Economic Crisis: Capitalism Exposed21 Feb 2008“Investors are no longer worried whether certain banks have enough cash. They are worried about the risk of a US or even a global recession.” So the Financial Times summed up the fear of those who live off capitalist profits on 18 January. Mainstream economic commentators agree on one thing: the crisis that began in one section of the financial system last summer could be about to create chaos through much of the capitalist system which they support. Former US secretary of the treasury Lawrence Summers says the US may be already sinking into a recession. Alan Greenspan, former head of the all important US Federal Reserve (the equivalent of the Bank of England), sees the chances of this happening as 50 percent. A United Nations report warns of a “clear and present danger” of the global economy slowing to near standstill this year. Ben Bernanke, Greenspan’s successor at the Federal Reserve, tries to paint a slightly brighter picture. He expects slower growth this year but no recession. Bernanke is supposedly an expert on crises, having written academic dissertations on the role of money in the great slump of the 1930s. But last summer he failed completely to see that a crisis was about to hit the financial system. Not much faith can be put in his forecasts, or in those of other mainstream pro-capitalist economists. Their blind faith in capitalism as a money making machine for profiteers means that they nearly always believe things are going wonderfully until they suddenly go wrong. In any case Bernanke was worried enough to cut interest rates, while George Bush is pressing Congress to agree on an emergency programme of tax cuts. They desperately hope that such measures can prevent an economic slowdown turning into a slump. One thing is absolutely clear. The extreme optimism in the world economy which characterised most mainstream commentary just a year ago turned out to be completely wrong. Typical was April’s International Monetary Fund (IMF) World Outlook, with its forecast that “the world economy still looks well set for continued robust growth in 2007 and 2008”. Gordon Brown, chancellor Alistair Darling and governor of the Bank of England Mervyn King were so enamoured of the wonders of the free market that they downplayed the seriousness of what was happening even after the crisis had erupted in mid-August. King resisted calls from his friends in the City to cut interest rates, while Brown and Darling believed that they only had to promise support for Northern Rock for its problems to be automatically solved. They had no notion that in the end tens of billions of taxpayers’ money would be involved. Faced with turmoil in the system, they are like people trying to navigate a ship without a map, compass or rudder. They put their faith in orthodox “neoclassical” economics as taught in school and university as it is supposed to prove the superiority of capitalism to any possible alternative. But it has never been able to explain the system’s propensity for crisis. The system rests on the unplanned interaction of thousands of multinational corporations and a score or so of major governments. It is like a traffic system without lane markings, road signs, traffic lights, speed restrictions or even a clear code that everyone has to drive on the same side of the road. This will make it very difficult for those who claim to oversee the system to prevent the crash in the financial sector generalising into something much more serious in the next few months. And any success they have will be temporary, at best deferring the moment of reckoning for a couple of years. To see why, it is necessary to look at where the crisis has come from. The immediate cause, everyone now agrees, lay in the US’s subprime mortgage lending. Keen to make easy profits, financiers began lending money to people who would previously have been regarded as bad credit risks because they were poor, did not have secure jobs, or had not been able to pay off previous debts. House prices were rising and it was assumed that if they could not keep up with their mortgage payments their houses could be repossessed and sold at a handsome profit. Such lending had the effect of encouraging the very rises in the house prices it relied upon. The financiers who lent the money did not usually do so out of their own pockets. They went to others to borrow, and these in turn would borrow elsewhere. At each stage small differences in interest rates for very large numbers of transactions involving very large sums of money meant enormous, apparently effortless, profits. Virtually all the major banks on both sides of the Atlantic joined in, setting up special entities to borrow in order to lend, packaging all sorts of different loans together into what were called “financial instruments”. For a time all seemed to go well, and those involved congratulated each other on their financial acumen and brilliant entrepreneurship. Just a year ago Northern Rock was “the toast of a glitzy City dinner where it was heaped with praise for its skills in financial innovation”. Politicians like Gordon Brown wholeheartedly agreed. The first signs that all was not well were about 18 months ago. US economic growth slowed, causing a sharp increase in the number of mortgage holders who could not afford the interest rates on which the whole business depended and there were a growing number of repossessions. But those involved in the trade in financial instruments were more interested in continuing to make profits than in the problems of poor Americans. Then as house prices fell the mortgage lenders discovered they could not make enough from selling off one million repossessed homes to pay back what they themselves had borrowed. The banks which had been so willing to lend them money just as suddenly found they faced losses of tens of billions of dollars. What made the situation even worse was that no one knew exactly how deep any particular bank’s problems were because the “financial instruments” were so complex. Financial institutions right across the capitalist system became afraid to lend to each other in case they found they could not get their money back. This was the “credit crunch”. Modern capitalism depends for its day to day activity on borrowing and lending (See below: Banking and credit). Every business expects to be able to buy certain things on credit, deferring cash payment until it has sold what it has produced. A credit crunch has been compared to a heart attack. If it is not dealt with, the whole metabolism comes to a halt. That is why governments whose whole philosophy is one of not doing anything to interfere with the free market have rushed to do so, pouring billions of dollars into private hands, hoping the recipients will use the cash to start lending and borrowing again. There are many media commentators who see the story as ending there. Usually the only lesson they draw is the need for more financial regulation. The whole debate over what has happened then degenerates into an argument about exactly how much regulation. However, some have looked a little deeper. One of those who has been most worried about the direction of events has been Martin Wolf of the Financial Times (perhaps because he completely misjudged what was happening when the Asian crisis began in Thailand ten years ago, describing it as a mere “hiccup”). “I now fear that the combination of the fragility of the financial system with the huge rewards it generates for insiders will destroy something even more important – the political legitimacy of the market economy itself – across the globe”, he recently wrote. Commentators like him point out that economic growth in the US since the last recession seven years ago has been to a considerable extent fuelled by growing debt, both of consumers and of the US government. Many of the goods produced by US firms could not be sold without that borrowing, and so if it dries up a slump is inevitable. It is not only US firms that are affected. If the US has been one motor of worldwide economic expansion, China has been the other. And central to its growth have been hundreds of billions of dollars a year of exports to the US. To add to the difficulties – and to the complexities for governments and central bankers in trying to deal with them – much of the lending that has enabled US consumers to borrow to buy Chinese goods comes from China. Effectively China’s profits from selling goods to the US cross the Pacific to be used in the US to buy those goods. The US consumer, as Wolf put it, is the “buyer of last resort for the world economy”. An important IMF-sponsored study of the world economy three years ago shows how this happens. About 10 percent of Chinese “savings” (to use the conventional term for profits) are left over after new investments have been made. Much of this excess has been poured as lending into the US economy. “Savings” from other south east Asian countries and oil producing states have followed the same path. Even US industry has been “saving” more than it invests, and lending the excess to the banks to lend to consumers. Enormous implications This has had enormous implications. For a capitalist economy to function smoothly the wealth being produced throughout the system must be bought. The world’s workers and peasants cannot buy more than a portion of it, because their living standards are held down to create profits. This means the rest must be used by the capitalists, either as their personal consumption, for state expenditures they regard as essential to themselves (armies, weapons, etc), or on investment aimed at producing future profits. If investment falls below savings, a gap opens up between what has been produced and what is being bought. Some firms cannot sell all their output and sack workers in order to balance their books. This reduces still further what can be bought, and a slump ensues. This has not happened over the last five years as lending to US consumers had provided extra markets and absorbed the surplus production. The credit crunch is putting a stop to this, and house building and car sales in the US are already being hit. Even if the banks recover confidence in lending to each other, they are not quickly going to start lending again to people without very good credit ratings. That is why the prospects of a recession are so high, and why one would have an impact outside the US. The story told by Martin Wolf and the others is not, however, complete. They cannot explain why the world economy has become so dependent on the US consumer. To answer that question it is necessary to look deeper than any version of mainstream economics – to an ailment which the world economy has been suffering from since the 1970s. What motivates capitalists to invest is not just the absolute level of profits they make, but the “rate of profit” – the ratio of profits to investment. This stayed more or less steady through the late 1940s, the 1950s and the 1960s. That is why these years saw a rising investment and a continual boom, sometimes referred to as “the golden age of capitalism”. But from the late 1960s through to 1982 profit rates fell, until they were only about half the average level of the previous two decades (see below: Marx and the rate of profit). The deep economic recessions of the mid-1970s and the early 1980s were a result of this fall. Mainstream economists usually blame sudden rises in the price of oil for those recessions. But those rises would have easily been absorbed by the system had profit rates not already fallen so much. Profit rates were able to stage partial recoveries in the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s. One thing which enabled them to do so was increasing the share of total profits in total national incomes at the expense of wages. Everywhere this meant increased pressure for people to work harder and attacks on welfare services (the “social wage”). In the US it has also meant a fall in the real wage from the early 1970s until the late 1990s and a massive increase in working hours. In Europe there has not yet been the same fall in real wages, but Britain has seen a rise in working hours (particularly if you include the unpaid overtime that is the fate of many white collar workers) and the pressure is now for the major European countries to follow suit. Alongside this, the bankruptcies of some big capitalists have allowed others to gain at their expense. Rupert Murdoch will have gained from the demise of Robert Maxwell’s media empire 15 years ago, a wave of bankruptcies in the airline industry will have helped the profits of survivors like British Airways, BAe will have benefitted from the troubles of GEC-Marconi, and so on. But the profit rates never recovered more than about half their previous decline and the booms suddenly ran into trouble with the stock exchange crash of October 1987 and the Asian crisis of 1997. On both occasions the US Federal Reserve and the Bank of England reacted by cutting interest rates and encouraging lending. Such measures were able to extend the booms, and media commentators boasted that capitalism had entered a new era of endless growth on each occasion – until it turned out that the recessions had been deferred a couple of years, not banished forever. The recession of 2001-2 was particularly threatening to the US economy. Giant firms like General Motors were already making losses before the 9/11 attacks, which added to the panic in the boardrooms. The US government rushed to cut taxes to the rich and to boost arms spending, while the Federal Reserve slashed interest rates so as to encourage even greater levels of borrowing than before. This dragged the economy out of recession – indeed, some mainstream economists went as far as to say the recession never happened. But it laid the ground for the problems the system faces now. For a time firms were able to improve their profit rates by making massive cuts in their workforces, with 2.7 million manufacturing workers (about one in six) losing their jobs. Real wages, which had risen for the first time in a quarter of a century in the late 1990s, fell again. But even so calculations made by Marxist economist Robert Brenner suggest that the peak for profit rates in 2005 was only about the same as the levels on the eve of each previous crisis since the mid-1970s. In 2006 the country’s biggest firm, WalMart, announced a fall in its profits and the big US owned car companies General Motors and Ford made record losses. It is then that the slowing down of economic growth hit the ability of many poor people to keep up with the mortgage repayments. The rise in profit rates had not been enough to raise investment to its previous level – Brenner calculates investment growth was the lowest in any economic recovery in half a century. But raising profits had cut into the capacity of workers to buy all the consumer goods being produced by the economy out of their wages. Hence the centrality of personal borrowing, which rose to the record level of 9 percent of gross domestic product. There has been no other way all the goods produced by capitalism could be sold. If borrowing collapses, there has to be a recession. This is not just the US’s problem. Some people point to the massive rate of expansion of the Chinese economy and suggest this can rescue the rest of the system. But that expansion rests to a large extent on selling goods to the US. If the US economy goes into crisis, it will face problems as well. The response of capitalist governments and their central banks has been to look for some desperate ploy to keep borrowing going. One way to do so is to cut interest rates so as virtually to give money to the banks to lend to people. Martin Wolf has compared this to dropping money from helicopters. Another way is to increase government borrowing. This is what Bush is proposing with his tax cuts. But states always face a problem if they simply print banknotes in order to cut interest rates or to cover the cost of cutting taxes. Such methods can