Animal Balm – The Noble Art of Getting Orwell Wrong

 

 

The trailer for the new Andy Serkis (Lord of the Rings) directed reimagining of Animal Farm has caused apoplexy among the right-wing guardians of George Orwell’s true message. With which there can be absolutely no messing. By order of God himself.

As is well known, Orwell’s novella is a thinly-veiled allegory of the descent of the Russian Revolution into Stalinist totalitarianism and repression. The dream of freedom and equality and liberation from human slavery is gradually turned into a nightmare of repression by the domination of the pigs, led by Napoleon (Stalin). In the end, the animals of Animal Farm are worse off and work harder than animals on neighbouring human-run farms. “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

This is where communism leads so don’t go getting any ideas is what they want you to think Animal Farm is saying.

Serkis’s unpardonable sin is to have ‘updated’ the plot of Animal Farm to make it about capitalism. The film, 15 years in the making apparently but only a trailer has been made public so far, has a tech billionaire plotting to take over Animal Farm and allying with pig dictator Napoleon to do so. Rather than leading a communist enclave, Napoleon now craves to “belong among the ruthless human billionaires”. And there are fart jokes, which last I checked weren’t in the original book.

Cue a predictable torrent of outrage from the sentinels guarding Saint George’s official message. The new Animal Farm is a “complete perversion of the book”, “they literally INVERTED Orwell’s message”, “It guts the entirety of the book’s message,” “Orwell must be spinning in his grave”, etc, etc.

Central Unintelligence Agency

It might be possible to take this avalanche of offence more seriously if the film adaptations of Animal Farm that have already been made, such as the iconic CIA-financed 1954 animation, weren’t also – while, unlike Serkis, outwardly sticking to the original plot – “complete perversions of the book”.

The problem for it seems almost everyone who wants to adapt Animal Farm is the way Orwell ends it *. In the final chapter, neighbouring farmers, including the old established farmer Mr Pilkington, come to visit the now unassailable pigs on Animal Farm. In the analogies of the book, Pilkington represents the West (Britain and France basically) while another farmer, Mr Frederick, who brutally mistreats his animals and leads a failed attempt to destroy Animal Farm (‘The Battle of the Windmill’, the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union) is a stand-in for Hitler.

“Years later” it is Pilkington who comes to Animal Farm clutching an olive branch, lauding the fact that “a long period of mistrust and misunderstanding” was now over. “Between pigs and humans,” he declares, “there was not, and there need not be, any clash of interest whatever …. If you have your lower animals to contend with … we have our lower classes.”

A gratified Napoleon clinks beer mugs with Pilkington, regretting the unfortunate misconception that Animal Farm had been trying to stir up rebellions by other animals on neighbouring farms. He then announces that, henceforth, Animal Farm will revert to its old pre-rebellion name under Mr Jones, the Manor Farm.

There then comes Orwell’s kicker of a last line:

The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and looked from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

Seriously, could this be any more obvious? Orwell is saying that the communists, Stalinists whatever you want to call them, were becoming indistinguishable from the exploitative capitalist countries that surrounded them, a fact celebrated by the latter.

But such an ending was unacceptable to the CIA in 1954. In that adaptation of Animal Farm, “pig delegates come from far and wide” ** to celebrate their supremacy with Napoleon. No human is in sight. This scene so incenses the watching animals that they rise up in revolt, overthrowing their porcine overlords. This was described by one critic as “a wholesale inversion of Orwell’s ending”.

Ironically, in portraying the pig dictator Napoleon’s “desperation to belong among ruthless human billionaires”, the new version of Animal Farm may be truer to Orwell’s actual message than its supposedly more faithful predecessors.

The History Nobody Knows

Because the events and history that Orwell was drawing on in the conclusion of Animal Farm have been deliberately forgotten, and in the current era of compulsory Russophobia are unlikely to be remembered. The uncomfortable kernel of that history is that Stalinism, while internally incredibly repressive (in that sense the story of Animal Farm hit the nail on the head) was externally totally hostile to revolution, desiring nothing more than, in Orwell’s words in Animal Farm, “normal business relations” with its capitalist neighbours.

Orwell was inspired to write Animal Farm (and its equally famous successor Nineteen Eighty-Four) by his experience in fighting on the Republican side against the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War in 1937. There he saw first-hand the role of the Soviet Union (then run by one man, Joseph Stalin) in destroying the anarchist and syndicalist revolution that had gripped Catalonia and other Northern provinces and that Orwell enthusiastically supported.

