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JONATHAN CHADWICK

Writer and Theatre Director

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Posted on March 13, 2019May 14, 2023


WELCOME

Jonathan Chadwick’s latest play, THE RUINS, more information at the end of the
Plays and other writing section

DECEPTION AND DELUSION is the latest blog

EXCLUSION PROCESSES is the one before

POLITICS IS FAR TOO IMPORTANT TO BE LEFT TO POLITICIANS is the blog before that.

PLEASE DON’T MAKE US GO THROUGH THIS AGAIN is the one before.

THINKING ABOUT THE STATE is a blog piece about the need in our current situation
in the UK in the Autumn of 2022 to reflect on the state

 

Here is a recent video interview hosted by Connor Hayes from Peace in Kurdistan
The Art of Politics and the Politics of Art

Here is a podcast he did for World of Wisdom on ‘Theatre and Transformation‘

‘Theatre as a Space of Transformation’ is a talk he did for Ecodemia.

All the blog pieces about Coronavirus, CV-19 Impacts, are in the blog section.
If you want to read the first in the series from May 2020. CLICK HERE.

If you want to read just the last six pieces I have published in 2021 CLICK HERE

All of Jonathan Chadwick’s recent plays are described and listed in ‘plays and
other writing‘. Any comments or enquiries go to ‘contact’

 

 

Posted on May 8, 2023May 9, 2023


DECEPTION AND DELUSION

Our society – UK April 2023 – is governed through processes of deception. This
could be attributable to recent large-scale growth of information management
enabled by advances in technology – mainly improvements in the efficiency of
microprocessors. (see CHIP WAR by Chris Miller) Attempts to shore up power
through deception and empty demonstrations of control are features of any regime
where a group holds power and manages the submission of other groups. The
centralised and convoluted ways in which the information is authorised and
collected may be furthering a tendency towards delusional behaviours and
mentalities that are incident to the decline in the regime’s – the West’s –
stability.  This tendency has intensified over the last 20 years but especially
during the pandemic. During a period of decline such as the West is suffering
now there is an enhanced need for deception in order to resist the consequences
of this decline.  This enhanced need is leading to delusional behaviours.  The
need for deception is so great that key sectors of the ruling apparatus become
delusional. They actually find themselves given to believe in the deception they
are perpetrating.

Two tendencies – overproduction of information and collapse of profitability
(not necessarily all profits in all sectors) are linked to each other in complex
ways. The fall in profitability or productivity (not the same thing but related)
is to do with the tendency for technological innovation to have an impact not on
production but on distribution. (See Smart Machines and Service Work by Jason E
Smith).  Division within the manager-worker relations of production becomes more
marked and the owners of the systems are more distant from the operatives.  This
is manifest in terms of income, wealth and living conditions as well as in
physical terms. This occurs in production as well as in social relations and can
make the ‘masters’ delusional. There is a peculiar alchemy of dysfunctional
impotence and illusions of omniscience and omnipotence. The latter is
particularly the case with the increased capacity for surveillance that has
occurred. ( see Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism) This is why I am
arguing that our political system, based as it is on deception, is liable to
being deformed by delusion.

With our free media, democracy and the openness that our social life assures, we
believe our society – the society of the West – is able to understand the truth
and base our way of life and system of values on it.  This belief is false and
it is the basis of the great delusion. A turning point moment in this respect
happened 20 years ago when a military invasion of Iraq was undertaken on the
basis of lies.  The lies were obvious.  Public relations outfits were hired to
sell the policy to the public. Because the attack and mass killing happened,
people thought that the lies must be the truth otherwise the launching of the
attack and the unleashing of so much violence would be evil.  People believed
they were not evil and therefore they believed that lies were the truth. When
the ruling elites of the West, undertook the strategy of the ‘War on Terror’ it
marked a new stage in the deliberate and programmatic use of deception.  

Is this delusional tendency dangerous to the regimes?  Will it form a negative
feedback loop and lead to it all blowing up in their face? Can it possibly do
the regimes of the West any harm, for example, to attempt to deceive the public
about who carried out the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines in the
Baltic? (See Seymour Hersch’s How America took out the Nordstream Pipeline) Will
it be a problem that people who cluster around the US regime believe that the US
was not guilty of this action?  We are used to the social media and information
management strategies that call any questioning of the authenticity of the
West’s official media-approved version of reality ‘conspiracy theory’ and
construct other stories of an even more incredible character to associate with
these and thus degrade them.  Any information about any event within the
conspectus of government is subject to what is called ‘spin’.  However it is
because of the huge material resources that are implemented in support of
approved ‘information’ that it gains support and belief.  As I have said, one of
the biggest ‘information’ events from this point of view was the ‘spin’ campaign
around the attack or ‘war’ on Iraq in 2003 when few were persuaded of the
maintenance of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ by Iraq but, since the massive
movement of resources that the invasion involved, took place, people accepted
this story almost in hindsight even though no such weapons were discovered.  It
is almost as if the collateral (and perhaps central) objective of the whole
enterprise was to gain the submission, not just of the Iraqi population, but of
the populations of the countries that joined in with the invasion.  Can a ruling
group maintain its rule and continue to lie?  Surely information must be managed
in such away that the functionaries of the regime don’t become delusional.  But
isn’t this a danger? These delusional behaviours are characterised by the
increase in securitisation and the isolation of the ruling group in what can
appear to be a preparation for flight.  Their destination of choice resembles a
bunker, even if this terminal space looks luxurious, a tax haven or gated
securitised community. 

As our regime – the West – with its democracy coating monarchical presidential
structures – comes to an end, a part of the strategy to sustain it is
increasingly and deliberately to practice deception.  The very brief period that
the USA will have been the ‘leader’ of the West started to come to an end with
its defeat in Vietnam in 1975.  After that it vastly increased its destructive
potential – a major part in this was played by information technology (see Chip
War by Chris Miller ) and brought this to bear in First Gulf War in 1991. Its
domination of the battlefield was unquestioned but its military goals were
unclear.  It was engaging in a display of power as if for publicity or
propaganda purposes.  It could not, at this stage of the inauguration of the New
World Order, appear to be a conquering army even though it had overwhelming
force. It was rather an army of liberation. Its empire from the outset had to be
disguised as a freedom project. It could not easily adopt the model of the old
European imperialism its destiny was to replace. It needed to proclaim its
liberal credentials counterposed to the ‘evil empire’ of the Soviet Union. In
its replacement of the older European Empires, it had to appear to be
de-colonial or anti-colonial.  A delusion, or at least a deception, was built
into its basic project: the empire that brought freedom.

The adoption by the ‘West’ of the ‘war on terror’ strategy as a unifying foreign
policy platform really flowered in the second Gulf War.  The invasion of Iraq
saw a crystallisation of the imposition of power over the truth. This
demonstrated by the introduction of use of widespread torture.  This was not
intelligence-gathering. It was primarily an instrument of terror, an enforcer of
the ‘lie as truth’.  Many of the torture techniques were designed to destroy the
internal structures of resistance, to break the will and sensibility of the
‘tortured’, to gain their fundamental submission. This disintegration of the
resistant character was aimed at permeating the social sphere. If someone is
holding a gun to your head and telling you that the red colour you are looking
at is green, you may begin to see it as green.  Problems proliferate when the
person holding the gun starts to see the red colour as green. Torture became an
extreme form of salesmanship.

The celebrated quotation from Karl Rove is pertinent and summed up the post-
communist new rule. It is said that Rove was talking to a group of journalists
or academics who had asserted overly simple ideas about truth: “That’s not the
way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we
create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as
you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study
too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all
of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

The strategies that have characterised the recent decades of declining US power
saw a reversal of rational idealist decision-making processes. People argue for
a course of action, gain consent to it and then carried it out. This was
replaced by the creation of ‘facts on the ground’ a la Rove.  One remarkable
example of this is the Israeli government’s colonisation of occupied Palestinian
land.  In fact the degree to which the shaping rhetoric of Western foreign
policy has been determined by Israeli policy in the ‘war on terror’ period is
also remarkable. This of course will have been assiduously denied and consigned
to  the bin marked ‘conspiracy theories’.  This will have been to some extent
effected through the weaponisation of the accusation of anti-semitism. An
extraordinary strategic by-product of this has been the use of anti-semitism to
defeat the left in the Labour Party in the UK.  Or maybe it was not a by-product
but the singular way in which the neoliberal establishment could continue to
deepen its struggle against socialism. The declaration by the Israeli state,
after the withdrawal of its colonies and armed forces from within the perimeter
of the Gaza Strip in 2006, that it was no longer in occupation of the Gaza Strip
was followed by the announcement that Gaza was ‘hostile territory’.  This meant
that Israel completely controlled the space of Gaza through material flows, its
currency, surveillance, power over its borders, and military control of the air,
land and sea but denied occupation and designated the Gaza space as an enemy
state.  Do they really believe they are no in occupation? Because foreign policy
and domestic policy are contiguous, the implications of the ‘war on terror’ seep
into ‘internal security’. The UK government decided to further the
stigmatisation of immigrants through harassment calling its policy the creation
of a ‘hostile environment’.  The idea that a government should create a hostile
environment inside its own territory is a remarkable policy innovation. It
extends the work of the Thatcher government in defining aspects of trade union
and working class organisation as the ‘enemy within’. 

The processes of deception mean a greater closeness between the ‘intelligence
community’, the media and the academy.  These institutions in their
interrelatedness appear archaic in their submission to absolute power. (See
Tucker Carlson and John Pilger) They can seem, in their doctrinal conformity, to
belong to an earlier political epoch, an arcane priesthood, where a unified
established religion, christianity was created within the emerging nation-states
of the West and used as a combinatory ideology.  The reason why Israel acted as
a kind of model for this most recent period of policy development was because it
offered a telling and typical story of struggle against fundamentalist islam. 
This was presented at a transitional moment for the West. Having accomplished
the downfall of the Soviet regime and the apparent defeat of real existing
socialism a new ‘enemy’ needed to be found.  The defeat of the Soviets in
Afghanistan had been effected through the financing and arming of islamic
opposition, the warlords amongst whom the Taliban were the most prominent. The
dispersal of the foreign fighters and their return to their respective countries
offered the pretext to talk up the danger of islamism and this played into the
‘war on terror’ story. For this brief period of domination – before Ukraine was
enlisted as the frontline state in the West’s war against the rest of the world
– when fundamentalist islam was constructed as the main enemy and Middle East
oil was a key commodity – this synergy between Israel and the West was crucial.
It is not surprising that as the West turns its attention to more significant
real opponents, Russia and China, the Israeli state project is seen to suffer
ruptures and internal divisions.  Fissures consequently will occur between it
and its main supporter, the USA. Meanwhile with the brokerage of China, Iran and
Saudi Arabia begin a process of rapprochement.  And in the foreground is the
emergence of the new togetherness of China and Russia bringing together the
largest industrial base with the largest source of key raw materials, a powerful
combination.  This is especially significant because the receding ice due to
global warming has freed up the route to the East via the Arctic thus cutting
out the need for transport through Suez i.e. through the routes controlled by
the West. An unforeseen consequence of global warming. Although the heyday of
Israeli influence is now over we are still left with the legacy of the war
strategies they generated and of course Palestinians are in an even more
vulnerable position, faced by a vicious genocidal project which is no longer
disguising itself as a peace process.

You can’t measure delusions. There is no way of estimating how delusional a
given regime or connected series of political spaces might be.  Nor whether it
makes the political and intellectual elites and their cadre vulnerable. 
Certainly they have been loyally supported by the modern secularised version of
the Lords Spiritual, the media and the academy. How is it that the liberal
intelligentsia of the West have been such a push over?  Is liberalism such a
powerful and convincing ideology?  Have they been fooled into believing that
secularisation and democratisation have brought an end in their milieu to the
underlying function of established religion in offering support and
justification for the aspirations of the expansionist delerium of the
military-oriented leading section of the elites? They are the functionaries of
that religion. The liberal intelligentsia have been at the core of the
generation of delusion.  Journalists programmatically went along with the
stories about antisemitism in the Labour Party and failed as an institution to
investigate what was going on. They didn’t feel they even needed to appear to be
impartial so obvious was it that Corbyn was a usurper, a traitor, a coward, a
king of shreds and patches. The search for truth – or just simply the other side
of the story – was easily staunched.  In this instance and this may reveal a
general truth, it is clear that there is an underlying agenda.  I repeat what I
said at the beginning that any ruling group that holds sway over other social
groups uses deception as a means of gaining submission.  This is patriarchy. 
The group that holds power is a concentrated expression of the institutionalised
power of men over women.  Capitalism is a further elaboration and dispersal of
this structure.  Men’s power is only power over women, the prioritisation of
production (economic growth) over reproduction.  Reproduction is reduced to the
production of labour power. The capitalist state has to ensure that this is done
as cheaply as possible in order to enhance profitability.  However it cant
appear to be doing this.  This is where deception is so important. Of course if
men take women’s power it is in their interest that women are powerful so long
as this power is already becoming submissive.  This is the control of beauty.
The character of the state structures themselves are built to deceive.  They are
in themselves deceptive.

The modern capitalist state is a vehicle for patriarchal rule but hides,
disguises or ceremonialises and it appears to both display/ritualise and defuse
this core value structure. It enacts discourses that lead these values to be
internalised or introjected as natural.  This is a consequence of patriarchy’s
initial move which was to take control of symbolic power, of ritual, of the
symbolic order. Control of knowledge, secrecy, ‘information management’ are an
essential part of the domination of society by a group within it. I believe,
because of this, that the reform of state structures is necessary, that is, the
thorough extension of diverse forms of democracy, the prohibition of hereditary
power, the abolition of secrecy and the establishment of transparency in
government. 

So what follows is a series of essays on why deception is intrinsic to
patriarchy and capitalism. It should be treated with suspicion and I am sure it
will give rise to mild ridicule.  What underlies my argument is the perception
that the change of which we are feeling the tremors is a species change, a
change in the sexual organisation of our species which is an adaptation to
environmental change.  The depth and extent of the change is measurable against
the protracted and complex process that brought patriarchy into being.  It is
this deep and wide.  So the decline of the West is just an echo of this more
fundamental change.  Since the West is patriarchy taken to its ultimate degree
of development, its instability brought about by its predatory character, its
exhaustion of resources and its delusional mentalities we will see here the
paradigm begin to shift. It might not be a pretty sight.  Its drive is expressed
in modernity and its essence is militarist and genocidal.  As the greatest
contemporary thinker about genocide, Daniel Feierstein has recognised: Genocide
is endemic to modernity.  

Is deception an essential aspect of patriarchy?  Does this current development
of an increased intensity and capacity for deception that seems to have
escalated during this period of the system’s decline make apparent something
that is a basic characteristic? Deception and the consequent delusion that it
produces is deeply connected to the whole ideological carapace of patriarchy. 
It is germane to it.  Patriarchy could not have developed without an
accompanying system of knowledge control.  This is based on secrecy. This is the
use of the control of space. This is what secrecy means.  It relies on the
partition or barrier between one space and another. Have a look at The Art of
Deception: Training for a New Generation of Online Covert Operations by GCHQ.
Secrecy accompanies the appropriation of ritual and symbolic power.  This human
development, a change in our species organisation, characterised the strategies
patriarchal males deployed in order to ensure paternity and patrilineal
succession.  It is energised by the need to counter women’s power. In giving
birth, the central act of species life, gives women initial control over
reproduction. This has been systematically taken away from them. This is one of
the fundamental efforts of modern science but of course it is seen to be rooted
in the primordial ritual of patriarchy, the witch hunt.  Have a look at the
appendix where I have attached a spoof report on a men’s meeting 12,000 years
ago.

The evolutionary revolution that brought about the development of the modern
human species (homo sapiens sapiens) was based on the suppression and management
of alpha male individualistic behaviour traits – those associated with
sex-for-food exchanges. The work of coalitions of human females in creating the
primary social space of reproduction for the protracted vulnerability of
big-brained early-birthed creatures involved the containment and distribution of
sexual energy. Women controlled who had sex with whom. After approximately
180,000 years of species development conditions changed and the male ‘takeover’
took place – a complex process of long duration. The element of secrecy and the
question of deception arose out of men’s collective experience of wresting
control from women.  The development of animal husbandry, crop cultivation and
sedentism introduced new conditions making possible the domestication of women. 
The subjugation and oppression of women was carried out in different cultural
settings and environmental circumstances.  The germ of the use of deception by
patriarchy and capitalism is seen in how it became a part of masculinist culture
to accuse women of being deceitful. Men will have experienced the ritual power
of women in their control of sexual distribution, guarding the young women going
through their first menstruation.  The location of this rite of passage may well
have been in a menstrual hut from which men were excluded.  Certainly strategies
of seclusion and ritual were a part of this original human culture. How men
mimicked this sacred space and inverted its function is typical of the processes
of ‘take over’. Exerting their control over death and installing the artefacts
thereof in their men’s houses formed an integral part of the development of
hierarchical forms of organisation and the development of an appropriated and
guarded sacredness.  Of course the precise truth of what I’m saying is open to
question.   Instances of red ochre body paint used by female coalitions, of
menarchal huts, of sacred rituals guarding menstruation, of men’s huts, of
initial developments of hierarchy are a part of the ethnographic record. Some of
these ideas derive from my inexpert understanding of the precepts developed by
the Radical Anthropology Group. The variety of developments in different human
groups will always provide rich and contradictory evidence.

As human males came to take over social organisation and place production over
reproduction as the social priority, they enforced their rule by incorporating
features of the pre-existing cultural order.  They could not exercise their will
– based on the new priorities that they were moved to adopt – only by violence
and brute force.  They had to recognise the power of the kind of internalised
organic community that they saw reason to change.  Recognising how powerful the
unknown was over them, they saw and experienced how the power of women depended
on their knowledge of their sexual availability and the relationship between
this availability and reproduction.  They recognised the power of the protection
offered to young menarchal females by the coalitional strength and
‘co-ordination’ capacity of women which was integral to women’s control of the
distribution of access to sex.

The initial development of the species involved the collective coalitional
influence of women in the first movement of the species in creating society.
This was held together by the inherent structures that arose in the course of
reproduction and child-rearing. This organisation was organic. This is not to
say that these functions were the province of women alone.  On the contrary, the
society was centred on the assurance of the continuation of the community
through the defence and protection of the young.  The young were not at this
point looked upon as a source of human labour capable of being exploited. 

Rule cannot be upheld over a long time by violence.  Control is exerted by
threat of violence, the sanctification of violence, but mechanical force is
ineffective without the control of symbolic power and symbolic power is gained
through deception unless it is organic.  Symbolic power is the knowledge of the
code, the ability to elaborate what things mean.  In order to disclose what
things mean it is presupposed that there is knowledge that is withheld and then
released under circumstances of submission.

A major feature of the mimetic incorporation of women’s culture – or the
appropriation and masculinisation of human culture – was how men inverted what
they experienced as the power of women at the level of symbolic organisation.
This inversion of human culture happens at the level of ritual and of poetry and
of mythic narrative. Masculinist culture is constantly referring to the original
human culture. Deception as a major component of patriarchy arose in the need to
hide the sources of their power as successfully as the sources of women’s power
had, in their experience, been hidden from them.  The development of these
structures (the sanctification of violence through the exercise of ritual power)
of patriarchal society brought forms of rule that depended on external forms of
control as well as internalised structures of belief, making the exercise of
power appear to be a matter of natural force.

All systems of rule, not to say all forms of social organisation, control
populations through deception.  If the rule of one section of society is imposed
on another – the first example of this was men’s oppression of women – then
control of what the population believe to be the case is essential.  What does
this control amount to? What are the methods and technologies involved?  Of
course it may be true that there are or have been societies that haven’t needed
a state because no group, as a group, or section programmatically exerts control
over any other group.  If control is exerted then this control is evident in the
submission of the oppressed group.  The submission may seem to the oppressed
group to be completely internally motivated.  They even might believe themselves
to be an integral part of the oppressor group and see their interests as the
same.  They may have been convinced that they gain protection from the oppressor
group and therefore submit.  Their submission may be habitual and be
interiorised through the experiences that form and shape their behaviour and
attitudes.  How much easier it is for the oppressor if the oppressed are not
aware of their oppression. 

One of the functional aspects of hierarchies is that the people inhabiting the
different hierarchised spaces have the power to permit access at different
levels.  This means that people are admitted to spaces from which they have
previously been excluded or prohibited and thus they gain access to knowledge
and perspectives, even secrets, that they were previously ‘not privy’ to.  So if
the keeping of secrets is a function of the ordering of the hierarchy and
hierarchies are themselves a primary technology of oppression of one group by
another then deception is an intrinsic part of all systems of rule.  Only when a
society is held together by an organic internalised non-exclusive process of
inherent co-ordination, maybe an internalised rhythm or harmony – can a society
dispense with secrecy and deception. The movement towards the restructuring of
the state through processes of organic democracy is not fanciful.  People all
the time have strong social experiences of love and equality.

The idea that the rulers of a given society ‘know’ things that the population
cannot or should not know is contrary to the thorough operation of democracy. 
What we witness in the modern capitalist state form is that the hierarchy is
shielded and protected by democratic elements. These elements are structured,
like concessions permitting the oppressed group to participate in its own
oppression and are ways of gaining the population’s consent to the rule of
power. In the current instance the appearance that all the participants in a
given society are equal is significant insofar as this equality hides the
inequality that resides underneath or behind it. I repeat, the modern capitalist
state form is itself deceptive.  It is based on the separation of the state from
civil society. The outer casework appears to grant access but the inner
structures are impenetrable and are made inaccessible by the apparent
accessibility of the outer casework.  This means that these democratic elements
are oppressively deceptive but also offer footholds for the completion of the
democratic process. This access can only become an effective lever of change
when society has assembled as a democratic force.

Does this make change impossible?  Everything that is made by human beings can
be unmade and made anew. Change of the sort that will break our submission to
patriarchy must involve the critical mass of the population.  Millions and
millions of people will participate. It must involve a qualitatively different
democracy than the concessionary representative sort. Is there a point during
this radical participatory democratic process that decisively separates the
democratic elements that are a part of the defensive oppressive deceptive
structure of the state, the concessionary representative sort, from those that
move towards the proliferation of democratic forms, transparent government and
the abolition of secrecy? It is public democratic power over the material
resources of society that is decisive.  Power over finance and the ability to
redistribute wealth has to be accompanied by the abolition of state secrecy. 
The structure and institutions of the state have to be thoroughly democratised.
If these two measures are not carried out in tandem with each other no movement
forward of society can take place.  The forms of the modern capitalist state are
operationally incapable of resource redistribution.  Any redistribution of this
sort will become liable to corruption and exploitation by groups acting in their
own interests. The basic frame of the modern capitalist state will remain in
place and this will continue to be a deceptive structure which, through its
array of institutions, obscures and disguises its real functions.  

The state form of our regime is built to ensure profitability by reducing the
cost of producing and reproducing labour power.  The modern capitalist state
institutionalises the division between politics and economics, giving the
appearance of political equality in order to maintain economic inequality.

