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A strange calm has settled over the Labour Party. There are debates over trade union influence, over what needs to be done to retain those poll leads, but when it comes to the question of political economy there is almost unanimity. From the left in the LRC to the right in Progress there is an understanding that neoliberalism is done. That Britain was dangerously exposed by the unfettered market New Labour assiduously cultivated. And, lastly, to get things going again requires some new thinking or, for Keynes fans, new old thinking. It is therefore a shame that Michael Meacher's new book, The State We Need hasn't had the circulation it deserves. It is very much a work of Labour's consensus around matters economic and, it could be argued, serves as an outrider for a "Milibandist" vision of Britain. This is not work of the hard or soft left, but rather the realistic left. And as such I can only see it attracting minor quibbles from the quarters that sit either side of it.
Obviously, The State We Need is a title that places itself in the camp of Will Hutton's reformed capitalism, as detailed in his important The State We're In. Like Will's book, Michael accepts that capitalism is the name of the game (although Michael chooses to label in 'ethical socialism' - a branding Éoin Clarke has been keen to revive), and that the immediate task is to make up for lost time. That is a root-and-branch reform of how Britain does business to turn around its century-long decline. I've said it, but how do you go about doing it?
Michael suggests what Britain needs is a decisive break with neoliberalism and a move to what he calls 'national interest capitalism'. His book details schemes for reigning in the banks, engineering class privilege out of the education system, rebuilding public services by severely curbing and reversing marketisation, rebalancing the economy with a necessary stress on manufacturing, lassoing corporate power with the thick rope of democracy, clamping down on tax dodging and the socially useless (and value-destroying) power of finance, and an vast expansion of green jobs. No country is an island, not even Britain, so Michael talks about the leverage it could use to rewrite the global rules of trade. It's also worth noting his is the first book on global political economy I've read that takes the issue of water shortages seriously. As you might expect, the state is the central mechanism for enacting these policies. But The State We Need is not a shopping list of uncosted demands. It's more an exercise in institutional design and the enacting of powers.
I'm not going to get into the nitty-gritty of Michael's suggestions. Together though, they make for a coherent package. And, crucially, they begin from the position Britain is in: a country whose assets have been flogged off and whose governing ideology is completely ill-equipped to guide its way in a global economy increasingly dominated by the East.
There is unfortunately one weakness to Michael's argument, but not a fatal one by any means. On one level, the structural reforms the book sets out are a necessity. Britain needs to go with the global capital flow and have a much more activist state that will drive investment and provide economic leadership. How do we get there? We can't expect our decadent ruling class to do it. They've had ample opportunity over the last 100 years and fluffed it each and every time. National interest capitalism requires longer-term vision and demands key social supports not beholden to short-termism and reckless profiteering to carry it through.
Policy is never a matter of free-floating ideas. They are always tied to and champion specific sets or ranges of interests. That's the nature of the capitalist beast. Its political economy is thoroughly contradictory and antagonistic - ideas and policies are specific moments in that interminable, restless struggle. Ethical socialism, for example, presents itself as a nice idea and that's it. But it's not. It too condenses the outlook, the collective experience of certain sets of people. Just as liberalism does. Just a Toryism does. Just as UKIP's faux libertarianism does. There's a reason socialist billionaires are few and far between.
National interest capitalism is no different. Clearly, that section of business who gained and are still doing well under neoliberalism's dysfunctional sway would lose out on the basis of Michael's plans. But who would gain? Business closely associated with manufacturing. Small and medium-sized enterprise. Firms into the promotion of renewable energies and green technologies. Yet the most immediate beneficiary would be working people - the vast majority of us who've had to put up with decades of uncertainty, hire-and-fire, scapegoating, crap wages, the erosion of dignity at work, the stripping out of social security supports, housing shortages, spiralling bills and rising food prices. While our interests ultimately lie beyond capitalism the immediate situation demands a capitalism that concedes a severe back-pedalling. Concession, however, is an outcome of applying pressure. Therefore getting Labour back into government in 2015 is an absolute necessity, but we need the labour movement to build a head of steam behind plans like Michael's. Thankfully, the trade union and cooperative movements as a whole already are. It just a simple job (pah!) of recruiting more and getting more working people into the party. And, to be fair, there are elements of Michael's plan to be found in the front bench's evolving thinking about matters economic. But it's not a one way street. The historic crisis of capitalism cannot be reduced to a question of proletarian leadership, but it is not irrelevant. A strong labour movement pressing for social democracy needs a quid pro quo, a policy compact where new measures benefit working people, ease that deep sense of insecurity and make it easier for the labour movement to organise and grow.
