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I love me some nostalgia. Back in our final year at school, a 48K Sinclair Spectrum mysteriously turned up in our classroom. With it was a single tape and only one game that would agree to load. The title? 1983's Jumping Jack by the infamous Imagine Software.
Like all software titles dating from that period, the graphics and sound were rudimentary but functional. The gameplay simple, bordering on the primitive. And yet, horrendously addictive. Us young hip things in the Class of '93 may have poured scorn on the Speccy's abilities. It couldn't hold a candle to our Amigas, our 386s, our MegaDrives, yet lunch time after lunch time we queued up and crowded round our rubber-keyed chum to see if anyone else could reach stage 12. What was the fuss about?
Jumping Jack is a single-screen platform game. Of sorts. Between you and the top are eight moving floors. Travelling conveyor-style in both directions are gaps. The aim is to jump through them to get to the top floor and thereby the next level. However, every time you jump a new hole appears randomly, making your journey increasingly tricky. Not to worry though, should you miss a hole and bang your head on the ceiling or fall through a gap you'll be temporarily stunned. You only lose a life if you fall back to your starting point. Adding to the fun are a number of peculiar-looking enemies. These include a man with a blunderbuss, an airliner, an axe, and a host of amorphous blobs. Here's a sample of them. If they touch you you're temporarily stunned, and it takes Jack a longer to recover from them than a simple fall through the floor. It adds another level of strategy to what is already a tricky game. 
Is there anything more that can be said? There's doesn't seem much else to it. Your flickery little stick man hardly condenses centuries worth of dodgy cultural codes. His surreal enemies betray nothing but random, if slightly Pythonesque choices. Yet again, like most video games of a bygone age they resist reading because they're all about the gameplay. While there's plenty to be said about that in and of itself which certainly applies to a culturally "thin" games like Jumping Jack, I'm going to take this in a slightly different direction.Jumping Jack was published by Imagine, but was not written in-house. Nevertheless, I think the game can work as an allegory of not just Imagine's fate, but the new rapaciousness that consumed business culture in the 1980s. Imagine, set up in 1982, lasted about 18 months before collapsing under heavy debts. It published reams of, at that time, good quality software but the company's cash was blown on salubrious offices, overstaffing, super-flashy marketing (again, by the standards of the day) and luxury cars for the bosses. It lived beyond its means and spectacularly went bust after some daft business decisions - such as buying up much of Britain's cassette-making capacity prior to Christmas 1983 so rivals would be hard pressed to manufacture games in sufficient quantities. It was less risk-taking and more risk-seeking behaviour. It couldn't pay its bills, nor could Imagine pitch for new contracts as its reputation spread. So down the tubes it went.
Jumping Jack, bizarrely, prefigured Imagine's fate in video game form. The first level, without the enemies, is easy enough. Jump up from one level to the next, making note of where the new gaps are and avoiding/utilising them where necessary. On and on it goes until you have five enemies racing across the screen. It requires careful timing, careful jumping, knowledge of where the gaps are and will be a few seconds hence, and the proximity of that bloody dinosaur. One can almost work out a strategy to get you safely to the upper floors, but as the risks multiply a simple misstep can screw you up. There's one floor to go, you jump too early and wham, you're down. A train, a witch, a pencil run you over in short order, keeping you stunned until a gap comes along and drops you to the next level. This dazes you further, another enemy comes along, and ... you get the picture. One slight mistake can escalate into a crisis for Jack. One moment you're at the threshold of the next level, and less than ten seconds later drops and enemies force your right down to the bottom of the screen, leaving you twitching on your back in pixelated agony.
It's fitting Jumping Jack was one of Imagine's last games as an independent entity. The temptation is to cut corners and recklessly dash for the top, but if one doesn't take care hubris is followed swiftly by nemesis. In Imagine's case, it took on the form of bankruptcy. For Jack, it's a blue snake that turns the screen purple.
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Many thanks to Sarah Ditum for reminding me about this brilliant tune in the week. It would be rude if the Solid Satday Night Disco cooked with anything else.