Capitalism is a direct adaptation of patriarchy and this can be seen in the
transition from the feudal state to the modern capitalist state.  This
transition contains continuities and discontinuities. I have described elsewhere
how capitalism is a dispersal and interiorisation of patriarchy.  Its
development is founded on the continued oppression of women and the extension of
the dominance of production over reproduction. According to Roswitha Scholz
‘Value is male’ and capitalism is ‘patriarchal commodity production’.  If the
intrinsic tendency of patriarchy – in its insistent pursuit of the domination of
production over reproduction – is to find a way of making into commodities all
elements in the social space then knowledge too is bound to be subject to this
process – commodification.  A sign of this will be the reduction and
quantification of knowledge to information, the rendering of knowledge into data

The change in our species, the reorganisation of humanity by patriarchy – a
massive complex process – triggered by multiple factors including population
growth and environmental change is now, in our own epoch, disentangling itself. 
We are having to change as a species in our organisational life and we are
having to make an adaptation to similar factors but at a different stage of
development and interrelatedness.  Of course it is not accurate to describe the
profound underlying species crisis which is having such a profound impact on our
political structures as a reversal though this is how it appears.  Our systems
are deeply structured on deceptive and delusional processes. An institutional
inability to face the truth and operate in accord with it is widespread. 

Is this our system really under stress?  Where does the stress come from? Why
are there moves to dispense with the democratic veneer in this period?  Why are
there tendencies towards autocracy? In the period when the West – because it was
the initiator of the capitalist industrial development and had a kind of first
mover advantage – was for a historic period able to moderate its need to keep
‘wage costs’ down in the ‘metropolitan’/imperialist centre, it could protect
itself through the super profits from imperialist expansion.  This capacity no
longer exists. As well as the over-exploitation of the earth’s natural resources
it has reached the limits of this competitive advantage and is in a period of
growing impoverishment.  The reason why the UK is the only advanced economy with
a minus growth rate is because this domain above all others has now exhausted
the advantages it accrued from empire.  Of course there is residual wealth.  Of
course there was a hope to return to the days of this competitive advantage in a
UK free from the restraints of the EU, taking full advantage of a renewed
deregulation of the financial industry.  This however has been forestalled by
the pandemic.  The long term decline proceeds.  It is in the UK that all the
features of the West’s decline can be seen writ large. 

The socialist or left opposition restricts itself to making what are effectively
economic demands.  The suppression of political thinking is general. There is no
doubt in my mind that unless there is a programmatic movement to reform and
restructure the state institutions by creating massive democratic pressure to do
so then problems of redistribution will not and cannot be solved. 

My basic point remains: if a political system depends for its
continuance/existence on deception – in other words, that a major part of its
ability to apply the instruments of government depends on making people believe
that they are not being governed and that the guiding parametres in which they
operate are simply natural forces – then as that system moves into its terminal
crisis the deception will become delusional.

It could be that the successful demand for the abolition of state secrecy and
for transparency in government may create the first cracks in the current
order.  Political demands of this sort are sparse.  Economic demands, even if
successful, are bound to reproduce current oppression.

Appendix 1:

Here is a report of a meeting that was held 12,000 years ago at a critical
moment of the development of our species.  As we know from our studies of
biology even at an elementary level the primary feature of a species is the
sexual relations that determine its reproduction:

The men were faced with what appeared to be a problem of awesome proportions. 
They had reached a point where they understood that the old system of hunting
and gathering had started to come to an end.  The changing conditions had led to
the herds being further and further away. Also they were victims of their own
success.  Human populations had grown substantially and certain species that
they hunted were no longer plentiful.  Also they had developed new ways of
controlling the herds of animals that provided food and of cultivating the
vegetable food sources that they depended on.  The old pattern of life where the
monthly movement of hunting and feasting was more difficult to sustain.  The men
were faced with resistance from groups of women to the new systems they wanted –
and felt they needed – to implement.  They had to assert their power over women
as a group.  They had to make the men’s word and the men’s priorities dominant. 
They traditionally had their own space, their own hut where women were
forbidden.  Now they gathered there to talk about what to do.  They knew some of
their number were true visionaries and leaders and would be coming up with some
dazzling ideas about what must be done.  It felt to them that they had physical
power; they were stronger than the women and when they worked together there was
no force that could resist them.  However they still felt the women were
powerful.  The women still determined who should have sex with who.  They had
amazing ceremonies when they initiated the girls who were becoming women. 
Furthermore, the men couldn’t tell when the women were sexually available.  The
women had the power to tell them.  It was true that they controlled the flow of
blood from the animals that they killed on the hunt but the women controlled the
secret flow of blood that designated a woman as ready for sex.  One man had said
that just as he owned his goat herd and just as his spear and his weapon were
his when he was hunting he should also own his chosen woman.  Unfortunately
everybody found this idea so comical that they couldn’t stop laughing,
especially the women.  Even the idea that the tools and weapons that he used
were a part of him made people laugh, especially when they started looking for
his tools in various parts of his body.  The men when they started talking came
to the conclusion that the women were keeping secrets from them.  They began to
understand, or so they thought that the women’s power was their ability to
deceive them.  Women are deceitful, one of them proclaimed.  This struck a
chord.  The women had their secrets but with the men nothing was secret.  For
example when they were aroused sexually it showed and it was obvious that their
penises had power over them or rather women had power over them through their
penises.  In fact, some of them said, the women wanted to take their penises
away.  This brought little eddies of cautious laughter amongst the group of
men.  One of the visionary leaders exclaimed suddenly that they needed secrets
and if they didn’t have any then they would have to create them.  They would
create secrets by doing what they were doing now, that is by keeping their talk
between themselves.  He suggested that they take an oath of secrecy, a secret
oath that they would not tell anyone what they had talked about no matter what
it was.  They would even keep secret the fact that they didn’t have any secret
to keep!  This was such a brilliant idea that strong intakes of breath could be
heard and murmurings of approval.  Just as when they fought their battles over
territory with other groups of men they would not let it be known how an attack
would take place, the same was true of the women.  Somebody protested that the
women were not their enemy and quite a lot of the men groaned with impatience. 
Of course not but also women were like enemies if they didn’t do what the men
required them to do.  Another quietly spoken but influential man told the group
that he believed that as well as having secrets they need to make displays of
power, ritual celebrations of their power and make these the dominant events and
make them time with the seasons, when the crops were gathered or when the herds
gave birth to their young.  Some of the men muttered about the idea that this
was women’s stuff.  But most of the men began to see, as the conversation
continued, that they needed to take over the rituals that the women organised. 
None of this was really new and all the ideas and suggestions were things that
they had talked about endlessly but the time had come for action.  They knew
that similar processes were happening in other neighbouring communities. Then
they started talking about stories and how they should take over the stories
from the women or only allow them to be told in certain circumstances.  They
needed to keep the basic elements of the stories the same but turn them inside
out.  Yes they needed to invert them.  Like this, some clown shouted, taking his
garment off and turning it inside out. It’s the same garment! They need to keep
the women in the stories and show how powerful they could be but seek different
outcomes.  One of the older men said that they wondered whether they would come
unstuck when they tried to use deception on the women.  They haven’t come
unstuck, another blurted.  No, because they don’t even realise they are being
deceitful, another opined.  But what happens if we start to believe our own
deceit, said the first.  The truth is what we say it is, said the visionary
leader and everybody cheered but this was partly because it was getting late and
the men were getting tired and restless.  They wanted to have a drink and do
some dancing.

Posted on April 1, 2023April 1, 2023


EXCLUSION PROCESSES

Our society – UK late March 2023 – is going through a process of organised
exclusion.  The rise of anti-immigrant sentiment and the deliberate policy
development that make the issue of migrants prominent and which consigns them to
scapegoats is the primary indication of this trend which has been most
virulently a part of the UK social landscape since 2010 with the formation of
the Tory-Lib Dem coalition government. There are good books like Maya
Goodfellow’s HOSTILE ENVIRONMENT (1) and Nadine El-Enany’s (B)ORDERING BRITAIN
(2) which talk specifically about this manifestation.  I want to think through
what are the underlying causes and movements. 

Exclusion refers to a number of interlinked processes happening in different
sectors of society.  There are events and behaviours in homes, streets, leisure
spaces, retail spaces and workplaces.  There are stories told and interactions
staged in the media.  And there are state activities – the formulation and
execution of policies – that construct and reconstruct institutions along with
the attitudes, values and behaviours they make habitual. 

The movement towards fascism is a widely expressed concern.  The football
commentator Gary Lineker hit a nerve recently when he made a comparison between
the language used by a current UK government minister and that used by advocates
of the National Socialist movement in Germany in the 1930s (3).  Exclusion
processes are widespread and multidimensional. As a consequence of recognising
the characteristics of these processes I am arguing for a qualitative extension
of democracy and reform of state structures.  This should be aimed at removing
institutions which embody inherited forms of power and privilege, including the
monarchy.  It should entail an abolition of secrecy and the establishment of
open, transparent government.  There should be an increase in local forms of
participatory and direct democracy.  Any redistribution and democratic
allocation of public resources to deal with the gross inequalities and
inefficiencies of our society must be accompanied by a qualitative increase in
democracy otherwise the intrinsic corruption of the current governmental
structures will contaminate and divert these processes. The popular
extra-parliamentary movement is focused too narrowly on economic demands (4)  

Societies form themselves through processes of inclusion and exclusion.  They
thus renew and reinvigorate themselves, holding people together, giving people
the means to recognise each other and enhance their sense of belonging.  For
people to be included, other people are excluded who may be considered to be
unlike them.  There is no accurate and unarguable way of describing the
processes in the different sectors nor the interaction between them.  Also it is
extremely difficult to be sure how exclusionary processes increase and get
stronger or decrease and get weaker. These tendencies could be caused by how a
society is thriving, how productive of life’s necessities it is, of how wealth
is created and how it is distributed. If exclusionary movements are getting
stronger and more widespread it could be connected to decreasing productivity
and increasing wealth inequality.  From an economic point of view, if sections
of the population are disposable or surplus to the requirements of the
production and distribution processes then it makes sense that exclusionary
processes will become more dominant. But many other specific circumstantial
factors are in play, especially the overall historical context.  I am arguing
for a conscious, public, movement of inclusion.  Our society should be grounded
in love and care.  At the moment these fundamental strategies are practiced in
smaller family and community circles.  These inclusionary strategies need to be
dominant in our public life and spaces.

Ways of dividing people against each other are found in order for low-cost
effective governance to be sustained. These may be legislative, executive or
policy instruments. For these to be effective they must echo and validate
everyday prejudices that arise spontaneously from the reduced circumstances in
which people live.  This interaction is fertile and highly dynamic.  If people
are suffering, finding it difficult to imagine the future, concerned about their
children or their elders, if resources are being withdrawn or depleted, if the
environment is deteriorating then finding a cause for this and scapegoating
other sections of the population gives those people a way of enacting their
grievances.  This is what is happening in the UK and to a more limited extent in
the West today.

The characteristics of human social organisation derive from the physiological
and psychological peculiarities of our species.  The formation of social groups
is consequent on our inability to survive as individuals.  The long period of
vulnerability of human infants is a major determinant of our social structures. 
Modern human beings (homo sapiens sapiens) are ‘born early’ and face complex
issues in assuming adulthood and relative autonomy. (5) The adult human being,
as well as the human infant, is dependent in a different but related way.  The
question of exclusion from the human group is a matter of life and death. The
circumstances of human infants are a clear illustration of this.  The issues
that arise are largely dealt with in the immediate family or kindred community.
In the course of human development populations have grown and therefore the
relationship of larger groups to smaller groups has changed. However some of the
structuring principles have remained constant. There is a synergy between
original processes of group formation in smaller groups and the strategies of
government and rule for larger populations. It is important to recognise the
specific qualities of these differing spaces.  There is a tendency in
patriarchal society to collapse social spaces into the space of the family. 

For the human infant the issue of inclusion in feeding and food-sharing is
existential. These basic situations in which human beings find themselves have a
major impact on social formation. For a human being not to be fed or not to have
access to food raises simultaneously both the problem of nourishment and of
symbolic exclusion.  When hunger occurs and when the prospect of food is
signalled separate parts of our brains and neurological circuits are activated. 
One part of our organism is responding to the need for nutrition due to
homeostatic or energetic impulses, and another part is responding to the
prospect of satisfaction that activates oxytocin, dopamine, endorphins,
serotonin and adrenalin. (6) For the young human infant feeding, which in most
instances is access to the breast, is a matter of being fed and of being loved. 
The ‘doubleness’ of this process may be more pronounced in the human animal than
in other species because of ‘early’ birth and prolonged period of
socialisation.  Human beings encounter predicaments and difficulties that are
characterised by attachment-separation. (7) We find it difficult to comprehend
the nature of our individuality, dependence, interdependence and independence. 
All the issues, tensions and difficulties attendant on these problems have
impacts on the way we make societies.  Moreover, these ‘human’ characteristics
are the levers used by ruling organisations as they hold together the
populations that they intend to govern. 

The ‘doubleness’ of the feeding process means that the human being uses a
different optic (set of assessment and evaluation functions) to process its own
actions to that which it uses to process the actions of others. (8) In the
former instance the impulse is determined by homeostasis and in the latter by
engagement in symbolic processes. This division is to do with the way the human
brain developed as it became larger in the course of evolution.  The parts of
the brain that respond to immediate sensory needs and appetites evolved earlier
than those which deal with processes of recognition, engagement with ‘the other’
and symbolic order. 

Individuals suffer damage caused by imbalances in the relationship between
feeding and loving.  This is especially the case for those who experience forms
of exclusion. Dependences and addictions arise when substances can be found
which interact with the chemical responses associated with feeding and loving,
solving the pain of separation and giving a temporary fix. Imbalances are easier
to spot at an individual level than when these re-channellings of appetites and
desires are socially regulated and organised. Commodity production in the period
of late capitalism is charged with addictive practices designed to give
consumers a sense of belonging (9). This happens through the media and
marketing. In the last 50 years production and consumption practices have become
imbued with the signalling and imaging that involve the exploitation of these
characteristics. 

All of us have in us a vulnerability to exclusion built into our physiology and
psychology.  It is a part of our experiences of being infants.  We can see that
children have an extreme sense of justice and fairness that is built up as a
countervailing capacity to these experiences.  The only partially hidden
hierarchies of capitalism are constructed from these processes.  The commodity
form constructs demand as a kind of pain of ‘not having’ to which it
fetishistically provides the solution.  Everybody is excluded and included
because everybody has more or less spending power.  The system so easily plays
on, provokes and appeases childhood anxieties.  The lacerations of outraged,
demoted, formerly privileged sectors of the population animated by envy and fear
of refugees is like sibling rivalry.  They perceive action in favour of the
well-being of refugees as preferential treatment. Racism is immediately evoked
and permeates these situations.

It is possible to see how these features of modern society have historical
roots. At a certain point in the development of the human species a critical
number, or the majority, of human groups developed forms of social organisation
that depended on one part of the group exercising dominance over the other.  Up
to that point – although of course all human groups vary – human groups
generally lived and reproduced themselves without externalised forms of
control.  This would be a loose description of what Murray Bookchin calls
‘organic’ society. (10) What is envisaged is that life was regulated by an
interiorised or interior apprehension of necessity. The human group was held
together by the process of reproduction.  It was centred on the rhythmic
connection of women’s collective bodies and the intersubjectivity originating in
the adult-child relationship.  (11) The process of transformation of human
society to one in which male dominance was practiced happened as populations
grew and the accumulation of knowledge of plant life and animal life became the
basis for a solution to the resource scarcity that population growth posed. 
This resource scarcity was exacerbated by environmental changes at the end of
the Last Glacial Period at the start of the Holocene epoch (approximately 11,650
years before the present). The other co-ordinate factor was the competition
between human groups for resources.  All human groups vary and different
thinkers have put different emphases on how uniform and complete was, what is
generally referred to as, the neolithic revolution. 

The advent of successful societies organised by male dominance and the spread of
this new kind of society to the point where it dominated the species is the
movement that human beings are now in a position to move beyond.  We are faced
with environmental change.  In this instance it is anthropogenic but this does
not affect the intensity of the change. The change in our species must involve a
change in the relationship between sexes with all the changes in gender roles
that this entails. It involves changes in how we produce and how we reproduce.
The development of human production, of the dominance of reproduction by
production, has reached a point of crisis.  The key resources of the earth for
the current production system have been exhausted and the impact of human
activity on our environment means that this production system is not
sustainable.  As these resources become scarcer war and competitive production
are employed in their allocation and this means that these resources are being
even more severely depleted.  The problem is complex with massive destructive
negative feedback elements. The challenge is to discover organisational forms of
society that can dismantle the practices and mentalities that have become
commonplace.  

Complete understanding of the long -term story of the human species and its
development may not be necessary to continue the combined processes of
dismantling the old and generating the new.  The knowledge, wisdom and practices
to do this already exist. The major problem is the defence of the old system by
organised violence, violent organisation. The foundations of male dominance lie
in the control of space through violence.  This was complemented by the
justification of violence through the appropriation of symbolic power.  The
brutality and violence of this original human oppression had to be sanctified
for it to be organisationally effective. The understanding of the double nature
of power is a commonplace. It is in the practices and figures that arise in the
development of the combination of brutality and sanctity that the processes of
inclusion and exclusion become more visible.  The marking off and separation of
territories are an integral part of the development of crop cultivation and
animal husbandry, major production developments that accompanied the
establishment of patriarchy. The definition, delineation and prohibition of
spaces and access for specified people for specified (or sanctified) purposes is
the architectural technology that enabled this revolution to take place.  The
configuration of sacred spaces according to the cosmos was a core part of this. 
The position of the hierarch and the warrior leader in ceremonial spaces meant
that power was held through display and processional events. (12) The hierarch’s
power depended on this ‘management’ of space (this reaches its apotheosis in the
relationship between private property and its sanctification through individual
freedom ie capitalism) and it is inextricably linked to the appropriation of
symbolic power based on secrecy and deception. Control of the processes of
exclusion and inclusion by the dominant group is essential to government
although the oscillation between these interconnected activities of inclusion
and exclusion cannot be completely controlled.  Because of this volatility it is
likely that as the capitalist (patriarchal commodity production) order breaks
up, the defensive action will involve the proliferation of processes of
exclusion.  This is why I am arguing for increases in participation and
inclusion, the abolition of state secrecy, open participatory democratic public
administration.

These exclusion processes are extremely fissile.  They are based on fear and
confusion because of their violent and arbitrary nature and this makes them
mimetically contagious.  It is very difficult to be accurate about how these
processes reproduce themselves.  Fear communicates itself immediately through
pheromones. It is rooted in homeostatic impulses.  It is mimetically instant. 
In a crowd it will fragment the crowd into individuals and it will endanger any
coherence as a group.  It is not surprising that these herd responses would have
been recognised and practiced in the course of hunting and animal husbandry. 
This was the beginning of their instrumentalisation in social organisation.

The weight and gravity of these movements are genocidal. In Daniel Feierstein’s
book about Genocide (Genocide as Social Practice) he asserts that genocide is
endemic to modernity (13).  I am insisting that the key to modernism is the
dominance of production over reproduction. His work points out that genocide is
a process that occurs in stages. The second to last stage is mass killing.  The
last is symbolic re-enactment. The first stage is stigmatisation of the
‘excluded’ or ‘victim’ group.  The genocidal process is a means of social
organisation where the holding together of the identity of a human group depends
on the effacement of the identity of another human group.  The oppressor group
is energised by the stigmatisation, isolation, exclusion and eventual effacement
of the ‘victim’ group. I have described how these forms of dominance are endemic
to patriarchy.  It is no surprise that a heightened movement and intensity of
these exclusionary processes will be accompanied by changes in the hierarchical
formation which is at the core of patriarchy.  The main impact is a regression
to the originating military uniformities and centralisation of command that
characterise its development.  This intensification of hierarchy often involves
the adulation of a saviour leader. There is a demagogic merging of the warrior
leader with that of the high priest. It features a top-down structuring of the
constitutional space and an almost simultaneous emergence of a bottom-up,
apparently spontaneous, grass roots movement that violently enforces control and
possession of territory. 

The social processes of inclusion and exclusion are embodied in taboos and
totemism. The definition of, and agreement on, what is sacred does not appear to
be a matter of conscious choice.  The human need to belong to a group is
fulfilled and is played out in making manifest what bonds the group. The
necessity of loyalty and the stigma of treason is a matter of life and death. 
To be disloyal is to be consigned to a non-space.  The space of non-existence,
where nationality is taken away, where you cannot be recognised, where you are
illegal or non-human, accompanies the genocidal process.  The creation of this
space in fascist and/or genocidal regimes is manifested in the concentration
camp, the space into which people disappear. Rule is through fear of being like
those who have been ‘othered’ and excluded.  These processes of exclusion are
like a contagion and they happen at both the micro and macro level.  Their
escalation may not be exceptional and it may be that they are normal or a
heightened state of an unchanged system.  However there is a feeling that once
they start it is difficult to stop. 

This tendency for the ‘othering’ or ‘exclusion’ to be like a contagion is made
evident by the way the victim group can be expanded or exchanged.  The process
‘leaps’ from one group to another.  The connection that underlies this ‘leaping’
is associational.  The likeness of one group to another group is asserted at the
expense of accuracy.  In fact underlying connection is preferred to truth. 
Migrants become criminals and become terrorists and become rapists and become
the homeless and become usurpers and become beggars and become communists and
become radicals and become subversives and become extremists and people who do
not uphold ‘our’ way of life.

The intensification of the exclusion process presents a new state of affairs
that is like a heightened normality.  It enforces an ‘identitarian’ coherence
that previously was held through consensus.  At the same time attention is drawn
to something irrational under the surface rationality of capitalism.  This in
turn can serve to remind us of how capitalism is both an extension and a kind of
disguise of patriarchy.  Widespread almost voluntary ordering that is achieved
by cultivating money as the measurement of worth for all things and people,
enabled the ruling elites to dispense with the more awkward and objectionable
subjections of monarchy and feudalism. However the less visible hierarchy of
capitalism lived out much more adaptably in the minutiae of peoples’ daily lives
requires further affirmations either natural or divine when its excesses become
ostentatiously distended.  This process of apparent stabilising and congealing
shakes the covers from the core assumed inequalities disguised in normal times
by the veil of freedom and democracy.  This is what makes the struggle for a
qualitative increase in democracy so vital.

The contagious quality of the exclusion process is activated by simultaneous
movements from the bottom up and from the top down.  The increase in the
exclusion process – which can also be described as as a proliferation of
exclusion processes – activates the hierarchy and changes its dynamic shape. 
The concentration or centralisation of power at the top is dynamised by a
corresponding intensification of energies at the bottom.  It appears like a
reactionary regression and figures appear from what seems like a preceding era. 
Comparisons are justifiably drawn with feudalism and autocratic monarchic forms
of organisation.  It is as if the hierarchy reveals itself in a more naked form
and its core energies become exposed.  In governmental terms the extension of
executive power is accompanied by a throwing off of democratic and judicial
procedural restraints.  The balance in the cultural emphasis moves away from the
rational towards the emotional and instinctive.  It is at once the assumption
and creation of an enforced unity of feeling and knowing.  

