have happened in the past and the jobs they eviscerated were replaced by different kinds of paid employment. But this new industrial revolution may take, in labour terms, far more than it gives. 

According to the writer John Lanchester, it isn’t just factory jobs around the world that are going to disappear because of automation. White-collar jobs, too, will vanish. “We are used to the thought that the kind of work done by assembly-line workers in a factory will be automated,” he writes. We’re less used to the thought that the kinds of work done by clerks, or lawyers, or financial analysts, or journalists, or librarians, can be automated. The fact is that it can, and will be, and in many cases already is.”

We are haunted by “the spectre of uselessness.” If ‘the robots eat all the jobs’, as Lanchester puts it, the effect in this capitalist society will be an almighty increase in profits accompanied by a haemorrhaging of purchasing power. Aside from providing material support to millions of ‘superfluous’ people, basic income may be the only way to keep consumption stable in this new world.

But, nonetheless, a basic income is rejected by many on the Left as an evasion of the real problem.

Why is a Basic Income opposed by large parts of the Left?

The reason is that the problems identified by advocates of a basic income – inequality, insecurity, poverty and the effects of computerisation – are considered to be effects of a particular kind of capitalism, namely globalisation, or capitalism itself. And they cannot be vanquished by merely bolting on to the economic system a radical new way of redistributing income.

Labour left commentator, Owen Jones, believes political changes since the 1980s in the UK have created an ‘hourglass’ economy, comprising well-paid professional jobs at the top and poorly paid insecure jobs at the bottom. The correct response, therefore, is to create secure middle income jobs, through for example, building council houses, introducing a living wage and implementing what has become known as the ‘Green New Deal’. This involves large investments in renewable energy and insulating homes. A basic income is not needed.

The problem with this “eco-Keynesianism” is that, though the spurt it provides to new secure jobs and stable consumption may be real, it is a one-off injection whose benefits will likely slowly evaporate. Basic income, by contrast, is a permanent solution.

The Piketty nightmare

But there is another leftist objection to a basic income that, I believe, has real merit. This criticism is that a basic income merely deals with the effects of capitalism, without trying to tackle the underlying causes. That is, basic income tries to abolish exploitation, and the fundamental inequality of the relationship between prospective employer and employee, but turns its head away from the forms of ownership that create this inequality.

And left untouched, these forms of ownership, in the context of rapid technological change and the destruction of white collar as well as manual jobs, will only further concentrate great wealth at the top of society. This is an amplified Thomas Piketty nightmare in which income from capital (based on ownership) spirals upwards, while income from labour (based on working) declines. Inequality will race ahead, a phenomenon that can, theoretically, be redressed by the radical redistribution of a basic income. But the only reason for accepting the great financial burden represented by basic income, on the part of elites, is fear of consequences of not doing so. At present, however, the dominant emotion detectable among the higher echelons of society is not fear, but supreme confidence.

In this sense, basic income, should it happen, is much like the compromise of post-war social democracy. Social democracy accepted leaving the amassing and allocation of profit alone, in return for the concessions of full employment, strong trade unions and some public ownership. Basic income can be said to make much the same kind of deal, except the concession demanded is unconditional material support. But social democracy, though victorious for three post-war decades, was eventually fatally undermined by its failure to challenge forms of ownership.

So I can see that, on its own, a basic income is not enough and will probably not succeed. But an unconditional income, regardless of how production is organised or ownership composed, is desirable in itself, simply because it is the greatest single way I can think of to increase individual freedom. And if the Left is not about increasing individual freedom, then what it is for?

In the second part of this analysis, I want to examine who a basic income is for. If it is just for the so-called ‘precariat’, it is doomed.

And here is part three