In the only instance of Stalin’s feared secret police (Napoleon’s dogs) operating in a Western European country, left-wing opponents of the Communist party were hunted down, tortured and disappeared. You can see something of this atmosphere in the Ken Loach film Land and Freedom. Orwell himself feared for his life and had to secretly slip across the border to France.

Contrary to the presumption of Western historians that in the 70 years of its existence the Soviet Union had an unvarying policy of fomenting world socialist revolution, the actions of Stalin and his henchmen in Spain were aimed at reversing a revolution. “The Russians,” as Orwell was later to write, did “all in their power to crush the Spanish revolutionary movements, defend private property and hand power to the middle class as against the working class”.

Why on earth would devout ‘communists’ do that? The answer lies in Stalin’s (prolonged) desire to do nothing to offend the Western capitalist countries in the hope that they would agree to ally with the Soviet Union against the threat of Nazi Germany. This alliance – the so-called ‘Grand Alliance – did eventually come about after the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 but it was a definite last resort for Britain and France who would have much preferred that Hitler leave the West alone and concentrate on the barbarians to the East.

Stalin pursued the same policy in the Grand Alliance – that of appeasing the Right and supporting non-Fascist conservatives in the West – as he did in the Spanish Civil War. For example, in the so-called ‘Salerno Turn’ of March 1944, Italian Communist party leader Palmira Togliatti – under instructions from Moscow – joined with ex-Fascists and monarchists in a unity government and disbanded the Communist resistance. In war-time Britain, the Communist party, in decidedly non-revolutionary fashion, threw its weight behind Conservative party candidates in by-elections.

Animal Farm was written between November 1943 and February 1944, i.e. when this war-time alliance between official Communism and actually existing capitalism was in full bloom. And many people overlook the fact that the book was not merely a barely disguised history of the Russian Revolution and the depredations on Stalinism in the 1930s, it was also a prediction. The last historical event ‘covered’ by Animal Farm was probably the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union – in the book ‘The Battle of the Windmill’. The animals, at immense cost, beat back Mr Frederick’s (Hitler’s) men. Although, at the time Orwell was writing Germany hadn’t yet been expelled from the Soviet Union, it was clearly going to happen.

Thereafter, and especially in the last chapter (‘Years passed…’), the book becomes Orwell’s prediction of what would happen, based on what was already happening in the ‘Grand Alliance’ between Stalin and the West. That capitalism and communism would merge, or to be more specific communism would become indistinguishable from capitalism, losing all traces of its revolutionary origins. Symbolically, in the penultimate page of the book, Napoleon/Stalin announces that Animal Farm will no longer be called Animal Farm – it will revert to the name it had under the ‘old regime’ of Mr Jones.

Of course, as it turned out, none of this actually occurred. Rather than converging, Stalinist communism and Western capitalism faced each other down for decades in the Cold War – ironically a term coined by Orwell himself in 1945. Stalin instituted socialist revolutions from above in Eastern Europe and the Baltic states and the West seriously considered invading the Soviet Union after Nazi Germany was no more.

But two things should be borne in mind. Outside of the confines of its buffer, Soviet communism remained non-revolutionary even, in Orwell description, “counter revolutionary”. Stalin and his successors never reneged on the “percentages agreement” hammered out with Churchill in October 1944, whereby each side was given control over its zone. This is why Italian and French Communists tamely left post-WW2 governing coalitions in their respective countries despite the huge well of support they enjoyed after leading the war-time resistance, and why Britain and America were given carte blanche to fight the Left in Greece (in fact also while the Second World War was still raging). This was their zone and they could do what they wanted in it.

Secondly, Stalin did avidly court the West (notwithstanding the interlude of the Nazi-Soviet pact) for about a decade (1934 to 1944). And this was the context in which George Orwell wrote Animal Farm.

After the Thaw

However, the passing of the Cold War and of the state that Stalin led for 29 years did not lead to more honest adaptations of Animal Farm. The ending of the 1999 Babe-style version (with talking animals) is, if anything, even more ridiculous than the 1954 CIA-financed animation.