These processes of exclusion connected as they are to genocide and war – after
all the most vivid example of hierarchy is displayed by military structure where
the commander hands out commands from a hill overlooking the battle or nowadays
from an office or living room far away from the actual bloody violence suffered
by the working soldiers – have had catastrophic outcomes leading to suicidal
bunkers or humiliating military defeat.  The problem with autocracy has proved
to be the question of succession.  The discredited ghost of divine kingship
appears in the apparently unavoidable succession of the offspring of the
dictator and thus the nasty primogeniture of feudalism haunts the
power-brokerage of the modern capitalist state.  However the question remains as
to whether the slide into government by the fear production associated with the
exclusion process durably alters the constitution of the modern capitalist
state.  In most instances it seems as if the disguising garment of democracy and
rule of law and apparently acceptable justice is more or less easily resumed
after the nightmare journey has reached its murderous and suicidal end.  However
every historical circumstance is unprecedented. 

In the last century social organisation in the West (and maybe beyond) has
depended more and more on scapegoating and stigmatising an excluded group. 
These organisational instruments were developed alongside capitalism and its
internationalisation. Western capitalist imperialism is based on the system of
slavery and racism.  But in the period since the mid-1970s the use of
psychological stimulation and control in marketing and in politics has become
more sophisticated.  A common reference for this tendency is the work written by
Freud’s grandson Edward Bernays, PROPAGANDA (14).

The features of these movements can be seen in the license given by the Brexit
referendum, the processes in the Labour Party which have carried out the
expulsion of members on the basis of anti-semitism (a kind of coded accusation
for socialist, left and pro-Palestinian views), the constitutional executive
powers used by Macron to legislate the increase in the pension age in France,
the attempts by the Israeli coalition government led by Netanyahu to suppress
the power of the judiciary, the proroguing of the UK Parliament by Boris
Johnson, the use of executive orders by Donald Trump, the interaction between
sectarian constitution in post-invasion Iraq and the tearing apart of society
there by armed sectarian-based groups and, of course the increasing
stigmatisation of refugees in the UK, the USA and Europe.

The regimes of the West are in a crisis of credibility and legitimacy.  The
modern capitalist state, aka liberal democracy, is an adaptation of the feudal
state just as capitalism is of patriarchy.  The evolution of the binary
political structures of this social formation mirrors the functions of the
warrior leader and the high priest of the original structures of patriarchy.
(15) These latter manifested themselves in the extension of the military
aristocracy and the religious aristocracy that ceremonially and practically
enforced and sanctified the power of the monarchic king. (16) These vestigial
forms still underlie the structure of the modern capitalist state like a deep
defensive foundation.  It is this ‘double’ social form which is in crisis.  The
idea of power as that which is hidden and the idea of knowledge as that which is
secret are increasingly seen to be both dangerous and redundant. The impact on
the political ‘parade’ of the exclusion processes is that the democratic front
is breaking up.  The array of popular options is no longer the binary
establishment/opposition polarity.  There is a division in the ruling elites
revealed in the ‘triple’ character of this array.  There is a right-wing
‘identitarian’ exclusionary component and a neo-liberal centre-right component
and a ‘left’ socialistic component.  This last is more structurally embodied in
France.  Here in the UK there is no political structure that embodies this
option.  Every effort has been made by the establishment regime to tame, purge
and bring to heel the Labour Party in order that it should adopt the space of
the neoliberal centre.  At the moment the ‘left’ space is defined by demands for
economic redistribution and is a popular social movement at the core of which is
trade union organisation.  This component will clarify its political project and
articulate a political response to the crisis. I am arguing that it should
advocate deep political democratic structural reform.  It should be radically
inclusive.

References:

 1.  Goodfellow, Maya. (2019) Hostile Environment Verso Books
 2.  El-Enany, Nadine. (2020) (B)ordering Britain Manchester University Press
 3.  https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/what-did-gary-lineker-say-bbc-b2303443.html
 4.  As well as the Trade Unions in struggle for better pay and conditions there
     are ENOUGH IS ENOUGH https://wesayenough.co.uk/ THE PEOPLES ASSEMBLY
     AGAINST AUSTERITY https://thepeoplesassembly.org.uk/ alongside many other
     campaign initiatives. As well as organisations emphasising economic demands
     there are PEACE & JUSTICE PROJECT https://thecorbynproject.com/  STAND UP
     TO RACISM https://standuptoracism.org.uk/ STOP THE WAR
     https://www.stopwar.org.uk/ 
 5.  Dinnerstein, D. (1976). The mermaid and the minotaur: Sexual arrangements
     and human malaise. Harper & Row.
 6.  Solms, Martin (2022) The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of
     Consciousness Profile, Panksepp,Jaak (2012) The Archaeology of Mind:
     Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotion: Neuroevolutionary Origins of
     Human Emotions 
 7.  Mate, Gabor, (2019) When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress
     Vermilion, London
 8.  Mausfeld, Rainer (2015) Why do the Lambs Remain Silent online:
     https://cognitive-liberty.online/prof-rainer-mausfeld-why-do-the-lambs-remain-silent/
 9.  Jappe, Anselm (2017) La Societe Autophage: Capitalisme, démesure et
     autodestruction La Découverte
 10. (10) Bookchin, Murray (1982) The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and
     Dissolution of Hierarchy Cheshire Books
 11. (11) Knight, Chris (1995) Blood Relations – Menstruation and the Origins of
     Culture Yale University Press
 12. (12) Ocalan, Abdullah (2015)  Manifesto for a Democratic Civilization:
     Volume I – Civilization: The Age of Masked Gods and Disguised Kings
     Capitalism, Volume II The Age of Unmasked Gods and Naked Kings. Manifesto
     for a Democratic Civilization.  New Compass Press
 13. (13) Feierstein, Daniel (2014) Genocide as Social Practice: Reorganizing
     Society under the Nazis and Argentina’s Military Juntas Rutgers University
     Press
 14. (14)  Bernays, Edward (Republished 2004) Propaganda IG Publishing, Public
     Relations Snowball
 15. (15) Piketty, Thomas. (2020) Capital and Ideology Harvard University Press
 16. (16) Kantorowitcz, Ernst (1957 republished 2016)  The King’s Two Bodies – a
     Study in Medieval Political Theology Princeton Classics

Posted on January 11, 2023April 1, 2023


POLITICS IS TOO IMPORTANT TO BE LEFT TO POLITICIANS

We are free to do absolutely to do anything except make a society that we want
to live in.  To make our society anew we must reform the state and make it
democratic.  This is not just a moral question but a practical question. It can
only be done with the participation of millions of people.  We have to change
the vehicle and not just the driver.  There must be many kinds of democracy not
just the ‘representative/parliamentary’ kind.  We must abolish parts of the
state that depend on hereditary privilege.  We must create transparency and real
freedom of information.  All activities carried out in the name of the people
should be open to criticism by the people.  At the moment our rights are
restricted to voting for a parliamentary representative, local government and
participating in juries in the justice system.  I’m not proposing chaos.  But we
need activity and participation.  Otherwise the current elites will ever more
tightly control the political processes and these elites are patriarchal and
institutionally racist.  And just plain greedy. They assume power through a kind
of unquestionable entitlement and will run the country like a colonial
plantation given half a chance. They will use every means available to them to
divide people up and appeal to sectional interests.  As the economic
mal-functioning of our society reaches more critical levels the ruling elites
will attempt to impose more stringent restraints on the cost of reproducing
labour.  This involves public service cuts and suppression of wages.  The myth
is that this will increase investment because of increases in productivity. 
Failure to invest is so clear for all to see. We need a state that will take
control of investment and this involves controlling the banks and the financial
institutions.  This must be done through democratic processes so self-seeking
entities cannot take over this process.  Our society is overflowing with the
skills and understanding to make this possible.  It is just a question of
linking up this intelligence with popular democratic institutions.  This is best
done by devolving this work.  In other words, localising decision-making through
consultative bodies.  There are good examples of how this can go wrong but
generally the lessons of history tell us that over-centralisation and
competition between interest groups at a national level are the problem.

The current UK government are setting out to beat the working people into
submission.  They are intensifying the divisions between rich and poor.  The
confrontation with the NHS workers is emblematic.  When they demanded from the
health unions an increase in productivity as a precondition for wage increases
they made a declaration of war against the people who do the most valuable work.
  They are attempting to introduce legislation to prevent successful strike
action by workers in essential industries. This is an attack on society.  The
next general election is imminent and the Tories are increasing social
conflict.  The ruling elites know that they have the Labour Party in their
pocket and will be happy to let a Labour-led government continue the decimation
of the collective and communal structures that hold our lives together.  As
people look towards the future they must be given an active chance to think
through and formulate what that future can be.

This cannot be left another day.  I am making a call to People’s Assembly and
Enough is Enough to set up Manifesto Action Groups in every constituency in the
UK to engage in formulating a charter of demands of what a new government
committed to a better life for people in the UK must commit to.  Politics is far
too important to be left to politicians.  The starting point could be the six
demands raised by Enough is Enough but the Manifesto Action Groups should reach
out to parts of the population who might not be in agreement, who might not feel
that it is their business or right to formulate social policy.  It is only in
the quality and richness of this kind of activity, of the conversation and
debate that can happen amongst people in their localities that a renewal of our
social life can take place.  We need to re-make our society.

Posted on November 9, 2022November 29, 2022


PLEASE DON’T MAKE US GO THROUGH THIS AGAIN

People in the UK are calling for a general election. Will it be tweedledum
versus tweedledee? Again?

Somebody* said that history repeats itself: the first time as a tragedy, the
second time as farce. What dramatic forms do further iterations take?  I’m
trying not to think about it but the nightmare and the nausea keep returning. 
Are we going to have to live through this again?  The naval expression of this
alternation of command is called Buggin’s Turn*.  Are we going to have to watch
as the deep feelings of solidarity, the aspiration to live better, to make a
better society, created by a people on the move against the outlook and policies
of the Conservative Party and the political elites who they represent, get
sucked up into the rotting bilge of compromise, equivocation, co-option,
excuses, bowing and scraping, obsequious mournful apologetics, so-called
‘realism’, submission to ‘finance’ and the laws of the market, horrendous ‘we’d
like to but…’, being sensible about climate change and being moderate about
inequality?  No, it won’t be a relief to see the back of the Tories if it means
that we have a Labour government like the ones we had in 1924, in 1964, 1974,
1997.  Who wants to watch capitulation and slow crushing defeat? Again?

I hope I’m not relying too much on the reader’s knowledge of history.

The only reason the 1945 government was different was because of the massive
popular movement holding it to account. However it too just prepared the way for
the return of the Tories.  It may have been similar if Corbyn’s Labour project
had been successful. But now, there is a strong smell of putrefaction, of
self-seeking, and pusillanimity.  Perhaps I should just turn my face away, smell
flowers and look at the ocean because there is only one word for it.  It’s so
boring. 

I’m not a politician.  I’m an intermittent activist.  I am in no position to
create an alternative political choice.  But what about all the people who have
been chucked out of the Labour Party for being on the left, all the de-selected
candidates, all the activists who have been silenced?  Can’t they give a us
break?  Can’t they give us something to fight for politically?  Can’t the
People’s Assembly, Enough is Enough, Stop the War, Just Stop Oil and all the
other groups who collaborated to organise the march on Saturday 5th November
form a united front, a broad political alliance and compose a Manifesto Charter
with key policy demands that can make the population of this island look up from
the dreadful decline perpetrated over centuries by our political elites?

Of course I’ve got my own wild ideas.  I want to see the state democratised.  I
want more power given to local authorities.  I want to see the monarchy and its
court taken out of the political institutions.  I want to see the House of Lords
abolished.  I want to see transparency and democracy at every level of public
and political life.  I think these democratic measures are absolutely essential
to create the participatory resilience sufficient to disempower the financial
institutions so that people, through democratic structures, can make decisions
about the movement of wealth and investment, simply so that they can have
control over their own lives and their environment.  Break down the walls of the
universities, make them into living centres of knowledge that can directly
benefit local communities.  Bring the media into public participatory
ownership.  Make the police a public service.  The list goes on.  Try not making
corporate structures the model of how we organise everything!

I believe you cannot make economic changes separate from political ones*.  I
want to see a change that makes it impossible for the Conservative Party and the
current political elites to ever return to power and play this stupid tennis
match, this tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee, ‘his majesty’s government’, ‘his
majesty’s loyal opposition’.  Pass the chunder bucket!

Are we serious? I don’t want to impose my ideas on anyone.  I just want to have
a real conversation about what is really going on.  But where is this
happening?  I want to exercise the human joy of making the society I live in.
The keynote is resounding.  Look at what our production system has done to our
earth.  Look at global warming and climate change. The key inspiring movement
here in the past period is the young people of the Friday For Future movement
and this is because it came from the heart and they really cared and they
weren’t seeking public office or advancement!! The model of humanity that our
regime is based on, the rational self-interested utility-maximising individual
is redundant. Dead. Deceased. Support from white supremacism and male chauvinism
has clustered around this absurd creation. Let it fall away. Decay. It’s gross. 
It’s boring.  Give us a break! No more bullies!

The connection between our production system and the ‘model of humanity’
described above is systemic. Another way of expressing all this is to say we
need a paradigm shift*.  If our social and political system is able to be
analysed in the way that other complex systems are analysed then the basic
assumptions we have about ourselves hold it together.  We know the system has
got inside us. We need a new model of our humanity. To change it we have to
change.  We can’t do this only by sitting and thinking things through.  We have
to share.  We have to talk.  We have to act. We have to start living the change.

But please let’s not have a tweedle-dum tweedle-dee general election.  Surely we
can do better.  Let’s not be uptight about it.  Of course if there is a new
political movement that stands candidates the anti-tory vote may be divided but
if we can break this cycle of either/or and continue to build a movement for
social change then it will be worth it.  But this movement has to be
participatory.  It has to activate people.  Please no Buggin’s Turn!

*Karl Marx in the opening of ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon’

*Thanks for reminding me of this expression to Goran Therborn in his wonderful
global survey essay ‘The World and the Left’ in the recent New Left Review

*The idea that a paradigm is the fundamental cohering element in the analysis of
systems comes from the brilliant short essay, written in 2000 by one of the
scientists who took part in the groundbreaking Limits to Growth report in 1972,
Donella Meadows: Leverage Points: Places to intervene in a system.

*See my previous blog THINKING ABOUT THE STATE

Posted on October 13, 2022October 26, 2022


THINKING ABOUT THE STATE

We now have a government led by Rishi Sunak. When I wrote this blog Liz Truss
was Prime Minister of the UK and I was able to describe her policy as ‘ striving
to be more profoundly linked to the financial system with no pretension of
‘levelling up’’. Now Sunak is in charge, the commitment to ‘levelling up’ has
been reasserted. We might well ask why there has been this very dramatic change
of policy and may be fooled into thinking that there has only been a change of
personalities. The deep divisions within the Tory Party that have opened up
since they failed to gain a majority in the 2010 election has now reached a new
stage. Reading what I have to say about the capitalist state being defined by
the apparent division between the ‘economic’ space and the ‘political’ space you
may remark this latest turn under Sunak, where it is clear that policy
intervention into the economy is the order of the day, seems to contradict what
I have said. However the definition holds true even though the basic paradigm
that the definition alludes to seems to be being modified. I will follow this
piece in another blog with observations about what this might mean.

It has become clearer over the past few weeks that what really determines policy
in the current system is the financial institutions. On the other hand, a mass
popular movement is emerging based on a co-ordinated and united sense of
agreement by trades unions whose members have mobilised for action and whose key
proponents have launched a public campaign ENOUGH IS ENOUGH to join and
interconnect with other resistance organisations such as Stand Up To Racism,
Peace and Justice, People’s Assembly, Stop the War.  In addition there are many
others that could be considered even more significant, groups that are oriented
by the climate crisis, by energy prices, against deportations.  There is now a
complex array of resistance organisations that are mobilising and sometimes
interconnecting.  Attention will start to move more emphatically towards the
political space and this is why it is timely to think about the state.

I set out to write about the state because, in the immediate situation here in
the UK, the movement of resistance and for change (the movement of resistance,
of course, might not be a movement for change!) will go through a process of
what might be described as ‘politicisation’.  In other words, the economic
struggle will be moved into the political space; it will engage with and
articulate itself within the relations of the state and those relations
surrounding the state.  In order to understand this movement and how it might
go, it seems to me to be necessary to have a realistic idea of the state.  This
means that you have to see these ‘state’ relations as being historically
produced and this will bring you to the conclusion that the capitalist state is
a specific form of organisation that separates the economic space from the
political space.  How this separation takes place and how it has developed can,
as far as I can see, only be understood by understanding how this state is a
patriarchal state.  In other words it is thoroughly permeated by hierarchical
and binary structures.  How this has come about can only be understood by being
clear about what patriarchy is, what male dominance is.  This also is an
historical phenomenon.  To be able to see how patriarchy gave birth to
capitalism is to understand how a ruling structure that mainly imposed its rule
from ‘external’ oppression, the use of brute force, albeit justified and
sanctified by hierarchy, came to ‘disperse’ itself into the ‘internal’
structures of individuals (their beliefs, values and outlook).  For structures
of behaviour and assumptions to become effective in people’s outlooks and
feelings about themselves, forms of thought and mentalities had to be generated
and shared.  In other words for this ‘dispersal’ to take place it had to
inculcate forms of self-rule and conformity.  One aspect of this process was to
persuade through argument and practice that the ‘self’ is divided into an
‘economic’ self and a ‘political’ self.  With the advent of capitalism the state
structures – the system of rule  – was internalised.  This is the meaning of the
freedom of the individual and its connection with the sanctity of private
property.  But also it entails forms of thought that divide our reality into
‘spiritless’ matter and ‘immaterial’ spirituality thus influencing deeply how we
know the world and ourselves.  The inculcation of mechanistic forms of knowledge
is an adjunct of the domination of reproduction by production.

We are more aware of the invasive aspects of the system when we see the way, in
its most recent stage of development that accompanied a renewed globalisation of
capitalism, the destruction of the ‘self’ has proceeded apace.  It seems
contradictory at first that the ‘self’ is destroyed by individualisation.  As
the deeper penetration of the capitalist system of rule into the intimate life
of the population has advanced, individuals have been persuaded to marketise
themselves.  They present themselves as bundles of competences for the labour
market and are able to select from a basket of identities in the consumer
market. The disappearance of any system, including capitalism, and the
presentation of the economy or the market as natural is the outcome of what is
called neoliberalism.  However this form of rule is itself invisible as a
system.  This has accompanied the subsumption of the state as the marketing
department of finance capital. The different nation-states are now pitted
against each other in competition to see how they can lower labour costs and
attract inward investment from corporate entities.  

The nature of the state and specifically the nature of the capitalist state
derives from this history.  Its binary structures and its hierarchies can be
deceptive. Becoming embroiled in its operation without changing its structure
will end up with the continuation of oppression.  What recent events have shown
is that the most powerful element in determining what the capitalist state can
and cannot do is the financial market.  Unless the movement for change can break
the separation between the economic space and the political space and insist on
a transformation of the state that enables democratic control to be exerted over
the disposition of capital wealth then movement towards a ‘better’ world will
fail.  This means that the sanctity of private property has to be rejected. 
Through democratic participatory processes people must be able to dispose social
wealth and invest this wealth according to their perceived needs.

The idea that working people can get a better deal within the current system
does not take account of the fact that the capitalist state system is organised
to reduce the cost of the production of human labour power to the minimum
possible level.  This form of production (of human labour power) is called
reproduction.  It is mainly carried out by women.  This should alert people to
being able to see the connection between capitalism and patriarchy from another
angle.

The idea that the effective presentation of demands involves ‘speaking truth to
power’ is completely self-defeating. It is another consequence of the myth that
this power can be left in tact if the truth becomes the basis for action. The
political system and the media are functional in their present form only if they
are lying and are able to deceive people.

At the inception of the current UK regime after the restoration of the monarchy
in 1660 the UK imperialist project had already started. The exploitation of the
earth’s resources were facilitated by navigation, weaponry and a sense of
European racial superiority inculcated by the Crusades 400 years earlier. The
restored monarch, Charles II, was a shareholder in the Royal African Company.
This was the organisation that conducted the trade in human beings that supplied
the slave plantation of the Americas. As this major source of capital wealth
flowed back to the imperial homeland it had a double benefit: the wealth itself
and the distinction that the system was able to draw between the white ‘free’
labourers and the black slaves. This lowered the price of labour at home. The
population racialised as white were offered this ‘supremacy’ as they were thrown
off the land and deprived of their indigeneity. This further enforcement of the
capitalist system of rule reached a kind of nadir when the black slaves were
‘freed’ and, in order to justify the compensation money paid to the owners, the
‘scientific’ elaboration of racist ideas was advanced. When the slave-owning
regimes declared the freedom of the individual they included the freedom to own
slaves. After all they were their private property. John Locke the esteemed
philosopher so influential in the development of empiricism and a forerunner of
the enlightenment, a humanist and major influence on the foundation of the UK
state, the writer of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, was an
administrative officer for the Royal African Company. This should alert people
to the connection between racism, patriarchy and capitalism.
 It is for this reason that this history is best looked at from the point of view of those people whose direct ancestors experienced this exploitation.  

These thoughts of mine are fumbling towards an understanding of what is at issue
in the present situation. They are not original but a jumble and regurgitation
of my reading of the thoughts of others.  Please help by emailing your response,
objections and corrections. There may be others far wiser than I who are working
things out, please put me in touch.

Watch out!  The movement for social justice and against inequality is constantly
moving into the political arena.  Because of the nature of the capitalist state
this process can be dangerous to the forces of resistance and for change. At the
moment, Autumn 2022, the cutting edge is the struggle for better wages and
conditions by the trades unions. But there are many other movements of
resistance. Particularly those who were galvanised by the youth rebellion
against climate change that manifested itself as Friday School strikes. One such
movement, Extinction Rebellion has not only proliferated internationally but
also has diversified itself into other forms of struggle and protest than those
used in its initial actions. The capitalist state, of which the UK state is a
version and local variation, developed as a way of sustaining the capitalist
system of rule through co-option, channelling social energies directed towards
change into the institutional structures of the state and thereby defusing and
defeating them.  The examples are many. Here are two.  We saw, at the beginning
of the 1970s, a formidable movement of resistance, to the Tories’ anti-trade
union legislation (the Industrial Relations Act), to new technology and job
insecurity in the dockers fight against containerisation, to the issue of pay
increases being eaten away by inflation in the 1972 and 1974 strikes by the
National Union of Mineworkers. At the climax of this struggle the Tory
government called an election and ask the country to decide: was it the
government or the miners who should govern the country? In February 1974 the
Labour Party was returned as the largest parliamentary party but could only
attain a majority in Parliament through a pact with the Liberal Party (the
Lib-Lab pact). They gained a parliamentary majority in October, in the second
election of that year. So it looked like the Labour movement had won a political
victory. This Labour government failed to substantiate and move forward this
massive movement of resistance and by 1979 the Tories won a majority. They were
led by Thatcher and had a renewed political agenda. In 1926 the movement of
unity amongst working people, through trades unions and communities, culminated
in a General Strike, principally in support of the miners. The leadership of the
Labour Party and the trades union movement called it off just as it looked as if
it might be successful. By 1931 the Labour Party was in a national government
which, when it failed, led to a return of the Tory Party. The question of how
‘economic’ struggle gives rise to ‘political’ struggle will dominate in the
upcoming period (from the Autumn and Winter of 2022). 

