Come you Masters of War ... I'm just want you to know I can't see through your masks

The Peter Jackson edited Get Back Beatles documentary is a fascinating insight into the way the most famous band in the world worked together a year before splitting up for good. It forces a revision of the idea that their rehearsals were marked by a simmering acrimony as suggested by the contemporary – and now suppressed – film Let It Be, which was based on the same footage. The much longer Jackson compiled film suggests they actually got on quite well, despite George Harrison flouncing off at one point. We see the Beatles working as a group on songs – such as Harrison’s 'All Things Must Pass' and Lennon’s 'Gimme Some Truth' – that would later become some of their authors’ most famous solo efforts.

It’s easy to forget you are watching fly on the wall footage that is over half a century old. And some of the most innocuous scenes, on closer inspection, reveal their age. Take the debate in the film over the idea ؘ– proposed by original filmmaker Michael Lindsay-Hogg – that the Beatles should hire a ship to take them to Libya where they would perform in a Roman amphitheatre on the coast (the Get Back sessions were meant to prepare for a TV performance which would eventually morph into the rooftop concert). “How are you going to get a ship in a couple of days?” asks Ringo Starr. “We got the American Navy for How I Won the War” says John Lennon, a reference to a 1967 film he acted in. To which Starr responds, “Yes but they were passing by and you only got them for a few hours”. Cue images from the film of the actors disembarking from a D-Day style landing craft.

Toy Story

To utilize a popular phrase, that could never happen nowadays. Something that is made painfully evident from the documentary Theaters of War which shows how the US military now meticulously controls the content of films and TV programmes, to the extent of insisting on line by line script changes to make sure they appear in a desirable light. In 2023, the PR savvy U.S. Navy would never allow their ‘toys’ to be used in a film as subversive as How I Won the War. Director Richard Lester said the film was an “anti-anti-war film” in that it portrayed war as intrinsically hostile to humanity itself rather than just being against the war crimes of the other side. The plot shows the battalion coming to the conclusion they have to kill their commanding officer as his incompetence is leading them to their deaths (unfortunately they don’t and it does). The effect is rather muted by the fact that he is played by Michael Crawford, later to become famous as Frank Spencer in Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em (although to be fair people wanted to kill him too).

According to Theaters of War, thanks to incredibly persistent Freedom of Information requests, it’s clear that “thousands upon thousands” of films and TV shows have been “rewritten at script level” by the Pentagon and the CIA. If the filmmakers want military cooperation – access to all those aircraft carriers, fighter jets and troop extras – they have to hand over their entire script for vetting. If they don’t, they don’t get to use the military equipment, which is usually essential for box office success. If they do agree, they have to sign a contract and the Pentagon “are effectively like another producer”.

This ‘help’ is most obvious in blockbuster movies like Top Gun (which according to the Pentagon “completed rehabilitation of the military’s image which had been savaged by the Vietnam War”) and its 2021 sequel, Pearl Harbor, or The Hunt for Red October. And it’s evident in TV series like 24 and Homeland which bear the hallmarks of the CIA’s decision to follow the Pentagon’s lead and open an office to liaise with television and cinema in 1996.

The Pentagon Universe

The national security state is also integral to the greatest ‘cinematic’ innovation of this century – super hero movies. The original script for Iron Man, for example, had its hero, Tony Stark, battling against the arms industry. But by the time the film went into production this had entirely flipped. In the actual 2008 film, he inherits his father’s arms business and the subsequent franchise is “an outright celebration of the arms industry”.

In fact, super hero movies like Man of Steel or Captain Marvel are the perfect advertisement for new military ‘toys’. And the Transformers franchise is little more than a showcase for new weapons. Until 1988, rules stated that the Department of Defense should only help films achieve “authenticity” and “dignity”. Subsequently, however, these were enlarged to allow promotion of “public understanding”, help with recruitment and support of government policy.

And this mission creep has had tangible effects. Captain Marvel was “a recruiting bonanza, a vehicle for the Air Force to reach young women”, channelling, according to its star, Brie Larson, “the spirit of the Air Force”. 2021’s The Suicide Squad has an assortment of super-hero bad asses overthrow a fictional anti-American government in Latin America. Any similarity to actual events is strictly coincidental.

These are just stupid films for kids, you might object, and besides anti-war films do get made. Both demurrals have some validity but don’t erase the basic problem. Super-hero films have a cultural impact way beyond their immediate fan base. Apart from being some of the highest grossing movies of all time, they reach a far wider audience by being constantly repeated on prime time TV. Critical war films – for example Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July or possibly 2005’s Jarhead – do get produced but they are swimming against the current. Oliver Stone’s Vietnam films were delayed for years because of their “unacceptable themes”.