In this version, the animals leave Napoleon’s dystopia which eventually collapses of its own accord (get the symbolism?). In time, a new human family comes to take over, promising that the mistakes of the past won’t be repeated. In a final voice-over narration, Jessie the sheepdog gasps “And now at last, we shall be free!”

How wonderful. Given that, in the real-world, the restoration of capitalism in the former Soviet Union after 1991 had led to the biggest decline in life expectancy, outside of war or famine, in human history, that final line should be seen, in retrospect, as somewhat ironic.

In truth, Animal Farm was a subversive book that satisfied virtually no-one. It was, predictably, banned in the Soviet Union. But ostensibly supportive Ukrainian and Russian translations in the late 1940s also saw fit to delete certain offending passages. There then came the travesty of the CIA-approved version of 1954, to be followed 45 years later by an even more inept interpretation.

And despite the weary, fatalistic assertion that Animal Farm is a parable of the inevitable fate of all revolutions – “humans are not equal and you can’t force them to be” – the book retains its pep 80 years after its publication precisely because it is not inherently pessimistic – the novella ends with the animals finally realising what is going on.

Orwell was a democratic socialist (and a real one, he thought Attlee and co. were sell outs) lambasting communist totalitarianism for becoming no better, probably even worse, than capitalism. HG Wells called him a “Trotskyist with big feet”. If Animal Farm was really a conservative critique of revolution as such, its author would hardly have bothered to fight for a real revolution in Spain, nearly being killed in the process. Why fight for something that would inevitably be perverted anyway?

In point of fact, Orwell did criticise precisely the fatalistic, conservative attitude that Animal Farm supposedly embodies. In 1946 (a year after the publication of Animal Farm), he wrote an essay admonishing the shallowness of ex-Communist Arthur Koestler, a man who had precisely concluded that because the Russian Revolution had ended in oppression and murder, “This is what revolutions lead to”. Orwell’s response was:

Perhaps some degree of suffering is ineradicable from human life, perhaps the choice before man is always a choice of evils, perhaps even the aim of Socialism not to make the world perfect but to make it better. All revolutions are failures, but they are not all the same failure.

The “unwillingness to admit this”, in Orwell’s words, had led all adaptations of Animal Farm to be travesties of the original book. Perhaps because Serkis’s version gets Orwell so wrong, it can turn out to be more right than any of its inglorious predecessors.

 

*Orwell’s endings, even of his ostensibly non-political novels, always seem to confound the adapters of his works. The end of the 1997 film version of Keep the Aspidistra Flying, for instance, is a joyous celebration of the belated maturity achieved by its ‘hero’, Gordon Comstock. But in the 1936 novel, the final act – putting an aspidistra in the window – is portrayed as a resigned succumbing to middle class respectability, after years of impotent defiance. Again a “wholesale inversion” of Orwell’s meaning.

** This makes no sense from the point of view of the book – or indeed the film. Both show Napoleon’s Animal Farm dedicated to trading with the surrounding human-run farms, so where exactly do these “pig delegates” come from? Their presence might ring more true if Snowball (Trotsky) had won the battle for control with Napoleon (Stalin) because he was dedicated, unlike Napoleon, to “stirring up rebellion” on neighbouring farms. But early on in the book, Snowball is chased out of Animal Farm by Napoleon’s dogs, never to return.

Devil's Pact or Doom Loop. Do we need economic growth?

To misappropriate an early song-title by a semi-famous Scottish indie band, everything flows – from economics.

What may seem on the surface a dry and technical subject actually reveals the beating heart of the political philosophy behind it.

The economics behind Starmerism consists of massively increasing spending on weapons, to be paid for by renewed austerity, and propelling the most vulnerable in society further into destitution and misery.

While, at the same time, asset-stripping the rest of the economy by selling it off to American vulture capitalists.

What flows from this will not be pleasant. It involves entrenching the rule of profit-extracting corporations while impoverishing swathes of the population. Though it will go by a far more benevolent name, this – necessarily buttressed by authoritarian means – amounts to corporate fascism. This kind of fascism will likely creep up on us gradually rather being proclaimed by a march on the capital, an Act of Parliament, or even a general election result.

In such circumstances, the Left doesn’t merely need to get its shit together politically but also economically.

In fact, economics, traditionally the weak point of a Left more concerned with the equities of distribution than the production of wealth, can actually become its strength. This is because though the Starmer government is rhetorically obsessed with achieving economic growth, it is very bad at actually achieving it.