sometimes give a short term boost to a flagging economy. But they are necessarily a short term remedy, since they do not solve the fundamental problem of how to raise profits to induce investment without cutting wages in a way that cuts the market for goods. So the Japanese state cut interest rates to virtually zero through the 1990s and still did not get the economy working back at its old levels. Governments in the US and Europe fear such measures would increase prices (on top of the existing upsurge of oil and food prices) without stopping the economic slowdown, producing the combination of stagnation and inflation known in the late 1970s as stagflation. In the US the fears are deepened by the way in which the combination of the financial crisis and low interest rates is leading to a rapid fall in the international value of the dollar. That will both increase domestic prices in the US and weaken the global economic power of the US ruling class. It is just possible, nevertheless, that such measures will defer the crisis, as they did at the end of the 1980s and 1990s. But they will not be able to do more than that. The British economy faces some of the same problems as the US. Borrowing has been at an even greater proportionate level here than there, with a debt to disposable income ratio of 162.9 percent compared to 137.3 percent. The house price boom has been even crazier, with average prices quadrupling in 12 years. There are already signs that house prices are beginning to fall and repossessions to rise. More importantly, perhaps, Gordon Brown’s policy over the past 11 years has been to compensate for the continued destruction of industrial jobs by trying to make London the centre of the world’s financial system. As a result the financial crisis can have a proportionately bigger direct effect on jobs here than elsewhere. At the same time, he has less room for manoeuvre than the US government when it comes to trying to keep the economy up by substituting government spending for private borrowing. He began increasing government spending six years ago (after cutting it to the bone in the previous four years), as a way of trying to sustain electoral support and limiting the impact of the last US recession. He is now under pressure to cut spending. His response so far has been based on his faith that the market can work wonders providing he can keep capitalists happy. Hence his offer of vast amounts of money for a “public private” solution to the Northern Rock disaster. Hence too his insistence on holding down pubic sector pay. Such measures are not going to be sufficient to protect British capitalism if the storm brewing in the US comes to a head this year. But they are going to deepen discontent with his government. They can also open many people up to arguments about the insanity of an economic system driven forward by the drive for profit. Banking and credit The financial system is often portrayed as a “weightless”, “global” system with no roots in the “real” economy and no particular national base. But finance has long been of central importance to capitalism. At any moment some capitalists will have excess cash that they cannot invest, while others will want to expand but will not have access to the capital to do so. Banks allow capitalists to deposit money they can’t use immediately and earn interest, or to borrow money they need for which they pay interest. This lubricates capitalism, but if the system goes wrong it can threaten the stability of the whole system. As Karl Marx put it, “Banking and credit thus become the most potent means of driving capitalist production beyond its own limits – and one of the most effective vehicles of crisis and swindle.” Central banks, such as the US Federal Reserve and the Bank of England, are key players in the world of finance. These central banks, which are subject to varying degrees of governmental control, are firmly rooted in a particular country, forming a pivot around which the wider financial system revolves. Generally they will have a monopoly over the issue of legal tender and great power to influence interest rates. Marx and the rate of profit The rate of profit – how many pence in profit the capitalists get for each pound they invest – is central to the dynamics of capitalism. Karl Marx argued that there was a tendency for this rate of profit to fall. He argued that “living labour”, the labour put in by those exploited by a capitalist, was the source of profit. Living labour creates new value, and some of this value is returned to the worker in the form of wages. Profit comes from the surplus value left over. But capitalists don’t just hire living labour. They also purchase “dead labour” – machinery, raw materials and so on. This is the product of past labour by different groups of workers. The capitalists who manufacture and sell these things might make a profit on them, but the capitalist who purchases this dead labour makes no profit on it. Marx argued that over time competition forces capitalists to invest in more and more dead labour – so each worker sets in motion a greater mass of machinery and raw materials. But if the total amount of dead labour rises, while the living labour (the source of profit) stays the same, the capitalist will invest more but get the same profit. Hence the rate of profit will fall.
How to Withdraw From Iraq21 Feb 2008With Iraq in a state of bloody chaos, many, from both sides of the political divide, are calling for an immediate withdrawal of all foreign forces. No matter what the consequences of withdrawal, they argue, the Coalition presence is only making the security situation worse and is helping to fuel the insurgency. Not everyone agrees. Some argue that the Coalition forces should ?stay the course? and that withdrawal would precipitate a civil war, leaving the fate of the country to be decided by violence. It could result in Iraq becoming a failed state and a haven for al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups. They fear it would damage the US?s and Britain?s ?national interests? and international credibility by handing a victory to the terrorists. But Iraq is already in a civil war. Day by day, jihadist paramilitaries are gaining experience in urban combat against arguably the best equipped and trained military in the world, the US Army and Marine Corps. Meanwhile, the interests and credibility of the US, Britain and other Coalition partners are only damaged further by this prolonged and disastrous occupation. The choice, however, is not simply between ?stay the course? or ?cut and run?. Nor should withdrawal itself be seen as either ?surrender? or ?the answer to all of Iraq?s problems?. It is dangerous that the current debate is being thus polarized. The simple fact is that Coalition troops need to be withdrawn from Iraq because most of the insurgency is actually a resistance to foreign occupation. The majority of Iraqis now want withdrawal. But because a significant part of the violence is occurring between Iraq?s diverse factions and communities, withdrawal on its own could have deadly consequences. It could be as disastrous as the invasion itself. The countries responsible for the invasion cannot simply pull out and leave the Iraqi people to their fate. While they may not be a part of the solution, they have a grave responsibility to support the Iraqi Government in finding a way to ensure the long-term security of the country. Reports commissioned ? and ignored: The Iraq Study Group was a bipartisan Congressional panel facilitated by the United States Institute of Peace and tasked with assessing the situation in Iraq and recommending policies to the US Government. The Group?s final report ? published in December 2006 ? focused on the phased withdrawal of troops and diplomatic engagement with Iraq?s neighbours. Despite promising to take the report seriously, President Bush largely ignored the Group?s findings and took the opposite course of committing to the ?surge?. View the report: http://tinyurl.com/ts4vs The UK Iraq Commission was an independent, cross-party group, tasked with producing a blueprint for future British involvement in Iraq. The final report ? published in July 2007 ? argued that only Iraqis can improve the situation in Iraq, but that they needed British support to do so. Despite being televised, the Commission did not generate as much interest as the US Iraq Study Group had, and the final report was largely overshadowed by Gordon Brown?s arrival as the new Prime Minister. View the report: http://tinyurl.com/3anf4a Following George W Bush?s rejection of the bi-partisan Iraq Study Group report and the lack of impact of its British equivalent, many in the political, media, academic and activist communities seem to have accepted that nothing can be done, that there is little point in suggesting ways forward for Iraq because they will simply be ignored. But there is a moral imperative not only to keep pointing out the failure of current policies but also to suggest alternative ways forward. The change of Prime Minister in Britain and growing unease within the US political system present the opportunity for a break with the past. This is why new policies that go beyond withdrawal are so important at this juncture. They might include the following proposals aimed at resolving some of the causes of the conflict: Withdrawal of combat troops There should be a rapid withdrawal of all foreign combat troops from Iraq. This should be linked to political and financial support for a new UN or regional stabilization force, but should not be dependent on such a force. While it is likely that such a force will still face resistance, the absence of US and British troops will help to calm many elements of the insurgency, leading to far more manageable levels of violence. The withdrawal should be carried out in discussion with the Iraqi Government and the governments of other countries with troops in Iraq, but should not be delayed because of this. The withdrawal must be coupled with engagement with regional powers, such as Saudi Arabia and Iran, and Iraq?s other neighbours, including Syria. These countries have a vested interest in ensuring stability in Iraq, with no desire for a failed state on their borders. However potentially unsavoury to the US, these countries will play a role in the future of Iraq, and must be engaged with now. Assistance to the Iraqi military and security services In place of combat troops, the Coalition governments should continue to provide training, intelligence and financial support to the Iraqi military and security services for a limited period of time, agreed in advance with the Iraqi Government (say, 12 months for training and intelligence and 48 months for finance). The level of commitment should steadily decrease over this agreed timeframe, and will need to be carefully monitored by the Iraqi Parliament. Any foreign military personnel remaining in Iraq should serve only as instructors and advisers, with a minimum number of support troops providing interim force protection and all being withdrawn at the end of the 12-month training period. Longer-term arrangements might also be made for a UN-supported force guaranteeing Iraq?s international borders and the security of any democratically elected government, but with troops stationed outside of Iraq. Support for the rebuilding of Iraq Real security for ordinary Iraqis will not just mean freedom from the fear of violence, but must also be based on satisfying some fairly basic needs ? electricity, medical care, education, jobs ? which require a functioning state apparatus. The US, British and other Coalition governments should therefore begin a programme of massive and sustained aid and technical support for the reconstruction and development of Iraq. This should be unconditional and must not be in the form of loans. Fair compensation, administered by local committees and civil society organizations, should also be paid to civilians who have lost family members, property or livelihoods as a result of Coalition military activity, and specific support needs to be offered to those people who have been displaced by the conflict. Non-interference in the development of Iraq?s oil reserves With the third highest reserves in the world (behind only Saudi Arabia and Iran), oil currently accounts for more than 90 per cent of Iraq?s government revenues, and is the main driver of the economy. However, the current draft hydrocarbon law focuses on unnecessary Production Sharing Agreements that essentially privatize Iraq?s oil industry by stealth. One of the most important developments would therefore be a revised system for the fair exploitation of Iraq?s oil reserves. By allowing foreign oil companies to benefit disproportionately, with the loss of hundreds of billions of dollars in potential revenue for the Iraqi Government, the current course plays into the hands of the insurgents who can easily argue that the invasion was actually about controlling Iraqi oil. There is no reason why Iraq should not maintain democratic control over its own oil industry and use existing government budgets to invest in developing its considerable oil reserves. Increased revenues from developing these reserves would help to sustain the reconstruction of Iraq over the long term. Support for inclusive reconciliation initiatives Long-term stability is dependent on all factions in the country being able to have a say in the Iraqi political process. Genuine reconciliation will need all sides to have a place at the negotiating table, including those insurgent groups who have targeted civilians or military personnel in terrorist attacks. They must all be brought into the political process wherever possible; exclusion will only cause people to turn to violence as the only course apparently available to them. Such reconciliation initiatives would be greatly aided by an apology from key Coalition governments for the mistakes that have been made during the invasion and occupation, and a public assurance that they will no longer interfere in internal Iraqi affairs. A new fund should also be established to support local, community-based conflict prevention and resolution initiatives as one of the most effective methods for ensuring peace in Iraq?s diverse regions. What do the Iraqi people want? For the first time, more Iraqis now back an immediate withdrawal of foreign troops (47%) as opposed to troops remaining until security is restored (34%). 85% of Iraqis have little or no confidence in the US and UK occupation forces. 79% oppose the presence of those forces in Iraq. 72% feel that their presence is actually making the security situation worse. Source: BBC / ABC News / NHK, September 2007 Of course there will not be agreement with all, or perhaps any, of the above proposals. There are, after all, no easy answers and no guarantees of success in Iraq. But that does not absolve us of our responsibility to develop and propose positive ways out of the current fiasco. What?s important is that we continue publicly to debate our involvement in Iraq and support those developing effective policies for the withdrawal of troops. Governments must be made to understand that there are ways of withdrawing troops from Iraq that will not necessarily result in disaster. It is up to all of us to make sure this happens. Chris Abbott is the Programme Co-ordinator and Researcher at Oxford Research Group and lead author of Beyond Terror: The Truth About the Real Threats to Our World (Rider, 2007). www.oxfordresearchgroup.org.uk