In the current period, political success depends on the participation of
millions and millions of people in actively constructing a movement with demands
that have been thought through and composed from the bottom up and the top down.
Politics is far too important to be left to politicians. At a recent ENOUGH IS
ENOUGH live meeting in North London, the organisers divided us into six
break-out groups to further discuss the six ENOUGH IS ENOUGH demands. The
conversations were vital explorations of the implications of policy. This
‘thinking through’ should be happening in every constituency in the country.
Perhaps it is. The danger is that as the movement grows and the Tories
disintegrate (by no means certain) the Labour Party will move to the left to
scoop up its traditional support and the manifesto will be left to the
‘leadership’ and ‘head office’. The Labour Party, possibly appearing to be
leaning to the left, will be returned as the largest party on a wave of
anti-tory sentiment but will fail to carry forward the movement for change. The
resistance movement will therefore fail to make a better society. Better that
there should be 650 manifestos, worked out by people who can popularise their
deliberations, checking their formulations at local meetings or with randomly
chosen people and use these documents to hold electoral candidates to account,
than there is only a handed down list of policies, worked out through marketing
and media processes. Anyway the popularly worked out ‘manifesto’ demands, if
they followed a commonly agreed format, could be collated nationally and this
charter could then be used to strengthen local consensual movements. If not
this, then how can a process of politicisation be carried through? How can
defensive resistance struggles be turned into mass democratic action?

Political struggle is aimed at changes in the behaviour of the state or its
transformation. The capitalist state’s significant feature is the separation of
‘economics’ from ‘politics’. The former is assigned to civil society whereas the
latter is conducted in and around the state.  But this relationship is
deliberately made confusing.  The state system including civil society is
developed from capitalism. But capitalism is a development of patriarchy.

It is difficult to understand how the capitalist state works if its link to
patriarchal structures are not brought to light. This also involves a
recognition that capitalism is not an economic system but a system of rule. This
system of rule derives from the way patriarchal structures are dispersed and
internalised as capitalism comes to dominate society.  Capitalism is a dispersal
of patriarchy into the micro-cellular structure of society. This means the state
structures are only in the last instance enforced by command and brute force.
The system is such that we inhabit it and it lives inside us. It constructs
itself in our feelings about ourselves that are as deep as our sexuality. It
influences the sense of our own power and capability and the way we relate to
each other. The system is soul- and self-destroying. The mode of exploitation of
women and of nature restructures the inner life of the population.  This is
further deepened by the institutionalisation (that is the living out of values
and ideas at an unconscious level, at the level of an unquestioned basic
assumption) of racism and white supremacism. It is the reconstruction of the
human individual as a competitive creature.

Why is the universal suffrage representational system the ‘natural’ form of the
capitalist state?

The state is expected to protect people against economic insecurity but it is
being weakened by increasing indebtedness. The people who might benefit from
protection are the majority of the population whilst those that benefit from the
indebtedness are the rich and those connected to, or reliant on, the global
financial system.

The constitution of the UK state is centred on the political authority of the
monarch in Parliament.  Any movement for change has to begin to undermine the
centrality of this institution.

The state is best viewed as a set of relations rather than as an instrument or
machine or control room. It is a complex of agreements, of performative acts of
avowal and contractual consent, enacted in procedures and rituals.

The illusion that it is a neutral instrument and that it can be used in its
present form to change society leads to its continuation as a means of
oppression.  The state absorbs, condenses and defuses opposition and resistance.
Political parties become instruments of the state by organising themselves
according to universal suffrage electoral processes.  They mimic the hierarchies
of the state in the choice of candidates to represent them.  These
representatives if elected are then incorporated into the state project by the
oath of allegiance to the monarch that they make on entering office. However
this does not mean that these processes are ineffective as vehicles for change.
But they have to be understood.

Characteristic of the modern capitalist state is the separation of the political
space, where equality must appear to exist, from the economic space, where it is
essential that it doesn’t.

The modern capitalist state is constructed to ensure the persistence of economic
inequality by creating a space where political equality can be enacted.  The key
function of the capitalist state is to ensure the reproduction of the conditions
of production. These include the supply of the cheapest and most docile labour
force and the assurance of profit-making so capital wealth can be accumulated
and invested. The state must mitigate the tendency for the rate of profit to
fall. This tendency is endemic to capitalist social and economic organisation. 


Capitalism is the dominance of quantity, as an emblematic coordinate of male
power.  The male ‘take over’ was a significant moment in the development of our
species (modern humans, Homo Sapiens Sapiens). From the neolithic revolution
approximately 12,000 years ago hierarchical and territorialised forms of social
organisation took over from a society infused with the rhythm and organicity of
human females. The capitalist state is best seen as a form of social
organisation developed from these hierarchical forms. It is a set of relations
whose energy is produced by the appropriation of women’s power.  Production
systematically dominates reproduction.  This manifests itself as the operation
of a collective assumption, like a kind of common sense.  The process is
continuously operational and resonates in every level and in every cellular
component of social organisation. Men take women’s power and that becomes their
power and they use it to dominate society.  The state dominates society in the
capitalist state by institutionalising the domination of the economy which it
makes appear as natural and free.

In the UK it is the power of the financial institutions that is the major
obstacle to change. Evidence of the so-called power of the markets is being
dramatically demonstrated in the mid-October 2022 when this is being written.
The power of finance is incompatible with democracy. It is people who should
decide through democratic institutions where investment takes place. It is in
the character of money and the emblems that are used to assure value (the
monarch’s head) that the perversions of sovereignty are made manifest. The right
to produce money in this way was granted to the Bank of England when it was
established in 1694 in exchange for the monarch’s right to raise money for war,
in that instance it was the Anglo Dutch Coalition against the French.

In the capitalist state the political space as a space of equality is directly
and organically linked to the maintenance of the necessary inequality of the
economic ‘space’.  This is how and why universal suffrage representative
democracy grows organically from the capitalist system. This is effected by the
apparent division between the state and civil society and the construction of a
democratic link between them.  It makes capitalism appear to be only an economic
system rather than a system of rule.  It sustains the myth that the state system
could replace one economic system for another and remain in tact. The
proliferation and internalisation of patriarchy, the collectivisation of the
oppression of women ensures each home is a little kingdom and that the
domination of reproduction by production continues at an ever deeper, wider and
more effective level.  The internalisation of the patriarchal system in the
capitalist system of rule is a foundation for the destruction of the self that
late capitalism has perfected. A major factor in this disintegration is the
division of the economic aspects of the self from the political aspects. The
workforce must present itself as free human beings ready to produce commodities
and services utilising the tools and infrastructure privately owned by the boss
class.  In this commodity-producing system the workers’ time is a commodity
produced through households in reproductive processes undertaken mainly by
women. The state must make this reproduction as cheap as possible.

You can see in the development of the universal suffrage system in the UK state
how the adult population has been brought gradually into the constitutional
project by the extension of suffrage.  First property-owning adult men (1867),
then all adult men and some women who had passed beyond the general age of
childbirth and who qualified as owners or co-owners of property (1918) and then
all adult men and women (finally in 1928)


The state is constantly withdrawing from society, appearing to leave it alone
and only safeguarding the freedom of the individual and the sanctity of private
property. This leaves the securitisation (Police, army, intelligence services)
aspects of the state in tact and eats into the protective, caring (education,
health, social care) aspects. The underlying myth is that if the state could
diminish itself, the social space would become even freer and people would allow
their nature to develop and would prosper.  This myth has become particularly
current in the period of universal suffrage democracy in the West where the
development of the New Deal and the Welfare State seemed to hamper ‘natural’
profit-making functions.  A heightened process of individualisation is
associated with neoliberalism, especially in the most recent period when the
media has been dispersed through social networks.  This system has successfully
used the study of psychology to break down the ‘self’ and to reconstitute the
individual as freely able to promote itself as a bundle of competences and to
constitute itself from a basket of available identities. One aspect of the human
creature that the system has exploited is the tendency for human beings to judge
their own behaviour with a different optic than that which they use to judge the
behaviour of others.

The later stages of the process that accompanied the arrival of universal
suffrage democracy saw the cementing of the relationship between marketing, the
media and electoral processes.  This advanced the disintegration of the self and
entailed deeper forms of commodification.  The elements of the state and
patriarchal structures were imprinted into the sense individuals had of
themselves. 

The power over people’s bodies, over life and death, the right to order bodies
to be or not be in certain places at certain times and the right to access the
private space of people’s property and persons, constitute the ‘regalian’ power
deriving from kingship.  It is mainly this aspect of the state which leads
people to think that it is a machine or instrument.

All the processes of agreement, of contract, of institution-building, of
rituals, of procedures, of the specification of spaces and the enforcement of
sovereignty are tied to, and energised by, the (divine) right to commit
violence, ultimately to destroy human bodies.  This is why war is the zenith
moment of capitalist state power.

The organisation of killing pulls all other state activities into order. It
organises and orders them and gives them their place. The power to define
territory and to specify spaces requires and obtains the submission of the
population. It defines what activities can take place in the spaces.  Ultimately
this is where violence and its sanctification make their deal, come to terms
with each other, condone each other, mutually re-enforce each other, become
complicit.  This is what centres the state and what lies at its centre.  In the
UK it is the monarchical throne in Parliament, the source and centre of ultimate
executive power.

The capitalist state form is binary. The outer visible processes, parliament and
the government administration, enable the partial ‘veiling’ of the central
authority, the power over life and death, of the monarch, the king patriarch. 
The ‘veiling’ enables this ‘regalian’ power to be held more securely.  So the
state can be described as a series of spaces, organised in relationship to each
other, that are formed and related to each other through agreements, contracts,
affirmations, rituals, displays, procedures and meetings.  At the centre of this
arrangement of ‘relational’ spaces is the core space from which authority
emanates.  This means that the monarchical ‘court’ system underpins and
underlies the work of government and the ‘democratic’ institutions and is
disguised by them.

Men formed and territorialised their power in the course of ‘taking power’ from
women.  The oppressive exploitation of women and nature is organised through the
creation of sacred spaces more powerful than the space that was dedicated to
safeguarding the reproductive movement of the original modern human (Homo
Sapiens Sapiens), the menarchal hut, the space of women’s first menstruation.
This was ritually guarded by women’s collective ‘power’ in the original modern
human groups. Coalitions of human females regulated the lives of the early
modern human groups. Men’s spaces needed to be symbolically more powerful than
this.  They needed to subsume the reproductive space.

The initial take over of power from women by men is associated with the
development of animal husbandry and crop cultivation during the neolithic
revolution approximately 12,000 years ago. This was effected by physical force,
but it could not be successfully accomplished without processes of justification
and sanctification. Women had to be coopted as well as oppressed.  Men had to
replace women as the holders of symbolic power.  This might be expressed in a
number of ways: men took away women’s magic in order to use it for their own
ends and create their own magic.  The key figures in the male hierarchies were
the warrior chief and the shaman priest.  These roles could be combined or be
played out in mutual justification, sanctification and enforcement.  It was only
at the end of the Roman Empire that kingship structures congealed into a
functioning political form of rule based on the divine right over certain
territories.  The king in holding ‘regalian’ power asserted sovereignty by
divine right.  The great gift of Christianity to this proto-imperialist,
emergent nation-state building was to construct a figure that was half god and
and half human.  The ‘roles’ of warrior chief and shaman were played out in the
group organisation that surrounded the figure of the king in what formed itself
as a court.  The warrior group developed into the warlords, the noblesse d’epee,
and the priesthood developed into the noblesse de robe.  In the UK system the
monarch is the Commander in Chief of the armed forces and the Head of the Church
of England.  As the form of the patriarchal state advanced, the organisation of
the aristocracy into the lords temporal and the lords spiritual developed into
the army and the church.  As the process of secularisation accompanied the
democratisation of the state the church’s function of sanctification and
justification was separated out and dispersed further into apparently autonomous
institutions: the education system, the media and the charity sector.  

Beneath the rational, secular, democratic set of relations that constitute one
level of the functioning of the state: the public administration, the justice
system, public services, health systems, education systems, there is another
underlying and intersecting level: the structures and processes of the monarchic
court.  This is the binary system that is so characteristic of patriarchy and
was made necessary in the successful ‘take over’ of power and influence from
women. At every level and in every aspect of these relational structures the
original oscillation between the warrior leader (military commander, leader of
the hunt) and the shaman (chief priest, hierarch) resounds.  In the structure of
the democratic institutions the alternation between the Tory and the Labour
parties replicates this movement.  The enactments and displays capture and train
the imagination of the population.  Also what appears to be entirely superficial
and decorative, the parades and ceremonies of the state, in fact relate to the
sanctification and authorisation of violence that lies at the centre of the
system.  This is like a mesmeric dance.  The monarch that sits at the centre of
the court as a source of divine authority sanctifying the violence that holds
the structure together is hidden by the overlay of democratic structures (local
authorities, Mayors, national parliaments, UK parliament) and this is then
decorated by the paraphernalia of the royals, mediatised and humanised in a
series of romances, rows and scandals and displayed in ornate parades and
processions.  The glamour of the decorative layer is a way of convincing the
population that they are people just like anybody else, that they have no ‘real’
power. It is this quality of being symbolically essential on which the whole
system is based.  They ‘appear’ to be glamorous and powerful so we know that
they are not.  But in fact they are.  The real power lies with the
democratically elected parliament but in fact it doesn’t. All the members of
this completely business-like assembly have sworn an oath of allegiance to the
monarch.  This is why the elected members from Sinn Fein in Ireland refuse to
take their seats.  Who do these members of parliament serve?  The monarch or the
people?  In a dazzling inversion it turns out that the monarch is the people
(the soul of the people?).  Thus sovereignty is secured.

What is the nature of power in our society? Male power is like that of the
hunter. When a hunter attacks and kills an animal he or she takes the power of
the animal.  The hunter’s power is the power of the animal.  The hunter gains
life by the death of the animal.  The hunter is powerless without the animal. 
The original power of life appears to be women’s power of reproduction.  Men
have power only in so far as they take power from women.  In capitalism the
vital source of profit is the production of surplus value through the organised
exploitation of human labour power.  The reproduction of labour power is the
crucial element in the production process. This is even more essential than the
accumulation of capital.  The exploitation of reproductive processes by
productive processes – this may clarify how capitalism is obsessed by what is
called ‘growth’ – must be guarded by the capitalist state.

The structure of the state and all the relations which compose it are ‘held
together’ i.e. dynamised/ energised by the space where violence is sanctified,
the space of sacrifice, where the issue of the control over life and death is
enacted.


An example in the UK state is the organisation known as the Knights of the
Garter.  They are the intimates of the sovereign, they can notionally enter the
monarch’s bed chamber, the death bed and birth bed.  They are the officials of
the funerary and coronation rites.  They are the sanctified warrior leaders.

The constraint that is encountered by democratic forces of change that might
initially formulate economic demands, demands for a different allocation of
social resources, and then express themselves through the universal suffrage
system, is composed of two elements. Firstly, the effective power of Parliament,
its access to ‘regalian’ power (power over life and death, monopoly of violence)
has to be channelled through the monarch. Secondly, its power over capital
wealth (the power to gain access to private spaces and ‘private’ wealth) is held
in check by the state’s institutionalisation of the freedom of the individual
and the sanctity of private property. This latter is underpinned by the
political equality incorporated into the electoral system. These two elements
are deeply linked and are secured through the internalisation of the system.
This produces individuals that are compliant and who abide by a common sense
that they had no part in making and that appears to them as natural in so far as
they recognise in this individual freedom the limits of their own mortality.

When our social life reaches its fullest realisation the state will no longer be
a set of relations through which people will hold power over other people. The
state will no longer be a power separate from, nor above, society.  The question
is how to transform the state in order that it can serve real social needs.

Through what seemed like chance events the movement against austerity which was
sparked by the student revolt of 2010 brought Jeremy Corbyn to the leadership of
the Labour Party in 2015.  This was accompanied by the large-scale increase in
Labour Party membership making the party a vehicle of mass popular activism.
This meant that the complex consensual tides of feeling and all the diverse
organisations of resistance had a focus, reflected in the main opposition
party.  The attack that was launched against this by the ‘establishment’,
especially after the ‘near miss’ election of June 2017, was unprecedented in its
ferocity, depth and extent.  It was a unique situation where a popular mass
movement was impacting on the heart of the UK state.  This story should act as a
warning about the movement from economic struggle to political struggle.  The
two-party system – government and opposition – is another aspect of the
defensive binary structures of the state. The Labour Party is a part of the UK
state. 

There is a narrative that only militant action – rank and file action, local
direct action – from below, from the bottom up, can possibly create the movement
of liberation we need.  There is also a narrative that social change can only
happen by engaging in legislative representative parliamentary politics. These
two positions are not exclusive of each other.  The ‘bottom-up’ movement can be
characterised as ‘economic struggle’ and the ‘top down’ as ‘political
struggle’.  But this repeats the separation on which the capitalist state is
dependent. The problem with this is that the capitalist state is organised in
such a way that these two aspects of social change are kept separate and are
reflected in the division between civil society and the state.  The capitalist
state is formed by its key functions: to guard the freedom of the individual and
to enforce private property.  These two principles (individual freedom and
private property) are affirmed as absolutely natural and directly ensure that
those that own nothing but their labour power are free to sell it and that those
that accumulate private capital wealth are free to invest it. So the political
state only intercedes in the ‘economy’ to restore natural rights (freedom of the
individual and private property). This binary structuring that pervades the
capitalist state has been evolved to disempower movements for social change by
re-channelling the energies of which they consist.

We are dealing with a system of rule, capitalism, that cannot simply be
characterised as an economic system.  It is a system that is extensive and
intensive.  It creates the forms of our society, our social formation, in doing
so it penetrates deeply into our souls and our being.  Capitalism is the
development of patriarchy.  It is a productively widespread and internalised
system of rule and self-rule.  People all over the world are struggling against
its impacts.  Ironically they are sometimes doing so by adopting its values and
attempting to enrich themselves and are spurred on to do so because it seems
natural and a part of their manhood or womanhood and particularly because it
offers a means of individual survival.  However also people are communicating
and sharing and co-ordinating their actions against the system. They are
realising their collective power.  We are caught within the limits of the
nation-state but this political form can offer protection and opportunities to
consolidate change.  People’s aspirations transcend societies, countries and
nation-states and our human lives are linked.  Liberation can not just happen to
individuals nor to individual societies.  But it cannot manifest itself other
than through these forms of social organisation. 

The movement of change will be simultaneously ‘bottom up’ and ‘top down’. The
waves of disruption and renewal will be like seismic oscillations that will
enable people to shake free of the encumbrances and obstacles, the existing
institutions and mentalities.  Human knowledge – the ability to observe,
reflect, experiment and transform – and our aspiration to satisfy deep needs are
unstoppable.  New mentalities are growing that repair the separation of human
beings from the earth and see us as a part of nature.  The need to relate and to
repair as an integral part of resistance and change is being recognised.

Capitalism is a dispersal and internalisation of patriarchal structures and
advances the domination of quantity and brute force over all other qualities. 
One major encouragement is that history moves not so much in a straight line as
in a spiral, continuously returning to similar positions at different stages.
Homo sapiens sapiens learnt at its very inception, that Alpha Male behaviour had
to be, and could be, contained and suppressed. This was to do with the survival
of the species. In fact this was the significant and decisive factor in its
development. This was due to the deep collective wisdom of human females.  Of
course we are not in the same situation but some of the practical lessons can be
learnt from reflecting on this deep human history.

Now in the autumn/Winter of 2022 in the UK the movement of resistance and
opposition can transform itself effectively into a political movement and alter
the balance of forces in the political space, reorganising the institutions and
relations of state power. Or it will be re-channelled and co-opted by the state.
 


Posted on February 15, 2021February 17, 2021


CV-19 IMPACTS: REGIME CHANGE? OLD AND NEW WAYS OF KNOWING

This is the sixth and hopefully the last in a series of blog pieces started at
the beginning of  2021:

CV-19 Impacts: Regime Change? Ecological Thinking? Socialist ideas?

CV-19 Impacts: Regime Change? The Human Revolution?

CV-19 Impacts: Regime Change? Ecological Limits.

CV-19 Impacts: Regime Change? How did we get into the state we’re in.

CV-19 Impacts: Regime Change? The Specifics of the UK Regime, for example, the
Labour Party.


Human beings invent powers over themselves which they claim they cannot
control.  This claim is usually called faith. Why they do so is a matter for the
history of religion.  The main strategy of patriarchy in the collective
domination of women is to make an appeal to a higher heavenly power that
completes the logic of the hierarchies they construct to countervail the
powerful dependence they feel on the magic of human reproduction, associated
with women’s earthly powers, menstruation and relationship to the moon. This
might be woven around their subjective perception of the manifestation of their
sexuality that can be attributed to the power of women’s beauty over them. 
Their exclusion from what appears to them to be the secret of women’s coming
into being correspondingly generates ideas about knowledge that depend on
secrecy and disembodiment.  Forms of thought that divide spirit or mind from the
body are worked into being.

When the English political elites that emerged out of the English Revolution
(1642-1660 CE) decided to restore the monarchy they must have been impressed by
their experience in the war years of seeing the rise of a leader (Oliver
Cromwell), primarily successful as a military commander, whose son succeeded him
as Protector on his death.  Old forms of sovereign rule appeared to persist
because of quasi-geological movements of continuity that mysteriously derived
from the earth or the heavens above.  Had not Cromwell signed the warrant to
execute Charles I?  A king killer becomes king! The men in power wanted a
monarch to rule over them that they could control!  Because of the peculiarly
theocratic character of the English State, the legacy of the English Reformation
(1527 CE) that authorised the monarch as the Head of the Anglican Church, the
king they eventually selected in 1688 had to be a Protestant.  This sealed the
spiritual security of the state.  Taking the Anglican communion could be used
alongside swearing allegiance to the sovereign as the prerequisite for holding
public office.  Hours measured in lifetimes were given to working out the
articles of faith that went to make the liturgical balancing act embodied in the
39 Articles that formulated the core creed of the Church of England.  This
ensured an easy doctrinal confluence with Catholicism while steering clear of
the extremities of radical ‘non-conformist’ protestantism.  The words of Charles
I’s father, grandfather of the restored monarch, re-echoed: ‘No bishop, no King’
or was it the other way round?