If that dialectic can be jump started, we're on our way.
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The below comes from 'Comrade X', the woman who, like 'Comrade W' made a sexual assault complaint to the SWP's Dispute Commission about the alleged behaviour of a former leading member. Again, it is worth reiterating that "Delta" has never had charges brought against him and is entitled to the presumption of innocence like anyone else. The scandal, the putrescent stench has always been about the appalling handling of those allegations and hounding of alleged sexual abuse survivors by active SWP'ers. As you can see from X's resignation note (original here via Ciara Squires), her experience too is of being bullied, harassed and smeared. What a disgusting bunch.
I'm glad to hear that now SWP conference has closed, those few decent socialists who've remained are packing their bags and bidding farewell. Good. A slow, painful fade into the footnotes of labour movement history now awaits the SWP, a decline that cannot come soon enough.There are many reasons I am resigning after the events of the last twelve months, you can read some of them in my Internal Bulletin piece. I will give only one reason here: a member of the DC claimed at the SWP national conference this weekend that my email account might have been hacked but they were confident that the Central Committee was not responsible. How is it possible that this hasn’t generated outrage? When told that the woman who brought a complaint of sexual harassment has had her email account hacked and one of the emails used as evidence in her case deleted, most SWP members seem content that it is OK because the CC did not personally do it.
This typifies the problems of the past 12 months. There has been no political will to resolve any of the issues in a principled way. There is no political will to demand that the person who gave the CC hacked emails should have to conclusively prove how they got the emails or be expelled. Instead at every stage smoke and mirrors have been deployed to manoeuvre to win votes and political positions. In the process I have been sacked, bullied, smeared and marginalised but this has been tolerated to prevent Martin’s supporters from leaving and to avoid the CC accounting for their mistakes.
What of the apology? I do not accept as adequate or sincere an apology fought for and said through gritted teeth. I first found out that the CC regretted my hurt and distress when I read about it in their motion. No-one has met with me to communicate it personally. In tragic fashion I have had to speak to a motion to fight for an apology for myself. For months I was told no apology is necessary. Is it any wonder that I am unconvinced by the apology at conference?
A sincere apology would have political consequences. It would require those who have bullied and smeared to face some sanction. Instead the party leadership continue to argue that there is parity between the slandering and smearing of women who have brought allegations of rape and sexual harassment and people, angry at the handling of a rape allegation, calling Alex Callinicos a “wanker”. A comrade who called someone an “idiot” faced disciplinary sanction, while those who claimed I was a police spy have faced none. That this is now the official party position is reason enough to leave.
The potential for a meaningful renewal of the SWP has dwindled. The last 12 months have polarised and entrenched positions. Debate is now refracted through the prism of a bitter faction fight. Too many people have left and continue to leave. For any organisation to remain dynamic and relevant there needs to be a high level of debate and discussion in order to develop the theory and practice necessary to relate to the real world. This crisis has not caused all the problems in the SWP but it has smothered the possibility that the SWP can develop into a serious revolutionary party.
I am not an MI5 agent, so I am leaving to rebuild the revolutionary left in Britain. This will be a process of years not months but for now I leave proud of my time in the SWP, deeply saddened that this is the endpoint and a little excited at the fresh air I can now breathe.
Update Ever behind the curve, "we aren't rape apologists unless we believe that women always tell the truth - and guess what, some women and children lie" got a round of applause in yesterday's session. Stay classy, SWP.
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After decades of loyal service to the Kim dynasty, "despicable human scum ... who was worse than a dog" was probably not the epitaph Chang Song-thaek hoped for. But the very public and very final defenestration of the "traitor for all ages" says a couple of things I think professional Kimologists and the BBC are missing. The idea the "Great Comrade", or whatever absurd title he's using this week, offed his uncle to secure his power is true. But making that kind of observation is a bit like saying Lehman Brothers collapsed because it ran out of money. It doesn't grasp the underlying dynamics, the shifting factions and patterning of influence cloying for favour and office in Kim the Younger's new regime.