Taking Crime Seriously21 Feb 2008Introduction Socialists need to take crime seriously. Traditionally, the left has been regarded as being ?soft? on crime, which is a consequence of two main factors. Firstly, it is in part due to the success of the right in determining the crime agenda, but it is also because crime is seldom discussed by socialists in a way that is pragmatic. In this article, I want to make the case that crime is an issue that the left needs to address, particularly if left wing political parties are to make inroads in terms of broad public appeal. New Labour has presided over a mixed economy of criminal justice, which has included the traditional method of incarceration (which has increased under Labour to alarming levels), alongside a range of policies around the theme of crime prevention, which are the main focus of this article. Why Crime is an Issue for the Left In the past two decades, crime control has moved from being a peripheral issue to one that is centre stage both in terms of public debate and social policy. Hardly a day goes by without newspapers, particularly the tabloids, discussing crime. The mainstream political parties compete with one another to be ?tough on crime?. Amongst the general public there is a real sense that crime and disorder is an issue, particularly in regards to young people. Statements like ?young people have no respect nowadays for their elders or their communities? have become truisms in some working class circles. The Labour Party acknowledges these sentiments and responds accordingly. Legislation such as the Crime and Disorder Act, or policies on Anti-Social Behaviour is often aimed at Labour?s heartland vote, particularly the elderly in marginalised housing estates; it goes without saying that this group should also be a natural constituent of the left. During the debate on anti-social behaviour, Labour ministers lined up to explain why this bill reflected the concerns of their constituents and in a sense, for once they were actually telling the truth. Moral Panics The whipping up of crime and fear by politicians and the media has created what sociologists refer to as a ?moral panic?. How then does the radical left respond? Traditionally, the response has been to stay quiet or to discuss crime in a way that is abstract and fatalist. For the left, crime is a product of the capitalist system; therefore it is only when capitalism is replaced by something better that you can begin to think about living in a society free of crime. The consequence of this line of thinking is a fatalism which leads to a paralysis amongst sections of the left whenever crime is discussed. Whilst I consider it to be a truism that unequal societies will produce crime, I also believe that the left, if it is to have broad appeal, needs to formulate workable policies in the here and now and respond to the concerns of many working class people who identify crime as an issue. To say we have to wait until there is a revolution, whatever that means nowadays, is to shirk away from responsibility. Moreover, the left needs to engage in a debate about crime control at the level of policy and on the ground practice. Failure to get involved, particularly in marginalised housing estates, creates a vacuum which will be filled by the ideas of the right and in particular the British National Party. Putting Crime into Context There is a debate regarding the extent to which crime is an issue. It is often pointed out by the left, and I believe it to be true, that the fear of crime is disproportionate to the reality. Politicians and the media promote the politics of ?fear? on a regular basis and it would be surprising if it was bereft of any effect. The ?rule by fear? reflects a broader malaise which has infected the body politic. Politicians and governments have detected that they no longer rule on the basis of consensus and popular support. In the past, politicians, in theory at least, used to claim that they represented the public; today the aim of mainstream politicians is not to represent but to protect. What is occurring is a careful marketisation and production of a political discourse based on fear. The world conjured up by opinion formers is that of danger and unpredictability; it is a world which is inhabited by ?teenage gangs?, ?drug dealers?, ?paedophiles?, ?foreign invaders? and ?Islamic fundamentalists?. In this new ?risk society? the part played by politicians and government is that of protector. Consequently, the government?s war on crime is perpetual and never ending. In the midst of all this panic, much of it manufactured, the left has been right to highlight the ways in which the media and the government exploit crime as a means of social and population control. Moreover, socialists are completely justified to warn against the outcomes of moral panics, which is often the violation by government of civil liberties and human rights. However, to dismiss it all as a ?moral panic? that is carefully manufactured by ruling elites would be a mistake. Furthermore, it would ignore the lived realities of many working class people, particularly those in the poorer housing estates where the radical left needs to establish a base. Class and Crime Crime is specifically placed and unevenly distributed and in the final analysis determined by social class. Forty per-cent of recorded crime takes place in just ten per cent of areas, the majority of which are poor. More than half of the people who show up in official statistics as victims of crime are repeat victims (Hughes et al, 2002). Consequently, a small proportion of people are experiencing a disproportionate amount of crime. All of the available research highlights that the more impoverished the area where you live, the greater the chances of you being a victim of car theft, assault, mugging, damage to your property, burglary or living next door to a drug dealer. Crime is a class issue and that is why the left must respond. In practice this means seizing the debate from Labour and the reactionary right. The starting point is to engage with contemporary policies in regards to crime and disorder, particularly those policies which constitute as ?alternatives to custody? and ?diversion from court? which are sometimes dressed up in the cloak of progressivism and therefore seductive to people who may be left leaning. The two pillars of contemporary policy, which aim to move beyond simply locking people up, are crime prevention and community safety, which I would now like to examine in detail. Crime Prevention Crime Prevention (CP) emerged in the UK in the 1980s. Hitherto, crime had been regarded as a peripheral issue and one primarily for the police and the criminal justice system. As the Tories economic agenda was pushed to the extreme there was a corresponding rise in the overall crime rate. By the mid-1980s, mainstream criminologists and officials in the Home Office acknowledged, albeit in private, that the war on crime was being lost. Consensus was emerging in right wing circles that the overall crime rate would not be affected by deterrence through punishment or as a consequence of traditional policing and increased police resources. Moreover, from the point of view of the government, treatment programmes for offenders were costly and unproductive. The Tories found themselves with a contradiction; on the one hand they were committed to a ?prison works? ethos, but at the same time they recognised that whilst prison was politically necessary, it was also highly expensive for a government committed to reducing public expenditure. It was in the context of reducing treasury expenditure in the criminal justice system that prevention began to look extremely attractive. Crime prevention was identified by the Home Office as being a policy which in the long term would be ?cost effective?. Situational Crime Prevention In the 1980s, discourses on crime shifted from overall cure to one of managing crime control. Despite the rhetoric of being ?tough on crime?, which was lapped up by a docile media, what emerged in policy terms was an acceptance of crime as a necessary risk among others in what was referred to as the modern risk society. Situational Crime Prevention (SCP) measures reflected this new thinking. SCP was seen as a pre-emptive approach that relied not on improving society or its institutions but on reducing the opportunities that exist for crime. SCP has been influenced by behavioural psychology and what theorists call Rational Choice Theory (RCT). RCT posits a common-sense view that crime is committed by rational actors who make psychological judgements or calculations in response to situations. The response to reducing crime is relatively straightforward according to RCT. What you need to do is create an environment where committing crime is difficult or extremely risky. If the criminal knows that he or she is likely to caught, and that the odds are stacked against them, this will decrease the likelihood of them offending. In practice, reducing the opportunities that exist for crime has been divided into two categories, ?target hardening? and ?surveillance?. ?Target hardening? means strengthening and making more secure everyday devices such as doors, telephone boxes and cash withdrawal machines at banks. Also included are things such as installing burglar alarms on property and placing steering locks on cars. CCTV is now the main form of ?surveillance? in the UK. In fact, British citizens are now the most observed by CCTV than any other population in Europe. Also included under ?surveillance? are neighbourhood watch schemes introduced by the Tories in the 1980s. CP approaches to crime control are viewed by their proponents as offering a way out of the failed traditional sanctions such as imprisonment and rehabilitation. SCP is seen as being able to reduce crime levels without the direct involvement of the criminal justice system. From this perspective, CP is conceived by its proponents as being ?anti-statist? and in line with the political philosophy of neo-liberalism. However a social price has been paid and we should ask ourselves if it has been worth paying? We now live in a nation where fear dominates and this has resulted in community segregation and the creation of a fortress mentality towards society. Furthermore, wherever there is fear, there will always be some right wing populist preparing to attack our civil liberties and take more power away from the citizen towards the state. Community Safety Community Safety (CS), alongside incarceration and crime prevention is the third pillar of contemporary crime control. Originally introduced by the Tories in the 1980s, albeit sporadically, CS approaches were taken up with zeal when Labour came to power in 1997. Labour controlled local authorities have been enthusiastic to sign up to community safety initiatives, which they like it because it emphasises ?community? and ?grassroots? approaches to crime. Moreover, local authorities are in the driving seat. Community Safety, according to its adherents chimes with an older aim of Labour and social democracy in general, which is to address the underlying causes of crime. CS is window dressed with buzzwords such as ?partnership working?, ?active citizenship?, ?social inclusion? and anything which follows the amorphous term ?community?. The 1998 Crime and Disorder Act instructed local government to play a leading role in co-ordinating community safety initiatives. CS was introduced at a time when the power and influence of local authorities was waning. It is not that difficult to see why local councillors were keen on CS: they saw it as a means of reinvigorating and giving purpose to local government. In practice local authorities are responsible for establishing various ?partnerships? which bring together the public, voluntary and private sectors. Partnership Working Labour likes to boast that partnership working is a holistic way of addressing crime control and one which utilises the resources of various stakeholders and actors from differing ends of the crime control spectrum. In addition to this, the government claims that partnership working is reinvigorating democracy at local level. For Labour, the democratic nature of partnership working is evidenced in the ways in which partnerships ?consult? with local communities and incorporate the community sector into the partnership model. Despite the gloss of community regeneration and empowerment, the reality of partnership working has been rather different. Community partnerships need to be seen in the context of the neo-liberal withering away of the social state, whereby services once provided by local authorities, are either contracted out to private tender or are handed over to the chronically under-funded voluntary sector. Partnership working is part and parcel of a culture of managerialism that now exists in the public sector, which in the main demoralises staff and undermines the very ethos of public services. Community Safety Partnerships are littered with terms such as ?target setting?, ?crime reduction performance indicators? and ?best practice? guidelines. Labour likes to boast that its response to crime is ?evidence-led? and based on ?what works?. In reality such claims are rather patchy: it is argued by criminologists, that methodologically rigorous research is the exception not the norm (Hughes, et al, 2002). Even the Home Office has acknowledged in numerous reports that monitoring and evaluation are one of the weakest elements of crime prevention programmes. In truth, Labour?s crime control agenda is driven more by ideological factors than practical considerations. Labour?s modernisation project has introduced a rigorous culture of auditing into the public sector. Auditing, despised by most workers in the public sector, creates a climate that encourages distortion and spin. Auditing creates a mentality whereby community safety initiatives focus on organisational instead of social goals. In practice, this results in organisations producing ?paper trails? of achievement and success which bears little relationship to real events taking place in communities (Hughes, et al, 2002). Community Safety has deliberately de-politicised the issue of crime. Moreover, the appeal to ?community? and localised solutions encourages communities to look inwards and removes from the agenda issues such as unemployment and public housing. Noticeable by its absence in the crime debate are traditional social policy concerns such as welfare and re-distribution of wealth. Furthermore, CS has contributed to a culture whereby social policies have become ?short-termist? in their thinking. Although there is not the space to discuss it here, the issues raised by crime prevention and community safety highlight bigger concerns about social policy itself which the left needs to address. There is a blurring of the boundaries between traditional social policy and criminal justice. The consequence is that poverty is transferred from the realm of social policy into a matter for penology, criminal law, policing, crime prevention and community safety (Hughes, et al, 2002). Conclusion The left must engage with crime at the level of policy and real events as they occur on the ground. This requires two things. Firstly, it means formulating policies in the here and now which can win popular support. It also means engaging in a debate about the ways in which crime has been localised as a consequence of community safety policies. The changes in the electoral system in Scotland (despite the elections debacle) are creating an opportunity for real change to happen at local level. One of the things that could happen is that the localisation of public policy under the term ?community? might be introduced to more rigorous scrutiny and public debate. Although it is fashionable for ministers and policy makers to refer to ?community? at every given opportunity, the reality on the ground is rather different. Policies such as ?community safety? or ?community planning? mean very little to real people outside of the apparatuses of bureaucrats and middle managers who are not directly accountable to the communities they serve. An opportunity is emerging for a mammoth spotlight to be shone on public policy in the community. Moreover, there is the potential to introduce a politics which is adversarial and puts back on the agenda traditional social policy concerns such as wealth redistribution and welfare. The radical left, to be credible, needs to be ready to engage in this new milieu. A starting point is to take the issue of crime seriously. This means engaging with crime as an issue not at the level of the abstract, but at the level of public policy. References Hughes, G, McLaughlin, E and Muncie, J, (2002), ?Crime Prevention and Community Safety?, SAGE Publications Ltd, London, UK Gary Fraser has recently completed a Masters in Social Policy and Criminology and is a member of Solidarity: Scotland?s Socialist Movement