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My comrade and former Twitter sparring partner Mark has a post up about the state of the anti-austerity movement after, well, four years of austerity. His basic argument is one I would concur with, albeit with some caveats. He confesses to feeling de ja vu ahead of next Thursday's public sector strike, an action that could see around two million workers take industrial action. He observes that while the cause is just and should be supported, workers are only striking for a single day. There is no joined up strategy to defeat austerity, nor a road map for what happens when people go back to work on July 11th. He sees it in a succession of set pieces of recent years - the TUC march, one-day strikes here and there, rallies down in London, and so on. Yet as time wears on the trade unions and the anti-austerity movement are stuck in a groove of doing the same thing and expecting different results each time.
I have some sympathy with Mark's argument. I said the same sort of things last year when the People's Assembly initiative launched. This from then:I am tired of what appear to be cyclical motions of activity of the left and the labour movement. It goes something like this.
We start with an issue, say a looming unpopular war, a perceived deficit in working class political independence, or opposition to austerity.
An organisation or group of organisations hold an exciting and energising set of meetings. These are usually along the lines of a massive speakerthon in London - typically at Friends Meeting House or ULU. And followed by local launches elsewhere that often see leading figures of the new movement feature as special guests.
The immediate objective laid out by the Steering Committee is a big set piece event, such as a demonstration, a day of action, or a general election campaign.
Once that objective has been met and a Herculean effort pulled off by all concerned, the next target appears - a local mobilisation or another large set piece such as another national demo, another day of action, another set of elections.
For some, especially those who were tempered by the initial 'heroic' phase of the movement, start getting disillusioned. It might be because there's other things going on in their lives, or they're feeling a bit burned out, or their activity is appearing to have little appreciable effect, or, all three.
As disillusionment sets in for large numbers, people start dropping out of activity.
Those remaining, who by this point are inveterate protestors of all types and self-decribed revolutionary organisations, typically turn in and blame each other and the SWP for screwing it up. "If only the right leadership were present."
I think Mark and many activists of similar mind make two common related, but fundamental errors. The first point is sort of voluntarist. There is no strategy beyond the set pieces because the "trade union bureaucrats" want to keep a lid on things. The one thing the bureaucracy fears more than a Tory government with a fresh mandate is an active membership pushing for action. There might be an element of truth to this ... if you went back to the 1970s. Nowadays things have changed somewhat. These days your trade union full-timer is less a bureaucrat and more a full-time activist. Unfortunately, as the labour movement has declined paid employees have had to pick up the work once done by lay elected officials and trade unionists. It has increasingly fallen on them to do the representing and the organising. Scared of autonomous rank-and-file activity? Chance would be a fine thing, would come the reply. Mark's argument is premised on the opposite view. That the trade union apparatus is and continues to be a break on action, and that workers would brush austerity aside if only the right leadership were in place. This Trotsky-inspired position reduces all political questions to a matter of working class leadership. Sort this out and the rest will follow.
If only it was that easy.
I'm not going to go into great depth about the changed political economy of the working class. I've banged on about it for yonks. But when you have a whole class of wage and salary earners who are mostly outside of their trade unions, and those who are in them display low levels of combativity, political opportunities for big-P politics industrial action are somewhat circumscribed. If you want to talk about the less-than-optimal outcomes of most labour disputes, always pinning it on the "sell-out" antics of unspecified bureaucrats is an abstention from analysis - and for the Trot groups who should know better, betrays an infantile approach to industrial politics.
"Hold on a minute, you might be letting the trade union leaders and full-timers off the hook. Aren't you excusing inactivity? If the TU tops got their fingers out and showed a fighting lead, we can organise a fightback. Look at the late Bob Crow!" The most crucial resource trade unions have is solidarity, the capacity that when push comes to shove, members will respect the ballot decision and abide by it as a disciplined collective. When you lose disputes, the confidence underpinning solidarity erodes. Hence full timers and officials are relentlessly pragmatic. They know it is not a resource to be squandered. And this is doubly the case when we live in an era of industrial peace conditioned by labour movement weakness. If disputes are routinely patchily observed, if membership densities are low, if ordinary members' participation in union structures remains historically depressed, then you can understand why general secretaries pay zero heed to calls for immediate general strikes and indefinite action - let alone using trade union power as a weapon on issues not directly related to members' workplaces.
Sorry to be such a gloom, but disempowered working people and the restricted political opportunities this allows feeds into the treadmill of demos, one-day strikes, more demos, etc. It's not an inability to absorb lessons as such. Yet I remain fundamentally optimistic for a resurgent labour movement. Things cannot and will not stay the same forever. There is something in the air, a sense that the old ways are found increasingly wanting, that politics is disconnected and that working people are getting a raw deal. Presently UKIP and the anti-politics brigade are reaping the benefit, but why not our movement too?