Rehabilitating Nukes

We are talking about a gradual cultural seepage. According to one interviewee, filmmakers are well aware their films are going to get vetted, so “they write their scripts in ways they know will ultimately please the Pentagon …. People self-censor and tone down any potential critical view.”  Much like journalists, you might say.

This process of cultural acclimation can be sent in a frankly scary (pun intended) segment about what happened to Godzilla. In the original 1954 Japanese film, Godzilla was literally created by hydrogen bomb testing and survivors of the monster’s attacks had radiation poisoning. Godzilla was “an allegory for the U.S. nuclear bombing of Japan”. This association survived in the 1998 Roland Emmerich version but by the 2014 iteration the U.S. Department of Defense was involved. A passage in the original script where a character recalls how their father survived the Hiroshima bomb was replaced by musings about the “arrogance of man”. And far from being the source of the mutation, nuclear weapons were the solution. Nuclear tests in the 1950s were actually attempts to kill Godzilla.

Revealingly, the 2019 reboot Godzilla: King of the Monsters was made without Pentagon assistance but stuck with the “nukes as heroes theme”. The filmmakers conclude: “It’s hard to imagine a more complete reversal. This long time warning about the dangers of proliferation is now an extension of the U.S. military and something of an advertisement for the bomb”.

Essentially, and terrifyingly for the future of humanity, nuclear weapons are being ‘rehabilitated’ and Hollywood is integral to that redemption. The subdued reaction to the possibility that nuclear weapons may be used in Ukraine may be evidence that it is having the desired effect.

That’s Entertainment

What Theaters of War unmasks is just how PR-saturated our popular culture is. With all due respect to Noam Chomsky, this is not about manufacturing consent through news and current affairs coverage. It is a form of propaganda that works through the slow accretion of subconscious associations and acquiescence with outwardly fictional, often absurd, depictions. “This is more insidious than state control and state-produced propaganda,” one interviewee notes, “because it passes off as just entertainment.”

As one internal Pentagon document observes, “Features films reach far greater audiences than any single news media story about the actual events. Audiences will voluntarily sit through a two hour ‘infomercial’ [about an army operation]”.

The contrast with the 1960s and How I Won the War could not be starker. That decade and the following one were laden with overtly critical, and fundamentally subversive, films about war. Paths of Glory, Dr Strangelove, The Hill, The Battle of Algiers, The Bed Sitting Room, Oh! What a Lovely War, The Charge of the Light Brigade, Catch-22, M*A*S*H and Apocalypse Now all reached large audiences. Sure, they were outnumbered by celebratory depictions of war (invariably involving daring exploits against nefarious Nazis), but the point is they existed and competed with standard fare. Nowadays, in an era when PR has hugely extended its tentacles, if they ever got made in the first place they’d be shunted off to the art house sector and only seen by people who attend film festivals.

This affects TV as well. In the 1980s the BBC could produce the nuclear war docu-drama Threads and the basically seditious Monocled Mutineer. Whereas now we are treated to The SAS: Rogue Heroes. For assorted cranks and weirdoes, the former are available on DVD.

It might seem strange to say in the aftermath of the Corbyn and Sanders insurgencies but, as Theaters of War demonstrates, the long march of PR is making our societies more and more conservative and averse to change. If the Left cannot find a way to counteract this tendency and reach mass audiences, it – and maybe humanity as a whole – will not have a future.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Worthless but more powerful than ever – the non-death of Britain’s right-wing media

 

A couple of weeks ago the Financial Times reported that the Sun newspaper, bastion of working class conservatism for nigh on half a century, had been marked down by Rupert Murdoch as a “worthless asset”.

The tabloid, which in the ’90s claimed it alone could sway general elections, had been so denuded by falling sales, legal costs related to the phone hacking scandal, and damages paid to civil claimants, that it made a pre-tax loss of £201 million in 2019-20 and had “zero carrying value”. The management of Murdoch’s News UK expected it “would not return to positive growth”.

Those who lament the Sun’s baleful influence on this country’s political and ethical culture – from smearing dead football fans as hooligans, to hounding gay celebrities, to, with certain Blairite lapses (if lapses they can be called), cheerleading for Thatcher – might indulge in a fully justified bout of schadenfreude.

But if there is such a thing as ‘pyrrhic crowing’ this is it. For, despite its financial woes, the right-wing media is as strong as ever in Britain.

There was a brief period of optimism around the time of the 2017 General Election when it seemed like shoestring news sites like Evolve and the Canary, and even single person blogs (not this one) could go under the radar of the mainstream media and reach millions. But that window was abruptly slammed shut, as traditional media organisations upped their social media game (News UK claims the print version of the Sun and its website reach a total of 36.5 million people), and a Facebook algorithm change meant that alternative sources of news found their ‘shares’ drastically reduced. 