Living With Difference20 Feb 2008Unless otherwise indicated the words in italics are Bill Schwarz’s In your article ?The Great Moving Right Show [Marxism Today January 1979], you told us that what Mrs Thatcher was going to achieve was not so much the victories of her own administration: she was going to set the tone of politics for future generations, whoever was in government. And you have been vindicated in that. That?s an interesting story because I think I came to understand the profundity of the change in political culture which Thatcherism represented, really, out of the work that we did at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies on race and mugging and crime, which was published in Policing the Crisis [Macmillan 1978]. This was an effort at understanding what was happening in Britain in the 1970s, and the prismatic function of race in all of that – race as a kind of recurring motif. It wasn?t that the deepening political and social crisis of the 1970s was all about race, but somehow race and crime were at the very centre of what it was that Thatcherism could operate on to try to roll back the social democratic feelings which had been developing during the war and the post-war period, and this provided a sort of prism through which the whole conjuncture could be ?read? symptomatically. It was not just a question of the political victory of the new right. It was a profound change in political culture, marking the shift to a new historical conjuncture. And if the left didn?t understand the depth at which this change was operating, it would be captured by it – it would be obliged to operate on territory which had not been
defined by itself. And I think that is indeed what has happened. What I have come to understand since then is that Thatcherism was not simply a British manifestation. It was the beginning of what we now call globalisation, the beginning of a new stage in the global capitalist economy: the revival of international capital after the period of the cold war and the welfare state. This could only happen if the new kind of market state – which is what is emerging today under the auspices of New Labour – was linked to a profound transformation of social and cultural relations across the world. I now understand Thatcherism much more in terms of its geopolitical reverberations, as the beginning of a new political conjuncture. Neoliberalism is a new epoch in the world, replacing the epoch which came into existence at the end of the second world war; which – even if there was a Conservative government in power – was dominated by the perspective of social
democracy. That is what has been entirely rolled away across the world. We are now in a completely different moment. This new conjuncture, neoliberal globalisation, is an international phenomenon, and has involved the re-militarisation of relationships between the west and the rest. Yes, globalisation has many aspects, including its strategic and military dimensions. However what I want to emphasise here is its contradictory nature. On the one hand it is a planetary project; it rolls across the boundaries of the nation state that have organised political and social life in the industrialised societies for the last two to three hundred years (though there have been previous eras of globalisation). It holds out the possibility of what we used to call internationalism (though, since it?s no longer something which happens between nations, we can?t use that term any longer). Potentially, this interdependence can be the source of a more pluri-centered world, the basis for the proliferation of difference. On the other hand, globalisation provides the basis of the incorporation of all of planetary society within the forms of western life. In this sense it is an ?imperialising? project, a civilizational struggle, though its forms are different from these types of struggles in the past. And this is the tension: the proliferation of difference versus the ?Macdonaldisation? of the world, as some people call it – the imprinting of western forms of consumerism, western values, western ways of life, western liberal democracy, western capitalism, etc, across the face of the globe, on one society after another. Really to work in its dominant form, capitalist globalisation must try to draw everybody into its web, within its geopolitical sphere. It is a new phase of what Marx called the construction of the world market, which he saw as nearly complete but which in fact was only just beginning. Everyone must come to look a little bit
like an American, or to love a little bit like an American, or to walk a little bit like an American. That?s why television and the cultural industries are so critical, because you don?t know quite how to walk and think in American until you look at enough television. That is one side of the globalisation project. It is throwing people across boundaries, drawing cultures contradictorily together, sometimes of course in
the most horrendous ways. People are displaced from their homes, forced across boundaries – living in transit camps, stowing away in the backs of lorries or underneath aeroplanes, putting themselves in lifelong debt to people traffickers in order to get somewhere else, to get out, to find a new life. This is globalisation too, the dark side, globalisation from below. In this aspect of globalisation, everything is free to move – investment, capital, images and messages: only labour must stay put. The great majority of people are not supposed to move, they are supposed to stay where they are and accept low wages, and become part of the world economy in that limited way. Otherwise how could the new international division of labour work? Instead of that, they get on a leaky boat and row towards the good life. Of course. What did we think they were going to do? You tell them that the good life is like that, and over there, and they?re on their way. ?Economic migrants? are just people who want a better life. They are also people displaced by poverty, famine, disease
and civil war. This is the other face – the underside, the underlife, of so-called global society. And our politics now, in the new conjuncture, is the result of a tension between forces associated with these new possibilities, and the tremendous barbarities and dangers associated with it, these two forms of global society. So you are looking at the dimensions of multiculture in this globalisation. But over the last ten years you?ve moved specifically into looking at the arts, and the black visual arts. Can you tell us something about this move to the visual? Do you think the black visual arts in Britain represent a privileged way of looking at questions of race and diaspora at the moment? Let me just say a few words about how the two things are connected. As you know, I don?t like the word multiculturalism, but I am interested in the multicultural question. And what that is, for me, is this: how are people from different cultures, different backgrounds, with different languages, different religious beliefs, produced by different and highly uneven histories, but who find themselves either directly connected because they?ve got to make a life together in the same place, or digitally connected because they occupy the same symbolic worlds – how are they to make some sort of common life together without retreating into warring tribes, eating one another, or insisting that other people must look exactly like you, behave exactly like you, think exactly like you – that is to say cultural assimilation? How can we recognise the true, real, complicated diversity of the planet – societies produced by different forms of development, etc – which is what constitutes difference? Different histories, different cultures, over long periods of time, have produced a variegated world, but the barriers are now breaking down. People find themselves obliged to make a common life or at least find some common ground of negotiation. Cultural absolutism is the great enemy of this multicultural project. The multicultural question, then, is: how can we do that without giving up the investments which people have made in what makes them who they are, which is what I call difference. Cultural difference doesn?t mean that I am totally different from you. But I come to the present, to who I am, by a different route from yours; and therefore our
conversation has to recognise that different histories have produced us, different histories have made this conversation possible. I can?t pretend to be you. I don?t know your experience. I can?t live life from inside your head. So our living together must depend on a trade-off, a conversation, a process of translation. Translations are never total or complete, but they don?t leave the elements exactly as they started. I don?t want to be you. I don?t want you to be me. I don?t want to insist that you give up being who you are and become me. Well, how are we to proceed? Questions of democracy, questions of equality, questions of difference, all have to be resolved. Together – and in ways which are unfamiliar to the culture of the left, which has long grounded its constitutive basis in quite unexpected and unexamined kinds of Eurocentrism, in which the civilizational value of one of those ways of life over all the others is taken for granted. Multiculturalism is a peculiar kind of way of trying to manage the problems which globalisation has created. And this is only the most recent of the multicultural problems that globalisation has created. It created exactly the same kinds of problem twenty, thirty, a hundred years ago. One multicultural question has been how black people and white people are to live together in the post-plantation-slavery Caribbean, when for centuries one race had simply assumed its civilizational superiority over the other; another is how Muslims and Christians are to live together, today, in Darfur. We are looking at new forms of the same question, produced by a new form of capitalist globalisation. And it has now arrived right into the middle of the societies that have lived the last two hundred years pretending that they could draw a boundary between themselves and the others; or that they could govern the others but at a safe distance which didn?t threaten their cultural homogeneity; or that they could regulate the lives and the economies of other people because they were or looked different, and this provided a legitimate basis for their exploitation. I am interested in the impact on these European societies in particular – since that?s the most ?developed? form of life we have – of having to live with difference, with people who dress differently, speak differently, have different memories in their heads, know a different way of life, follow a different religion – how are they going to live in greater equality but also with difference? How are these often conflicting objectives – equality and difference – to be reconciled? If I give up my burka will you give up your union jack? What is it the difference that I?m willing to die for? What difference is so important to me that I?m going to fight for it, that I?m willing to murder you for it? Or am I willing to have a trade-off? Am I willing to negotiate with you to live in relative peace? That trade-off is going to be an untidy row. Don?t think it is going to be what is called, these days, social cohesion – which is a polite form of assimilation of ?the other?, and represents in effect the abandonment of the multicultural principle. There is going to be nothing cohesive about it at all. It?s going to be a bloody great row. Any form of democratic life – and I?m not talking about political democracy only now – is a big, staged, continuous row. Because there are real differences, and people are deeply invested in them and so they have to find ways – difficult ways – of negotiating difference, because it?s not going to go away. Now, you can have a political argument about that, and I?m interested in the politics of negotiation that could make multicultural societies a possibility in the
future. Iraq and Afghanistan are different examples of the failure of this project of negotiation between different ways of being in the modern world. But I am also interested in how the other – how difference – operates inside people?s heads. And if you want to learn more, or see how difference operates inside people?s heads, you have to go to art, you have to go to culture – to where people imagine, where they fantasise, where they symbolise. You have to make the detour from the language of straight description to the language of the imaginary. Unless we can deconstruct the colonised imaginary which governs the heads of a substantial number of British people we will never live multiculturally with difference. I have always been interested in the ?straight? argument, but also in the argument by indirection. So, the visual arts is not a surprise. I?ve always been interested in culture because it is the domain of indirection. As Shakespeare once said, ?By indirection find direction out?. Of course the real world, the historical world, the political world, has the most enormous bearing on culture, but the one thing we can?t say is that culture
simply reflects this other world. It is connected with it, but unconsciously, at some profound level – and we can?t decode one world directly into the other. This is the mysterious place where art arises from experience, is at the same time different from experience, and reflects critically back on it. This is the invisible point of intersection between the social and the symbolic. We have to take one step back and go through the imaginary to enter the domain of culture. Sometimes people say to me that cultural studies thinks culture is everything, but I don?t think that at all. I think culture is very important, more than important – it?s absolutely constitutive. But it?s also one among other things – how could you not be also interested in capital, or war, and be alive today? Of course culture isn?t everything. But culture is a dimension of everything. Every practice exists in the material world and simultaneously signifies, is the bearer of meaning and value. Everything both exists and is imagined. And if you want to play in the area where deep feelings are involved, which people hardly understand, you have to look at culture. People don?t understand what it is that terrifies them about difference. They don?t know what it is that disturbs them viscerally about people who don?t look or think like them. What is it? It gets them somewhere in there, but it is not a place that you can get to by reasoning with them. (Have you ever tried to say ?you should give up your racist prejudices because they are rather irrational?? Forget it.) The