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What does inequality mean to British politics? Everything. There are many kinds of inequality out there, but in Britain, the world's first capitalist nation, its politics has long reflected the class relations capitalism produces and depends on. The Conservative Party was - and still is - a coalition of land, business and finance. And Labour, basically, a coalition of everyone else. The former represents money made from the labour of others, the latter the labourers who make money for others. So when it comes to the question of inequality, where do the parties sit? How do they address the problem?
Well, the Conservatives do not. We are told the Tories have a long-term economic plan. Dave and co are eager to utter those words at every available opportunity. But do they, really? More on that another time. For now, whether in possession of an economic plan or not, they certainly do not have a programme for addressing inequality. In fact, is it even recognised as a problem? Clearly not. For them, inequality is good. Rip out the social security safety net and you have a mass of people who, of necessity, will queue up for the latest zero hours, minimum-wage offering down the dole office. And this is a good thing. If you're ever fortunate enough to receive a ministerial letter from the DWP, they wax lyrical about the mental a physical health benefits of being in work. Low paid work encourages employees to graft harder, to work their way up the greasy pole. It demands discipline and self-responsibility. Best of all, low wages are attractive to overseas investors. Where else in Western Europe can you find a benign corporate tax regime, excellent transport links to the continent, and an educated work force on the cheap?
Previously, I've mentioned, from the standpoint of British capitalism, how dysfunctional the Tories are. They are, but that's because they pursue the short-termist logic of individual capitals. Every business strives to produce commodities at minimum cost, thereby reducing the risk each commodity represents when it goes on sale and maximising the potential realisation of surplus value (see point nine, here). Examples of how businesses go about this is the introduction of labour-saving technology, IT systems, greater surveillance and supervision of the workplace, forcing through temporary and zero hour working. We could be here all day listing the means by which individual capitals wring every bit of surplus value possible out of their employees. And, of course, they have an interest in keeping the work force as individuated and atomised as possible. Disorganised workers do not challenge management decisions. Disorganised workers accept whatever pay and conditions are thrust upon them. So trade unions, wherever possible, are a no-no. The Tories are basically governing Britain as if it was Amazon or McDonald's. Grind the workers down, pretend there are no long-term structural problems, and celebrate inequality not just as a virtue, but a selling point.
Labour is different. Forget the far left fairytales you might have been patronised with, Labour has always been a party of capitalism. Let me repeat that. Labour has always been a party of capitalism. Yet, because it is a labour party, it has a varied and patchy batting record for the interests of working people. Working people here is everyone who, of necessity, works for a wage or salary in all the possible jobs you can think of. And interests are their particular and general interests as they exist within the system. Also, as a party of labour, it is suffused with the potential to become something more than just a better manager of British capitalism. But more about that another time too. As big business abandoned Labour prior to the 2010 general election, it has become more dependent on affiliated unions and cash raised by party members. The party's circumstances may be reduced, but it is much clearer about the problems British capitalism faces. Look at the emerging party programme. Decentralisation of government, 50p tax, jobs guarantee, attacking land banks, no EU referendum, reversal of NHS marketisation, higher minimum and living wages, ambitious house building programmes - even the maligned training or no benefits for the young unemployed - they slot together as scaffolding around a creaking, tottering capitalism stubbornly stuck in relative decline. Ed Miliband talks an awful lot about inequality, and has even mentioned the S word. This, of course, is not socialism. It's a vision of a managed capitalism different to the 1945-79 Keynesian consensus, but not entirely dissimilar. It's a vision in which inequality is eroded, in which the power of the state breaks capital's collective investment strike, and gives stability and security to millions of people without it.