One little appreciated reason for the Conservative victory in 2019 – beyond Brexit and Corbyn’s sullied reputation that is – was the diminished influence of alternative media and the restored power of the mainstream press.

The huge decline in newspaper sales in Britain is not an illusion – they have dropped by two-thirds in 20 years according to one estimate  – but the influence of the press, and the mainstream media more generally, is felt far beyond the number of sales or subscriptions.

As shown by the Hancock surveillance (and the absence of any need to explain how it occurred), the Sun still has wields huge influence and, even if it is a financial dead weight, will not be permitted to go under.

Notwithstanding diminished sales, the right-wing press still commands a palpable physical presence and is basically assured that its leading stories will be amplified by broadcasters or least relayed through regular paper reviews.

In Bad News for Labour: Antisemitism, the Party and Public Belief (the first chapter of which is an eye-opening account of how an invented narrative pushed by the right-wing and liberal media can become firmly lodged in the public mind), one participant who doesn’t read newspapers explains how he came to his belief that 20% of Labour members had been accused of antisemitism:

Headlines I see. I work in Tesco’s. As I walk into the shopping mall I read the headlines every day …. Most of my perception was based on – as I say I don’t read newspapers – my perception was based on the number of headlines and how long it was in the papers. [participant 4 nods in agreement]

And in an era of all-pervasive social media reach, and permanent smartphone connection to the Internet on the part of most of the population, the reach of the press – quite apart from actual newspaper sales – is greater than ever. Web portals, search engines, Facebook and Twitter will all place the output of the mainstream media in front of users so even if you consciously don’t read a newspaper, you will find it hard to avoid knowing what they are saying.

This is reminiscent of Noam Chomsky’s and Edward Herman’s concept of “big news” in 1988’s Manufacturing Consent, except that these “sustained news campaigns” are even more potent than they were three decades ago.

We are reaching a state where news and advertising are converging. This is not necessarily because news is becoming the slave of advertising, though that does occur, but because news is taking on the qualities of advertising. Advertising works through endless repetition so that even if it is incredibly annoying (or perhaps because it is) the brand name becomes ingrained in the observer’s brain and they may choose it if they ever buy that product.

News now – amplified through multiple platforms – works on the same principle. Deliberate censorship is unnecessary because in our information-saturated society unwelcome news can be guaranteed to reach only a small minority if it does not receive the blessing of escalation by powerful interests.

There are many important and validated news stories – for example, the purging of Labour party members by Keir Starmer, falling life expectancy, or the ongoing atrocity of the UK ‘welfare state’ – that fail to make even a ripple on public consciousness because they are not amplified.

In a compulsively busy society such as this one, the attention of most consumers of news is necessarily slight with most relying on snatches of news to form a picture of what is going in on the world. There is, as others have said, “a crying need” for the Left to invest in its own media because a social media presence, however strong, cannot compete with a uniformly hostile mainstream media. But even if new investments are made and TV stations created, the gatekeepers will still do their utmost to ensure the vast majority remain unblissfully unaware.

Some American myths in the month of November

So the American people will have four more years of “socialism”. However will they cope? Some aren’t taking it well at all, such as Donald Trump who came over all Benito Mussolini and called for a “March on Washington”. In the interest of historical accuracy, it is only fair to point out that Benito Mussolini was actually invited to march on Rome in 1922 and bring to power the world’s first Fascist government.

Do you feel, consciously or not, a sense of relief that Obama won? Do you suffer from guilt about feeling relieved? Have I just hit upon a new psychological state – relief guilt? Given the absurdly constricted nature of the choice, you can debate endlessly whether it was right to vote for Obama or shun the whole corporate charade. Some, like Noam Chomsky, have confronted that dilemma.

But, from an international perspective, I don’t think voting or not voting is the main problem. It’s fundamentally irrelevant. The enduring problem is that the American Presidential election campaign puts out so many myths that possess a stickiness that attaches them to the cultural landscape. Before you know it, the elusive reality bird that you worked so hard to track down has flown away.

So here are three myths that urgently need dispelling.

Myth 1

Laissez-faire bad/Government intervention good

Obama spent $14 billion bailing out General Motors. Romney would have let the company go bankrupt. Whether the latter is actually true is highly questionable given that George W started the enormous bail out of corporate America. But the General Motors’ bail-out was presented as a victory against the ideological denseness of pure laissez-faire and for the United Auto Workers Union.

But it was a strange kind of victory. Post bail-out, the UAW signed a deal with General Motors in which, aside from its existing members getting a below the cost of living pay “increase”, also ensured that new car workers would be hired at half the pay rate, $16 a hour, that their predecessors received. This result of government intervention is not good. It’s not loitering on the outskirts of good. It’s very bad.