common response to our fears about difference is to split the other from ourselves, symbolically expel them from the body social so that we can project on to them our deepest fears and fantasies. So, if you are interested in a society which somehow learns, painfully, how to begin to live with difference, to recognise the way in which it has constructed the other as the opposite of itself, you have to understand how the culture is working. In the arts things get said in ways in which they can?t get said in any other domain. So I?m interested in people who are living here who come from different cultures, whose route to the present is different from that of the ?native?, and who now also confront the difficult conundrum of difference. And in what this has done to the dream of equality and justice. I?m interested in what people imagine, how they imagine, how they represent themselves, figurally, in the visual and literary field, how they position themselves in the narratives of self and society. And I am committed to the wider society having a greater access to these visions and dreams and nightmares and traumas and fears. So, the turn to the visual arts. [question from audience] What would you say to the proposition that people should ignore difference as opposed to embracing it, that they should focus on what we share, and shared experience? That is a big and complicated questions. I used to think that, basically, we are all human beings, and so what one should do is ignore the differences and find the commonality. Of course we are indeed all human, but I?m afraid I came to think, at a certain point in my life, that our common humanity is not enough. What makes us distinctive is indeed the particularities, the specificities, of our historical and other experiences. There?s a phrase by Marx – why is it that one might be hesitant to quote Marx? – that, of course, people are all unified in the fact that they are all human, but that what matters more are the different social categories into which people are divided: slave and slaveholder, worker and capitalist. It is the distinction between slave and slaveholder that registers historically. That?s where the trouble begins. That?s where the conflict over wealth or interest arises. And analytically that?s more important than what Marx calls the more ?chaotic? generality or understanding of the humanity we all share. That, in some ways, was a very difficult proposition for me
to accept; it is a more difficult route to follow. However I do think that difference doesn?t go away. Difference is ineradicable. Of course, it?s not absolute. Of course there are things we all share as human beings, and this impels us to find common forms, in order to make a life in which we don?t destroy one another, or oppress one another, or make the other abject before us. But these will be common forms that recognise the diversity of human histories, human cultures, languages and so on. The more difficult but greater ambition, then, is to try to recognise and generalise those differences, so that what or who begins as ?other? to us, outside us, can be gradually taken into us, without requiring it to become us. Ernesto Laclau argues that this process of trying to expand the universe of demands so as to take in and include those interests and ambitions which begin as different from, and ?other? to, us and ours is the only ?universalism? there is – an always-unfinished process of universalization. It?s a difficult operation – but I think we?d better try to find a way through that if that?s really how it works. I think, now, though I didn?t for a long time, that it?s a more complicated, more
difficult, but wider ambition than relying on the universalism of our common humanity – particularly since the masking or disavowal of difference always involves the operation of some kind of power over ?the other?. I don?t want other people to be like me. I don?t know why they should be. I don?t think my experience is rich enough to embrace the existence of the rest of the world. I have to find a way of recognising that I cannot be self sufficient in myself. I am, from the moment of birth, from the moment of entry into language and culture, dependent on that which is different from me. Otherwise love is self love, love is narcissism, love is locked in solipsism, never gets out of the confines of the reflection in the mirror. It?s not enough. We are dependent on the other – to feed us, to recognise who we are, to speak a language. Our common humanity, which is what you are speaking about, is the process of reciprocity with that which is not us, which is other than us,
which is different. So I hope that when we tear each other apart, we?ll find a little bit of common humanity, just so that we don?t fall into what Hobbes called the war of all against all. But humanism is not any longer quite enough for me. [question from audience] Could you say something about the early 1960s, the time of the new left, when we were serious and dedicated about our politics, but there was also a fun side – we talked about the cinema, good food. I was wondering if you could talk about some of the influences of that time and how that led to your move into cultural studies. That was a very important moment for me, and one of the most important things was the recognition that political and economic questions were grounded in, and dependent on, the cultural. The conception of politics had to be expanded in order to deal with cultural questions. So it wasn?t simply that we liked to go to the cinema, or we were interested in Look Back in Anger and the theatre and so on; we saw these things as constitutive of political subjectivities. You couldn?t be a political subject – having an economic programme, urging political mobilisation, identifying with the oppressed, the exploited, etc – without also thinking about what were the ideas that held these structures in place, legitimated them. Culture, we came to believe, was constitutive. Economics was constitutive but so was culture. The conditions of existence were cultural, political and economic. All three things had to be articulated
to make sense of any situation, event or conjuncture. That?s why people like Raymond Williams, who expressed this idea in what may now seem rather simple terms, were so important to us in the early days of the new left. This may come as a surprise to many people, but I saw cultural studies as the pursuit of that politics in another place rather than as a career. I went into it because I wanted to go on pursuing those questions. I saw cultural studies, in the early stages at any rate – it later became something else – as a way, within an academic and intellectual framework, of pursuing the same kind of questions that lay at the root of what had created the new left in the mid 1950s. So the things that you talk about were one of the most important contributions that the new left made to the political. But I would go beyond that. We didn?t
recognise, any of us, at that moment, that this too was a new conjuncture, the conjuncture in which culture, in terms of the cultural industries, was beginning to play an economic and political and social role of enormous importance. The cultural industries were becoming – and again I use a Marxist phrase – part of so-called material production. Culture is now as integral to how these societies work, how the global society works, as the economic itself. All economics these days is cultural, as all culture is economic. In that sense, I am not talking about having a politics, and then being interested in the cinema, I?m talking about a redefinition of the political itself, an expansion of the notion of the political to include the cultural. Then, of course, there?s the new and major expansion of the political that occurs in the 1960s, especially in feminism, which expands the political to include all kinds of new domains – the politics of the family, the politics of the bedroom, the politics of sexuality, the politics of food. When the new left in the 1950s and later were talking about all politics being cultural, we didn?t get to that, we didn?t come anywhere near that. I think you may need to go back to the question about good food and the pleasure principle. The important thing about pleasure is that it can?t be easily corralled to any political tendency or party – to recognise the very explosive, boundary-shifting nature of pleasure. This is part of the history of how I have had to transform my own head. I transformed it about culture, I transformed it about gender and sexuality, I transformed it about difference – I have gone on transforming it – which is why I don?t believe in identity as a fixed principle. I?ve had to learn about the nature of pleasure. I didn?t think politics had anything to do with pleasure – and pleasure is a very deceptive political value. Pleasure, as I was saying earlier about art, addresses your subjective investments in ways over which you have less control, in ways that are less conscious, less under the rational inspection of your purposes and intentions. It plays across the boundaries. It connects you with people you shouldn?t like, for instance. It makes you love your political enemy, or see something positive in people that you quarrel with. I suppose my life has been changed precisely by this awareness that within the political domain, though politics is always composed of antagonisms – it?s nothing if there aren?t people who take different positions – these
antagonistic positions are never ones which exclude the other, they can?t exclude the other. And the question of pleasure enters into this understanding, that one cannot construct one?s political opponents as a mirror image of oneself. [question from audience] What would you say to those who point out that encouragement of the assertion of difference and our multiple specificities is also the project of neoliberal capitalism, and, even as it works always and everywhere to undermine difference, it wants to sell back to us our flimsy affirmations of what our differences might be? Yes, that is one of the most difficult and perplexing questions that I have had to think about, because, of course, contemporary consumer capitalism absolutely loves difference. It thrives on difference of a certain kind. It creates a niche market before you can say hello, overnight. The proliferation of difference is therefore a complicated thing because it brings you so close to that aspect of the system that you are trying to contest. This is a question about a lot of my work, that I have come dangerously close to that against which I want to stand. I?ve come close to Thatcherism, and I sometimes sound as if Thatcherism is the best thing since sliced bread – because in the 1980s it understood hegemonic political struggle in a way in which the Labour Party simply didn?t. And I?ve come close to difference, which is, after all, simply an aspect of modern consumerism and the market. And cultural studies comes very close to celebrity and commodified culture. You like popular culture, and before you know what you are saying there is no difference between commodified popular culture and serious culture, and one is in danger of falling into a false kind of cultural populism. I don?t know how to answer this critique in a principled way – that is to say, I don?t know what general principle is in operation. What I know is the strategy. I
know I have to get close to that against which I want to mount an argument. I have to understand from the inside how it works and what it is about. This has to do with this failure of any field to polarise itself into absolute opposites. Of course a lot of popular culture is simply the commercialised repetition of formulae, but at the same time popular culture includes feelings and experiences which have not got expressed in the dominant culture, in high culture, and without which you don?t understand, actually, how ordinary people are thinking and feeling. So popular culture is a complicated combination of the commodified and the experientially significant. You can?t draw a simple line between high culture and popular culture. It has to be a line drawn within popular culture. You have got to get into the field in order to see where the critical distinctions occur. So I have to go with difference in order to see which differences don?t matter a damn, which differences are just a repetition of superficial market varieties – if you make soup, you make a thousand varieties of them, but it doesn?t make a difference. These are differences that don?t make a difference. But paradoxically you have to get close to understanding why
differences of that kind appeal, become pleasurable to us, in order to understand those differences which really do make a difference, which constitute the differences of actual experience, the differences of real history. So I can?t stand outside the field. I can?t make the distinctions and judgements I need to make without getting perilously close to it. I have to run the danger of being assimilated by it in order to know what it really looks like. Only then can I know why it?s winning! This is an edited extract from a conversation between Stuart Hall and Bill Schwarz at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in February 2007. Thanks to Ruth Borthwick and the South Bank Centre Talks Department for permission to publish.
Marginal Benefits20 Feb 2008It’s lose, lose, lose for the Foreign Office as the Guardian publishes the secret evidence of the Foreign Office witness who tried, successfully at first, to stop us finding out that before the war someone in government compared Israel to Iraq in its “brazen” pursuit of weapons of mass destruction and defiance of the UN. It could hardly have turned out much worse for the hapless FCO. First, the information tribunal shot its fox by pointing out that it could publish the John Williams draft of the dossier without the marginal note that makes this comparison. Then it was careless enough to let the evidence into the public domain, providing a readymade story. And, of course, it has been caught trying to conceal something, which just adds to the story. I was at the tribunal hearing in December and was aware that Neil Wigan was giving oral evidence, and who he was. He was incredibly indiscreet as he chatted across me with Stephen Pattison, the other FCO witness, about the latest thinking on the Middle East. David Leigh is critical of the process by which the FCO managed to suppress the note. You could either see its case as very desperate or very clever, but in the end it backfired spectacularly. Whatever the merits of the Freedom of Information Act – it allowed the Williams draft to be released only after a three-year delay – the most important things often come into the public domain through leaks. Martin Bright has a terrific piece in the New Statesman today, about the Williams draft but also about the marginal note. He points out that the government sent the draft to the Hutton inquiry without any request that it be censored. As he also points out, the draft never got to the other parties to the inquiry. Neither did it get on the Hutton website. Perhaps the government knew this would happen. Since the draft was published this week, people have been asking who wrote the marginal notes. The tribunal pointed out that there are two different handwriting styles, and that the fact that people were commenting on the draft contradicted the FCO claim that it was immediately put aside. Some comments, such as the one that identifies British bases in Cyprus as being within the range of Iraq’s missiles, have already attracted attention. Now that we know about the Israel comment, people will really want to know who wrote it. Is Jack Straw, then foreign secretary, a candidate? Williams himself has said he does not think so. But it is clear from the emails going around the Foreign Office on September 11 that Straw was looking at the redrafting very closely and almost certainly saw the Williams draft. I am told that, as the remarks of the serving secretary of state, Straw’s comments would have been in red. Can we have a colour copy of the draft please? As the Guardian makes clear, with its comprehensive coverage, the significance of the story in relation to Israel has many interesting layers. It is clear that, inside the Foreign Office, people were aware of the possible charge of hypocrisy in going for Iraq while ignoring Israel’s weapons of mass destruction and its defiance of the UN. It is also clear that the Foreign Office is very sensitive to the charge that it is anti-Israel, and that Israel is able to exploit this. The great irony is that whoever wrote the comment was aware that the claim that Iraq was unique provided a hostage to fortune, inviting people to talk about Israel. Neil Wigan’s evidence was the greatest hostage to fortune you can imagine. People are certainly talking about Israel now.