It is the party not based on capital that can see the general interests of British capital most clearly. Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution is seldom spoken of these days, let alone used intelligently to shine a light on capitalism's guts, but an occasionally useful tool it remains. For those not au fait, it's basically the thesis that nascent capital in colonial or semi-colonial countries were not capable of leading anti-imperialist revolts and developing a national capitalism because their immediate interests were too bound up with those of the occupier's capital. Only proletarian-led forces, which are free of those interests, have the capacity to take power and get development moving. Whether that has been confirmed or refuted by subsequent history need not detain us here. Yet, surprisingly, it has some purchase on the position of social democratic and labour parties in the advanced countries. After the war, as British capital lay exhausted and its bourgeoisie rudderless, in six short years Labour restructured the system. It could not be any other way. The Tories through a million and one ties of friendship and kinship were bound to the old, inefficient and exploitative way of doing things. From an existential stand point, they were incapable acting as Labour did. And so it is the case today. We scorn at the prospect of Dave ever standing up to the hedge funds, the fossil fuel lobby, private health, because they're his mates, his bedfellows, the bedrock of the Tory Party. The Tories cannot enforce the sort of reforms endorsed by Labour because acting in the interests of capital-in-general means going against the interests of the capitals-in-particular they are heavily dependent on. Labour's different social base allows it, compels it to act differently.
With the fall of the Berlin Wall, we've had to endure 25 years of triumphalism, of dog-eat-dog capitalism being the only game in town, of scorn poured on claims of socialism's superiority to capitalism. Yet the historical egg could be on our ideologists' faces. Marx is very clear that socialism is a real movement, a real tendency in really-existing capitalist societies. Trade unions and labour parties are vehicles and incubators of that movement and, in Britain, is the only political force capable of saving British capitalism from itself. What a lovely irony.
We now see him for what he is. For decades, Rolf Harris was adored by millions. His was a warm, avuncular presence on our screens. Whether introducing kids to classic cartoons, or shedding a tear over a dying puppy, Harris was a reassuring fixture and one of those very few celebrities to reach national treasure status. No one disliked Rolf, how could you? The women who were abused and assaulted over a 30 year period knew another Rolf Harris. The one who couldn’t keep his hands to himself, the predatory sex pest, the man who groomed and assaulted his daughter’s 13 year-old best friend. That Harris, the one who left trauma and bitterness in his wake has been dragged from the shadows by his survivors and exposed for the world to see. We should be thankful Harris has lived to a ripe old age. Unlike Savile, he will go to his grave knowing he didn’t get away with it, that justice has been done, and the women he abused have seen him brought low for his crimes.
There are two wider, slightly related points I want to make about Harris and celebrity abusers. There is the monstering of sex offenders. They – rightly – inspire visceral loathing. In the case of Harris and, to a far greater degree, Savile, this gut reaction is all the more potent because of the esteem and trust in which they were held, and that their crimes, their abuses, often took place in plain sight. Yet sex offenders, though guilty of monstrous things, are not monsters. Writing that line tastes like ashes in the mouth, but there are human beings too. They were not born sex offenders, they are not a species apart. Like everyone else, these men were made. We might not do it under the circumstances of our choosing, but all of us make our own way in life. For Harris and Savile, there was no especial trigger that flipped their abuse switch. Understanding them does not lie in a putative paedophile gene – the reason anyone chooses to abuse is rooted in their biography, and how this is formed and constantly reformed by choice and circumstance. In Harris’s and Savile’s cases, fame conveyed upon them an aura. Celebrity gave them opportunities to offend, and a means of silencing the survivors of their abuse. It feeds back time after time, heightening a sense of invulnerability and entitlement. Their offending are early examples of pathological narcissism (Ian Watkins, for example), a state of nihilistic self-centredness in which people – men, women, boys, girls – are so much adjuncts of their wants, their lusts. What was it the First Baron Acton said?
The second is the effacing of the celebrity abuser. Foucault’s classic Discipline and Punish opens with the detailed description of a hanging, drawing and quartering from 1757. The victim, Robert-Francois Damiens had attempted to murder Louis XV. Tortured and found guilty of regicide, his body was obliterated through dismemberment and burning, his house destroyed, his siblings forced to change their names and his immediate family banished from France. In 21st century Britain, the body – if still living – is incarcerated. Yet for the likes of Savile, Gary Glitter, and now Harris, a process of effacement begins. It is impossible to undo the damage their abuse of trust caused, but society can recuperate itself by erasing their position in popular culture. Commissioned retrospectives of the 1970s, for instance, avoid all mention of Savile and Gadd, despite their then looming figures on. Top of the Pops retreads are carefully edited to keep them out. The same will now happen to Harris. Reels and reels of archive footage rendered unusable, a place in the popular consciousness unthought. This is replaced with trial images around which the old memories are illustrative flutters. The organising principle for these men from now and for many decades hence is their offending. This is held up to be the truth of their characters, and how they will be forever re-remembered.
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