Unfortunately, no American or South Korean intelligence assets report directly to me but there are a few points that might help in making sense of the purge, and that about to engulf Chang's hapless allies. First, there is a generational aspect to the purge. The idea Chang was somehow plotting Kim's overthrow is preposterous. Had he been left in post there was every chance he would have carried on as per normal. Chang's real crime was being a holdover from Dad. The pre-eminent position he held in the bureaucracy was independent of Kim III's largesse - at least in a sense, and therefore had to go. And other North Korea watchers are probably right that this is a moment in a wider purge. Beneficiaries of Chang's patronage have to be rooted out because, on paper, they represent a potential source of opposition. Yet it's an opportunity for some, too. Solzhenitsyn's analysis of Stalin's terror, whatever its problems, was nevertheless right to acknowledge how the pattern of denunciation, arrest, and purge cleared out parts of the bureaucracy. It was a career opportunity and a refresh of the apparatus. Old officials, whether loyal or not were packed off to the gulag and in came new blood loyal to the boss at the top. We saw it in Stalin's USSR, in Mao's China, and now (again) in North Korea. Sometimes though a purge can develop a dynamic all of its own. Like China, the party/state bureaucracy is stuffed full of office holders who've been in place for decades. This is a gerontocrat bloc, and a gerontocrat block wedged in the machinery preventing younger, aspirant careerists from climbing the greasy pole. A denunciation here, a whisper there can be all it takes to improve one's promotion prospects. However, when this happens a purge can quickly get out of hand. An exercise in stabilising matters can risk destabilising the whole edifice. I can't see Kim's looking to carry through a terror-scale clean out for precisely this reason, but stranger things have happened.
That said, whether the purge is small or large scale it will certainly be conducted with all the theatrics the regime can muster. All dictatorships are brittle, and history has proven that unreconstructed Stalinist regimes are especially vulnerable. In a society where the party/state reaches into every aspect of social life, so it will inevitably be blamed for absolutely everything that goes wrong. In China and Vietnam, an unintended consequence of market reform is that, occasionally, opposition to the party (from grumbles to protests) are directed at particular enterprises or certain corrupt officials. And in China, there are subordinate political parties that recognise the primacy of Communist Party rule, and a degree of freedom of discussion in the approved media. Hence aspects of the party/state can bear the brunt of dissent without necessarily calling the legitimacy of the set-up into question. Though that still does happen too. In North Korea the relationship between party/state and citizen is not even partly mediated. The perverse personality cult is never out of people's faces, Kim Jong-un's person is identified with the party, the state and the country. So when the drain is blocked or there's yet another queue at the supermarket, it's not the party's fault - it's Kim's.
The lack of mediating relationships helps explain the personality cult and level of repression. Without institutions that can act as diffuse, independent sources of legitimacy and hegemony it has to rely on shock and awe to keep the populace quiescent. For example, what are the Mass Games if not a display of totalitarian power, of coordinating thousands of human being in perfect synchronicity? How to explain the violent rhetoric greeting the fall of Chang, or its penchant for blood-curdling rhetoric vis a vis the USA, South Korea and Japan? The threat of terrible retribution against internal and external enemies is always a matter of managing an atomised population, as much as the dynastic cult and juche ideology tries gluing together 'one nation' out of Brilliant Comrade photo ops and canary melon harvests. Whatever would Disraeli have thought?
Making way for Kim's lackeys and providing someone new for a very cynical two-minute hate, and keeping its cold war opponents on their toes taken together are not satisfactory explanations for the purge. Internally, since Kim III's accession there have been moves to trim down the military. As expensive as they are, nuclear weapons and long-range ballistic missiles are cheaper in the long-run than keeping over a million under arms. From the dynasty's perspective this is rational - not "mad" as outside commentators like to portray. However, managing down a military that is a key prop and source of power within the bureaucracy is far from straightforward. Issuing decrees and expecting generals to meekly accept a trimming of their power will not happen, even if you're a Kim. In the 80s the Chinese Army accepted a diminution of their size in exchange for state-run companies, giving them a stake in Deng's economic reforms. Kim does not have that chip to bargain with, and DMZ brinkmanship can only "distract" the military brass so many times.