Behind Flat Earth News20 Feb 2008On 1 February, MediaWise, one of The Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom’s associated groups, released online the Cardiff University research report that underpins Nick Davies’ devastating critique of British journalism, Flat Earth News, previewed in the current issue of Private Eye and this week’s edition of Press Gazette. The report can be downloaded here The quality and independence of British journalism has been severely damaged since the Wapping Dispute in 1986, when Rupert Murdoch challenged the power of the print unions. Over the last 20 years, the research shows, profits have doubled and pagination has trebled, across the industry, while the number of jobs is about the same and productivity, in terms of the number of stories produced by journalists, has trebled. Many journalists now have to feed a 24-hour news operation, producing copy for a variety of media ? print, online, television and radio. Increasingly deskbound, they have no time to go out and find or properly research stories. Our report suggests that less than 1 in 5 stories is now independently sourced. As a result the public relations industry exerts an unduly powerful influence over the news agenda. And with each medium feeding off the content of its rivals, the public has no way of knowing which news items may have originated in an unchallenged press release. Profits may be up but there has been no corresponding investment in the actual business of journalism. This is one of the complaints of striking journalists at the Milton Keynes Citizen, who have queried their management’s commitment to quality journalism. Johnston Press, now has 18 daily newspapers, 291 weekly newspapers and 317 local websites, acquired and developed over recent years. Take-overs, merged titles and shared newsrooms and overheads have improved balance sheets across the industry to the detriment of journalistic integrity. Yet few members of the public can be expected to appreciate the complex mesh of media ownership that controls the flow of information they receive, and may indeed influence news content. They may be familiar with News Corporation and Rupert Murdoch’s massive global interests in media production, but what about Newsquest, the UK end of the US publishing giant Gannett? It owns 17 regional dailies, some 300 local weeklies and 180 local websites. The Daily Mail General Trust includes 50 companies with more than 100 local newspapers, 28 local websites, as well as radio, TV, teletext outlets and its national titles. Their influence over public discourse is immense, so it is not surprising that Daily Mail executives were among the first to try and rubbish Nick Davies’ book and the Cardiff research. Funded by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, our report is a major contribution to the debate MediaWise initiated in 2004 on Journalism and Public Trust. We were pleased to assist Nick Davies, since those who object to criticism of journalism standards constantly demand hard evidence. Cardiff’s research contains evidence in abundance. Its closing section, ‘The View from the Newsroom’, offers perhaps the most dispiriting evidence – a collapse in confidence among even then most experienced of journalists. Only last weekend (26 Jan 08) former Independent on Sunday Editor Peter Wilby reflected this mood, when he told the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom conference on ‘New Threats to Media Freedom’ that marketing managers are now taken more seriously than Editors. “Is it any wonder that public trust in journalists is declining?” responded Jeremy Dear, General Secretary of the National Union of Journalists. The situation is not peculiar to the UK. A poll in the US has revealed that fewer than one in five Americans is willing to trust the accuracy of news reporting, and four out of five are convinced that the media seek to manipulate public opinion. One third of Americans believe the media is biased and unfair, according to research by Sacred Heart University in Connecticut. The House of Lords Communications Committee members need to read the Cardiff research and Nick Davies’ book before they complete their current deliberations on Media Ownership and the News. We shall also be submitting it to the Secretary of State for Culture, Media & Sport, and renewing our call for a Fourth Royal Commission into the state of the UK media. For more information or interviews, contact 07968 031 531 Flat Earth News by Nick Davies (Chatto & Windus) was published on 7 February 2008 – for more information visit www.flatearthnews.net
Parties, Movements and Radical Change20 Feb 2008I am constantly struck by the failure of the radical left to explicitly seize the moral high ground. The right (especially the evangelical right) are not averse to doing so when it suits them, yet socialism, internationalism, ecological sustainability, feminism, anti-imperialism all have very strong ethical foundations. Appealing broadly on key issues to a very basic humanity and compassion potentially connects us to audiences that for some years have been removed from radical left politics- the many people in various religious and moral camps. This may cause some on the left to question long-held beliefs, such as on the use of violence, but that?s no bad thing. The enormous success of the London Citizens movement in bringing together trade unions and religious groups should be a lesson to us all. We tend to focus too much on detail and not enough on the big ethical issues underlying our politics. For example, half the world?s GDP is routed through tax havens which means half the potential tax revenues are lost. This is so grotesquely unfair to people who pay their taxes that it allows us to explain to them that there is enough money in the world- it?s just who?s got it and the tax systems set up to protect them that?s the problem. Identify the issues We need to identify the issues where there is real possibility of a broad anti-capitalist, anti-establishment consensus emerging in the UK (and internationally) and focus on these. It is possible to change mass consciousness on certain issues in a relatively short space of time. They key then is to turn this into a permanent (or near to permanent as possible) step forward, ideally framed in law as well as in the popular consciousness. It?s been noted in other contexts how social attitudes to drinking and driving changed dramatically in a generation to one of outright hostility to such selfish and dangerous behaviour. The same is now happening on global warming and living within environmentally sustainable limits. Radical left activists must build the broadest possible unity around such issues and be at the heart of arguing for such transformations, using them to explain the links to other social, economic and political issues. Respond rapidly and create permanent resources Insufficient time and effort goes into translating successes into permanent acquisitions, not just ideologically but also physically and virtually. To be able to respond rapidly and effectively, the radical left needs embedded resources and infrastructure. This will take many forms such as resource centres, websites, socio-political networks and funding sources. Rather than forming another party or newspaper a shrewder investment may be to create and sustain permanent resources for the range of needs the radical left needs for its activities. Remove the barriers There are some structural issues that are critical barriers to progress for radical left politics. The most obvious is the electoral system. Proportional representation is no panacea but crucial if radical left politics is to enter the mainstream electoral and political arena. Another barrier is the party system and elections. The party system, especially in local elections, is a major barrier to making radical breakthroughs at a local level. The radical left needs to develop proposals and campaign to make it much easier for independent candidates and small parties to stand in local, national and European elections. Recognise opportunities As Hilary Wainwright hints in her article it is also crucial to seize any opportunities to create and sustain forms of local democratic debate and accountability as ongoing spaces. For example, for its own reasons this government has decided to promote participatory budgeting but is it just a panacea? No, current developments in Porto Alegre show this. To incorporate local processes of structured debate and discussion about what needs to be done and how money should be spent locally would represent a huge step forward for the UK. Potentially it could raise debate about the need for structured discussion of the national budget and priorities, weaken the power of the traditional local parties to have exclusive access to this discussion and help reawaken interest in politics. The crucial thing is for the radical left to recognise such opportunities when they arise and to seize them rather than sneer from the sidelines at the government?s motives. This article is one of a number, in what Red Pepper describes as ‘not so much a debate as a collaborative inquiry’ on Rethinking Political Parties. Join the debate here.
The Dreaming City19 Feb 2008Gerry Hassan discusses the innovative Glasgow 2020 project. What Glasgow? – The city, not the film. The city
is the film. – Oh come on. – I tell you. – Right then,
look. Renfield Street, marchers, banners, slogans.
Read the message, hear the chant. – Lights, Cameras! Edwin Morgan1 Yes I know the city like a lover
Good or bad it?s hard to love another that I?ve found
This is no mean city, no mean city. Maggie Bell2 Thinking about the future is part of being human. For as long as human beings have lived they have begun to think, dream, imagine, hope and worry about the future. Imagining different worlds has been a central creative theme in art, literature and film. The world of ?futurology? is far removed from such accounts, however; it has its origins in the vast research spending of the US military-industrial complex in the second world war, when policy boffins such as Robert McNamara worked to produce detailed analysis of the effectiveness of bombing Japanese cities. Then in 1946 this new way of thinking about warfare gained focus with the establishment of the RAND Corporation, a federally funded research facility, which during the cold war developed ways of thinking about the future that included the theorising of nuclear weapons scenarios.[3] Analysts such as Herman Kahn began to develop some of the key tools of future thinking – for example scenario-building and visioning – and in 1967 the World Future Society was established. Future thinking mostly takes place within the narrow and elitist world of those with power, influence and status. Governments, corporates and big institutions future scan, trying to identify possible new trends, discussing possible, probable and preferred futures, as well as unforeseen events that may unsettle their plans, with the aim of controlling the future as much as possible. This is not an open, democratic set of conversations; it is about those with power looking to maintain it and second-guess any challenges, or emerging threats or rivals. My argument is that the rest of us need to join in this debate. In the last couple of years I have been involved in two major projects looking at a much wider sense of how we imagine the future: Scotland 2020 and Glasgow 2020. The Scotland 2020 project looked to overcome the prevalence of negative accounts of Scotland?s devolved government, and to identify positive possibilities through the idea of story; and from this came the impetus to set up a much more ambitious and daring project to test the public appetite for imagining the future through story, this time at the level of a city.