Nation Equals Rate Times Time

It is not money that renders the commodities commensurable. Quite the contrary. Because all commodities, as values, are objectified human labour, and therefore in themselves commensurable, their values can be communally measured in one and the same specific commodity, and this commodity can be converted into the common measure of their values, that is into money. Money as a measure of value is the necessary form of appearance of the measure of value which is immanent in commodities, namely labour-time.

Karl Marx Capital Vol. 1

As new migrants, we are accused of both stealing jobs and stealing welfare, we are told that we are health tourists and essential health workers. We reject being defined by those who seek to rule over us. We are thinkers and office cleaners, we are your hopes and your fears, we are lovers and agitators, we are greedy and self-sacrificing, we are the policed and the persecuted, we are the Other. Our children are likened to parasites and our acceptability is ranked according to our “usefulness” to the nation. We are criminalised and classified as “illegal”, and to become “legal” we must be loyal and obedient, we must bear heavy burdens but not become burdensome, we must know more statistics about Britain than the British Prime Minister. We are forced to justify our right to exist, work, live and procreate.

 

You will be subject to full conditionality and work search requirements and you’ll have to show you’re genuinely seeking employment. And if you fail that test, you will lose your benefit. And, as a migrant, we’re only going to give you six months to be a jobseeker. After that, benefits will be cut off unless you really can prove not just that you are genuinely seeking employment but also that you have a genuine chance of getting a job. We are going to make that assessment a real and robust one and, yes, it also will include whether your ability to speak English is a barrier to work. 

And to migrants who are in work but then lose their jobs, the same rules will apply. Six months and then, if you can’t show you have a genuine chance of getting a job, benefits will be cut off. That means that EEA migrants who don’t have a genuine chance of getting work after six months will lose their right to access certain benefits. So, yes, of course they can still come and stay here if they want to, but the British taxpayer will not go endlessly paying for them anymore.

The second pro-slavery law of 1996 was the "welfare" law, the "Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act," which in effect eliminated the US government's guarantee to provide minimal benefits to every indigent person in the US. This law puts a limit of five years on the federally-funded welfare support they receive and in order to get it they must join a "workfare" program. "Workfare" requires that people receiving benefits report for work or training at assigned places (usually in government agencies) or they will be cut off. In effect, the welfare benefit is transformed into a wage. But again, this is a non-negotiable wage. Consequently, these women, who are not a small percentage of the adult female work force, are transformed into a quasi-slave condition, a form of debt bondage.

Finally, we come to the immigration law of 1996, the "Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsiblity Act." This law has many draconian penalties for documented and undocumented immigrants even though the US is a society that is largely peopled by immigrants. But most crucial for our theme are the provisions that make a transition from an "undocumented status" to a "documented status" next to impossible. This creates a permanent sector of workers in the US who have no rights nor even a possibility to petition for them. This stratum is immediately transformed into a slave-like status because people in this situation have great difficulty in negotiating a wage. For an employer of an undocumented worker faces a small fine if s/he is discovered, while an undocumented worker faces financial catastrophe or even death. 

It found that the traditional view that the poor were seen sympathetically during recessions has disappeared, with support for welfare "largely confined (to) recipients of unemployment benefits". The report says there is a "general trend" where the public accepts that individual characteristics rather than societal issues cause poverty. Most striking was that this change over the past 30 years can be put down to the shifting opinions of Labour voters. Just 27% of the country's leading left-wing party voters cite social injustice as the main cause of poverty, down from 41% during the height of Thatcherism back in 1986. During the same time Labour supporters blaming the individual rose from 13% to 22%.

I am the wrist watch…  

From the general down to the newly-arrived buck private, they all wear me, they all swear by me instead of at me.  

On the wrist of every line officer in the front line trenches, I point to the hour, minute and second at which the waiting men spring from the trenches to the attack.  

I … am the final arbiter as to when the barrage shall be laid down, when it shall be advanced, when it shall case, when it shall resume. I need but point with my tiny hands and the signal is given that means life or death to thousands upon thousands.  

My phosphorous glow soothes and charms the chilled sentry, as he stands, waist deep in water amid the impenetrable blackness, and tells him how long he must watch there before his relief is due.  

I mount guards, I dismiss guards. Everything that is done in the army itself, that is done for the army behind the lines, must be done according to my dictates. True to the Greenwich Observatory, I work over all men in khaki my rigid and imperious sway…  

I am in all and of all, at the heart of every move in this man’s war. I am the witness of every action, the chronicler of every second that the war ticks on… I am, in this way, the indispensable, the always to- be-reckoned-with. 