But this could put the move against Chang in a different light. Chang was responsible for North Korean business in China, and was known to be an advocate of Deng-style reforms. After all, they've kept China, Vietnam and Cuba from going the same way as the USSR and its satellites. Chang and his faction were, if you like, "realists" and were helping bring home the reddies from Chinese markets. According to China, trade between the two were perfectly balanced, though 90% of transactions are with Chinese currency. Not good news for jucheist self-reliance. Liquidating Chang and his cadre of business bureaucrats could have something to do with the state protecting its sovereignty from Chinese capitalism. Periodic crackdowns on domestic black markets are not unknown, and Kim does not seem sold on Deng-style policies. Or it could be that this potentially lucrative sector of government activity is turned over to some bureaucrats in fatigues. I guess we'll know if those operations are closed down, or continue with new personnel. It could be either of these things, both of them, or neither.
North Korea is unfortunate enough to be inflicted with a disgusting regime, and one that could well be the worst currently in existence. Yet these things are always creatures of circumstance, of economics, politics, development, classes, and geopolitics. If the cold war frontier can be sorted and relations between the Koreas and the US normalised, that could contribute to the fall of the Kims over the long-run, and see the welcome passing of its grotesqueries into history.
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If you pretend to speak for all working class people, then you've either got a chip on your shoulder, are a bit of a wally, or have some theatrical identity politics you feel the need to manifest. I'm guessing no one's used the platform of the Daily Telegraph to do so before, so many congratulations to Lisa Ansell for being original in at least one respect.
Her thesis is that "The Left" are responsible for grinding down working class people, the demonisation of the right-wing media's merry-go-round of favourite scapegoats, and choking off discussion about possible alternatives. Sounds very Trotty: "if it wasn't for the (mis)leaders of the working class ...". Yet the only people I have come across who believe the left have the semi-totalitarian cultural power to shut out and exclude critics are the stunted characters one finds ambling about the yellowing grassroots of the Tories and UKIP, and the degenerate knuckle-draggers of the BNP. "Cultural Marxism" is a thing, don't you know. But don't talk about it. The liberal conspiracy will only clobber you.
This is being unfair to Lisa, mind. She's no right-winger. But still, her thesis is bunk. While New Labour were definitely preferable to the Tories and did some alright things, nevertheless it nailed its colours to the neoliberal mast. It went beyond the traditional Labour conflict between principle and expediency and enthusiastically embraced market fundamentalism until the crash called time on the love-in. Sure, New Labour was a project, a strategic orientation to politics and government by a section of the right wing of the labour movement. It had its architects. It made its deliberate moves. And no one forced it to extend marketisation, bind the tax payer to rip-off PFI contracts, or make war on Iraq.
Where were "the left" when this was going on? Well, for the most part, it was protesting this retrograde nonsense. Organising in community groups, campaigning against privatisation and cuts, mobilising against war. It was doing what the left has always done - fighting working people's corner. From Chartism through to the New Unionism, the TUC and the Labour Party; the foundation of the NHS, fighting the miners' strike and the poll tax, the left has backed working people. Because the left is the labour movement. It is working people.
When Lisa moans "the result of their [trade union leaders] ineffectiveness is shown in the expansion of welfare to the working population and a labour market underpinned by zero-hours contracts", she forgets that whatever the faults of those leaders, the labour movement as a whole suffered a run of strategic defeats from the miners' strike to the general election defeat in 1992. The much weaker movement we have now is the direct consequence of battles lost. The workplaces, the communities, the solidarities, the very backbone of the left collapsed under the triple whammy of defeat, deindustrialisation, and the privatisation of everyday life. It's unsurprising that the response to this from the right of the labour movement was an accommodation to the market, not a radical challenge to it.
The left still has not recovered, but it has got better. Lines such as "Labour movement indifference allowed our benefits system to demonise women, carers, mothers, the ill, the unemployed ..." could only be written by someone who's had scant involvement with it. Remind me, who has thrown their weight against anti-bedroom tax campaigns and the appalling attacks on disabled people? What organisations are fighting for women's equality, against racism, and rights for LGBT people? Who is now leading the charge against monstering and scapegoating? Oh yes, the left. Working people who are active in the labour movement.