The General Motors bail-out exemplified 21^st century government intervention in which corporations are saved from their own mistakes through gifts of taxpayer money, while their workers and customers get the discipline of free markets. And this happens while the tax burden continues to be shifted away from corporations and the rich and onto the shoulders of the majority.

Anti-austerity but pro-capitalist economist Ha-Joon Chang has shown how General Motors’ failure was preceded by dabbling in every conceivable corporate fad over the last 30 years – shareholder value, buying other car firms and creating a highly profitable finance arm. But when it came to the state saving the company from bankruptcy, “the US government”, says Chang, “deliberately took shares that do not have voting rights (albeit priority in dividend payouts) – so that it would not have any say in the management of the company.”

Chang has noted the same reticent government intervention in Britain, where the government has legally nationalised two large banks, but does not control them."This is not even capitalism anymore," he says. “What is the point of owning a bank, when you have to negotiate hard, or (one suspects) even beg, in order to set the pay of your employees or make it lend more in the way you want?”

The original bail-out of the banks was, in scale and expense, the supreme example of “not laissez-faire” dwarfing all others. But was it a good thing? It saved the economy from collapsing at the time and saved the banks at massive taxpayer expense, transferring a large proportion of their debt to the public. This was followed by a huge infusion of quantitative easing which they used to recapitalise themselves. But they are still indebted. Bank of England Governor, Mervyn King said recently that advanced economies won’t be able to escape “their current predicament” without more write-downs of debt by banks and more recapitalisation. So what began in 2008 is not over.

Just possibly, in 2008, the banks should have received a classic dose of laissez-faire and been allowed to go bust along with their debts. Then new public, debt-free, banks could have been created, as suggested by, among others, Joseph Stiglitz. The “pain” would have been more intense in the short-term but not prolonged.

But our governments “intervened” the make sure this didn’t happen and we are living with the consequences.

Thomas Frank quotes a line from the 1930s American socialist, Norman Thomas, in his book, Pity the Billionaire. “There is no Socialism at all about taking over all the banks which fell in Uncle Sam’s lap, putting them back on their feet again, and turning them back to the bankers to see if they can bring them once more to ruin.” But there’s quite a lot of capitalism about it.

Myth 2

The middle class is the bedrock of a strong economy, democracy etc

Obama clothed his campaign in the need for a “strong middle class”. Romney vowed to “protect the middle class”. But like the fabled word “community”, the larger the middle class looms in political rhetoric, the more it disappears in reality.

According to US census research, published in September, the gap between rich and poor has widened to its highest level since 1967.  “The gains from economic growth in 2011 were quite unevenly shared as household income fell in the middle and rose at the top,” said Robert Greenstein, President of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, about the data. Average incomes fell for the bottom 80% of earners and rose for the top 20%. The top 1% of households experienced a 6% rise in income.

The income of the median American family is lower than it was in 1998. In a 2011 article about the disappearing American middle class, the US journalist Paul Harris said, “I do not care if you are a Tea Party activist or a Socialist party USA organiser, you should be able to agree on one thing, at least: this is unsustainable. Something has to give. But no one in the current political system looks like they have an answer.”

In Britain, as Ed Miliband’s rhetoric about the “squeezed middle” shows, the political class are having to come to terms with the new reality but are equally clueless about what to do about it. In Britain, on current trends, the entire bottom 50% will be poorer by 2020. The Trades Union Congress in the Britain thinks companies should be encouraged to raise the average wage. Well, that could work. In another galaxy.

As far as the vanishing middle class in the US is concerned, it’s plus ca change, no matter who lives in the White House.

Myth 3

“Equal Pay” is more achievable under Obama than Romney

Ok, so maybe this myth is a bit of a cheat, but language speaks volumes, if you’ll pardon the tautology. To keep referring to “equal pay” in the context of contemporary America and Britain is akin to waxing lyrical about “human rights” in a Roman coliseum at lion time. Pay in both countries is staggeringly unequal and getting worse. And neither Obama, nor Romney, had he been elected, will do anything about it. Obama clearly didn’t in his first four years, as the above census data shows. This is not meant to justify any kind of gender pay discrimination or retarded Republican views on abortion or contraception, but the “equal pay” mantra gives the impression of railing against privilege when, in reality, it does nothing of the kind.

In order to even begin addressing pay inequality the debate needs to move on from just talking taking about discrimination to understanding and, acting upon, exploitation: the remuneration workers get in compensation for their contribution to profit, the two elements of which are wildly out of sync. This, in turn, needs to expand to look at who decides pay levels, and thus the economic autocracy we live under will come gradually into focus. This is a mammoth intellectual shift which, as the Presidential election campaign showed, the political mainstream is incapable of making.

As the American writer Walter Benn Michaels has said, the ostensible Left in the US is little more than the “human resources department of the right". It is, despite what Donald Trump believes, not dangerous to the status quo.