New forms of thought – new ways of knowing the world and of knowing what
knowledge is – preceded, and were cultivated and affirmed by, the new regime.  A
new version of humanity installed itself, new mentalities developed.  At the
break up of a regime corresponding changes occur.  The paradigm shifts, humanity
redefines itself.  In my view in the present circumstances it does so by going
back to the origins of homo sapiens development in the crucial development of
intersubjectivity by collectives of human females that heralded the evolution of
our (then) new species.  There is a fluent and complex connection between forms
of thought, beliefs about the world and material reality, and political
structures.  The English political elites saw the formula of ‘monarch in
Parliament’ as the underpinning of what was happening in their world, the
emerging capitalism that was imperialist and therefore co-created with racism. 
The dehumanisation characteristic of racism was practiced institutionally on
women first.  The assignment of degree to physical characteristics was already
endemic.  

For capitalism the core content of commodity production is labour power.  Its
production depends  on reproduction.  The exploitation of women’s bodies is
connected to the exploitation of nature, of environmental resources.  At first
sight ‘monarchy in parliament’ doesn’t immediately say: capitalism, imperialism,
racism.  However the regime, the system, is a totality. 

Definitions of freedom and humanity that flowed from the work of the key
philosopher of the English Restoration, John Locke, were rooted in private
property.  Private property as a system is essential for the exchange processes
of transforming commodities into money and vice versa.  Freedom is the freedom
to own enslaved people.  The main vehicle of collaborative investment at the
time of the English Revolution was the joint stock company, incorporated as a
legal entity or person.  The Royal African Company was an English mercantile
trading company set up by Charles II and City of London traders in 1660 (the
year of the restoration of the monarchy) to trade principally on the west coast
of Africa.  Main commodity: human beings.  John Locke famous for his writings
about human liberty, the ‘father of liberalism’, famous for his Treatises on
Government and Essay concerning Human Understanding was an owner of stock in the
Royal African Company and worked for it as an administrator.  He was a leading
empiricist, making deep assertions about the nature of mind and rationality.  I
am using shorthand, trying to summon an exemplary instance.

The coronavirus didn’t cause the Black Lives Matter movement.  It didn’t make us
suddenly and collectively conscious of our existence as a species.  It didn’t
start the recognition that something is systemically and institutionally failing
in our society.  The connection between the recognitions we make between the
oppression of women, of people of colour, of consumerism, of climate change, of
capitalism isn’t just in our heads.  It is in our bodies and our history.  It’s
not true to say that when one thing changes everything changes but there’s a
limit to our ability to pick and choose.  The change we are experiencing is
environmental.  We have irreversibly (in the millennial medium term) changed the
chemical composition of the biosphere.  Change doesn’t arrive from our
individual will. 

We need more resilient forms of social organisation.  The current forms and the
thinking that underpins them, are inadequate.  Our view of ourselves and of the
natural world are changing

Lucretius, born well over two thousand years ago, in his De Rerum Natura,
insisted on a connection between conceptions of the natural world and social
forms:  

Furthermore, I will show by what force piloting nature steers the courses of the
sun and moon, in order to preclude the possibility of our thinking that these
bodies freely and spontaneously pursue their perennial courses between heaven
and earth out of kindly consideration for the growth of crops and living
creatures, or that they roll on by some divine design. For even those who have
rightly learned that the gods lead lives free from care may wonder how all
things can be carried on, especially the phenomena above their heads in the
ethereal regions; and they relapse in the old superstitions and subject
themselves to cruel tyrants whom they believe, poor fools, to be omnipotent, in
their ignorance of what can be and what cannot, and again by what law each thing
has its scope restricted and its deeply implanted boundary stone. Lines
75-90 Book 4 On the Nature of Things

It is a fair warning against institutionalised vanity and the danger of
believing that the earth is here for our benefit and why this leads to a
submission to hierarchical oppression.  Lucretius’ observation that there is a
connection between earthly powers that claim an eternal or divine aspect (the
Tyrant) with the the ignorance of a sense of limit is prescient.  Students of
the history of philosophy will know that it was at the crucial period of the
development of the European nation state based on kingship (from 1100-1300 CE)
that the idea of eternity or infinity was re-invented.  The medieval Church
proclaimed it an error to maintain that motion had no beginning; that time was
eternal.  Look at Kantorowicz’ Chapter VI on Continuity and Corporations in The
King’s Two Bodies. A corresponding change to the lexicon of mathematics was the
addition of zero to the order of numbers.  This latter was directly attributable
to the work of Fibonacci (1170-1250 CE). 

Lucretius was an atomist, a proponent of the ideas of Epicurus (341-270 BCE) who
had founded his school in Athens and had revived the atomist theories of
Democritus (born 460 BCE).  The idea that everything is composed of irreducible
elemental particles became important again at the turn of the twentieth century
with the work of Ludwig Boltzmann (who laid the basis for understanding entropy
and thus the recognition of the end of the universe), Ernest Rutherford (who
provided experimental proof of atomic particles) and Albert Einstein (who
initiated an understanding of time as time-space).  The further development of
the ideas of relativity by quantum physics (Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg)
led to the understanding that particles are simultaneously waves. The discovery
of quantums or ‘bundles’ of energy changed what could be known and our way of
knowing.  The outcome of this work was that natural philosophy was absorbed by
experimental physics.  Carlo Rovelli in his wonderfully lucid work, Reality is
not What it Seems, explains why infinity is a concept that has a limited use. 
By the way, the special treat in this work is his description of the similarity
between the shape of the world given in Dante’s La Commedia Divina and in
Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity (pages 77-90 op.cit.).  Clarifying the
unity of time and space as a 3-sphere he could formulate the universe as having
a finite volume but no borders.  We are what we are surrounded by. He thus
asserts the idea of limits to time and spatial dimension.  

Analysis based on the continuous divisibility of matter stand in the way of our
knowing the world.  It is impossible for me to say how commonly agreed this
predisposition is in the world of experimental physics.  This is not the point. 
Scientists root their work in the ‘knowability’ of the world. Lucretius and the
tradition of human thought that he connects with is one example but the best
known is Archimedes (he of the overflowing bath and ‘Eureka!’ fame but I really
encourage the reader to look at all the other useful things that he came up
with!). His work The Sand Reckoner set out to count the number of grains in the
universe, driven by the assertion that the material world was knowable.

The creation of forms of knowledge that divide the mind and the body, that break
the dynamic of duality of the knower and the known, that attribute life to the
knowing subject but death or inertness to objective matter and reduce knowledge
to binary information tend towards abstraction. It cannot be a coincidence that
the system, capitalism, developed by human beings that has recently become
dominant constantly obscures material processes with more elaborate forms of
abstraction.  The money system itself is the first step on this trajectory, but
the further step is the elaboration of money into forms of credit. This became
dominant when the international reserve currency, the dollar, severed its link
to the value of gold (1971). This hastened and facilitated the systems of
quantification hastened by financialisation, where the aim of transactions that
propel material production (ie the consumption of natural resources) is to
increase quantities of money. In other words, the role of money in the exchange
of commodities may appear to be the production of commodities, expressed by the
exchange Commodity-Money-Commodity, but with financialisation this has become
inverted so commodities are produced in order to increase money amounts, as in
M-C-M.  The only question becomes whether, when I put in my dollar, will I get
more than a dollar back. A further step towards abstraction is taken with the
digitalisation of these money quantities so that money becomes information. It
becomes pure quantity expressed in the the form of a binary code. Infinite
growth driven by infinite demand.  This mechanisation (or ‘electronicalisation’)
relies on technology that directly derives from quantum physics.  The crucial
element is the development of the transistor and then the silicon chip that
allows for the miniaturisation of electrical circuits. So much information can
be processed that it perfectly creates a system that would have made the mouths
of the early hierarchs and patriarchs of the Neolithic Revolution water. 
Imagine a system that runs through these extraordinary mineral elements that is
so complex that nobody can possibly understand what the outcomes might be.  A
tool of which we can become tools.  We have finally managed to elaborate a
system that has power over us and that doesn’t appear to be a religion. We go
into ululations when a computer beats a human being at chess and put our faith
in Artificial Intelligence.  We could be forgiven for imagining that information
technology is immaterial  but the carbon footprint of the social network system
with its massive data banks, even before the pandemic, was more than the whole
of the international civil aviation industry.  Today a critical situation has
arisen, especially in automotive production, because of a shortage of silicon
chips.  This is connected to the increase in the use, and therefore the
production, of electronic devices during the pandemic. Of course there is no
shortage of sand out of which silicon is made. Consult Archimedes on this
question.

Isaac Newton the great mathematician and physicist, alchemist, rationalist,
founder of modern physics and of optics, finished his working life as an
employee of the Bank of England engaged in seeking out coin-clippers who reduced
the precious metal content of the coins of the realm (they were called
sovereigns and crowns!) and put them up for prosecution.  If they were found
guilty they were subject to horrendous public torture and death.  Undermining
the currency was tantamount to treason, a desecration of the monarch.  The
sovereign’s visage was stamped on to the sovereigns and crowns and therefore
they were sacred.

There is a kind of congruence between Newton’s ideas about physics and the new
English regime founded in 1688 of which he was a contemporary.  His laws of
motion and of universal gravity which gave a metric to the relationship between
mass and velocity and force, finely articulated in  in differential calculus,
was a part of a scientific revolution that would only be superseded by the work
of Einstein and others in the comparable revolution of the early 20th century. 
It is as if the social revolution that could accompany the latter is protracted
and we are in the middle of it and because of this may be unable to comprehend
its full dimensions.

Surpassing the current regime, as it disintegrates, requires new ways of
knowing.  A woman activist from a people indigenous to the Amazonian rainforest,
speaking at a session of the Radical Anthropology Group, told us about her
encounter with academic work at a University where she was studying for a
Masters degree and how she realised an ‘epistemological rebellion’ was required
to counter the thinking that had developed around and through the exploitative,
‘growth’ system that was destroying her people’s homeland.  What on earth does
this involve?

How can we use technology, cybernetics, quantum physics, biochemistry and other
forms of knowledge that are advancing in our world rather than become the tools
and victims of what appears to be a massively complex system consisting of
almost incomprehensible quantities and interactions?  Understanding that these
goods are the common property of humanity and creating institutional ways of
wresting them from private ownership is a good idea.  This probably means that
all these networks should be brought into public ownership and control but only
if there are governance structures that ensure transparency and freedom of
information.  However this requires a cultural shift. 

My way of knowing the world has been shaped by working in theatre and drama for
half a century, producing performances, running companies, training actors,
directing courses, writing plays.  At the core of drama is a space of
transformation.  This is the inner and outer work of the actor: to embody, to
transcend the limits of subjectivity, to encounter the other, to make the
invisible visible.  For me this connects very strongly to the
‘intersubjectivity’ that I have spoken about as being the invention of
collectives of human females at the very origin of our homo sapiens species in
the Rift Valley of Africa 200,000 years ago.  I have quoted the work of Sarah
Hrdy in this respect.  This is at the deep core of our reproductive capability. 
This is common knowledge and yet it is trapped and confined.  It is
undervalued.   

We know through interaction. This accords with the wonderful recognitions made
by Augusto Boal when he describes theatre in The Rainbow of Desire as being the
first human invention because theatre is human beings seeing themselves and
seeing themselves seeing.  He attributes the discovery of theatre to a woman, a
Chinese woman called Xua Xua, in the preface of Games for Actors and Non-Actors.
It is a space where we able do things and watch ourselves doing them at the same
time.  He described it as being gnoseological, a way of knowing. He took the
deep cue for his work from that of Paulo Freire, who through his literisation
projects (teaching people to read) amongst the peasant communities of Brazil and
Chile developed his pedagogy, the pedagogy of the oppressed.  In this work he
constantly makes the distinction between active knowledge (derived from
interaction between the knower and the known) and banking knowledge (the
accumulation and reiteration of units of information). It would be generally
helpful to understand the difference is between knowledge and information.

In somewhat the same vein, the founding of the Sarugaku (the Japanese Noh
Theatre) is said to be the re-emergence of the Goddess of the Sun, who had gone
off in a huff to a cave, sealing herself off with a large boulder, thus leaving
the world in darkness. The singing and dancing of the performers outside the
cave caused her to push the boulder aside bringing light and joy back to the
world. It is said that the first crack of light as the cave was opened resembled
the movement of a smile across her face. 

There are false divisions in our culture between the kind of knowing we summon
when we say we know a person (or a dog!) or a place (or a home!) and that which
we summon to know the society we live in or the system we use and inhabit or a
mathematical formula.  Our intellectual lives (quite a lot of people even
disclaim that they have one) are institutionally divided between the intuitive
imaginative (arts) and the ratiocinative and analytical (science).  This is a
disabling disaster.  It means that places of learning, especially universities
have no organic institutional connection with the society around them.  This is
made worse by processes of commercialisation, making universities into
businesses.  This is why I have recommended a project where citizen reporters
(activists) in every constituency report on all aspects of life at a local
level, going out to engage with different sections of the community, breaking
open the resources of local ‘places of learning’ or universities, breaking down
artificial barriers between different kinds of knowledge.  This activity has to
be collated and democratically edited into an accessible database at a
‘national’ level, using information technology with wit and live human passion
to build an ongoing big picture of our lives together.  This network could be a
live wire.

Going back to what Lucretius said about ‘limit’, I’m reminded of the crucial
moment when computer modelling was used to analyse the interaction between
social and natural systems and a new step forward was taken in our knowledge of
ourselves.  Limits to Growth in 1972.  Look at Donella Meadow’s work!  She led
the team that developed the modelling, World3, systems analysis technology that
effectively is the same but on a massively extended scale as that which is used
for climate change models.  Limits to Growth was the first comprehensive study
of processes that predicted exhaustion of natural resources. Look at what she
has to say about systemic change. 

When we say we know about climate change and global warming, the knowledge we
have is derived from a truly extraordinarily wide number of sources.  It’s not a
simple fact.  It’s not a dogmatic belief.  It’s an understanding derived from
interaction, that is from a complex sentience characteristic of human beings
because we have developed (although this is always problematic) a capacity to
interact with ‘the other’.  Are we going to be able to create a society that
roots itself back into this primordial ‘intersubjectivity’? 

Look at the extraordinary work of theoretical physicist and philosopher, Karen
Barad, in her exploration, in Meeting the Universe Halfway, of quantum physics
and interactive knowledge.  It is true to an extraordinary degree that elemental
particles reach towards us and we reach towards them in mutual knowing, defying
the erroneous and quite stultifying division which splits off consciousness from
matter and renders the environment, the world around us, as less alive than we
are and subject to our superior examination and exploitation.  She is a
Professor of Feminist Studies.

What is our knowing of the environment?  I refuse to simply immerse myself in a
kind of incandescent deism.  As we go about our lives on this earth, what is the
truth of our interaction with it, individually, collectively, poetically,
scientifically?  This was written by a man 223 years ago from his recollection
of looking over a rural landscape in the west of England:

And I have felt
 A presence that disturbs me with the joy
 Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
 Of something far more deeply interfused
 Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
 And the round ocean, and the living air,
 And the blue sky, and in the mind of man,
 A motion and a spirit, that impels
 All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
 And rolls through all things.  Therefore I am still
 A lover of the meadows and the woods,
 And mountains; and of all that we behold
 From this green earth; of all the mighty world
 Of eye and ear, both what they half create
 and what perceive; well pleased to recognise
 In nature and the language of the sense,
 The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
 The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
 Of all my moral being.
 


Is this consciousness thus expressed compatible with the information outputted
from a climate change model?  Of course it is.  

We need the epistemological rebellion called for by the woman I mentioned
earlier.  The work of the prophetic singer Bob Marley echoes through my mind:
‘Free yourself from mental slavery, None but ourselves can free our minds’ 
(Redemption Song) and ‘Would you let the system get on top your head again? No,
dread, No. The biggest man that you every did see was, was just a baby’.(Coming
in From the Cold)  Seen.

Thanks be.  This is the last of six essays I am publishing online in an effort
to understand more clearly what the basic underlying story of our times might
be.  I’m sick of the sound of my own voice.  What’s so good about writing drama
is that somebody says something and then, thank our lucky stars, somebody else
says something back; the more contradictory the better!

Posted on February 11, 2021February 19, 2021


CV-19 IMPACTS: REGIME CHANGE? THE SPECIFICS OF THE UK REGIME: FOR EXAMPLE, THE
LABOUR PARTY.

I have said elsewhere in this series of online pieces that the moral collapse of
the Labour Party during the leadership of Keir Starmer is a sign of the break-up
of the UK regime.  What role has this party played in sustaining the power of
the ruling elites?   What is the meaning and import of the splits and divisions
in it?

The Labour Party can no longer be the instrument for the suppression of
socialism for the UK political elites.  The historical tensions that held it
together have torn it apart.  In the aftermath of the defeat of Jeremy Corbyn’s
project, it has reverted to administrative procedures and inner-party
machinations to deal with political difference. It has conformed to the role
designated for it as Her Majesty’s loyal opposition and in so doing it has
succumbed to its function in the two party democracy that re-iterates the
‘trifunctional’ state, the kingship-based form that underlies the ‘monarch in
parliament’ constitutional settlement that is the basis of the UK regime.  The
popular movement for ecological and socialist change that will be the undoing of
the regime must come from elsewhere, from other networks and alliances,
dissociated from the institutions of the regime and not supplicant to them.

The early political development of sovereignty and constitutional adaptability
that characterise the English and UK state have been both its enduring strength
but will play a part in its undoing.  This state exhibits the most fulsome and
coherent continuity between feudal and modern forms and also has succeeded in
prolonging liberalism in a way that has given unique scope to the predatory and
financialised forms of late capitalism

What are the specific contours of the UK state of which the Labour Party is a
product? I have described some of the ecological determinants of the British
Isles and the broad history of the political constitution of the nation state.  
Has the geographical or bioregional situation of the islands of Ireland and of
Britain, a relatively short distance from the landmass of the Eurasian continent
on one side, and the Atlantic ocean on the other, shaped the social formations
that have developed?  For example, from a meteorological point of view the
British islands’ weather systems are subject to the alternate influences of the
Eurasian continent and the Atlantic ocean. The additional and decisive impact of
the Gulf Stream means that the islands are warmer than their northerly latitude
would have dictated. These elements may have had an impact on the human
populations predispositions, capabilities and temperament. I have described the
political and economic impact of England’s position, and particularly that of
London, being closer to Eurasian continent and the advantages afforded by the
Thames estuary. How far are these physical circumstances determining for the
formation of the political regime, of its centralisation and of its
adaptability?

The societies that formed in the Western edge of the continent after the
break-up of the Roman Empire tended to become nation-states earlier than those
further east.  Germany and Italy became integral nation-states only in the later
part of the 19th century.  England, France, Spain, Portugal, Holland all
developed early and pursued that development through imperialism.  Ireland was
dominated by England, as were the other nations, Wales and Scotland, that were
the non-Roman-occupied regions of Britain.  

The British island provided immediate and clear borders advantageous to
nation-state formation.  At an early stage the image of England became elided
with Britain as the domain of the whole island. This laid the basis for its
imperial ideology. Soon after the Norman invasion of 1066 Geoffrey of Monmouth
wrote the hugely influential pseudo-history The History of the Kings of Britain
(1136) that depicted the island’s pre-Roman British/Celtic unity and is a major
source for Shakespeare.  The latter gives John of Gaunt the blithe paean that
celebrates ‘this scepter’d isle’, referring  to it as ‘This blessed plot, this
earth, this realm, this England’, in the play, Richard II (circa 1595). The
issue of how kingship was related to the territorialisation of sovereignty was
worked through in literature and philosophy with an urgency that was unique.
Richard II also most clearly dramatises the ‘king’s two bodies’ described in an
earlier piece in this series.  Performance of it was forbidden in the closing
years of the 16th century as Elizabeth I’s rule was threatened by
insurrectionary social movements because it depicts the dethroning and murder of
a king. 

The origins of christianity on the islands were complex.  One mission associated
with St Columba (521- 597) and the Celtic Church came from Ireland creating the
monastery on the Island of Iona as staging post in an ongoing mission. This was
the main source of the gospel in Scotland and northern England.  A major centre
of this missionary movement was established at Lindisfarne where Bede (672 –
735) worked. He wrote an ecclesiastical history of England.  The other main
christian mission was that of Augustine (died 604) who established the centre in
Canterbury.  The Canterbury mission is generally credited with the foundation of
the Christian Church in England. There still exist the traces of this division
between the northern church and the southern church. An example of this is the
power of the Archbishopric of York.  The murder (1170) of Thomas a Beckett,
Archbishop of Canterbury therefore the Pope’s main envoy in England, by agents
of King Henry II, shows how contested these relationships could be.  The English
Reformation (1527) may have been made doctrinally more acceptable by this
division between the celtic-rooted church of the North and the Archbishopric of
Canterbury. However there is no mistaking the unique and integrating
centralising force of this break with the Roman Catholic Church and the unity of
the monarchical sovereign power that could boast both Head of the Church and
Commander in Chief. This was a remarkable political innovation.

The power and influence of the English monarch’s court was amalgamated and
interfused with the early development of parliament, eventually creating the
basis for the nobles (landowning feudal lords who also had military capabilities
and responsibilities) and the clergy (Bishops and Archbishops) to have their
powers in relation to the crown installed in the House of Lords.  The House of
Commons restricted membership to those capable of being taxed (non feudal
landowners and merchants, the gentry).  The relationship between the two
‘chambers’ offered the opportunity for power to be transferred from one (the
Lords) to the other (the Commons) as the state needed to modernise and
democratise itself.  This process accomplished itself in the early 20th century
with the relegation of the House of Lords (1911) and the final arrival of
universal suffrage (1928). However even before the settlement of 1688 when the
current UK regime was established, this system was already a highly centralised,
adaptable and effective structure for conducting sovereign power.

Understanding the structural tensions and divisions in the Labour Party involves
taking account of how political parties formed out of the structures that I have
just described.   The groupings of interest that formed the two political
parties that dominated UK politics up to the 1920s were shaped by the English
Revolution (1642-1660).  The Tories emerged as the party that supported the
monarchy and showed a more favourable inclination towards Catholicism though
they were supporters of the Church of England.  They supported the Jacobite
claim to the throne and the succession of James II, brother of Charles II, who
was son of Charles I, executed for treason in 1649.  James was a Catholic and
was deposed in favour of the Protestant William of Orange and his Anglican wife,
Mary.  The Whigs were the main force behind the constitutional settlement of
1688.  At the beginning of the following century they affirmed their dominant
influence as the UK state inaugurated the Hanoverian line of succession onto the
English throne. This was the subsequent attempt to find a monarchy that was
guaranteed protestant. The Hanoverians were the immigrant German family from
whom the current UK monarch is descended. They changed their name from Saxe
Coberg Gotha to Windsor during the First World War to avoid confusion.