But really what Lisa has in her sights is not the labour movement per se, but the left Twitter "establishment". Shooting through her article - and many tens of thousands of tweets - is a resentment, a belief that a left commentariat is making its way in the world speaking for working people and excluding genuine proletarians like, um, herself. It's nonsense, of course. Young Owen, a favourite target of Ol' Green Eyes, writes articles for money and appears in the media. So what? He never claims to speak for anyone but himself. Polly Toynbee has been cranking out centre left comment for years - she doesn't pretend to be the voice of working class women. In fact, the only people conceited enough to think they're speaking for "the working man" (and it is the working man) are the ideological kin of her Telegraph stable mates; Nigel Farage, Godfrey Bloom, Nadine Dorries. It's these people with their "common touch" that are allowed to pass themselves off as the authentic voice of Britain, of the real representatives of the salt-of-the-earth. It is their rubbish, their divisive rhetoric that gets a free pass from Lisa. And it is they, not a single New Statesman interview on 'brocialism' that poses the "complex, chavvy, intersecting, working class" the greatest danger.
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Back in the olden days when hair was long and loading times were even longer, you could more or less divide video games into two broad and not entirely discrete types. In one corner were the fast-paced action-oriented games. They looked nothing like the arcade games of the early-mid 80s, but their ethic of playability owed more than a passing acquaintance to them. Glaring at them from the other end of the market were the more cerebral games. The proper chin-strokers. These were your adventure/role-playing games, and given their sedentary pace I'd say you can place early strategy titles in there too. These were the very opposite of action games. You pondered your moves, or thought deeply about the direction your party of adventurers would head in - if you could work out the frequently frustrating text interfaces. But on a primitive basis, they established two key principles of gaming: action, and immersion.
Video game history since then, when looked at askance, could be described as a series of encounters between these principles. "Immersive" elements from role playing and adventure games invaded arcade conversions, particularly on Nintendo and Sega machines. Fancy a spin on Super Hang-On and Super Monaco GP? Here, have a bolt-on career mode to give a quote shallow arcade experience some depth and longevity. It worked in reverse too. The Legend of Zelda is widely-credited with popularising the action RPG genre, at least outside of Europe. The mutual to-ing and fro-ing of tanks on each others' lawns gathered pace with hardware capable of rendering 3D environments. Action and immersion were less antipodes, and more bezzy mates. One could play an action experience like Tomb Raider, but simultaneously get lost in its intricate puzzling and game world. The story-telling one used to associate with cerebral games bust out of "high gaming" and established itself as standard to action-oriented product.
The Killzone series typifies the change mainstream action games have undergone. Three generations of Playstation (the 2, 3 and 4) have been graced by four titles. In case you don't know, Killzone is a first person shooter, and it's you vs the space Nazis. In the not-too-distant future the human race have colonised two worlds around Alpha Centauri. Vekta is a blue/green paradise very much like our pearl of a planet. Helghan, by contrast, is a hell hole. There is, as you might expect, a detailed back story, but to cut to the chase the Helghast have a grievance, and as a Hobbesian dystopia with heavy 3rd Reich overtones, it wants its lebensraum back.
Killzone on the PS2 sees the Helghast invade our sleepy, liberal-loving Vekta and it's up to you to beat them back. In the second game's outing early on in the PS3's life you are part of Vekta's counter-invasion of Helghan. It's down to you to hunt down and capture the crazed half-Hitler, half-Mussolini Helghast chancellor. The third game, also on PS3, is about your escape from Helghan and your efforts to prevent the deployment of a super weapon. The game concludes with a radioactive chain reaction that sweeps Helghan's surface, laying waste to the population lying in its path. Is the threat finally over? Well, no. There would be no Killzone: Shadow Fall (KSF) available for the PS4's release otherwise.
KSF is definitely a superlative product. As you would expect from a next generation system, the leap in performance is palpable but not as obvious as preceding console generations. To get a sense of it, if you take a cut scene from a PS3 or Xbox 360 game, the PS4's performance is akin to playing them. As such it's one of the most beautiful games out there.
This time Vekta is the scene of much of the action. Following the last game, which rendered Helghan uninhabitable, the survivors are granted land on the lush, green planet they were driven from in the first place. In fact, half of Vekta's hemisphere is handed over to the former enemy. Three decades on Vektans and Helghast lead an uneasy co-existence either side of a globe straddling wall. The Cold War is in, David Hasselhoff rocking Looking for Freedom atop the wall definitely is not. The game casts you as Lucas Kellan, a so-called Shadow Marshall who is tasked with all kinds of stealthy missions on the other side. The plot proper kicks in about a third of the way through which tasks you with tracking down the leader of the 'Black Hand', an underground Helghast terror group responsible for bombings, shootings and attacks against Vektan civilian targets. And it gets increasingly murky from there.