The Czech dissident and later head of state, Václav Havel, developed the concept of “living in truth” as a means of defying the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia. It entailed, in part, a refusal to accept the lies of official propaganda. It is becoming a principle that is applicable to living in western, “democratic” countries. Whether one votes or not.

The Great Repetition? Karl Polanyi and today

“Some books refuse to go away” it says in the introduction to the 2001 edition of The Great Transformation by the Hungarian economist Karl Polanyi.

Painstaking research sponsored by Google reveals that those words were written by a historian called Charles P Kindleberger, who with a name like that has to be American, in 1974.

If in 1974, The Great Transformation was obstinately sticking around, by now it is snaking out of book shelves across the world, screaming “Read me!”

Written as the Second World War was raging, The Great Transformation:  the Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, to give its full title, is a book that becomes more prescient the older it gets.

The book is about another age that is frighteningly reminiscent of our own. Its subject is the creation, in the nineteenth century, of what we would call now free market capitalism, molded and justified by the ideology of economic liberalism. It shows how that free market, liberal civilisation reigned supreme for a while but then imploded in the 1930s, as Fascism took over.

In keeping with the best Hollywood tradition, the plot of the sequel is uncannily similar to the original.

Then there was economic liberalism, now there is neoliberalism. Then, Fascism and Stalinism were in the ascendancy, now there is a fear that totalitarianism will return as neoliberalism flails ineffectually, unable to deal with the consequences of the society it has created.

Polanyi says the only humane alternative to the utopian fantasies of economic liberalism and the nightmares of totalitarianism, is socialism. He defines socialism as the conscious subordination of the free market to the demands of democratic society.

As such, The Great Transformation has provided inspiration to those who want to re-regulate capitalism. Maurice Glasman, the English political thinker behind Blue Labour is a “Polanyian”. The preface to the latest edition is by Joseph Stiglitz, the American Keynesian economist, who believes that government intervention will make capitalism stable and just.

But The Great Transformation can be interpreted in more than one way. It has also influenced more radical thinkers like the libertarian socialists Murray Bookchin and Noam Chomsky, who see in the book an appreciation that for almost all of human history, capitalism was rejected as a way to run society. And why should the future not draw on the wisdom of the past?

What The Great Transformation does is to destroy the notion that capitalism is a natural way to be, that a market economy automatically emerges when the restraints are taken away and people’s innate competitiveness is allowed to surface unimpeded. On the contrary, free markets are conscious creations, dependent on the destruction of older, more stable forms of society. Human nature, according to the evidence that exists, is not naturally competitive about the means of life.

Capitalism is an artificial economic system, in exactly the same way Communism was. And what has been created, can be uncreated.

Polanyi looks in detail at the first society that experienced this “great transformation” – England during the Industrial Revolution. He was able to study this history first hand because he fled to England from Vienna in the 1930s.

A market economy was pitilessly created by systematically annihilating the old society. Peasants were forced off the land and into the ‘dark, satanic mills” by government enforced enclosure of the open common lands on which their livelihood depended. Craft guilds, which set wages and established the quality of products, were abolished. A labour market was created by repealing laws which restricted workers’ mobility, obliged employers to provide seven-year apprenticeships, and enforced annual wage assessments by public officials.

In this blog, it has been asserted that the market economy is a myth, that the economy is not the scene of an entrepreneurial, Dragons’ Den-style, battle of the fittest among individuals, but a place where large corporations, controlled by tiny elites, seamlessly work for their own advantage.

But in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the market economy was not a myth. There was a transformation from an ordered, hierarchical and static society to an immensely fluid society in which new inventions could change the fortunes of people and the society around them. Industrialists often came from ordinary backgrounds, although they were soon swallowed painlessly into the British aristocracy. Corporations did not come into being until the 1850s.

This market economy did two things that are often not contemplated together. One was to create the dependency of millions of people on the fortunes of an economic system. In pre-capitalist societies, people were not threatened by society with starvation unless they made enough money. They were economically secure, although not rich. This changed with the creation of a market economy. People’s livelihoods and, often lives, were dependent on the kind of employment they could find. In Marxist terms, masses of people were turned into proletarians, surviving by selling their labour. The Left in the nineteenth century called it “wage slavery”.

The second was to create “unheard of material welfare.” For the first time in history, production based on machines became dominant and people were compelled to work for it, on threat of starvation. This raised the possibility, if not the actuality, of material abundance for everyone. “At the heart of the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century there was an almost miraculous improvement in the tools of production,” says Polanyi “which was accompanied by a catastrophic dislocation of the lives of the common people.”

This feature of capitalist societies, economic insecurity in the midst of material plenty, is an essential fact of life today. Most people are in an economically precarious situation – they are one or two payslips away from insolvency - but the economy produces an immense superfluity of goods.