[4] Glasgow 2020 had three dimensions: it was about the city of Glasgow; it was about cities generally; and it was about how we think about the future. These three strands came together to make Glasgow 2020 something of a unique project and intervention, and as far as we know a world first – an attempt to reimagine the city through the idea of the stories people tell. It involved the support of virtually every public agency in the city – including the city council, Scottish Enterprise, the Health Board, the universities, art school and music academy, and the fire and police services. Each gained a perspective of the city they would not otherwise have been able to get (and none asked for a veto on its findings). Glasgow is a fascinating city in which to attempt such an experiment. It is Scotland?s first city in terms of size, still being significantly larger than Edinburgh. It likes to see itself as a ?big city? – a place bigger and more important than its population or status might imply. It is a city that has undergone huge waves of expansion, growth, change, reinvention, challenge and decline. While its formal council area has seen a population decline from 1.1 million in the 1950s to 600,000 today, the wider Glasgow conurbation still contains 1.2 million people, and is one of the most vibrant and varied parts of Scotland and the UK. It has left behind its role as the Second City of Empire – when it made its wealth from transatlantic commerce and trade. It is now the Second City of Shopping – reflecting its retail power. This is a city rich with stories and tales. Some of these can be problematic: the city is variously known as ?the sick man of Europe? and ?the murder capital of Europe?. In the 1930s Glasgow gained opprobrium as ?No Mean City? – for its gang culture that was over-sensationalised in the novel of the same name. In the 1980s the city?s swagger and sense of importance saw this phrase reappropriated as part of Glasgow?s cultural reinvention, in the opening credits of the TV series Taggart. Then there is the football, which no discussion of the city can be without. The city has never been, as some have claimed, a ?Belfast without the bombs?, but the sectarian divide between Celtic and Rangers undermines the efforts of the city authorities to promote images of the city as cosmopolitan, modern and welcoming. Alongside all this there is the upbeat picture of the city: a place of culture, creativity and innovation, a city filled with vibrancy and buzz. This is a city of artists, writers, musicians, dreamers, and of Glasgow characters and humour: the place that gave the world Stanley Baxter, Lulu, Billy Connolly and so much more! Glasgow 2020 aimed to look beyond these images and accounts, and to find perspectives of the city that opened up possibilities and addressed some of the fundamental questions about the future: what kind of city do you want to live in, what kind of values do you want your life and city to be shaped by, and, ambitiously, how can we begin to mark out a route map to get there? An age of urban renaissance? The Silver Tree was an impossibility in a rational landscape. It mocked our city, our civilisation, which was the most advanced in the history of the world. As it grew it reminded us of our morality, our limitations. All my life had been about the focusing of the will. In search of perfection, the architect had fused the human with the inhuman – but along with the wonderous buildings, there came this infernal tree! Suhayl Saadi, The Icarus Tree5 This is, according to some analysts, a golden age for cities. Regeneration. Redevelopment. Renaissance. Across different societies and cities, skylines are changing, and the same faceless, shiny buildings are rising, often owned by the same corporations. A new era of cities located in the once ?Third World? – Dubai, Shanghai, Seoul – see themselves as the ?hot? places of tomorrow. The once dominant cities of the West are reinventing and redesigning themselves to stay ahead, anxious that complacency will mean they will lose their competitive edge. This has had the cumulative effect in ?the West? of producing an identikit city that you can practically buy off the shelf. The urban formula of success – first tried and tested in places like Barcelona and Bilbao – has become an increasingly narrow one, with diminishing results. It reduces cities to participation in a kind of cultural arms race, competing with iconic buildings, galleries and museums, riverfront developments and squinty bridges. This is the model of development advocated in Richard Florida?s over-hyped The Rise of the Creative Class, a frequently referenced but rarely read book, which instrumentally appropriates ?culture?, ?creativity? and ?diversity? for economic policy – an urban manifesto for the globally mobile and successful. In this model creativity and culture become nothing more than a commodified adjunct of economics. At the 2007 ?Imagining the City? symposium held at the newly reopened Southbank Centre, two very different ideas of the future of cities were put forward. Richard Sennett offered a critique of the contemporary urban orthodoxy, and the grip of a monoculture that is shaped by tourism and finance; as he argued, a city shaped by such forces becomes a site of inequality: a lived-in space filled with lots of people doing well and lots of people struggling to survive. A very different model was put forward by Peter Head, Director of Sustainability at Arup (www.arup.com), a global design and business consulting firm. Head offered us a glimpse into the world of Arup in China, in a presentation of ghastly and near Hollywood-style sentimentality, with soft focus, dewy colours and ?new age? music. Head focused on the monster project for the new city of Dongtan, in which Arup are strategic partners with the Shanghai Industrial Investment Corporation. Dongtan is being built as an ?ecocity? in the Yangtze River delta, near Shanghai, and Arup see it as a potential ?Chinese Manhattan?, or alternatively a ?new Venice?: the beginning of ?a new paradigm? in cities. This project is part of the export of the identikit consumer city; it benefits western business interests and promotes consumerism, in a partnership in which both sides are able to ignore issues of democracy and equality – a lack of concern for such matters being a common bond between Leninist vanguardists and market fundamentalists. The bright green aspects of the project only add to its charm. Dongtan is not all it appears, however; it has been called the equivalent of a ?Potemkin eco-village?, an attempt by China to showcase its eco-conscience while all the time, down the road in Shanghai, 18-20 million people live without any environmental regulations.[6] There is also the issue of how a sustainable eco-city can be built upon the flatlands of a river delta, barely two metres above sea level: by the time the model city hits its target of 500,000 people in 2050, it could be an underwater city. The proposals clearly appalled Sennett but Head could find nothing to criticise in them. The Dongtan example illustrates a number of wider issues about cities, development, politics and public debate. Firstly, there is the compromised nature of our political classes. The deal to bring about Dongtan was signed at No. 10 Downing Street with Tony Blair present. John Prescott, as Deputy Prime Minister, made several trips to Dongtan, and there have been rumours that his retirement may see him join Arup?s Board as a Non-Executive Director. The lack of discussion about such issues is highlighted in the uncritical way that this deal, and others like it, are presented in the media and public debate – from the Financial Times to Wired. People want to do business with China and want to get their feet in the door, and are prepared to compromise their ethics to achieve this. Dongtan is the ultimate in trying to have your cake and eat it: building a new Chinese city while dressing it in eco-camouflage. Dongtan is an extreme example of tendencies in the mainstream city discourse, but it embodies the main outlines of the official-future view of the city. The presentation of this dominant vision may be sweetened with creative industry mood music, but it has little to do with the world of people, imagination and democracy. The official future versus the world of mass imagination ?. ?Sur, what does GDP mean? Ah?ve just downloaded ma news page here, in it says that Scotland?s goat the highest GDP in the world. Is that good Sir or bad Sir?? John Daly, Allowed, Able and Willing The ?official future? is the place where the public discourses of government, public agencies, mainstream media and the corporate world coalesce into a relatively coherent worldview.[7] It increasingly points in one way – towards a model of the world centred on economic growth, determinism and the primacy of competition and markets. ?The official future? is a place filled with its own jargon, buzz words and bright, shiny documents, which promise an upbeat, glorious world of optimism and prosperity. Beneath this panglossian promise, however, there is an innate and deep-seated pessimism – which acknowledges that this is a soulless, friendless and loveless world. It is a world filled with such word games as ?inviting people to do the step-change?: sadly, not a new dance craze, but an example – one of many – of consultant-class speak. The concepts of change inherent in this official future are imbued with words and values from business models and the primacy of economic development. Ideas of change that are social, cultural or ecological, or organic and community-centred, just don?t get a look in. Given the power of this worldview in public discussions, most people feel they have little choice but to accept the ?There is No Alternative? mindset; and yet they do so with little real enthusiasm, and with a sense of resignation. There is a sense that ?the official future? has already been decided by forces more powerful than you and I – and this makes people feel like instrumental agents, and brings a feeling of powerlessness. Glasgow 2020 set out to challenge this feeling, to explore the possibilities of people thinking, conceiving and developing their own futures. We called this a mass imagination exercise – drawing on the ideas of the 1940s mass observation surveys, but with the aim of something more pro-active. We ran a total of 38 events, nearly all of these in Glasgow, involving over 5000 local people – nearly one per cent of the city. We reached out across geographies, generations, identities and socio-economic backgrounds – from taxi drivers and hairdressers to journalists and entrepreneurs, from people living in social housing, to asylum seekers and commuters. This was an imagination exercise, not a consultation: animation, fun, humour, creativity and fuzziness were the main characteristics in our events. Discussions did not focus on people?s identities – as ?single parents? or ?creative entrepreneurs?, etc; instead they developed a general, structured conversation about the future, using the techniques of philosophical inquiry. This meant that discussions that began with people stating their usual views on a subject typically ended up somewhere else. A variety of public spaces were used. Some were everyday public spaces such as libraries, museums and community centres. Others were disruptive spaces – for example Glasgow-Edinburgh trains were taken over for two days; a Saturday of events was run in the city?s biggest art gallery and museum, Kelvingrove; and a boat equipped for a day as an office sailed up and down the River Clyde in stormy weather. Tales of the city Glasgow – Green City?
No since they built hooses on hauf the parks and ran a motorway
through what was left.
Glasgow – Clean City?
Graffiti City mibbe.
Or Chuggie City?
Aye you cannae walk down a street wioot gettin it stuck tae your
shoes. Anne Donovan, Glasgow?s Pants One of the central pillars of Glasgow 2020 was the power of story. Stories matter. People relate to and identify with the idea of story. Our lives, loves and world are made sense of by the various stories which make them up. Politics used to be shaped and defined by a set of over-arching and potent stories that offered to make sense of the world. The centre-left in Britain once had a story in socialism, along with an idea of how this was to come about through ?the forward march? of ?the labour movement?. One of the fundamental changes of the Blair era has been the near complete disappearance of this story, and the subsequent Brown administration also seems unsure of its moral compass and mission.[8] Cities are shaped by the myths and potencies of stories, as Armistead Maupin recognised in his famous Tales of the City set in 1970s San Francisco. Glasgow 2020 looked to encourage the non-institutional stories of the city to find their voice. We ran events where people, after their initial discussions, created characters who inhabited the city in 2020, and embryonic storylines; from these seeds many fullyfledged stories of the city of the future emerged. There is a direct relationship between people?s disquiet about ?the official future? and the way they see public institutions, from government to the corporate sector. More and more people say that they suspect that the values which inform institutions are not the values they would like them to be informed by. People also suspect that the public face that these organisations present to the world, with all their talk of being sensitive and informed by the public, is not what really influences them. This is not a perception that can be addressed by better communications or transparency. This is about something much deeper: an emerging values gap between people and institutions. There is a general sense that institutions have bought into a view of the world that has a set of values far removed from notions of public service and public duty, or from any sense of real consumer sensitivities and power. It is revealing that the scepticism that people feel is often articulated in hesitant and unsure ways – as if they wish they could be proved wrong by the facts. And the manner in which people state their views shows that the language of this doubt and disquiet – after the demise of socialism – has yet to find a full form. In every event across Glasgow 2020 people expressed hope for themselves, their neighbourhoods and city. From the poorest to the most affluent areas, people had hope and showed that they had individual or neighbourhood ways they acted upon this. What was missing was the sense of a city-wide collective agency joining this up. Across the city this tale was shaped by gender. More women than men ?did? things. Women had tales of doing things to take hold of their lives, support their children and change their communities. Frequently they had a very different and more immediate idea of change and politics than the more conventional ideas expressed by many men, who tended to have a view of politics and social change which was rooted in others – i.e. politicians – bringing about change. The seven cities of the future And the film makers. The city?s teeming wi? them! Everybody wants
to make their films about Glasgow these days. Or write books set
in Glasgow. And you wouldnae mind so much except it?s no your
old Glasgow they?re writing about. It?s this new European Glasgow.