It was as if the relative powers of the monarch and of parliament in the
constitutional settlement of 1688 were enacted in the contest between these two
parties .  As the UK state project moved forward, different interests expressed
themselves through, and within, these two vehicles of policy formation and
execution, the Whigs and the Tories.  At the beginning of the 19th Century, the
Tories were more clearly connected to landowning and colonial property
interests, while the Whigs or Liberals were more connected to manufacturing and
encompassed the reform agenda that arose with emergence of the working class. 
This reached a decisive moment in the outcome of the struggle over the Corn
Laws.  These laws protected the landowners interests, keeping prices high by
imposing tariffs on imports.  The Whigs became the Liberals because of their
support for free trade and the abolition of the Corn Laws.  The success of this
struggle led to price of staple foods being reduced to the advantage of waged
labourers on whom the ongoing manufacturing expansion depended.

It was the Liberals that were replaced by the Labour Party and as this change
took place the Tory Party altered its political base to accommodate this. The
Labour Party became an intrinsic part of the UK state institutional machinery,
an apparent strength. The Liberals’ reforming agenda carried on through the
first world war, creating the foundations of a national insurance scheme and the
beginnings of a welfare state. it was a Liberal, William Beveridge who
elaborated the idea for this welfare state during the second world war. The
Labour Party in 1945 put it into operation.  The Labour Party was aptly named
since it became the major instrument for the ruling elites’ control over the
cost of labour.

I refer once again to the work of Thomas Piketty who, in his explanation of
ideology addresses the question of why it is that electorates do not vote
according to their direct economic and social interests.  He proposes that the
shape of the modern state with its adversarial democratic ‘choice’ between two
political parties replicates earlier forms of state power.  His description of
how the rule of the monarch was operationalised through a pre-democratic
‘trifunctional’ order wherein the warrior nobles and the clerical nobles
collaborated and participated in the work of ruling and government. The third
estate was the common people.  I have suggested elsewhere that the ceremonial
and ritual roles of these two ruling components enact and display the ‘double’
two-bodied nature of the king.

The warrior noble and clerical noble groups that surround the monarch in the
earlier state form were in themselves powerful as owners and controllers of the
life around them, but were enlisted as a crucial part of the spectacle of power.
They had a symbolic function, especially at a time when public parades and
rituals displaying the ruling order were a key way of communicating and
affirming power. The display of democracy has a similar symbolic and
representational function in an age of print, broadcast and electronic media.  

The Labour Party was a product of the aspirational forces that impelled its
foundation.  Its formation was shaped by the constitution into which it had to
become effective.  Its function in this respect was prescribed.  The splits and
divisions within the Labour Party can only be understood fully by taking account
of the binary system of power, coercion that must conceal itself behind consent.
They were determined by the field of forces the Party was active in.

The modern state, the secularised state, the democratic state, the property
state, that which came into being with the American and French Revolutions, and
that which the UK state conformed to through a process different in character if
not in function to the preceding ‘trifunctional state.  Consent had to be
internalised as freedom.  Rule had no longer to be ritually displayed in order
to compel obedience to a sanctified social order of privilege and property but
the very production and consumption of property itself became that which was
displayed. It enlisted participation; subjects became consumers.  The mall along
which the processional fineries of the monarch attended by the lords temporal
and spiritual paraded, became the mall along which customers processed gazing
with wisdom and wonder through the crystal awnings at the objects their freedom
allowed them to believe they might own.  This space was further privatised and
individualised in the array offered electronically through the spectacle of
endless plenty that could be enjoined by the flickering movement of ocular and
digital muscles on the internet. 

The function prescribed for the Labour Party by the ongoing constitutional
project of the UK state was above all to modernise.  It is difficult to clarify
how this ‘reform’ project layers itself over the primordial movements of the
kingship nation state that it was induced to renovate and conserve.  In theatre
practice we are used to the idea of underlying action being a subtext for the
staged utterances and movements of which the performance consists.  We are
practiced at holding and garnering the tension between the visible and the
invisible. The process of modernisation was one of secularisation. The original
meaning of the word secular described the movement of sacred objects from a
sanctified place into an un-sanctified place.  Thus the sacred is maintained
through a suppression that resembles concealment. The priorities of the regime
are guarded through this process, thus they are internalised into the Labour
Party as a tension between its sacred allegiance and its secular modernity.

This may be the reason that repressed religious structures make themselves so
agonisingly apparent in the virulence and hocus-pocus of the recent goings-on in
the Labour Party.

The question remains: what roles do political parties play in the nation-state
structures that derive from kingship or monarchy?  What are they enacting or
playing out?  There was an article in the online magazine, ‘unherd’, about
nationalism or patriotism ( I’m not interested here in the distinction) in
relationship to the death of Captain Tom Moore.  The writer told us that the
Captain perfectly embodied two different, if not contrary, aspects of
patriotism.  One could be symbolised by the Spitfire (the plane that won The
Battle of Britain in the early years of the Second World War in which Moore
fought), the other by the rainbow that symbolised the communal appreciation of
the National Health Service.  The writer pointed out that the former could be
associated with the Tories whereas the latter could be associated with Labour. 
If the governing structures can display and play out an oscillation between
these two aspects of the nation state, security and care, they can successfully
absorb and express the energies of the multitude who inhabit them.  They can
keep them politically satisfied. I believe this ‘play’ is the same as the ‘play’
of the warrior nobles and the clerical nobles around the king, articulating,
feeding and ritualising the basic assumption of the sovereignty of the monarch,
enacting the King’s two bodies, the temporal human and the eternal divine. 
Pacification is the aim, passivity is the outcome.

This representational show which is described by political commentators from
Bagehot to Miliband has transitioned and developed in the modern era. It is now
different from the ‘trifunctional’ state, described by Piketty, in so far as it
has to contain the threat of socialism. Piketty describes the state formation
that replaced the ‘trifunctional state’ as the ‘Property State’.  The keystone
was freedom of the individual as expressed through private property. This move
in the direction of equality and participation requires an extra ‘dialogue’ to
accompany that between security and care as core functions of the modern state.
This is the ‘dialogue’ between stability and change.  Constant appearance of
change is that which ensures stability.  This was the peculiar function of the
Labour Party. Of course the dialogue cannot be diametrical.  Elements of
security, stability and ‘spitfire’ are mixed to different degrees with care,
change and ‘NHS’ in both parties.


I can only give a schematic account of the genealogy and functioning of the
Labour Party.  It was founded principally through a need for representation in
Parliament, and thus for participation in legislation, by the Trades Union
movement.  The Trades Union Congress was founded in 1868.  At first there was a
collaboration with the Liberal Party, until, for reasons I can’t go into here,
this ‘vehicle’ started to go into political decline.  The other major element in
the Labour Party’s initial development were the socialist groups that espoused
the ideas of Marx and other socialist thinkers of the time.  The tension between
these elements gave energy and dynamism to the new party.  Like the trade union
movement it recruited and founded itself on individual card-carrying membership
and this made it quite unlike the Tories and the Liberals.  It nevertheless
absorbed the social mission of the Liberal Party and this became the glue that
held the new vehicle together.  Its model of representation was structured by
the janus-like function of trades unions.  They engaged with the employers and
owners as agents or spokespersons of the claims and interests of the employees,
the workers.  The unity of the workers behind them was their power. Looking
towards the working people the representatives would be saying:  ‘Leave it to
us.  We will get a good deal.’ Looking towards the owning class they would be
saying: ‘Unless you give way to our demands we will unleash the power of the
workers’.  As their political representatives the Labour Party was effective
only in so far as it could win influence on state policy to legalise and protect
the rights of collective bargaining. However to maintain the collective unity of
their adherents, their members, they had to give expression to the general
interests of the working class. The consequent programmatic demands for public
ownership and redistribution gave the reforming agenda of the Labour Party a
critically important energy.  It could be the receptacle of the socialist
aspirations of the working class at the same time as restraining their
actualisation.  Its strength rested on its ability to promise an outcome at the
same time as assuring the ruling elites that it would never effect it.  Thus it
was granted official opposition status. Its historic role was to both deliver
and suppress socialism.  Due to this contradiction, because the Labour Party
must at least seem to embody the general aspiration for social change, and also
due to a rule change that empowered individual members of the party to choose
the party leader Jeremy Corbyn was thrust into the Labour leadership. The party
became the expression of the massive opposition to austerity and a rebellion
against the conditions imposed by the solution to the 2008 crash. The elections
of 2017 and 2019 demonstrated that there was a danger that universal suffrage
may unleash an irreversible change towards socialism.

On two critically important historic occasions the contradictory function of the
Labour leadership reached maximum intensity. The first was the General Strike of
1926 when the Trades Unions Congress capitulated to the Tory government and
abandoned the mineworkers around whom significant sections of the working
population and their organisations had united.  The second was in the period
from 1972 to 1974 when events climaxed in the Tory government under Edward Heath
calling an election on the question of whether it was the government or the
miners who ruled the country.  The strike by the National Union of Mineworkers
in 1974 the resounding victory in the 1972 strike which climaxed in a
confrontation at Saltley Gates near Birmingham. The coke depot there was finally
closed by engineering workers marching in solidarity from the nearby metropolis.
This had followed another climb down by the government when in the struggle
around the Industrial Relations Act dockers’ leaders who were resisting
containerisation of the London docks were imprisoned in Pentonville Prison. Mass
pressure led to their release. The result of the February election of 1974 was
indecisive. This led the Labour Party to making a pact with the Liberals.  Those
that lived through the days after that election will remember that there were 5
or so days when there was no government. Everything was stalled before
eventually a deal was stitched together.  Tanks appeared at Heathrow. A state of
emergency descended on the nation.  Ultimately these social movements – the
General Strike of 1926 and the threat to government power posed by the
Mineworkers Union in 1972 and 1974 – were defeated by the collusion between the
Labour leaders and the ruling elites.

As a trivial aside to my description of these events, in 1976 a play called THE
NINE DAYS AND SALTLEY GATES, about the general strike of 1926 and the Miners
Strike of 1972, co-written by John Hoyland and me and co-directed for FOCO NOVO
by Roland Rees and me, made a national tour backed by the National Union of
Mineworkers and the Arts Council of Great Britain (as was).  Alarm bells rang
and questions were asked in the House of Commons about taxpayers money being
misspent on socialist propaganda.  That’s how touchy our rulers were about such
things in those days.

If the historic role of the Labour Party for the ruling elites was to guard the
constitution by suppressing socialist revolution this was complemented by its
role as a moderniser.  In this it reached its apotheosis in the ‘reign’ of Tony
Blair who, through impulses and inclinations that await their explanation
elsewhere, had to re-balance his ‘clerical’ reform agenda by assuming the role
of a ‘warrior’ leader.  His rule brought the UK into even closer political
alliance with the EU on the continent where the UK state had first founded and
asserted its sovereign form.  Had he succeeded in his desire to get the UK to
join the eurozone he may have been able to resist his martial urgings.  His
conversion to Roman Catholicism after he left office struck a personal note that
resonated back to the English Reformation of 1527.

During the leadership of Keir Starmer the Labour Party has been unable to deal
with the legacy of the popular movement that Jeremy Corbyn found himself at the
head of without replacing political argument with administrative action and
procedures. Jeremy was ousted from the party for a while and has still been
excluded from the Parliamentary Party. It is too dangerous for the current
leadership to offer an alternative policy to those presented in the manifestos
of 2017 and 2019 because it might remind people of what they were.  What is at
stake is so problematic that ‘anti-semitism’ has had to be used as a code for
those views and adherences which are found to be so egregious.  The danger for
the ruling elites of not having an alternative party that can contain and
restrain opposition to its rule is that an oppositional popular movement will
transcend the available political forms of expression and create new ones that
are less easily incorporated into the UK project.

Installed in the Labour Party are the binary tensions of the regime of which it
is a creature.  The party is often characterised as a broad church.  It is this
inclusiveness that enfolds the splitting that is at its heart. However the move
in the direction of socialism under Corbyn’s leadership brought about such a
hysterical panic that some larger existential danger was evoked.  Leading
figures in the party were shunned and ostracised as if some dreadful contagion
had been encountered.  Curses were hurled. Ordinary civility and solidarity was
abandoned. Strange judicial confessional processes were entered upon. 
Humiliating pubic apologies were sought.  People were slandered and misquoted. 
Oddly skewed investigations were carried out, followed by demands for
contrition.  It was as if some deep secret bond of loyalty had been
transgressed.  The evidence is that the Labour Party under Corbyn presented a
challenge to the foundations of the regime.  It is the role of the Labour Party
to absorb and channel revolutionary energy rather than enact it. It felt as if
the party was being taken away from its proper role of loyal opposition.  All
the fundamental primordial defences were invoked, as if the issue was
existential, life or death, involving a deep elemental struggle between good and
evil.  This could explain why the coded test of anti-semitism (expressed in
thought, action, utterance, implication or association) was adequate to the
emotional extremities that needed to be deployed. Like an infant dragged from
its mother, or like a subsidiary space craft losing contact with the mother
ship, the Labour Party was cast into vertiginous dark space. Timorous in
engaging with this revolutionary space, the Corbyn leadership were intent on
maintaining the illusion of inhabiting a broad church. They agreed to their
sworn enemies’ demand to include the policy of a second referendum on EU
membership in their manifesto thus hobbling any chance it might have of being
elected to government in 2019. The new leadership knows no such restraint. Its
collapse is absolute. It is getting down to details, seeking out a new dress
code and practicing postural correctness before the union flag, a reassertion of
patriotic allegiance so antiseptic it is as if the Party had been infected by an
alien creed. 

The Labour Party under the leadership of Keir Starmer is failing to hold
together the tension between the elements that brought it into being and that
have made it such a crucial instrument for conducting the power of the ruling
class. 


Posted on January 30, 2021February 19, 2021


CV-19 IMPACTS: REGIME CHANGE? HOW DID WE GET INTO THE STATE THAT WE’RE IN?

This is the fourth piece in the most recent series.  The first was a general
outline of why, during this pandemic, the UK regime was breaking up.  It
advocated bringing ecological thinking together with socialist ideas to
facilitate this and called for a movement for environmental and social justice
rooted in a localised network of activist citizen reporters building a big, deep
and diverse picture of our lives under Covid and after.  The second traced the
roots of the human story from the earliest female-oriented human societies
through the male ‘take over’ of the neolithic agricultural revolution to the
patriarchal nation states under threat in our contemporary world.  The third
explores the UK from an ecological and bioregional perspective, pointing out how
new forms of resource use need to be adopted.  This fourth piece explores the
political structure of the UK regime.  I started writing a blog in May of last
year because I couldn’t write plays.  The pieces I wrote from then until
September were, like this current series, provoked by the Covid crisis and
expressed a yearning for a popular movement against the dreadful Tory
government.


It is not surprising that the shock of the pandemic is precipitating a general
crisis.  The crisis will end the current UK regime, formed during the
revolutionary settlement of 1688, which rules through ‘the monarch in
parliament’. We cannot have regime change without ending capitalism.  The fuller
participation of people in the organisation of society, making decisions about
what is valuable and what we should invest in, is incompatible with capitalism.
The regime in the UK disguises itself as a parliamentary democracy.  The
monarchy is wrongly supposed to have ‘only’ a symbolic or ceremonial role. 
Capitalism is falsely described as ‘just’ an economic system. 

Is what is true of the UK regime also true of other nation-state regimes?   Is
the UK regime the original that other states more or less copy?  Nation states
are a system and they conform by resembling each other in certain key
functions.  They have sovereignty and this forms the basis of their agreement
with each other.  The formation of nation states is an aggregative process. 
They come into being together.  When did this process begin?  How was it worked
out?  The idea that nation-states are generated in the break-up of empires is
familiar.  When Germany in 1991 recognised Slovenia, previously a part of
Yugoslavia, it precipitated its break up. From 1945, during the decolonisation
process that followed the second world war, the European empires were broken up
into nation states.  In this process, by and large, the template constitutional
form, the model, was provided by the USA.  This had been the first nation state
formed as it gained independence from European imperial domination.  Haiti may
have been the second though its continued independence was compromised by
continued oppression and debt.  I can’t go into a lot of detail here.  You get
the picture.  

The nation state is a particular form of human group organisation that first
occurred in the Western part of the Eurasian landmass.  Its original components
were derived from the break-up of the Roman Empire in the complex process of
migration and settlement that happened from 300 years after Jesus Christ was
born and continued its development until the present day.  The commonly accepted
crucially formative moment was the treaty signed between the European powers in
Westphalia in 1648 at the end of the Thirty Years War.  The 1300 year long
movement was propelled by the structural and institutional energies of
patriarchy (i.e. it was based on the collective oppression of women) and the
development was collateral with that of capitalism.  1649 was the year the
English Parliament tried and executed Charles I for treason; 1660 was the
restoration of the English monarchy, ending the English Civil War; 1688 saw the
constitutional settlement which brought the current UK regime into being; the
foundation of the Bank of England was in 1694.

Unsurprisingly, since its components were derived from imperial structures, the
nation state was a particle of empire.  Its monetary systems, based on national
currencies, accumulating wealth towards ‘the head’ or the capital, thus forming
capital, propelled expansion. Sovereignty constantly sought (and seeks) to
extend itself. Borders were decided by war. Through its mercantile and then
industrial development the European nation states created empires. From 1945
this imperial system transitioned, augmented itself and engaged in further
financialisation. This was accompanied by an internationalisation of financial
markets, trading principally on differences between currencies. The abandonment
in the early 1970s of fixing the value of the dollar to gold was significant in
the escalation of these processes known as neoliberalism and globalisation.  It
was during this process that nation states appeared to be less influential in
the circulation of value and many were dwarfed by multi-national companies. They
became effectively competitors, deregulating and holding down wage costs, for
inward investment from international corporations, . The period from the
mid-1970 to 2008 saw a struggle between democracy and the international
financial system that created a succession of modifications of state financial
structures. This recent history is described by Wolfgang Streek in Buying Time,
The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism.  The issue of nation
state/government indebtedness is central to the crisis precipitated by the
corona virus. The basic components in the recent story are the same as those
that were brought into play when a group of bankers set up the Bank of England. 
The deal was that the bank was permitted to print money if it would make loans
to the ‘King in Parliament’ i.e. the government, to conduct a war against
France.  This was the first central bank.

So what is the origin and nature of the UK regime, the nation-state form
characterised by Parliamentary Monarchy? In order that our society can be
reorganised and renewed in the light of the changes in our environment,
signalled by the pandemic and global warming, this institution needs to be
replaced.  However this needs to happen from the bottom up.  Productive and
creative activity needs to be regenerated through people’s common understanding
of what people’s needs are.  A version of what needs to take place is described
by foundational economics.  How the perception of people’s vulnerability can be
operationalised into an inspirational productive strategy requires participatory
democratic bodies close to where people live.  To engage with human
vulnerability our society needs to base itself on processes much more akin to
those that flowed through the earliest human societies oriented towards
reproductive needs and the physiological rhythms of human females. The awareness
of education, teaching and caring as social priorities has been critically
heightened by the pandemic. For this reorientation to happen the state needs to
be radically decentralised.  Its functions need to be dispersed.  Many people
will have sensed during the pandemic how crucially important local government is
and how close to people’s needs the services it provides are.  The renewal
process starts and continues with attention to the most vulnerable, turning
human need into productive inspiration.  Dispersion of the state obviously
requires the dispersion of investment decisions, of finance and banking.  To
de-capitalise is both a geographical and redistributive process.  

In my play The Field events of this sort are described.  The crisis that the
play depicts is precipitated by government failure in the face of an ecological
challenge precipitating a financial disintegration. A popular ‘localist’
movement follows, with a radical government pushing through reforms.  This
encounters a massive movement of resistance not unlike the MAGA movement in the
USA, fuelled by male rage.  I wrote the play in 2019 and we made a public online
reading of it in April 2020.

Our current social organisation, our state, inhibits participation and therefore
destroys resilience. This is decisive in a period that is characterised by
ecological changes, like the pandemic. The tendency towards passivity and
confusion is to do with the deceptive nature of our political institutions.  The
rule of the political elites must be disguised by democratic and participatory
structures. People are induced into collaborating in their own oppression.  The
problematic of patriarchy is that rule cannot be imposed simply and singly by
brute force and terror.  The concealed nature of patriarchal power is that it
rests on power over women’s power.  This source of power has to be hidden
through making it appear sacred. The secularisation that has accompanied the
development of state forms based on kingship preserves the sacred core of this
form of power.  Kingship and sovereignty, the divine right to rule a given
territory, meets the problem of how those who are ruled can be convinced of this
authority.  Kantorowicz sheds light on this.  He calls his work, The King’s Two
Bodies, a study of medieval political theology.  The King has a temporal/human
body and an eternal/divine body.  This latter manifests the continuity and
assumption of power.  The king is dead, long live the king! 

The study of political theology associates Kantorowicz’ work with that of his
contemporary, Carl Schmitt who wrote about politics in the context of the rise
of the National Socialist Party in Germany in the 1930s and who invented the
idea of the state of exception.  This is a moment when democratic and judicial
processes are suspended.  This suspension is undertaken apparently to protect
the very processes that have been suspended.  The justification is the
identification of an egregious threat to the underlying stability of the state. 
What it calls into play is the basic assumption of power by the King or the
ruling group.  They, as it were, stand behind the constitutional structures. 
The power that is assumed is the power over life and death.  

In Piketty’s book, Capital and Ideology, he describes the reorganisation of
state power in the French Revolution that started in 1789 as being a
renegotiation of the relationship between ‘regalian’ power (the assumption of
power over life and death) and the power of the individual over his or her
(private) property.  The state retains the ‘regalian’ power as long as it
protects the freedom of the individual as embodied in private property. The
state of exception suspends these latter rights in order to protect them and
utilises state violence to do so.  The analysis that Piketty gives, which relies
on the work of Blaufarb in his book, The Great Demarcation, where the transition
from the trifunctional state to the property state is described. This also
throws light on how these same political components were combined as a result of
the English Revolution in the settlement of 1688.  I am drawing attention to
this because the way our state is structured is such that the exception is the
rule.

Another way of thinking about this is to consider the provisions of Terrorism
and Counter Terrorism legislation.  Another is to consider how political parties
work and how the difference between them is constructed; what remains the same
when there is a change of government.  Another is to consider the meaning of the
oath of allegiance, sworn by all elected members of the UK parliament except
those from Sinn Fein who refuse to take up their seats.  The allegiance sworn is
to the crown.