I am the wrist watch. 

Stars and Stripes 15 February 1918

The Audacity of Dopes

As intellectuals, academics, activists, artists, concerned citizens, and social movements we stand in solidarity with the Syrian revolution and people’s struggle against dictatorship. Join us on Facebook.

(...) 

In a sane world, the left would first provide us with honest analysis: Foreign countries are arming, training, infiltrating and paying for an armed mercenary force to destabilize Syria. Honest leftists would call for the cutting off of all support for this foreign destabilization before all else. Until all foreigners are removed from the destabilization scene, stopped from blowing up civilians, mosques and churches, businesses, the industrial infrastructure of the country, how can anyone, in their right mind, talk of dignity, freedom and democracy? What world do these signatories live in?

In a sane world, the left would stand against Israel and the US, attacking other nations unprovoked, dropping depleted uranium on defenseless people to cause injuries and defects for all of future history, perhaps. In this world, the feckless, magical thinking left, petition against Assad.

Finally, the word "revolution" has been bandied about as a propaganda word, preventing meaningful discourse and analysis of the political economic structure of the nation being analyzed. It has all the meaning of "swish!", "goal!", or "home run!" these days; it is fashionable. It has become a media term and stripped of a meaningful descriptive role. And the feckless left promotes this meaningless glamorization: The wanton destruction of a nation through age-old divide and conquer tactics has magically morphed into "the revolution in Syria." What is happening in Syria is as much a revolution as the self-serving, sanctimonious, feckless left is a force for good in the world, that is to say zilch.

Fire Escapes

(The below was written as part of the group exhibition and ongoing project Landmark Seizures, which opens on the 2nd of May. Further details here and here. Please note that this was written ahead of Margaret Thatcher's death.)

However far back we sit, it always demands that we recognize its performance. Applause is of course optional, but be prepared for disapproving glares if you fail to join in. One pageant, or procession, follows another. Arcane rituals based on the oldest forms of branding the nation can bring itself to recall: Royal rituals, international sports, recycled fictional heroes, military celebrations, collective punishments enforced at all levels. Those who orbit closest to these spectacles drift – perhaps in vain – towards that most ancient promise: to belong. Advertising explains to us the most efficient means of doing so. Billboards, policies, shop fronts, profits, policing and urban planning move towards an ideal of a city that exists as theme park in the social imaginary. The collection of fragmentary experiences aggregating into a thematic coherence, or rather an over-reaching alibi: the future. Or, when that fails to convince even its most loyal ideologues, a tradition that always threatens to be lost in social reality.

Like all theme parks (or indeed all ‘events’ coordinated for promotion and profit), the mechanics of its production must remain out of sight, out of mind. Like the bottle collectors and burger vendors of music festivals, those struggling to hold the whole edifice together are contracted to remain in the dark, to skulk backstage. To perceive the production of the national pageant for an extended amount of time is to risk sharing in its accentuated sense of alienation. The cold, unforgiving Monday morning of an impatient, precarious service economy must also work to deny its hourly reality when open for business. If we can’t get our sandwich with a smile, then we would prefer it without any mouth at all. If the mouth must insist on acknowledgement, then security is never more than a phone call – or a threat - away.

Considerably less obscured than the productive forces upon which it is built, the image of security must remain visible at all times. And, unlike its productive forces, its competence must remain beyond rebuke; even when all evidence points to the contrary. Indeed, the militarized scaffold of the national pageant stands firm, even when everything else is calling attention to its sense of vulnerability. Like all national narratives established without mandate, it must be weaponized to instil respect. Whether it’s the waste and indulgence of the Olympics, or the ideological delirium of an unelected government, security apparatus must be shown to continuously innovate in its resilience. Even outright defeat must present opportunities to reboot it as a shared sense of noble sacrifice, even when we’ve passed the point of understanding what the sacrifice was actually for. Once the stage is prepared, emergency lurks everywhere. In the absence of it, imaginary scenarios must be speculated upon in obsessive detail, but within the confines of its designated genre. As much as a Royal personage, security apparatus is ever mindful of its role as the nation’s way of marketing itself to the world; or rather, the corporations constantly revolutionizing its movement.