KSF is interesting because it self-conciously plays across the two levels of video game analysis established here. Like the bulk of modern video games, and especially first-person shooters, the backdrop and in-game narrative are open to what you might call "standard" ideology critique. In this case it's about protecting Vekta, which resembles the clean, hypermodern USA/West of science fictional imaginations against a scary Other. In this case, polluting, war-crazed, racist genocidal Nazis who go into combat wearing coal scuttle helmets and glowing gas masks. It opposes the liberal, tolerant values of Vekta with the totalitarian madness of the Helghast. It's straight forward goodies and baddies. Humanity vs The Covenant in Halo. Humanity vs The Hybrids in Resistance: Fall of Man. The yanks (and British!) vs (ultra nationalist) Russians in Call of Duty. And humans vs the Locust in Gears of War. The Alliance vs The Reapers in Mass Effect. It's very black and white, very straight forward.
KSF however pulls a neat narrative trick that puts some distance between these standard storytelling ploys. The franchise story line is founded on an ambiguity in the first place. As rancid and as fascistic the Helghast became, they are the ultimate blowback - the result of a planet wide eviction and subsequent exile to a barely-habitable rock. You forget that during the course of the first three games, bent as they are on genocide and other dark things. KSF on the other hand finds out that Vekta are up to some very murky things. Under the protection of Earth alliance military, the ISA, it turns out has been employing one Dr Hillary Massar. In true Mengele fashion, she is experimenting on live Helghast captives to produce a bioweapon that will target their biology specifically. Of course, she ends up getting lifted by the Helghast who quite fancy getting their hands on her research, and so a major plot point turns on trying to recapture Massar and repatriate her work to the Vektan cause. Also, for the first time, in the covert missions on the other side of the world we are introduced to Helghast civilians for the first time. As you might expect in a tyranny overseen by a fascist aristocracy, the people you meet are poor, downtrodden, and clearly in need of a meal. They live in corrugated shacks wedged between glowing, gothic-looking skyscrapers and their sense of despair is palpable. At one point you have the choice of preventing a man from blowing his head off while his anxious wife looks on, sobbing. Are the Helghast you've spent three previous games shooting at that different from us? It would seem not, which makes the plan to wage germ warfare on them all the more obscene - even if their regime is appalling.
Ah, the regime. This is where things get interesting. One of your repeat antagonists is Tyran, the mastermind behind the Helghast terror cells on your side of the wall. You end up in a few scraps with him. Like all good villains, he can't resist taunting you as you make your way to the place of battle. But instead of trash talking, he goes off on a sub-political lecture about the Helghast - how they are a "worthy people" because they battled with Helghan's poisonous environment to build a mighty military power, and how Vektans are soft and aimless because they don't believe in anything. They might have affluence and liberty, but they lack loyalty to something larger than themselves. Which is why, of course, the Helghast will eventually win. It makes you wonder if this is a comment on US society and those who are arrayed against it.
Nothing wrong with a little bit of ambiguity. But it's right at the end where KSF performs its cleverest narrative trick. While you're approaching Stahl's hideout (Stahl being the bad guy from the previous game, think Sting/Goebbels), his voice rasps out of the speaker informing you that Vektans are selfish, fear one another, and that their sole motivation is greed. A rhetorical flourish before he's dispatched into the night? Or is he speaking directly to you, the player, about your motivations and your culture. Why are you playing this game? Because you like overthrowing digital dictators or simply fancied a blast with a state-of-the-art game on a state-of-the-art system? You who throughout the game and its predecessors have merely followed orders - both of non-player characters and the game's logic. And the ambiguity returns in the final seconds of the game with a vengeance that puts into question everything you have done in KSF, including why you've sat there for hours battling through the 24th century Wehrmacht.
Plenty of games throw twists and ambiguous touches at you, but few like Shadow Fall call into question the reasons why you're playing the game. At least on my reading. If this narrative ploy that uses a well-crafted game universe to reach out to the 'meta-level' of gaming culture is going to be used more often, then the new generation of video games promises some very interesting and potentially critical product that goes beyond tired cynicism and overblown satire.