Where does sovereignty lie?  (By the way, I will return to the significance of
the fact that the some of the earliest English monetary units were coins called
sovereigns and crowns).  Does it lie with the people?  It appears to.  The House
of Commons only assumed sole legislative power in 1911 when the House of Lords
had to cede its power to impede legislation in a dispute about progressive
taxation (Piketty p.163).  Has sovereignty in the UK regime gradually, a step at
a time, come to lie with the people?  The final move towards universal suffrage
was in 1928 when women gained political equality with men.  Is the sovereign,
the monarch above the law, the source of the law or subject to it?  The central
part of Kantorowicz’ book is devoted to the work of Henri de Bracton, the
English political philosopher who wrote De Legibus et Consuetunibidis Angliae
(The Laws and Customs of the English, 1235 CE). This is mainly concerned with
the question of the king’s relationship to the law.  He wasn’t alone in the work
of formulating and arriving at conclusions about this question. It was a major
preoccupation of thinkers and administrators from this formative period in the
13th century through the English Reformation (1527) (when the English Monarch
became the Head of the Church of England), up to the execution of Charles I
(1649) and onward to the revolutionary settlement of 1688.  When Charles I was
executed the question was raised as to whether it was the temporal human king
whose life was ended or that of kingship.  At one point during the Civil War the
cry from parliament was ‘We must defy the king in order to defend the King’. If
the King was not enthroned in Parliament was he still the King?  Did the crown
remain in parliament? Bracton’s conclusion, 400 years previous to the English
Civil War, was that a ruler could only be called king if he exercised power in a
lawful manner.

As the actual power of the sovereign appeared to diminish and become ‘only’
symbolic, the sovereignty of the people appeared to augment and actualise
itself. This is myth. Friedrich Engels was quick to point out the anomalous
nature of the English regime (The Condition of England by Friedrich Engels
Vorwarts! No.75).  He describes how the power of the crown seems to have been
reduced to nil and yet the constitution cannot exist without the monarchy.  He
comes up with the image of an inverted pyramid where the apex is at the same
time the base: ‘and the less important the monarchic element became in reality
the more important did it become for the Englishman.  Nowhere, as we all know,
is a non-ruling personage more revered than in England'(Engels op.cit.).  It is
as if the sovereign presents, as a function of its apparent distance from
politics, the essence of the people. 

Although the English or British example seems so specific, the regime, the
constitutional arrangement, is an outcome of a historical process that becomes
visible in the years following the break up of the Roman Empire and shares this
provenance with other European nation-states.  The English model was formative
in this process.  It managed to resolve key issues of sovereignty that were
influential in European nation-state formation in this extended period (400 –
1648CE).  I want to emphasise the point that nation states come into existence
as a system through processes of mimesis.  A crucial part of this mimetic
process is the way in which in war the opposing armies line up against one
another.  Wars are the decisive means of determining sovereignty in the
establishment of borders.  The English state was an early developer in its
refinement of kingship as the hidden core of the state and it was an early
developer of advanced industrial capitalism and imperialism.  There is no logic,
as I have said elsewhere, that would lead us to believe that since, in both
these respects, it was first in, it will be first out.  However the UK
resistance to becoming a modern republic may make it, under the kind of crisis
circumstances like those of the CV-19, particularly fragile and in danger of
break-up.

The danger posed by the secession of the American colonies in the war that
started in 1776 and the French Revolution 1789 was considerable.  Only resolved
for a time by the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. The relationship between the
English and French revolutions, that happened only just over a hundred and fifty
years apart, is a good example of the part played by mimesis in the aggregative
processes of the co-development of nation states.  This point is pushed home
when you also consider the impact of the constitutional forms that emerged in
the American Revolution that started in 1776. These latter were created out of
resistance to the English ‘monarch in parliament’ form.  However in replacing
it, it reappeared in the relationship between the President and the Congress,
though the significant adaptation was the separation of these functions.  The
attempt to retain ‘regalian’ power by Trump revealed the ‘kingship/monarchical’
forms that lurk under the surface of the democratic republican constitution. 
During the attack by Trump supporters on the Capitol Joe Biden made the comment
that Trump was not ‘king’ and the Congress was not the ‘House of Lords’ as a way
of expressing outrage and giving a sense of a society having progressed beyond
forms of power associated with a more antique regime.

It is important to gain an understanding of the history of this nation-state
form of which the UK regime is an example because it has been systematically
imposed, often with disastrous consequences, on much of the human population
through imperialism and neo-colonialism (decolonisation).

The idea that the Roman Empire went through a ‘break up’ as ‘barbarian’
populations moved into the Western part of the Eurasian landmass doesn’t fully
take account of the process of transition that these groups went through as they
interacted with the communities occupied by Rome.  This story is superbly told
in Guy Halsall’s book Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West – 376-568CE.  The
initial movements of these populations into territories colonised by Rome were
characterised by settlement and absorption.  In a wonderful description of how
ethnicities changed and were fused Halsall makes significant observations about
ethnicity itself.  The populations were incorporated into ‘Roman’ institutions
and structures.  The structures of imperial rule which had synchronously adopted
the Christian religion as the state religion, became the organising principle of
the cultural and political lives of the ‘invaders’.  The cathedrals and
bishoprics of Western Europe were derived directly from the centres of Roman
imperial administration.  

The Christian religion offered, due to its universalist philosophy, a good
homogenising imperial ideology that could give the emperor a model of kingship
that amalgamated the human and the divine.  The creation of a hierarchy that, at
its centre, had a figure that was proximate to Christ could validate the rule of
a human being who was blessed by divine power.  It was later that the idea of
christomimesis, the idea that the king takes on the role of Christ, was
developed.  The hierarchical structure of the empire transitioned into that of
the Catholic Church.  But this was contested.  The period in question was
followed by an ongoing contest between Popes and Emperors.  To some extent this
issue was solved by the organisation of the Crusades which started at the end of
the 11th Century.  By this time kingdoms had emerged.

Dynastic claims to territory were consolidated through the assertion of divine
right.  Borders were established through force and sanctified by holy
benediction.  The figure of the king who claimed allegiance from other
contesting leaders was anointed with the aura of godliness.  In the court
structure that centred on the monarch, the warrior nobility played out one
aspect of his power while the clergy, the holinesses of the church, played out
the other.  One gave restless obedience while the other supplied divine
blessing.

Looking backwards towards the origins of patriarchy in the male ‘take over’ of
the human group at the advent of agriculture in the Neolithic revolution that I
described in a previous piece, the emergence of the particular form of kingship
that laid the basis for the nation state was a specific solution to what I have
described as the problematic of patriarchy: how could men take women’s power
without destroying it?  How could they successfully create hierarchies that
combined the power of the warrior leader and the charisma of the shaman/priest?

Looking forward, the development of the king’s ritual, administrative and
military functions were characterised by what Piketty describes as the
tri-functional state (Piketty op. cit.)where the sovereign was surrounded by the
community of the commonwealth, consisting typically of the lords temporal
(warriors, nobles) and the lord spiritual (priests, clergy) and the
commoners/subjects.  The functions of these institutions transitioned into
modern ‘parliamentary’ democracy and the development of political parties. The
underlying movement of the two-party state replicates the vestigial functions
embodied in the tri-functional state.  By the way, this could explain the
strangely sectarian ‘religious’ structure of the Labour Party and the sacerdotal
demeanour of some of its factotums. Particularly, in this recent period, its use
of anti-semitism as a kind of coded ‘test’ of loyalty accompanied by
confessions, accusations, prohibitions, public recantations, disavowals,
ostracisations, heresies, ritual judicial procedures and witch-hunts. 

What disposes human beings to form groups?  This might seem a stupid question
since we are born into them.  They are a function of our existence. Are nation
states derived from human needs that are not determined by specific ecological,
historical or geographical circumstance?  Psychoanalysis has offered, through
its intensive intersubjective co-examination of humanity in the consulting room,
remarkable insights into human need.  Wilfred Bion explored the underlying
structures that prevailed in groups brought together in a therapeutic setting. 
In a sense what he lays bare is like the raw material of human group interaction
but his analysis has more general application.  He arrived at a limited number
of structures which he called ‘basic assumptions’ which determined the ‘culture’
of the group (Bion, op.cit.).  Sigmund Freud wrote about group psychology and
made observations of a sort that were to some extent the basis of Bion’s ideas
and he arrived at two basic forms of what he described as ‘artificial’ groups:
the Church and the Army.  The artificiality was connected to hierarchical
characteristics.  To my mind the other great thinker about group formation is
Elias Canetti.  In Crowds and Power he gives a comprehensive morphological
account.  Many of these thinkers recognise the significance of money.  This is
also true of another perceptive thinker, Alfred Sohn-Rethel, who explained in
Intellectual and Manual Labour, A Critique of Epistemology, how the abstraction
of value that money presents is inextricably connected to its role in what he
described as ‘social synthesis’.  I am going to go no further here in exploring
these important ideas that are relevant to our understanding of the state we’re
in. These thinkers were working when fundamental questions about social
cohesion, power and leadership were being asked as a consequence of the collapse
of the financial system in 1929 and the rise of fascism and national socialism.
 

What might be going on in a given group – the example I have given above is the
British Labour Party – may be typical and indicative of processes active in the
social formation of which it is a part.  To understand how deeply lived and
pervasive the structures of kingship might be can shed light on the fear and
loathing provoked in the establishment, the media and in the Labour Party itself
by Jeremy Corbyn as leader.  The party 30 years before had been galvanised by
the extraordinarily charismatic triumphant war leader, Tony Blair. He was a
winner. Jeremy Corbyn would be seen by acolytes, media arch-priests and
political battalion commanders as a usurper, not a ‘real man’, incapable of
pressing the nuclear button, unsuitable for the proxy ‘regalian’ powers bestowed
on the prime minister, a loser!  It was after the election defeat in December
2019 that the party had to be purified and re-sanctified.  This process has led
to its moral collapse and this is one of the key indicators of how far the
deterioration of the UK regime has gone. 

In the next piece I will go into more details about the specific political
contours of the UK regime as it came into being and as it now manifests itself
in its dissolution.  Just to reflect back on what I’ve said about the UK regime
being a particular manifestation of the European nation-state that based itself
on kingship of a type that was an amalgam of political forms derived from the
Christianised Roman Empire let’s look at Percy Shelley’s work.  The iconic
moment of the movement that cohered around Corbyn’s leadership was his
appearance at the Glastonbury Festival main (Pyramid!) stage in 2017.  At this
event he unlocked the poetic roots of the slogan (‘For the Many, Not the Few’)
that had brought increasing support in the election of that year, by quoting the
final verse of the poem, The Mask of Anarchy, that Shelley wrote as a response
to the Peterloo Massacre (1819) when the dragoons made a military charge on
Chartist demonstrators in Manchester:

Rise like Lions after slumber
 In unvanquishable number
 Shake your chains to earth like dew
 Which in sleep had fallen on you
 Ye are many, they are few

Shelley was in Italy when he heard the news of the massacre and the poem takes
the form of a nightmarish parade of the English regime, the embodiment of
murderous anarchy.  This was 1819, a hundred and thirty years after the English
imported a king from the Netherlands, guaranteed to be Protestant thus crowning
the movement that was initiated with the break from the Roman Catholic Church at
the English Reformation in 1527, and settled him into the ‘Monarch in
Parliament’ constitutional settlement.  Here are some earlier verses he didn’t
read out:

And many more Destructions played
 In this ghastly masquerade,
 All disguised, even to the eyes,
 Like Bishops, lawyers, peers, or spies.

Last came Anarchy: he rode
 On a white horse, splashed with blood;
 He was pale even to the lips,
 Like Death in the Apocalypse.

And he wore a kingly crown;
 And in his grasp a sceptre shone;
 On his brow this mark I saw -
 'I AM GOD, AND KING, AND LAW!'
 
With a pace stately and fast,
 Over English land he passed,
 Trampling to a mire of blood
 The adoring multitude,

And a mighty troop around,
 With their trampling shook the ground,
 Waving each a bloody sword,
 For the service of their Lord.
 


And a little later (just to drive the point home):

For with pomp to meet him came,
 Clothed in arms like blood and flame,
 The hired murderers, who did sing
 'Thou art God, and Law, and King.
 
'We have waited, weak and lone
 For thy coming, Mighty One!
 Our purses are empty, our swords are cold,
 Give us glory, and blood, and gold.'
 
Lawyers and priests, a motley crowd,
 To the earth their pale brows bowed;
 Like a bad prayer not over loud
 Whispering - 'Thou art Law and God.' 

Henri de Bracton must have been turning in his grave!


Posted on January 21, 2021February 19, 2021


CV-19 IMPACTS: REGIME CHANGE? ECOLOGICAL LIMITS.

Why has the corona virus pandemic been so devastating for the UK? The brutal
indicators of excess deaths per 1000 have shown the UK to be a major disaster
zone from the point of view of public health.  The economic consequences are
even worse from an orthodox growth-oriented viewpoint.  As I have said already
in this series it is the way the government has set out its policy as a
balancing act between health and the economy that have been the sign and cause
of its ineffectiveness.  The attacks on the public health system were central to
the austerity programme of the 2010 coalition government so a whole decade has
been spent grinding down the resilience of our communities.  Does the
government’s incompetence coupled with its corruption mean that the UK regime is
any less stable than others?  What is the underlying situation?  Can ecological
thinking help to distinguish between superficial and profound instabilities in
our political structures.

In the USA, of which the UK is a client state, the current crisis is centred on
the response of a population to the loss of industrially productive
infrastructure.  Exacerbated by the increased distribution of wealth and income
towards the wealthy during the recovery from the 2008-9 crash, immiseration of
large sectors of the middle class, casualisation of work, outsourcing of
production processes have created a massive reaction of disillusionment,
resentment and hatred of the central government.  So far this has been captured
by the right. Racism and ‘masculinism’ have been the immediate forms of
expression. The long-term devastation of the industrial heartland of the UK
which began much earlier than in the US, during the Thatcher government of 1979
onwards, has had similar impacts.  The dramatic consequences of
deindustrialisation are seen in a raw form in these two interlinked countries
and it is manifesting itself as a betrayal of the poor white male by their
ruling elite compatriots. This sector was bound by privilege, race and gender to
ruling elites who now appear to have abandoned them.  In order to understand
this unravelling it is helpful to look at the coalescence of factors that led to
the early development of industrialism here.  The story of the rapid development
of US industrial capitalism after the 1776 is well told in Trade Wars are Class
Wars: How Rising Inequality Distorts the Global Economy and Threatens International Peace by Matthew C. Klein and Michael Pettis. 
Essentially these two processes were dynamically linked but that is a larger
story.


The initial development of markets dominated by money at a critical scale took
place in the mediterranean area in the 14th century and were centred on the
mercantile centres of Genoa and Venice.  This network had eventually taken over
from the Greek and the Pheonician trading ‘empires’.  The sheer volume and
variety of goods, the way in which the merchant ships were the key focus for
entrepreneurial investment, called for a stable means of circulating , measuring
and storing value.  I’m not saying this was the origin of money simply that it
was at this point that money was operationalised at a level that created
previously unseen forms of capital and banking. It became systemically
significant. The obvious question arises: why did industrial capitalism start so
much further north?

Twenty years ago Philip Parker published a book called Physioeconomics, the
basis for long run economic growth.  In it he relates climatic conditions to
productive development.  Because he looks primarily at human need he describes
causes of development as being associated with homeostasis.  This is the
tendency for human beings to require their body temperature, whether they live
in the hot tropics or the frozen north, to be stable.  I don’t want to simplify
his argument but he attributes this interaction between human beings and the
immediate average circumambient temperature to be a crucial determinant of how
the productive infrastructure is developed.  Recently the study of
bio-regionalism has developed and become more influential. Focused on the
specific interaction between human populations and the immediate ecological
circumstances of a given terrain it has given us a redrawn map of the earth
cutting across nation-state boundaries. It has enhanced understanding of how
human beings like other species, depend for their material existence on
environmental resources and have an adaptive relationship to their habitat.  It
is in this way that a population or a species will reach a carrying capacity
determined by available assets. Interactions at a micro-level are related to
those at a macro-level.  In broad terms this makes the history of human beings a
part of natural history.  

Physioeconomics and bioregionalism help us to understand our situation.  Due to
industrialism and imperialism human societies have transcended their immediate
local supplies of environmental goods. The inventive use of input-output
modelling has given us a sense of this extension of impacts in the composition
of carbon-footprinting. Imperialism has exported the inequalities created by
capitalist development thus extending their exploitation through trade. The
colonised countries were (and are) sources of raw material for the industrial
centres.  The costs, for the owners of capital, of raw material (natural
resources, nature, or land) and labour (the production of labour power,
reproduction) could be massively reduced by imperialist trade.  This did not
simply consist of cotton or wood or oil but of human labour power that was
apparently free of any costs of production.  This latter was the basis of the
slave trade.  At the early stage the enslaved people were transported to where
the productive infrastructure could consume their labour.  In the second wave of
imperialism, globalisation, it was the productive infrastructure that was
transported to where the production cost of labour power was lowest. By the
second half of the twentieth century, on the basis of accumulated capital
infrastructure and due to political imperatives, the high wage economies of the
first and second waves of industrialisation had relatively high labour costs.
Expectations of a high standard of living including the ‘welfare’ costs of
public health and education had institutionalised these high costs.  The
advantages experienced by the initial centres of capitalist accumulation later
appear as burdens.  The austerity policies after the 2008-9 crash, brought in to
facilitate the massive state subsidies to the finance sector, were a way of
discharging this burden.  High wage costs act as a disincentive to investment so
the problems of the first industrial centres have been exacerbated.  As states
with trade surplus economies emerged, Germany and China in the present period,
they tended to distribute wealth to the elites rather than sectors of the
population are more likely to spend money and consume.  The elites tend to save
and therefore decrease consumption imbalancing societies even further.  In the
case of the UK as the first location of industrial ‘take off’, the first surplus
industrial economy, the failure of renewal  and investment has also been made
worse by the export of investment capital, benefitting from imperial advantage. 

There is no inevitable logic to the consequence of having been the first
industrial power.  It does not necessarily mean that the UK will be the first to
experience the full impact of post-industrialism but that is what’s happened. 
The first phase (1979-2008) of this movement, that is complex because of the
interaction between industry and empire, seems to have completed itself.  It has
left the UK as the beneficiary of capital accumulation that reached its peak 150
years ago. There is residual capital infrastructure and wealth and, due to
specific intra-imperialist relationships and conflicts, an over-centralised and
internationalised financial ‘industry’.  It has left the UK population muddled.

The last major exploitable mineral resource within the UK territory was North
Sea oil and gas.  The excess income derived from this enabled successive UK
governments to continue with the  ‘run down’ of manufacturing industries and
engage in wars.  The public housing stock was sold off as was most of the other
public assets, services, infrastructures, and wealth.  The UK regime is unstable
and will break up because the political elites have no more assets at their
disposal.  They have no room to move and have no natural advantage.  Did they
ever have?  What was the ecological basis for the development of industrial
capitalism.

The wealth and well-being of people must derive from the land and natural
resources with which they are surrounded and on which they live.  Of course
culturally generated skills and knowledge, even predispositions, must play a
part.  Ingenuity and inventiveness is natural and cultural.  Japan has been
through extraordinary economic and natural crises and catastrophes over the last
20 years.  Bending Adversity by David Pilling is a book about the particular
qualities of resilience that have shown themselves to be a part of Japanese
culture and society. Interactions between human populations and their habitats
are multiple and diverse and thus specific societies and groups and political
regimes develop.

Every human culture is grounded in the unique response of human capabilities to
the resources afforded by a given terrain and geographical position and is
specifically developed from the social and political cultures that are
antecedent to it.  The political contours of the British islands were formed by
the extent and nature of the Roman occupation from 52 CE.  Whatever preexisting
human developments – the British Isles were had a highly developed iron age
culture – it was the Romans who first intensively extracted mineral wealth and
organised agriculture in a systematic way.  The establishment of a major centre
in London and the building of a system of roads that connected up the rest of
the island to it was formative.  The extraordinary centralisation of
communication that this provided has been determinant and is still. Already the
benefits of the Thames river system and the harboured access to the sea were
established. During the Roman occupation this facilitated the export of raw
materials from the British Isles. Later the flow of trade would be reversed. The
subsequent invasion (400-500 CE) by Germanic people in the period following the
break-up of the Roman Empire kept within the geographical boundaries created by
the Romans.  The Norman invasion, once again abiding by the Roman boundaries,
was the last major movement of conquest and settlement that had started with the
movement of people from the east, probably responding to climatic changes, who
came into the western part of the Eurasian continent as the Roman Empire
declined. The colonisation of the American continent that began 500 years later
could be considered to be a continuation of this process of migration.  The
country submitted to a comprehensive survey of assets carried out at the request
of the new owners, the Domesday Book.  The suppression of resistance to this
settler colonial invasion was violent and programmatic. It was particularly in
the north that rebellion was most widespread, the suppression of which is
remembered as the ‘harrying of the north’. The imposition of a ruling
aristocratic elite was still being referred to during the English Revolution,
nearly 600 years later, as the ‘Norman yoke’.  

As the political nation states of the Western region of the Eurasian landmass
began to form themselves England was able to be peculiarly definite in its
constitutional construction. This was partly due to the sea providing both a
natural limit as well as a means of transport. Unity and homogeneity had been
imposed by the Norman invasion. I will address the political consequences of
this in another piece. The extraordinary natural harbour of the Thames estuary
and the expeditious uniting of wool production with maritime expansion meant
that within 300 years, England dominated the wool markets of Europe, even the
cloth manufacturing of the Italian peninsula was dominated by this import.  It
was rather the coincidence of shipping and wool that laid the basis for the
introduction of Italian banking methods (Italian bankers became influential in
England during the reign of Edward I) that extended the dominance of London and
laid the basis for mercantile capitalism and later imperial expansion.  

The Romans started the exploitation of most of England’s coal deposits and
thereafter, only when sources of timber began to run out from the 12th Century
onwards, did coal production recommence. Maybe the impact of homeostasis can
really be seen in this development in which the English, Welsh and Scottish were
preeminent. The English dominated the coal market in Europe from the 1600s as
they had the wool market. In 1905 the UK was still the largest coal producer.
This is the underlying basis of the industrial development which took root at
the beginning of the 18th Century.  Unsurprisingly the industries of cloth
production and this newly exploited energy source were brought together in the
steam powered looms which were so significant in the development of the factory
system.  But the first innovation was the Newcomen steam engine that was
developed to pump water out of coal mines.  Coal-mining in the UK was more or
less brought to an early end in the mid-1980s by the Thatcher government’s
declaration of war against what she stigmatised as the ‘internal enemy’ embodied
in the militant trade unionism of the miners.  This they could only afford to do
because of North Sea Oil. 

Although most of the mineral wealth of the British Isles has been extracted, the
land is rich and rainfall means that it is well irrigated though there are signs
that this land is exhausted. The ship-building that was so well keyed into the
coastal and forest resources of the islands reached a peak of competitive
success 100 years ago. The advantage that we gained from the early days of
financial de-regulation in the mid-1980s, being conveniently placed between Asia
and America and giving US banking access to deregulated financial markets, has
been eroded by information technology innovation. The ideology of the peoples of
the islands is badly divided and anything but homogenous.  The divisions between
the north and the south which can be dated back to the Norman invasion have
become more inflamed especially because of de-industrialisation. The huge
distortion that the city of London has created in terms of wealth distribution
has led to severe disruption between the rulers and the ruled.