So our pageants, our processions, our weakened attempts to belong, they move ahead with the synchronized efficiency of a school fire drill. Spotlights, surveillance, news anchorage, parliamentary endorsement, the visual mode of production must present all possible narratives within strict generic frames of acceptable possibilities. The outright failure of the pageant itself must be dismissed as the least of its worries. Instead, disruption - from enemies within or without – is the only palatable antagonist. Because, of course, the protagonist is the nation preserving its image with recognizable motifs, character conflicts, coherent settings, plot formulae. Maintaining continuity – or acclaim for the decorative aspects of a reboot – can only be challenged by that which it exists to oppose in the first place. This applies as much to official policy, talking points, architecture, or the ideal of the city as it does to the finite procession. By all means feel that alienation, but expressing it can (at best) remove you from the picture temporarily or (at worst) prevent you from ever entering it again. From that new housing development to the Royal Wedding, contained within all national pageants is the harsh judgment on those failing to proceed in pre-arranged directions, signed off by higher authorities. This is a generic requirement, not always scripted but implicitly understood in the exuberantly filmic language of CCTV, police data, corporate branding, property rights and city planning. Like screenplays, laws, regulations and ideology are preferably performed as a series of acts.

The national pageant rarely, if ever, aims to forgive. Indeed, to merely forget is insufficient. Only the violence of amnesia will do. Its purpose is to consolidate power, its capacity to turn heads from one side of the court to another with impeccable timing. To serve games and match, to muse over the day just passed in anticipation of tomorrow’s conclusion. So, Her Majesty’s Opposition repositions itself as the alternative it never once contemplated becoming, the fanciful quantum slippage from a hidden universe that never quite manifests itself, melting into a kind of sub-genre of science fiction; vanity projects beloved by the kind of novelists harvested by the press, or hack historians incapable of narrating the world as it actually exists. As mystified as anyone within this nation by science, the clerks of the public record find lazy solace in genre. The comforts of a familiar narrative framed within a fraudulently eternal present. Where, even if justice and a sense of closure remain ambiguous or subject to controversy, the story as a product can be classified to sit safely among those with which it claims allegiance. And so on to the next story claiming to be retold anew. Disbelief not so much suspended as postponed. If even then we remain unconvinced, it’s the job of the future to validate this postponement. The clear and present issue or need that is always about to be addressed.

The mirage of healthy competition offers its image of energy as an enthusiastic substitute for life. In almost neurotic denial of where its accumulated value ends up, it hawks its methods of making the national pageant more dynamic, coherent, efficient. Management solutions. Accounting solutions. Catering solutions. Technology solutions. Security solutions. Final solutions. Solutions. Salute. Behind this production of clipped answers, that only beg more questions, exist the troublesome remainder of social principles that exist without the finality of a solution. The social relations that the pageant wishes to bury with ever more intense levels of aggression and distraction. Outside of work, or spectacle, the reality of social reproduction dares to make its presence known on corners the pageant has yet to pass, where competition is relatively rare. Walk slowly and you may see them: People caring for parents. People caring for spouses. People caring for children. People caring for friends. People caring for the world that surrounds - or ambushes - them. People caring without much in the way of a solution to perform this process as final. The unpredictable energies that refuse to accumulate into the nation’s official image. However, the movement of life is the least of this enclosed image’s concerns.

The pageant of nation is, ultimately, a lockdown. But of what? Our government and its corporate partners have already abandoned previous narratives of progress or renewal. Neoliberalism once promised youth to its best beloved. From Morning in America to Cool Britannia, it aimed to revive a childlike yearning for choice, growth and individuality. A world where something somewhere everywhere is describing itself as a ‘start-up’. That it largely offers none in practice is neither here nor there. It’s about the story they coax some of us into telling ourselves; be it what we are as individuals or what we are as a society. All stories need winners and losers, heroes and villains. Repeatedly, we hear the story of who was indulged and irresponsible until the bubble popped; or, when to witness one fiction being exchanged for another. The culprit shifts, according to whomever has the power to shift blame. It’s a relatively easy process, as blame brings an idea of ‘us’ together, helps us to belong. At times, the guilty may even admit their culpability at a precise moment of scheduled judgement. One can be sure there will be further culprits, but the procession will move on regardless, to find ever more pantomimes of remorse, in honorable denial of one overwhelming taboo: Death.