The Doom Loop

Growth expectations from the Office of National Statistics are terrible, and as socialist economist Michael Burke says, without higher growth, living standards will not rise.

Sustainable growth, he says “is an appropriate aim for all economic policy”. The problem for Starmer is that his avowed method – austerity and taxes rises on ordinary people in the context of ramped up state spending on weapons (military Keynesianism) – is, in reality, anti-growth.

The British economy, says Burke, is trapped in a “doom loop” of deteriorating public services, rising government debt ‘necessitating’ more spending cuts which depresses the economy even more. We need to break out of this ruinous cycle and actually achieve growth rather than merely talking it up.

The fundamental question is whether pursing growth by other means is possible, and if it is possible, whether it is desirable.

The economics of the socialist case rest on first of all not massively hiking spending in a drive to war. Money, buttressed by a wealth tax on billionaires, will instead be diverted to public investment in areas like public transport, council housing, infrastructure. At present, under the ‘Labour’ government’s Spending Review, non-defence public investment is set to fall in real terms over the coming years.

But ironically for a political ideology invariably condemned for being ‘anti-business’, socialists aim to reverse the pervasive, and long-term, weak growth of the economy. This will be attempted through methods like the above-mentioned public investment but also through ‘innovations’ like a national investment bank.  The aim here is to revive private investment which is at anaemic levels, and has been for a long time. RMT trade union leader Eddie Dempsey recently told the TUC conference: “Corbyn had the right idea — we need a public investment bank funded by seed capital that can drive strategic investment in parts of the economy, where we will build proper unionised jobs, good work that will take the country forward instead of leaving us at the mercy of the money markets”.

Socialist Pro-Capitalism

If it is accurate to estimate, as is frequently done, that capitalists need annual economic growth of 3 per cent to make a decent profit, then ‘socialism’, in attempting to resuscitate growth in the economy, is not anti-capitalist at all, rather the opposite. But I don’t expect enlightened self-interest to become the fashion any time soon.

However, merely correctly understanding the aspiration is no guarantee it will be successful. Many other countries and blocs have public investment banks, but their recent growth record is nothing to write home about. In fact, the Eurozone boasts a worse growth performance than Britain despite the existence of the European Investment Bank.

Even where a public investment bank does have a tangible impact, as seems the case with Brazil’s BNDES, the remaining commercial banks are left free to concentrate on speculation and mortgage lending, which is extremely profitable but merely exacerbates the inherent flaws of the extractive economy where small minorities make huge profits but many people struggle to make ends meet.

That is why some Marxists advocate taking control, as the British Labour party once aspired to do, of the “commanding heights” of the economy which includes nationalising the big, private banks (properly nationalising not merely assuming ‘hands-off’ ownership as the government did with RBS after the financial crisis). This will direct private, now public, investment into desirable areas.

Should we aim for growth?

But we are still left with the basic assumption that economic growth is a good and necessary thing – “an appropriate aim for all economic policy” – even if, in an historical irony, only the Left or radical Left seem serious about attaining it.

However, is growth the goal we should be striving towards? Growth, as the word implies means getting bigger, over time much bigger. Economic growth of 3 per cent a year, a sweet spot for corporate profits, government finances, and personal livelihoods, means the economy doubles in size every 24 years. A little over a decade ago geographer, and Marxist, David Harvey wrote that compound growth means the result will be even more extreme.

Imagined physically, the enormous expansions in physical infrastructures, in urbanisation, in workforces, in consumption and in production capacities that have occurred since the 1970s until now will have to be dwarfed into insignificance over the coming generation if the compound rate of capital accumulation is to be maintained. Take a look at a map of the city nearest you in 1970 and contrast it with today and then imagine what it will look like when quadrupled in size and density over the next twenty years.

 It is worth noting that, in Britain, the rate of capital accumulation has not been maintained – an economic malaise that has produced various maladies – but that cities and towns have nonetheless grown “in size and density”. In the context of the government’s huge housebuilding targets, totally reliant on the private sector, they are predicted to do so even more in the coming years. Many British urban areas are anticipated to have virtually whole new towns tacked onto them over the next decade, even if a sputtering housing market means that improbable government targets will not be met. Presumably had the ‘rate of capital accumulation’ been sustained, these urban conglomerations would have expanded even more.