Cosmopolitan Glasgow. Kirsten Anderson, A Tale of Two Cities From the range of discussions and activities of Glasgow 2020 seven very different cities of the future emerged. All these possible future cities – unlike utopias or dystopias – were already present in some way in the city of the present. The seven cities merely took different aspects of the present and accentuated them or crossfertilised them with other forces. They were: The Two Speed City The Soft City The Dear Green City The Slow City The Lonely City The Hard City The Kaleidoscope City This futures diverge widely. In the Two Speed City, the two halves of the city, evident now, become virtually separate, two distinct communities living side by side. In the Soft City, the city shaped by feminine values and nurturing comes to the fore, changing how both men and women act. In the Kaleidoscope City, the changing nature of the city – affected by everything from migration to sexual liberalism – radically alters the mainstream culture. A fundamental difference emerged between these seven cities of the future and the way the official future portrays the city. The official version of the city emphasises factors such as shopping, tourism and culture alongside economic and cultural regeneration. It is shaped by the importance of sectors and promoting them as a dynamic manifestation of the creative city. But across the Glasgow 2020 project very few individuals talked for very long in such ways. This is partly because people just take these things for granted as part of modern life; and partly because they recognise that shopping and tourism et al are not part of what makes a city unique because everywhere has that. Instead, the manner by which people talked about the city and the future was informed by addressing questions about the meaning and purpose of life, and the question of values – what kind of values people would like to see their city represent. Running through all of this was the question of what vessels and sense of agency people can create, that they themselves can own. Glasgow 2020 offered the beginnings of a road map on how to begin to tentatively answer this huge question. It showed that people have the capacities, creativities and imagination to think deeply and profoundly about their city and the future. The book of the project, The Dreaming City: Glasgow 2020 and the Power of Mass Imagination, contains a collection of stories about the future which emerged from our events. It also contains a critique of the way we think about cities, and lessons and implications for thinking about the future. A number of independent initiatives spun out of the project. The seven cities of the future that emerged were summarised into individual postcards and distributed around the city as part of the Scottish Executive?s Six Cities Festival. A music album of the same name, The Dreaming City, brought together the work of nine musicians and groups, who took some of the stories and used them to create new artistic pieces of work.[9] The resulting album involved the artists creating a series of musical landscapes which were about Glasgow and Scotland, but evoked a distant, magical or imagined city in a far-off land. Assemblies of hope While beneath this ball Glasgow swings
With bass rhythms and cathedral rings
Franz Ferdinand and Barrowland kings
Country and western under angel wings
John Maclean and his George Square noise
Charms Gregory?s Girl and the Glasgow Boys Jim Carruth, St Mungo?s Mirrorball Glasgow 2020 suggested as one possible answer to the issue of agency the idea of ?assemblies of hope?. These are fluid, flowing networks bringing together an array of people – alchemists, campaigners, imaginers – people with ideas, creative energies and the desire to do something. Their aim would be to develop dialogues that don?t normally happen, to cross boundaries and divides, to aid individual action into collective action, and to support communities of interest into communities of action. These assemblies – and there are already in existence many nascent ones – would not define people as mere props of economic policy. For them, human action, interaction, art and creativity have worth on their own terms, and should not be seen as instrumental and subordinated to the needs of economic determinism. Many of us feel increasingly squashed and pressurised by the inexorable logic and insatiable appetite of the market, and by being defined by economic logic. The aim is to create spaces, zones, discussions, deliberations and ways of being which aid us to define ourselves in different ways. The reality of much of city life and public space is the all-pervasive pressure of consumerism, advertising and the hustle and bustle of a fast life. There are few places within cities where an individual is not defined as a consumer. A more daring notion of city spaces would perhaps see the encouragement of ?quiet zones?, in the manner found on some train carriages; these would be advertising, brand-free zones, where people could go to find a slower, gentler, more contemplative mood. Imagine the positive effect for the first major city in the UK that began such a process: of recognising that life wasn?t all about getting faster, smarter and leaner, and arguing that ?life in the slow lane? had some advantages. The city and the left ?Change?? The word echoed in Jack?s head. He felt the money in his clenched fist and thought he probably had enough for an Underground ticket, a day spent dozing round the clockwork orange. Ewan Gault, That Change is Nothing The Glasgow 2020 project was a unique and wonderful project; it was a pleasure and privilege to watch it flourish and grow. Its rich tapestry of ideas, insights, processes and findings showed that people do increasingly question the current orthodoxies in policy, politics and society. The old-fashioned wisdoms of the right – of the market as the solution and government and the state as the problem – and of the left – of the state and government as the solution and the market as the problem – are increasingly out of touch with the challenges of modern society and the planet. The conventional left and right are united in a narrow economistic view of the world; they have similar ideas of human nature, and similarly restricted notions of progress, founded on materialist values; both are oblivious to the coming environmental crisis. This is an age where mainstream politics across the Western world operate in an increasingly narrow bandwidth. The language, values and priorities of the official future have become an intolerant, inflexible orthodoxy, with little room for manoeuvre or dissent. The power and hold of this worldview is directly linked to the demise of the Soviet bloc, Soviet Union and socialism in 1989-91: from this set of events a belief in the possibilities of another kind of social order has been discredited. In this vacuum a newly confident and triumphalist ideological perspective has arisen about the attractiveness and appeal of a certain kind of capitalist economy and order: one which is increasingly divided into winners and losers; which celebrates wealth, status and power; and which is shaped by massive structural inequalities, with poverty sitting side-by-side with wealth undreamt of in human history. One of the great tragedies of the last decade and a half is that so many, many people have gone along with this warped, flawed and horrid view of the world. Figures from the centre-left across the Western world have become the leading cheerleaders of this perspective: from Clinton, both Bill and Hillary, to Blair and Brown. People in leading positions in public institutions in the UK, US and Europe have embraced the language and mindset of this world. They have given sustenance to the notion that we live in an age where ?There Is No Alternative? , where words such as ?knowledge economy?, ?globalisation? and ?step change? are bandied about without any critical understanding. The Glasgow 2020 project shows that people don?t want this state of affairs, and nor do they believe in their hearts and souls in the official future. They recognise that the world on offer is a pretty unattractive, soulless and pessimistic one, where every person is a potential economic threat and competitor, rather than a friend and neighbour. They recognise that relationships have to be about more than economic logic, and that we cannot go about the world viewing everything else – other cities, countries and institutions – as threats that we need to trash and undermine. There is a very definite message of optimism and hope within the Glasgow 2020 project. Firstly, there is this deep-seated lack of faith in the values, aims and aspirations of the official future. Secondly, there is a profound sense of creativity, imagination and play, something which is not touched upon or recognised in mainstream debates. If we are to live in future societies that we can identify with, connect with, and feel some sense of ownership of, we need to fundamentally change direction as a society. This has to be centred on a concept of progress, and a version of the future, that we wish to nourish. Once upon a long time ago the left had a sense of certainty, even arrogance, on such positions. Now it has a sense of doubt, silence and unease. Throughout human history cities have been places where different versions of humanity have contested a multitude of versions of the social order and the future. The city has been a place of social change, upheaval and dislocation, the place of capitalism?s greatest triumphs and potential demise. For the left, historically, it has been a place where it feels more at home, and has more to say. But we now need a very different model of a city: one that renews an idealistic, optimistic and forwardlooking idea of humanity and the future. One that is imbued with a green sensitivity and an ecological concept of the planet. We cannot leave the utopian imagination to the free market modernists, unchallenged. We have reached a nadir in the official conceptions through which public agencies, corporates and developers think of cities. Our cities are the product of an age that is filled with talk of change, innovation and diversity, but is defined by conformity and fixed mindsets. We have to dare to dream of cities and communities in which people live, work, love and interact in ways which nurture and nourish the best in all of us, rather than play to our worst and most base instincts. Notes 1. Edwin Morgan, ?A City?, in H. Whyte (ed.), Mungo?s Tongues Glasgow
Poems 1630-1990, Mainstream 1993, p262. 2. Maggie Bell, No Mean City (Theme to Taggart), www.taggartfanclub.
co.uk/nomean.htm. 3. On RAND and the American military-industrial complex see
Andrew J. Bacevich, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are
Seduced By War, Oxford University Press 2005. 4. Gerry Hassan, Eddie Gibb and Lydia Howland (eds), Scotland 2020:
Hopeful Stories for a Northern Nation, Demos 2005; Gerry Hassan,
Melissa Mean and Charlie Tims, The Dreaming City: Glasgow 2020 and the Power of Mass Imagination, Demos 2007. 5. From The Dreaming City: Glasgow 2020 and the Power of Mass
Imagination. Hereafter all quotations without citations are taken from
this collection. 6. For a critical overview of Arup, Dongtan and the British
political classes see the analysis of the Ethical Corporation at:
www.ethicalcorp.com/resources/downloads/20076411627_
Paul%20French%20Cast%204.mp3 7. On the idea of ?the official future? see: Richard Eckersley, Well and
Good: How We Feel and Why It Matters, Melbourne: Text Publishing
2004. 8. Gerry Hassan, Introduction, in Gerry Hassan (ed), After Blair:
Politics After the New Labour Decade, Lawrence and Wishart 2007. 9. The Dreaming City, Glasgow: Sub-Urban Collective 2007. Available
from:www.sub-urbancollective.co.uk.
Alex Wheatle Remembers ‘Stop and Search’19 Feb 2008When I heard last month about the government?s plans to give police more powers to stop and search, my mind flicked back to the early 1980s and all that happened in the days running up to the riots in south London on 10 and 11 April 1981 that we call the Brixton Uprising. The police stopped thousands of people at that time under the ?sus? laws, which allowed them to stop and search people ?suspected? of wrongdoing, and to arrest people for ?loitering?. They were used to systematically harass black people. I remember going down to Brixton and being stopped maybe two or three times a day. I wasn?t totally innocent ? I was a bit of small time hustler ? but the huge police operation hit many innocent bystanders who were going about their daily business. That fuelled the resentment we felt. Just before the uprising, the police launched Operation Swamp ? a massive police operation in Brixton. In just four days the police stopped 943 people and arrested 118 ? over half of them black. That added to the anger. Of course there was anger already ? going back a number of years ? at how the police treated black people. But that tension was really cranked up with Operation Swamp and with the experience of the fire in Deptford, a few miles from Brixton, in January 1981. The fire, which happened in New Cross Road, killed 13 young black people. We felt that the police didn?t bother to investigate it properly. Protest We strongly felt that a crime had taken place, but that the police were not using their powers to try and solve it. So there was a protest march. I was on that march and I remember the police trying to intimidate us. We had a police ?escort? all the way along the route. There were confrontations on the fringes ? though I never saw any of that. The way it was reported in the press was as if we were ?public enemy number one?. We had marched peacefully, but the next day the press called us thugs and hooligans. We really felt that although we were born here, we might as well not have been. We were made to feel like outsiders and that we were not wanted. It was driven home to us that we didn?t belong. The far right never had much sway in Brixton. But we had our ears to the ground so we knew there had been incidents in nearby Lewisham where the far right wanted to march. We heard about the police killing activist Blair Peach during an anti-Nazi demonstration in Southall in west London in 1979. Blair Peach changed everything in a way because that?s when we realised that they could kill us on the street and nothing would be done. Blair Peach was a white teacher from New Zealand. He was killed in the broad daylight. So we started to fear. We began to resist arrest even more because we feared that we would be killed too. Music played a big part in the events of the time. We were listening to Burning Spear, Bob Marley and Peter Tosh. We had album covers with clenched fists. I was politicised in a way that is maybe not normal for 17 or 18 year olds because of the music I was listening to. It made you aware of the political landscape around you. It made you think about what Margaret Thatcher was trying to do when she made her speeches. For us it felt like the Tories and police just wanted to purge us off the streets. We were expendable. That?s how we felt ? expendable rubbish. The uprisings didn?t just happen in Brixton. All over Britain people erupted with fury at the police ? not just in the big cities, but in many smaller towns. Many of us involved in the uprising were quite young ? I was 18 at the time. We were in conflict with an older generation. Our parents didn?t quite believe what we were telling them ? that we were being physically abused by the police. They thought this couldn?t really be happening. So there was conflict there all the time. This made us feel even more isolated and when a young generation feels isolated then you get to a stage where you don?t care any more. That?s how many of us felt on the first day of the rising. We looked into our futures and we thought we would probably end up in a prison cell anyway. When you reach a point where you don?t care anymore you can do dangerous things. The uprisings didn?t change things straight away. In Brixton, it was still very much a ?them and us? situation with the police. But the uprisings forced the Tories to hold an inquiry headed by Lord Scarman. His criticisms of police racism were not acted on. Racism It wasn?t until the Macpherson Report in 1999 into the investigation of the murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence that we saw any change in the establishment and the recognition of ?institutional racism? in the police. I was arrested soon after the Brixton Uprising and spent
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