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MPs' pay has had a corrosive effect on our politics that doesn't stop at Westminster. There is a widespread view that councillors on local authorities are banking massive sums. In Stoke earlier in the year, the decision to postpone a rise in members' allowances from £11,000 to £12k per annum in 2015 sparked outrage among the local pub bore brigade. "Corruption!" and "piggy piggy piggy, oink oink oink" were among the offerings served up for the local rag's letters' page and comment boxes. I'm sure this isn't unique to Stoke either. In fact, I know it isn't. MPs' diddling their expenses deepened the anti-politics mood and tarred all of mainstream politics with the same crooked brush, whether you're a town councillor or Member of the European Parliament.
The issue of pay goes deeper than the antipathy the public have towards politics and their elected representatives.
As per my walk-on part in the Great Moving Right Show, I don't hold with the 'workers' MP on a workers' wage' populism any more, but its critique of the current £66k salary is unanswerable. A wage, if that's the right word, of that size can insulate MPs from the real world. Whether intentional or not, it is now the immediate material basis for our old friend the Westminster Bubble. Being out-of-touch with what's going on "out there" has the effect of bending our honourable members' focus toward the stakes 'n' shakes of parliamentary affairs. For the Tories, it compounds their blindness to the character of a sizeable chunk of new private sector jobs, and the cost-of-living crisis ("crisis, what crisis?"). For Labour, as Hazel Blears once noted, it did little to build more social housing during 13 years of government because no one at the top had ever been affected by housing waiting lists. That, if you ask me, is a recipe for elite politics. And it's something a massive pay rise will compound.
"But the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority are just that, independent! What's the point if we don't take their recommendations?" Well, yes, IPSA is *politically* independent. But just who are the people that run it? What milieu do they come from? Let's have a look. I make that two senior lawyers, two ex-hospital chiefs, one ex-MP, and one former senior civil servant. That's what I like to see - a board that reflects Britain's full range of income scales. I mean, seriously, what a farce. IPSA is run by people who circulate in the same London-centred milieu as MP's and, unsurprisingly, have set a salary commensurate with the expectations and entitlements of it.
IPSA shouldn't be in the business of setting MPs' salaries. The board's "qualifications" and their backgrounds would rule them out in my book. Quite what level they should be pegged at is something for another time. Yet the sting needs to be permanently drawn out of MPs' pay as one condition of rebuilding trust in politics. And the way to do it is not by accepting a hefty £7,600 rise. Instead, it needs depoliticising as a matter of urgency. And the way to do that is by pegging it to public sector pay settlements. MP's are, after all, paid by the taxpayer (even though, for bureaucratic reasons, they and their staff are on the Crown's payroll). Then we will see how keen they are about that public sector pay freeze.
When you play a video game, you're playing fast and loose with communism. Who knew? Well, Paul Mason did, for one. His piece, 'How computer games can help us overthrow capitalism' demonstrates how critiquing games can, as much as any other media product, help illuminate certain cultural logics; sets of ingrained, commonsensical social practices; and the continuous structuring and restructuring of political economy. Quite why this kind of writing in relation to one of capitalism's cultural mainstays continues to be underdeveloped is baffling, both in and out of the academy and radical social movements.
There are two basic points about Paul's piece that are interesting. Firstly, he notes how contemporary capitalism is utterly dependent on free stuff. Networks, information, user-generated content, collaborative working; all this is where the cutting edge is at. And capitalism increasingly needs this digital global commons to keep the wheels of innovation turning - it's about harnessing its power and finding ways of making money from it (more in Cognitive Capitalism by Yann Moulier Boutang, review coming ... eventually). In one respect, while the free flows of information are public goods that can be mined profitably is a new thing, capitalism's relationship with artefacts held in common is not. Just think about the post-war institutional landscape. The NHS, social security, road-building, nationalised industry, these were "free" tax-payer owned goods that capital could make use of without impacts on their balance sheets beyond the taxes they paid. And as successive waves of privatisation have shown, in the vast majority of cases sold-off industry and infrastructure have proven to be virtually risk-free and massively profitable. These programmes of sell-offs are analogous to the process of "grinding" found in many role playing video games. Paul talks about killing infinite numbers of respawning wolves, that can then be sold for gold, which in turn is used to buy better weapons, armour and the like. The relationship of the player character to the game's environment is redolent not just off privatisation, but of capitalism's symbiotic relation to nature. It proceeds as if the globe is an infinite resource. Capitalism converts natural wealth into riches measured by money or digits on a bank balance, and the costs - pollution, waste - are dumped back into the environment as if it were a bottomless toilet bowl. This is video game as allegory.