Supporters of the idea that economic growth can be sustainable would counter that it can be directed by the state into beneficial and necessary things, such as public transport and public housing. Futurologist Jeremy Rifkin who predicts the end of capitalism in a ‘zero marginal cost’ society where copies of products can be produced for virtually nothing, believes transitioning economies from fossil fuels and nuclear power to renewable energy “will require millions of workers and spawn thousands of new businesses” (note however that that he thinks this will involve “one last surge” of wage labour and thus growth).

The Chinese Way

But it is stretching credulity to believe that all economic growth can be funnelled towards socially beneficial ends. China, the bête noire of America and the faltering West, presents an example. On the back of high public investment in infrastructure, China has achieved GDP growth rates the West can only dream about and lifted millions out of poverty. But, it was believed, this was bought at a price – exponential carbon emissions and falling life expectancy because of unbreathable air. At the Beijing Olympics in 2008, the Chinese authorities famously manipulated clouds to disperse smog, while life expectancy in northern China was five years below that of the south of the country because of air pollution.

Now, reportedly, such problems have been significantly assuaged because of the Chinese government’s war on pollution – pollution has declined by 42% in nine years, while air quality correspondingly enjoyed a massive improvement. In the face of climate change, China has also made huge investments in solar energy was a result of which the cost of generating electricity from solar has plummeted.

But pollution has not been vanquished. It is still six times higher than the World Health Organisation’s guidelines and in Beijing at about the level of Europe’s most polluted city Sarajevo. And air pollution-related deaths in China are projected to continue to rise despite the improvements.

China also features heavily in the UN’s Red List of endangered species, a fact clearly not unrelated to its high rate of economic growth.

Devil’s Pact

And in the West, where over two-thirds of economic growth can be attributed to consumption, the Left will face an additional problem. If it is to distinguish itself from the corporate automatons in government and opposition, it will not only want to encourage growth in some areas, but restrict it in others. A Left government, if it is worth its salt, will want, for example, to place restrictions on gambling or marketing to children.

It is unquestionable that the health of the UK economy has been significantly impaired by the fact that wages have been held down for years and incomes depleted. ‘Britain needs a pay rise’ as the slogan goes. But should it get one, part of that will inevitably go into becoming the willing prey of profit-driven market forces to an even greater extent. The exploitation of “culturally generated pseudo needs”, though clearly anti-social, has been a crucial element of the economic growth that has been achieved in the West (and elsewhere) in recent years, a chink of light, if you will, in an otherwise gloomy picture. Toxic consumption is a mainstay of the modern economy.

We face a quandary we seem only dimly aware of. In the corporate capitalist economy that we live in, if you don’t achieve economic growth – or only very anaemic growth – the result is misery, poverty, inequality, racism (probably in time fascism), rising public and private debt, and global conflict.

But if you do have growth, while, if it proceeds are equitably distributed, you relieve some of the pressure on individuals and government finances, you just accelerate global warming and environmental degradation, the relentless swallowing up of what’s left of the countryside, and acquiesce in the exploitation of our psychological vulnerabilities to the benefit of obscene corporate profits.

Eventually, actually probably quite soon, you hit a society that may be economically successful but that nobody wants to live in.

In the short-term this devil’s pact is, to varying degrees, in virtually everyone’s rational self-interest. But from a wider perspective it plainly isn’t in anyone’s, barring maybe that of a small, and insulted, ultra-rich elite.

Explaining Donald Trump

But then there is the problem of whether reviving economic growth is even possible – that the Left, if it by some miracle achieves power, will discredit itself in a futile drive to “save capitalism from itself”.

Looked at historically, the only time the capitalist system, in advanced countries, attained sustained healthy economic growth was in the period from 1950 until the mid-1970s – the so-called “thirty glorious years”.

In fact, according to a research group at the University of Manitoba in Canada, the reality may be even worse. Growth in Northern industrialised economies, they argue, has been falling, “with only brief and limited interruptions”, since the early 1960s.  If so, economic problems cannot be placed solely at the door of bad policy, such as neoliberalism, or economic trends, like financialisation. The findings, according to the report’s author, Alan Freeman, “shed light” on seismic political developments such as the rise of Donald Trump and the far-right, the implosion of the centre and centre-left, the growth of social unrest, and rising geo-political tensions across the world. But they also indicate that:

… limited measures, whether of a left character such as fiscal and monetary stimuli unaccompanied by state-led investment in new production, or of a right character, notably austerity, but also the free-market economic nationalism of Donald Trump and other such figures, are unlikely to resolve these problems.