The Great Transformation shows how the Industrial Revolution in England, which became the model for the rest of the world, was justified and shaped by the ideology of economic liberalism. Shaped because the idea of a laissez-faire economy, in which everything was a commodity and there was no outside intervention, became the unimpeachable principle of the age. England’s cotton industry, for example, initially got off the ground with the help of protective tariffs on imports, but later in the nineteenth century, free trade was supreme.

Economic liberalism sought validation in the past. It, finally, was liberating an elemental feature of human nature, which had been artificially held down by “civilisation” for thousands of years, the desire for individual gain. Adam Smith, who inspired free market philosophers, based his thought on man’s “propensity to barter, truck and exchange one thing for another”.

But this idea, though immensely powerful as a spur to action, was a gigantic error. “No society could, naturally live for any length of time unless it possessed an economy of some sort,” says Polanyi, “but previously to our time no economy has ever existed that, even in principle, was controlled by markets.”

Primitive societies lived through reciprocity. There was division of labour – different people performed specialised tasks – but not markets. A person coming back from a hunting or foraging expedition shared their spoils. Later, they would take as others gave. There was no motive of gain, or labouring for remuneration.

Later societies, even those horribly oppressive like the despotism of Egypt under the Pharoahs, were based on distribution in kind, rationing, not markets.

In Europe after the 15^th centuries, markets in towns were created, but they were deliberately prevented from trading with the surrounding countryside.

Past societies were not more altruistic or selfless, but non-economic purposes were paramount.

The historical falsity of economic liberalism means that its fabled concept of laissez-faire is also false. Laissez-faire has come to mean that if society is left alone by government, a market in which everyone competes and some people inevitably emerge victorious, will naturally come into being. Government regulation stops this natural competition happening. Much as laws against assault stop physical aggressiveness happening.

(Although notice the inverted logic, government stops market competition happening so it should get out of the way. Laws stop assaults happening, without them there would be mayhem, so they are necessary)

There is nothing natural about laissez-faire. What Polanyi shows is that laissez-faire can only happen once other ways of reproducing life, are destroyed. And then a laissez-faire, free market economy can come into being, rigorously policed by the state, so that it is not improperly interfered with. Economic liberals in Britain in the 1830s/1840s were fanatically opposed to extending the vote to the working class. And trade unions were illegal because they interfered with labour, now seen as another commodity, finding its price on the market. Neoliberals hate trade unions for exactly the same reason.

“For as long as that system [the market system] is not established, economic liberals must and will unhesitatingly call for the intervention of the state in order to establish it,” says Polanyi, “and once established, in order to maintain it.”

As the former New Labour health advisor, Paul Corrighan, put it in 2010, “The state has to actively create a market, they don’t appear of their own account.”

The experience of India under the British Empire illustrates what Polanyi is trying to get across. Millions of people died in famines in late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. The natural reasons for crop failures had not changed but the effect was far more devastating.

The explanation is that whereas in the old feudal arrangements of the past, there were stores of grain in case of famine, in the new market system, they were destroyed. Millions of people had to buy what they could on the market, where prices rocketed because of shortage.

“The three or four large famines that decimated India under British rule since the Rebellion were thus neither a consequence of the elements, nor of exploitation, but simply of the new market organisations of labour and land which broke up the old village without actually resolving its problems,” writes Polanyi. “While under the regime of feudalism and of the village community, noblesse oblige, clan solidarity, and regulation of the corn market checked famines, under the rules of the market the people could not be prevented from starving according to the rules of the game.”

So the great transformation was justified by piling fiction upon fiction. Humans weren’t naturally economically competitive, laissez-faire wasn’t just leaving things alone so that liberty could flourish, the power of the state didn’t diminish under the free market.

But balancing above all this was a still more fundamental fiction. Under a free market system, everything has to be a commodity and find its price on the market. Humans and nature were treated as commodities like everything else. But they aren’t commodities. They are, in Polanyi’s description, fictitious commodities.

A commodity is something – like a mobile phone – produced for sale. But human beings and the natural world are not produced for sale. They are not “produced” at all. But in the world of economic liberalism, they were assumed to be commodities, just in the same way that cotton was. Owners of land could do what they want with it. People had to get the means to live by selling their labour. If they can’t find a job or the economy goes into downturn, they can’t sell their labour commodity, and person irrevocably attached to that commodity, starves or is reduced to poverty.

Polanyi’s point, and one reason why he is extremely relevant today, is that people naturally rebel against being treated as commodities. “To expect that a community would remain indifferent to the scourge of unemployment, the shifting of industries and occupations and to the moral and psychological torture accompanying them, merely because the economic effects, in the long run, might be negligible, was to assume an absurdity,” he writes.