The second point is about using play styles to subvert capitalist logics. While it is possible to mod games that are 'closed', like nearly all video games have been since the Magnavox Odyssey, and thereby play them out according to new rules, multiplayer game worlds cannot. Introducing mods that fundamentally alter the digital world is like daubing pro-Hamas slogans on the White House wall. It ain't going to happen. So Paul raises the possibility of subversive gaming modes. Why not occupy a player character's castle? Why not set up picket lines outside of dungeon entrances? Why not do a digital Swampy and prevent others from ransacking the infinitely bountiful forest? Being awkward could be fun - though I doubt annoying others who pay monthly MMO subs will make them firm friends of anti-capitalist causes.
Gaming has always been a social experience. Mine, and I'm sure many others', first introductions to video games were usually around a mate's house. From the Spectrum to the Mega Drive, that's how it was for me. Thursdays and Fridays at FE college saw a gang of us all trying to play public domain games on my mate's cigarette ash-covered Amiga. Given the amount we smoked, it's a wonder we didn't prematurely succumb to respiratory problems. But games were closed. Most "proper" games had two-player options - usually taking in turns after the other player died - and very few had more. All have traditionally required players to be in close physical proximity. Yet most games have been solitary experiences. The social element came in when you were showing off at home, or talking/arguing about them in the school yard.
Whatever the case, for most of video gaming history, the standard model of play has been a player, a controller, a computer/console, and a display. And most games are typically a journey, of getting from A to B while avoiding enemies and obstacles; or of amassing points and advancing through the levels by completing certain sets of tasks, like lining them blocks up or clearing the screen of baddies. This is certainly the case of the old non-canonical games I've covered here - Smash TV, RoboCop, and RC Pro Am. Playing such arcade-style games required (and do require) that one disciplines one's body for serious lengths of time. Sitting still, learning the controls, and developing the reflexes - the embodied memory - was what it was all about. The player is oriented toward something that exists outside themselves, and to control it demanded one conformed to its rules. This was where the fun and the challenge lay. Hokey stories were a barely acknowledged excuse to blast waves of alien scum. As such while present, ideologies and common cultural tropes barely stood out. So what if you were rescuing a princess or a girlfriend? So what if your hypermasculine player character mowed down hoards of enemy soldiers. So what. It was all a bit of fun. Gameplay was the point, and it was the ethics of playability that was officially sanctioned and reinforced by the video game review industry.
Throwing together Adorno, Foucault and Bourdieu would leave an unseemly pile of bones. You might also have a sense of subject construction appropriate to the age. From Adorno, video games see the (im)patient repetition of commands learned by rote in a form of entertainment that excludes the possibility of a critical relation to it. Have you met anyone who plays the Metroid franchise because of its deep insight into the decadence of late capitalism? From Foucault there is the self-disciplining of the body. You will sit there until you beat that level, even if it means you're dying for the loo. And from Bourdieu is the acquisition of habits of mind that fit the sedentary, repetitious, problem-solving workplace environment typical of most jobs. Of course, subjectivity is always a creative process. The video gamed body makes decisions and devises stratagems, not all of which are anticipated by game studios in advance. But these are within the terms of the game's universe. And this also applies to the POKEers and crackers of yesterday, and the modders of today. They expose game code and rewrite it, making a familiar experience ever so slightly unfamiliar. Yet this hardly troubles the Adornian/Foucauldian/Bourdieusian matrix. Their activity is entirely within the digitised realm, and their acts of game rule subversion reproduces game player subjectivity at the very moment pertinent questions about the ideological composition of game worlds are raised.
Therefore, you have two senses, two levels of the social critique of video games. One that is a property of all ideology critique - the teasing out of overt and hidden politics, of making plain the history and transformation of tropes utilised, of the logics of abstract social processes they sometimes unwittingly reflect. You know, the stuff literary critics, theatre critics, film critics, and music critics have been doing since the year dot. And then there is the second level, of the specific and unique body discipline/practices that one must perform as condition of gaming and the subjectivity or habitus this inculcates. And where it gets interesting is when these two levels, the in-game and the 'meta' interact, as we shall see in the follow-up post.
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