A key-note in the speech Johnson gave to the Tory Party conference in 2020
projected a vision of the UK based on the exploitation of wind power.  He told
members that wind would be to the UK what oil had been to Saudi Arabia.
Johnson’s idea that wind would be to the British isles as oil was to Saudi
Arabia needs a massive correction, it was wool or coal not wind.  

The British state, the UK project, has absolutely no obvious strength nor
advantage.  The economy is highly indebted. This would be manageable if the
currency remains stable.  However, sterling has already been downgraded because
of what has been identified as political instability.  This will impact on the
sale of bonds and restrict the ability of the central bank to engage in
quantitative easing.  The impoverishment of the population by the 2008/9 crash
has increased and this can become a source of deep alarm and discontent as the
anti-austerity movement that started in 2010 showed.  The economic processes
that are entailed in the exit from the EU look very different in the light of
the ravages brought about by the pandemic.  The government are running out of
credible candidates as target ‘enemies’.  There are efforts to engineer a
connection between terrorism, left socialism, migrants, leftie lawyers and this
could be escalated if they get into real trouble but, because of historical
example, this isn’t an easy strategy for them.  They would need to prove
widespread treason and subversion.  They have edged towards this in their
attempts to isolate the socialist left but they have had to use the ‘veil’ of
anti-antisemitism to do so.  Since the real enemy to their project must be
social justice, egalitarianism, and environmental sustainability the
reconstructed ‘war on terror’ can not serve them as a vehicle of counter
resistance. They were only forced to construct this model of social struggle as
the collapse of the Soviet Union deprived them of an obvious and powerful
target.  It has turned out that the major consequence of the socialist movement
that dominated the world in the twentieth century is the power and influence of
the People’s Republic of China.  It is easy to forget that the victory there of
the Communist Party was connected to the success of the Soviet Union in
defeating German National Socialism.  Of course there will be attempts to show
that China poses a deep threat – in the attempt to persuade people of this, the
totalitarian nature of the Chinese Communist Party is always underlined.  At the
moment this also appears as an unlikely target to focus counter-resistance
around.  Will the external and internal weakness of the UK state with its
economy so deeply in debt, so dependent on imports in all fields and on
financial and related services that can so easily relocate and that anyway
depends on the stability of a currency that is becoming more and more exposed,
with a deteriorated education system, a damaged and demoralised university
sector, a health service ravaged by privatisation, an increasingly apathetic and
disaffected population that has lost a coherent sense of public responsibility
and deeply distrusts its political institutions, be capable of being blamed on
an internal or external enemy?

Do the weaknesses that I am pointing to mean that the UK regime is in a process
of imminent collapse?  On their own they don’t but there is no feature of the
situation which suggests any sources of strength.  The financial deregulation
can be pushed a bit further and undoubtedly Brexit will act as occasion for
this.  There is no North Sea oil nor can the UK look to be bolstered by a
special relationship with the US based on military adventurism and shared
security institutions. London continues to offer US banking an offshore
deregulated haven. The US is also suffering relative decline. The cost of labour
can hardly be driven any lower but undoubtedly the Tories will want to cut into
it even more savagely.  The cohesion of its original colonising project first
carried out through the colonial settlement of Wales in the 13th Century was
grounded in the domination by the English of the British Islands.  It created a
union with Scotland in 1707 and with Ireland in 1805.  It is clear that
devolution of certain aspects of local government to the Welsh and Scots by the
Blair government took place within the overall aegis of the European Union and
this was even more pertinently the case with Northern Ireland.  This union is
more and more fragile as we emerge from the EU.  Though this connection is more
symbolically important than actually necessary, its meaning is powerfully
central to the UK imperial project. One needs only to look at the Union Jack
flag for confirmation of this

I fully admit that the picture I have given of the ecological determinants of
the rise and fall of UK capitalism and imperialism is neither comprehensive nor
authoritative.  It’s a sketch. What can these considerations tell us about what
has supported the UK regime since it crystallised in the settlement of 1688-9. 
Eventually imperialist advantage is worn away and wealth moves to where labour
productivity is highest in order to recommence its cycle of dominance.  However
radical changes in available and sustainable sources of energy have taken
place.  What resources are available? The mineral raw materials that are the
basis for electronics are not available in the old centres of imperialist
power.  How can people reconstruct a productive and creative life conforming
with these ecological imperatives or parameters or limits? 

Each of the elements of an ecological history of the British Isles has a
political and social correlative impact. I will attempt to describe these
consequences and interactions in the next piece.  I am not advocating ecological
determinism. Also the focus on the UK may be misleading. The UK regime’s crisis
is linked to an international crisis that is expressed through the specificities
of the nation state. I am describing what factors determine the advantages and
vulnerabilities of the political elites in the UK but also indicating the depth
of the issues that must be addressed by a new movement based on ecological
thinking and socialist ideas.

Posted on January 15, 2021February 19, 2021


CV-19 IMPACTS: REGIME CHANGE? THE HUMAN REVOLUTION?

I wrote in my last piece (see below) that ecological thinking based itself on a
view of humanity as a species, a species inter-relating with other species.  I
pointed out that this thinking would play a part in the break-up of the UK
regime.  My question now is: can our understanding of human origins shed light
on the specific underlying shifts, movements and crises we are aware of in our
contemporary world?  Especially here in the UK and in the USA the signs of
fragmentation are provoking a kind of rage of reaction and it might appear that
the forces of radical patriarchy are strengthened through this chaos.  They are
manifesting themselves in an extreme form but this may be impelled by despair
deriving from a deep sense of loss.  In the midst of a tense exchange about the
story of women in human evolution and the revolution, the brilliant
anthropologist, Camilla Power, exclaimed in an email to me: “How can we use our
past to help us reach that: we have the bodies, hearts and minds today that made
that revolution before.  Care of children taught us how to do it!” Exploited and
oppressed but constantly moving like a very deep dance the human truths that our
bodies feel exact more vivid forms of listening and touching and community.  The
deeper the crisis, the deeper into the past we have to go.

Much of what I am describing here has been described far better by others who
know more and have thought more deeply.  I want to find a connection between
what I have learnt from radical anthropologists like Camilla, other thinkers and
writers and my own observation of what is happening around me.

Darwin’s work of discovering the developmental determinants of species underlies
ecological thinking.  The formation of the new species of hominids, homo
sapiens, was due to particular adaptations relating to selected
characteristics.  These manifested themselves in distinctive genetic changes. 
The erect posture of the immediately preceding species of hominids enabled their
occupation of increasingly diverse terrains which gave a wider scope of food
sources.  Collective organisation and communication abilities were related to
larger brain in successive hominid species.  The trade-off between larger
brain-size, thus the heavier, larger head, and the erect posture was complex.
The birth canal of the human female was compromised by the erect posture so the
size of the head needed to be accommodated by ‘early’ birth.  The human (homo
sapiens) baby was born into a state of physical, emotional and social
dependence. This engaged with the social and collective skills associated with
larger brain size.  Our species needed to be social. The reproductory and child
care processes were extended.  It involved protection against the most
significant competitors, big cats. In order to build group solidarity it was
necessary to isolate and disempower ‘alpha male’ selfish individualism. We
needed to counter the behaviour that led to the largest male being able to make
immediate sex for meat exchanges and to be destructively disposed towards
offspring from other fathers.  These were the basic material narratives that
selected for a high degree of social collaboration.  The development of the
larynx giving the ability to make complex sounds, the shape of the human (homo
sapiens) eye with the unique mobility of the iris against a white background
gave an enhanced ability to communicate. Human females’ collaborative ability to
control the rhythm of the availability of sex was connected to human males
developing co-operative strategies in hunting, thus enabling social sharing of
food.  The work carried out by coalitions of human females ensured that caring
processes were at the centre of early human activity and this was enabled by the
link between human biology and the cyclical movement of the moon, establishing a
social rhythm of sex and hunting.  The development of intersubjectivity and of
language both propelled and were outcomes of this new species development. This
specific aspect of early human development is outlined in the work of the
renowned primatologist, Sarah Hrdy in Mothers and Others: the Evolutionary
Development of Mutual Understanding.  The other part of this story is to be
found in the work of the Radical Anthropology Group but particularly in Blood
Relations: Menstrual Synchrony and the Origins of Culture by Chris Knight, a
colleague of Camilla Power who I quoted above. This social form of organisation
was successful and enabled the spread of the new species from the Rift Valley of
Africa 200,000 years ago to populate the entire earth.  The last significant
land mass that was colonised by our species was Aotearoa (New Zealand) settled
by Polynesian people from 1280-1350.

At the centre of developments in the sciences of primatology, social biology and
anthropology in the past 70 years is the work of a growing number of women
social and life scientists.  The influence of this new perspective is described
in Chris Knight’s book.  A good recent example of this work is Human Origins,
Contributions from Social Anthropology edited by Camilla Power, Morna Finnegan
and Hillary Callan.  The idea that human females were responsible for the origin
of culture and society is not surprising when looked at from an evolutionary
point of view.  But what difference does it make to how we look at our current
situation and the social forms which we inhabit?  Arguments are made that it was
human males and their collective organisation of hunting that played the leading
role in these developments and even that war played this role. This affirms a
view that male dominance is natural. What is surprising is what happened 12,000
years ago when our female-oriented species was transformed into a male-dominated
hierarchically-organised creature disposed exploitatively towards the natural
resources with which it was surrounded. This transformation is complex,
developing unevenly and gradually and some human groups exist where this
transformation is incomplete.

Let us, for a moment, counterpose the vision of human origins articulated by
contemporary radical anthropology with the vision given in Thomas Hobbes’
Leviathan. This extraordinarily influential book was published two years after
the execution of Charles I in London in 1649.  This event during the English
Revolution was of crucial symbolic and political importance and Hobbes’ thinking
was fundamental to the subsequent restoration of the monarchy and the eventual
settlement of 1688-89 which I believe is the foundation moment of the regime
that is beginning to break up. Hobbes describes the state of nature as a war of
all against all where the intercession of the sovereign, the embodiment of
reason presents essential unity.  The book encompasses descriptions of the
make-up of the individual, how in each of us we wrestle to attain our better
nature through processes that he connects with money accounts or rationality,
and about how the commonwealth resembles an artificial man that is above nature
and forms itself through a kind of contract. He bases his argument on deep
consideration about the the senses and the external objects of the world, where
contrary to Aristotle, he asserts an empiricism that diminishes knowledge as an
interaction between material agents and emphasises the immediate responses of
the senses to external stimulus and the separation of the subject from the
object.  Nature is the objective and increasingly measurable reality that lies
outside us and can be conquered epistemologically by reason.  The justification
for the authority of the sovereign state derives from an assumption that the
animal in us, the natural beast, is bad and must be struggled against through
the construction of a sovereign power and submission to it.  I shall describe in
a future piece why Christianity offered such a profoundly stabilising ideology
to empire.  At the start of this Christian narrative we find man and woman in a
natural state into which evil is introduced by the woman.  This state of sin is
only redeemed for humanity with the advent of Christ who combines, like the
kings for whom he was a progenitor, man and god. 

Murray Bookchin in Ecology of Freedom and elsewhere describes this initial
period of human existence as the organic society and its break up as being
signalled by the development of humans distinguishing themselves from the
circumambient natural world and dominating it and the synchronous development of
exploitation of humans by humans. These ideas have been influential on the work
of Abdallah Ocalan, a leading member of the PKK, whose voluminous Manifesto for
a Democratic Civilisation, written while in a Turkish prison, explores the
specific impacts of the beginning of hierarchical society in the fertile
crescent where the Kurdish people have their home.  He urgently asserts that the
first intra-group oppression practiced by humans was the exploitation of women. 
This oppression sets the precedence for other forms of slavery. Alongside his
reexamination of the origins of society and of human oppression, Ocalan and his
movement have criticised the central role of the nation-state in the liberation
of the Kurdish people. This is an extraordinary and inspirational example of how
re-thinking human origins has played a part in structuring a strategy of
resilience for sectors of the Kurdish people, especially those in Turkey and
Northern Syria.  The strategy is based on the liberation of/by women, ecological
sustainable development and participatory democracy.  This last principle is
based on calling into question the role of representation, of representative
forms, in the functioning of democracy.   The full global implications of the
political inventiveness of the Kurdish people have yet to be realised.  The
Kurdish revolution as it is conceived by Ocalan is an attempt to confront the
historical consequences of the development of patriarchy.

So what do we imagine happened during this transformation of human society, the
male ‘take over’, and what are the consequences for subsequent human history? By
the way I’ve written a play, THE STORY OF GO, about this event. It was given a
reading in an event co-hosted by the Radical Anthropology Group. There’s brief
description here. There were important ecological factors, such as the end of
the Last Glacial Period and the changes in herding patterns that determined the
movements of the big game that the human populations had come to rely on. 
Correspondingly there was the success of human population growth which meant
that certain stocks of hunted animals had been reduced by over-hunting,
transgressing the critical point in a population when predation prevents
replenishment of stocks.  Population growth also meant that the major
competitive pressure was other human groups, thus creating conflicts between
them.  There may have been other factors such as knowledge of terrain and its
biomass potential that derived from inter-generational observation, also
knowledge of herding patterns could have led to herd control and intervention in
breeding that was the basis of animal husbandry, the movement towards settling
land and cultivation may have derived from observation of river systems and
exploitation of tidal movements in adjoining land. A number of books give
accounts of the break up of the egalitarian society, for example, The Creation
of Inequality: How our prehistoric ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery
and Empire by Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus.

The move towards the prioritising of production over reproduction, the turn from
hunting group to war organisation, the re-emergence of alpha male dominant
behaviour, the territorialisation of power and space that arose from crop
cultivation and animal husbandry, the creation of surplus and the social
dynamics of storage and distribution all shifted the basic structures of human
life towards men’s dominance of women.  An important factor in this was the
ability of men to take women’s power and institutionalise their possession of
it.  To do this they mimicked the forms of power that women exerted over them. 
The powerful mysteries of reproduction, the isolation and protection afforded by
women to young females moving into adulthood, the first appearance of the
menstrual blood, were ritualised and men were excluded.  Often in the current
life of hunter gatherers this secrecy, exclusion, withholding and protection is
the basis for social play.  Men copied their exclusion from the menstrual hut in
the construction of men’s hut where they also performed rites of passage that
involved blood and scarification. There, in these sacred spaces, the warrior
leader and the shaman emerged as powerful actors. In recent discoveries at
Gobeklitepe, one of the earliest discovered neo-lithic sites dating from 11,700
years ago and situated near the border town of Urfa in Southern Turkey it
appears that the dynamic of the process of cultural development reverses a
simple mechanical materialist explanation.  The creation of ceremonial sites
connected to the burial of human remains and to the dramatisation of the border
of the world of the dead were laid out in accord with the emerging knowledge of
astronomy.  The evidence is that these sites which were in continual development
that would have required the organisation of, and provision for, large groups of
workers and thus it was these sites which preceded the developments in animal
husbandry and crop cultivation made necessary by the organisation of their
construction.  The need to exercise symbolic power drove the organisation of
production.

The need for men to exert their control over the symbolic order, to create
exclusive sacred spaces connected to power over life and death, was based on
territorialisation and secrecy. Knowledge was to be the privilege of the
hierarch and be controlled through control of space.  The driving energy was
men’s exclusion from reproduction.  The continual impossibility of dominating
women’s bodies drove the cultural project forward.  The energies derived from
the oppression of women were effectively the energies of human reproduction
recathected through men’s domination and control.  Men’s power was and is
effectively women’s power.  The continual social enactment of domination is the
very structure of the political institutions that we live in.  Men’s power is
their power over women.  This domination is not an event but rather a continuous
process of theft and coercion.  It is symbolic and actual and it depends not on
women’s weakness but their strength – which at any given moment is their power
over men – and this is the basis of their submission and incorporation into the
social project dominated by men.

In fact one of the crucial processes that lies at the core of patriarchal
cultural appropriation is a process of inversion. The stories and images of the
truth of human origins in the work of human female coalitions are re-played so
that the basic energies can be incorporated in a re-writing of the story that
inverts the basic images and movements. This cultural appropriation through
inversion and incorporation retains the source energies of the narratives. 
Symbolic power was taken from women but my further point is that this is a
continuous process.  It is in this way that men’s power is only their power over
women and this power is women’s power re-cathected through the institutional
forms of patriarchy. 

The energies that were engaged with as the process of male ‘take over’ started
are effectively those which fuel our current social and political institutions.
It is in this respect that the story of origins becomes important in terms of
our understanding of the basis of our society and how it can change.  The
presence of the power of the feminine and the story of the preceding organic
society whose primary organisational principle was the reproductive activity of
human females are seen in cultural manifestations everywhere. Anthropologist are
skilled at ‘decoding’ the myths and stories in which the core values of women’s
culture are revealed inside the, sometimes scarcely visible, patriarchal
carapace.  But also in corporeal terms this other world, the world of the body
and the collective, is constantly resisting the mental dominance of the male
abstract, virtual, oppression. For a wonderful description of how hunter
gatherer cultures can help us to contact our collective sensuality particularly
in this pandemic see Morna Finnegan’s talk to the Radical Anthropology Group,
Touched: Hunter Gatherers and the Anthropology of Power. This is why social
change seems so dynamically linked to a return to our real nature.

It is the continuous nature of this cultural project that impelled patriarchy to
construct a relationship with eternity and infinity in order to enact the basic
assumption of male power.  It is almost as if this culture is energised by ever
more superior forms of power, as if perhaps this is like the helplessness men
encounter when faced by women’s power or beauty, or their mother.  Marx
describes the cell form of capitalism as a commodity and describes how this
object is endowed with a kind of power that he associated with fetishism. Look
at Chapter One of Part One of Volume One of Capital He describes a system in
which things have power over people. Capitalism is a development of patriarchy
and it manifests itself in a typically mystified or disguised form.  It presents
like an economic system rooted in humanity’s god-given nature.   Posing as an
economic system it separates itself from the political forms that give it a
rational carapace.  It ‘dis-embeds’ itself from real social human processes. The
developmental movement is continually towards higher and higher degrees of
abstraction.  The circulation of commodities appears as the circulation of
money;  money appears as the circulation of quantities, money quantities appear
as credit, credit money then appears as digitalised entities, money appears as
information.

The early organisation of patriarchal culture is enacted in the figures of
warrior leader and the shaman/priest/spiritual leader.  These figures are the
core components of kingship.  This political structure is the basis of modern
state organisation.  Power over life and death – I believe this is what Foucault
refers to as the concern of bio-politics – which is the prerogative of the state
must be sanctified by an appeal to a higher authority which acts as a ‘basic
assumption’ (see the work of Wilfred Bion)  in the human group.  To achieve
this, power must disclose itself as right.  Just as physical force and spiritual
power must be virtually separated so that they can be brought together as the
power of government.  This is reconciled in the production of knowledge as
secrecy.  It admits of a fundamental splitting of human capability. 

In Thomas Piketty’s extraordinary study of modern politics Capital and Ideology
he examines ideology initially from the point of view of the trifunctional
state, the state form that existed in its clearest manifestation in the
pre-revolutionary French state. There the basic operation of kingship, of
sovereignty, was acted out through the three estates: the nobles, the clergy and
the populace.  He traces the development of these forms through the
revolutionary period as they make their appearance in the modern ‘democratic’
state.  He describes the action between the key political parties as being
tributes from this earlier state form, the Merchant Right versus the Brahmin
Left. The dance ritual of the modern state is a play between the vestiges of the
warrior class (the Lords, nobles however constituted, reflected in the Tory
Party in the UK, those who assume a god-given right to rule) and the clergy (the
intellectual classes, the media, legal systems, the Labour Party in the UK).
Piketty, constructing an international model, alludes to the Indian caste system
in calling these secularised clergy, the Brahmin. We can see clearly in this
organised and ritualised political form the original embodied forces that lay at
the origins of patriarchy.  This dance between the different aspects of state
power keeps the status quo balanced like a gyroscope and the basic energy is the
suppression that derives from the constant reduction of women to objects, either
as symbolic commodities or as functional providers and generators of labour
power.

I believe the corona virus pandemic has sheered the outer casework from this
weird machine so we can see the key operations of kingship, patriarchy, racism
and look into the core processes of our social lives. These are, unsurprisingly,
held together by women, consigned to the roles that are generative and
essential, that of caring for human beings.  Beside them, behind the veil of
justice and democracy, are revealed the heaving pitiful fearful creatures
crouching in despair and hope that their outrage and anger will restore their
king-like function. I am thinking particularly of the recent mob attack on the
Capitol in Washington and the crisis of the regime there as the republican cover
is blown off the monarchic core.  An immediate cause is a deep discontent at the
impoverishment escalated by the financial crash of 2008 and the subsequent
bail-out of the bankers and in the foreground is the rage of these ‘real men’ so
desperately afraid of weakness.  It is the symbolic reenactment of the Civil War
of the 1860s that keeps emerging but even deeper in the formation of the US
state is the agony of their modification of the structures of kingship that
animated the rebellion of 1776. This story moves like a field of force in the
undergrowth.  There is a deep ambiguity in the very formulations of a
constitution made in the name of humanity by slave-owners declaring freedom. 
Essentially patriarchy is hierarchical and is based on the assumption of
superiority.  Initially exercised against women.  As the ever more complex
social forms appeared this exercise manifested itself systematically as the
extraction of labour power from the processes of reproduction, ever pressed into
yielding product at lower and lower cost.  Racism inextricably linked with
slavery is driven by labour power extraction and cost reduction employing
similar cultural mechanisms of oppression.  Can the US regime admit this history
without breaking up?  This crisis is joined to the one that afflicts the centre
of the imperial system from which it appeared to gain its independence. 

I believe that the reason why our political structures are ‘double’, as
described by Piketty are because they derive from the problematic of patriarchy
in its suppression of women: how to exert violent power and justify this right
so to do through symbolic power.   Vast quantities of intellectual work and
social organisational effort were expended to reconcile whether the King or
Monarch was above the law or the source of the law.  I will describe in further
contributions to the CV-19 Impacts series and refer there to the remarkable book
by Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies.

It is the continuous character of this drive to exploit reproduction through
production that I am attributing to the endless project that patriarchy
presents.  To call it a take over could be misleading since power is constantly
taken.  Labour power and human need is constantly exploited.  This operates at
every scale and level in our society.  It is the source of male violence.  Its
theoretical extension lie in the bases of economics as it is taught and commonly
understood.  In this discipline we are told that demand is infinite.

During the corona virus we have witnessed the break down of what is called the
economy and we are told that public (and individual) health has to be balanced
with the health of the economy.  The economy is assumed to be a mechanism that
is dis-embedded, that has its own divine laws of motion.  Really the absurdity
of this weird mystical system can only be summoned by saying it is based not on
infinite demand but the underlying myth of infinite supply.



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