But as The Great Transformation shows, that rebellion can take different forms. It can be a civilised transition to what he calls socialism. But it can also entail scapegoating minorities, armed conflict and totalitarianism. In the 1930s, that rebellion meant the American New Deal but also Nazism and the Second World War.

Treating people as commodities, that periodically are not needed, has effects. What economic liberals said in the Great Depression was that if trade unions and the government stopped interfering, wages would naturally drop, in the long run, to allow profit to be made and the economy would eventually return to health. Theoretically, they have been right. But, in the long run, as John Maynard Keynes, said we’re all dead. What was said about Marxism by the Darwinist psychologist Edward Wilson, is now most descriptive of free market capitalism: “wonderful theory, wrong species”.

In part two, we will look at how economic liberalism gave way to totalitarianism in the 1930s. And what not treating human beings as commodities, really means.

Willing Slaves: Stanley Milgram's obedience experiment in perspective. Part one

The Milgram experiment, described as “one of the most controversial experiments in history” was first carried out when John F Kennedy was US President. Milgram’s own book about the experiment, Obedience to Authority, was published before the end of the Vietnam War. Why delve into ancient history?

Partly because its findings about human nature are timeless. In 2009 a BBC recapitulation of the experiment came up with very similar results to those obtained in 1961. 

But, more importantly, the experiments reveal a fundamental misconception about why people behave as they do, a “seriously distorted view of the determinants of human action”, in Milgram’s words. This delusion has, if anything, become more acute.

The idea that we alone control our behaviour and that our personal wants and desires shape the world around us, is a fundamental axiom of everyday ideology. Though the clamour for ethical responsibility is intense, it is also pointless. As the Milgram experiment demonstrates, ordinary people can perform horrific acts precisely because they don’t feel responsible, and don’t control what they do.

The experiments also shed light on why people don’t disobey. It is something that the Left, which is predicated upon disobedience, has to understand if it ever to progress. What Milgram shows is that circumstances by themselves, no matter how terrible, don’t produce disobedience. In fact, some people would rather kill than disobey authority.

It is a dark, negative view of human nature, though Milgram would add, realistic. The Left, by contrast, is usually assumed to believe in human decency. But an understanding of Milgram’s findings leads to inescapably left-wing conclusions.

What did the infamous experiment involve? You can see a film of the BBC replication of the experiment here

Volunteers were recruited to take part in an experiment on learning. But this was just a cover-story. A real experiment was taking place but it was not about learning.

A learner, an actor, was strapped into an “electric chair”. In an adjacent room, the volunteers were sat in front of an electronic shock generating machine with 30 switches going from 15 to 450 volts. The switches were each labelled, going from “slight shock”, “moderate shock” all the way up to “extreme intensity shock”, and the last two just “xxx”. Actually the machine did not deliver any electric shocks though the volunteers believed that it did.

The volunteers were told to shock the learner every time he got an answer wrong. The shocks were to increase in intensity each time. It was prearranged that the learner would get most answers wrong.

The victim’s cries from being shocked were recorded on tape and played so that the volunteer could hear them. They progressed from grunts and groans, to exclamations like “I refuse to go on, “I can’t stand the pain” and an “agonised scream”. Then there was just an ominous silence.

If the volunteer protested, he was told to go by an “experimenter” in a lab coat.

When told about the experiment, the vast majority of people, including psychiatrists, expected people to disobey and refuse to go on. “These subjects see their reactions flowing from empathy, compassion and a sense of justice,” says Milgram. Even people who watched the experiment through one-way mirrors expected disobedience. Only a pathological fringe of sadists would go on shocking, it was thought.

But in most cases – around two-thirds in the basic experiment – the result was obedience. People went on giving electric shocks up to the highest level, even though, in many cases, they feared the victim was dead. When the experiment was replicated in different locations and countries, obedience was even higher. In Munich, for example, 85 per cent obeyed to the final shock on the generator. Empathy and compassion did not win out.

But the point of the experiment was not that most people are sadists just beneath the surface. If the experiment was tweaked so that volunteers were not ordered to shock, but merely told it was fine it they went on to the highest possible electric shock, they invariably didn’t. In fact, the vast majority stopped before the shocks were painful.

 In another variation, there were two experimenters who disagreed. One wanted to go on shocking, the other didn’t. The effect was to stop the experiment dead in its tracks. No-one took advantage of the conflict to give more electric shocks.

Palpably volunteers did not like what they were told to do. When ordered to go on shocking, they protested, they sweated, they shook, they even laughed hysterically at themselves. They were obviously experiencing great stress. But most went on obeying.

“It is the extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on command of an authority that constitutes the chief finding of the study,” writes Milgram, “and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.”

The book Milgram wrote about the experiment, Obedience to Authority, is full of references to atrocities committed in the Vietnam War and by Nazi Germany. But at one point, Milgram says that to focus just on what the Nazis did is to “miss the point entirely” of the experiments.