Why should this be so? Although, there is no consensus on what led to the post WW2 economic boom, part of the explanation must surely lie in the fact that it was preceded by the most destructive conflict in human history. The Second World War was not only physically devastating, it also vaporized capital value – the mass of money that can be deployed to build up infrastructure or enterprises. Society could, so to speak, begin again.

However, that option is no longer available. In subsequent decades, economic downturns were dissipated by the soothing balm of state intervention and subsidy because, quite rationally, nobody wanted a return to the miseries of the Great Depression of the 1930s. Meanwhile, in the West, the forces leading to war (and thus destruction of capital) were consciously repressed.  

As a result, the ‘wall of money’ (capital) seeking profitable outlets, steadily grew, reaching astronomical levels. The other option, war among advanced countries, will likely lead to the end of human civilisation and the death of millions, though, astoundingly, western elites seem willing to toy with this possibility.

Such are the choices that the capitalist system, at this stage in history, presents us with.

Facing the Truth

In this 1998 book The Trouble with Capitalism, economist Harry Shutt argued against forever taking refuge in “limited measures”, against the comforting notion that capitalism could always be ‘rewired’ to work in more equitable, ‘greener’, and less amoral ways:

The truth must at last be faced that there is no realistic hope of expanding demand (and hence aggregate global output) fast enough to 1) Absorb the ever-accumulating capital surpluses generated by the private sector 2) Contain, let alone reduce, the rising burden of public-sector deficits and debt under the existing pattern of income distribution and taxation 3) reduce the huge gap between the super-rich and most other people.

And, given by now obvious environmental limits which place necessary restrictions on the expansion of the economy, the “traditional policy of seeking indiscriminately to maximise GDP will have to be jettisoned”.

In other words, growth is neither possible nor desirable.

The consequences of not striving to maximise GDP are two-fold: 1) that government finances will no longer depend, as they do now, on how much tax revenue can be squeezed out of the economy. And 2) that people’s living standards will no longer hinge, as they do now, on what they can extract from the economy from wage-labour or, if they are fortunate, from the ownership of property.

This might seem a frightening, in fact, unthinkable prospect, such are these two notions seared into our consciousness as just the way things are and always will be. However, it is important also to appreciate how much of a liberation a post-capitalist society will be. Society will be freed from the necessity to find profitable outlets for the huge wall of money seeking. At present this pathology manifests in profoundly anti-social ways such as speculation in food prices, which causes hunger around the world based on artificial, not genuine, scarcity, the privatisation mania, the hunt for profitable companies and public services that can be taken over using borrowed money and milked for returns, the vast weapons and security industry, the compulsion to seek more and more debt as a means to dabble on the stock and bond market, and the corporate juggernaut that looks on our psychological make-up as something to be exploited for profit.

Individuals, too, will be relieved from the necessity to secure their livelihood in the market and to suffer if they fail to. This has to mean that, for the first time in history, a person’s income will be unconditionally guaranteed.

All this may seems like a pipedream that will never happen except that it flows from two inescapable facts about the modern world – in Harry Shutt’s phraseology the “decline in demand” for both capital and labour.

Nature of the Problem

In Britain, the latter problem may seem belied by the eclipsing of the 4 million strong dole queues of the 1980s by high rates of employment. But the solving of the unemployment problem is in many ways illusory in that it is based on zero hour contracts, the dramatic rise of the ‘solo self-employed’ and the stifling of the healthy wage growth of previous decades. Certainly, wresting some kind of income from the economy – mimicking the huge “informal sectors” of the Global South – is not the same as the secure, decently-paid, and full-time jobs of the past.

And that is not getting into the contention of the late David Graeber that many white-collar jobs, while decently paid, are not only socially useless but economically pointless too. They are a form of “pretend work”.

But certainly, with demand for capital “fixed investment” (big things like factories and offices) in decline, there is no hope of reviving the benign equilibrium – where capital outlay and effective demand existed in a kind of symbiosis – of the post-WW2 years. And this mismatch cannot be nullified by abolishing zero-hour contracts, reinstituting collective bargaining, and welcoming back trade unions into the fold.

But there is no hope of understanding the need for a solution unless, first, the problem is recognised.