In fact, to focus on atrocities or the human propensity to inflict pain on others is to miss the point entirely. What the experiment demonstrates is not just that most people will obey malevolent authorities, but their willingness to obey authorities of any kind, of varying degrees of malevolence. Not just amoral scientists or Generals, but companies and governments.

And it is when Milgram tries to explain the willingness to obey that his book becomes really enlightening.

Milgram says that obedience works when people are in, what appears to be, a paradoxical state of mind. Obedience has to be willingly entered into, but the actions it entails are nothing to do with the personality of the person who carries them out. It is one of the findings of the experiment that motives were irrelevant. Cruel people did not deliver more electric shocks than kind people. Yet, at the same time, nobody put a gun to their head.

Willingness is vital because it creates a sense of moral obligation. “The psychological consequence of voluntary entry is that it creates a sense of commitment and obligation which will subsequently play a part in binding the subject to his role,” says Milgram.

This is why neoliberal thinkers are so intransigent, although completely wrong, on this point. To neoliberals, a person selling themselves on the labour market, is no different to a person selling any type of commodity. It is a voluntary process and so should not be interfered with.

So, to neoliberals, obedience in a job ought to, morally should, follow naturally because the contract has been “voluntarily” entered into. As Milgram says, if obedience is willing, compliance is “easily exacted”.

But if obedience is not willing, compliance depends on direct surveillance. If surveillance ends, obedience stops.

Under voluntary obedience, control comes from within the person. Therefore, there is an internalised basis for obedience, not just an external one.

That is why ideology, or as Milgram phrases it, “the definition of the situation”, is so important. “Control the manner in which a man interprets his world,” he says “and you have gone a long way toward controlling his behaviour.”

 Liberal capitalism was under greatest threat in the nineteenth century when the Left espoused the concept of “wage-slavery” the idea that when a person is compelled under pressure of need, to rent themselves to a company and give away all control over what they do, their position was similar to that of a chattel slave.

Then obedience was powerfully contested and had to be enforced. Now, obedience is, to a large extent, voluntary and the values of liberal capitalism are internalised. We are, as the title of a recent book put it, “willing slaves” 

In the Milgram experiment, the participants quite willingly gave the victim what they believed were excruciatingly painful, possibly fatal, electric shocks. Yet what they did had no relation to what they themselves wanted to do. They voluntarily allowed someone else to dictate what they did.

As Milgram says, “It is the essence of obedience that the action carried out does not correspond to the motives of the actor but is initiated in the motive system of those higher up in the social hierarchy.”

Or as he puts it elsewhere, in hierarchical institutions, “relationship overwhelms content”. When a person merges their unique personality into an organisation, they become something else, a mere vessel, not an autonomous person.

This is remarkably similar to Noam Chomsky’s distinction between people who are moral agents (for good or ill) and “structures of power” that are basically amoral. But this distinction between people and institutions is hard to accept because, as Milgram says, society promotes the ideology that a person’s actions stem from their character. Bad outcomes are the result of bad people.

In the fifty years that have elapsed since the Milgram experiment was first conducted, the ideology of personal responsibility has increased in intensity. It has become an important foundation of the neoliberal ideology now dominant in the UK and US.

As the UK free market think tank, The Institute of Economic Affairs, which played a huge part in intellectually creating Thatcherism, said as the neoliberal revolution was just beginning, "The 'economic system' has no impulse of its own apart from the personal impulses of the individuuals who comprise it." The endless tail-chasing of attributing blame only serves to obscure the problem of the absence of ethical responsibility.

“We” has become the most overused pronoun of all. We are responsible for global poverty, we cause global warming. But “we” aren’t responsible for anything, because “we” don’t exist.

But the effort to make structurally amoral institutions, such as corporations, moral, is not only wrong-headed but malignant because it takes energy and attention from the proper task – institutional change

As Mark Fisher asks in his book Capitalist Realism: “Does anyone really think, for instance, that things would improve if we replaced the whole managerial and banking class with a whole new set of (‘better’) people? Surely, on the contrary, it is evident that the vices are engendered by the structure, and that while the structure remains, all the vices will reproduce themselves.”

But, as Milgram says in Obedience to Authority, for a person to feel responsible for his actions, “he must sense that the behaviour has flowed from ‘the self’. In the situation we have studied, subjects have precisely the opposite view of their actions.”

So far we have only examined the behaviour of those who obeyed authority. But a sizeable minority – around one third of volunteers - defied the instruction to shock the victim and disobeyed.

As we shall see, defiance was no simple matter. But there were conditions that disobedience easier. In Part Two we will consider these.

In Milgram’s words, “The individual is weak in his solitary opposition to authority but the group is strong … this is a lesson that every revolutionary group learns.”