If life as it is lived must be buried beneath the fiction of a nation that once was and a nation to come, then the ultimate reality – the present – is to be competed for in the name of ritual. This is as applicable to the talent show or (impeccably timed) news controversy as it is to our wars and political narratives. Events, be they unexpected or planned in advance by a team of consultants, are required to follow their own generic movement. As with all genres, it adapts to shifts in distribution or technology, cunningly disguised as a radical revision or reboot; presenting itself as open to alternative readings. But time and time again, its dramatic acts obey their own logic and demand we work to decipher it on its own terms. The unpredictability of life submits to the pantomime of a nation – the harsh contours of a city centre, the militarization of social policy, language and race as an ideal packaging of unity, unelected governments with new stories to absolve us of the one we were told only yesterday. Something was once here, and now it’s gone. Mourn if you will, but please observe the requirements of the programme; and pay your respects to the deceased even when the party kicks in. The national procession is an act of burial. Estranged and embittered, this is the family that only comes together at funerals. All we have to show for it is its death mask, applied to closed eyes.

TIME, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, PLEASE.

Obituary

She was born in the 1920s, with most of her childhood spent at the sharp end of the Great Depression. Though it must be said the economic situation following 1929 probably made little difference to her family, compared to what came before. Through passing autobiographical snippets, and anecdotes frequently cut short, one living in 21st century Britain can only speculate a rawer will to survive that was required to maintain the majority of families. Precarity cut much, much deeper then than it would even now. The welfare state was still, at that point, the stuff of speculation amongst the more discontented representatives of the educated and self-educated. The wounds and transformations of the Great War lingered throughout the 1930s. We should not need reminding that women and mothers were far from exempt from its effects. 

When war arrived again, the bombs fell blocks away and evacuation beckoned. In many ways, this would form her fondest recollections of childhood. Rural Britain was a different world to the industrial centres then being incinerated. It was far from a holiday, but one can guess that her sense of freedom was a relative matter during that period. The nation had demands, and the countryside demanded its young guests fulfill them. She worked. She always worked. From an earlier age than any civilized society should find acceptable. First tertiary, later industrial, and perpetually domestic; in accordance with the requirements of her class. For the greater part of her life, she worked in both sectors at once. In that respect, the night would offer scant refuge from the day; in accordance with raising a family - for all intents and purposes, alone - of her class. 

Despite a lack of vocabulary for it then, one could describe her political existence as 'intersectional'. A diaspora of roots, interests, burdens and beliefs lived with considerable difficulty, but little in the way of confusion or failure. A snapshot of Empire measured in terms of time as much as space. From the region when this Empire was generally agreed to have begun, to where we commonly assume it to have ended. Its territories being gradually conceded to its inhabitants made little difference to her sense of identity. The world was expected to move on, and for a time (for better or worse) it felt like it was. For all the destroyed buildings, limited resources and weakened manpower to which she returned, there was enough to work towards some forms of redistribution. For those who would always work, there would be work. For all her life, she would vote for this accordingly: Not in the interests of property, but the survival of herself and her dependents; and that now fragile, rare idea of a sustainable future. 

That there was work - always work - didn't prevent her enjoyment of life, especially in relative youth. For every bombed building and corpse, there would be palaces of entertainment and new people to meet. A community that ebbed and flowed, but always worked. They - rightly - felt they had earned their right to leisure. The Songbook of the day made this clear time after time. As much as it would emphasize a general principle of care; a principle rendered a little more aggressively in later years, until it was largely overtaken by a principle of competition. A culture that would follow the Depression and the Wars that surrounded it with curiously effective illusions of acceleration and change. The kind that paradoxically would, for a time, provide an image of security. An image that the two generations to follow would also be born into; in accordance with the requirements of their class.

Life lived abiding to the letter of the law in no way prevents antagonism or hostility. The social contract always had its small print, its anomalies, and its breaches. Some services, more repressive than many care to misremember, were often best avoided until absolutely necessary; but acknowledging their uses - even grudgingly - remained part of the consensus. Some grew ever more vital with her advancing age. Entering late middle-age, their necessity became more readily apparent to her. There was still work - always work - and, as with most people of her generation, that would be regarded as its own best service. When it didn't, that was a time to gather together and demand to know why. At the point when no answers were forthcoming, industry thought it best to cease operations entirely. All that remained for her was tertiary - and domestic, always domestic - work. This, at least, would continue until retirement. Indeed, for much longer than the forms of leisure she previously enjoyed. It may have also been the case that the more acute edges of her identity - as it was lived - became more blunt, while the realities of her class sharpened in ways not known since her youth.

So, as could still be the case then, work ceased with retirement. Or rather, waged work ceased. Domestic concerns continued apace, along with her general principle of care. Leisure was gradually replaced by television schedules ever more hostile to her generation, and the progress it once felt itself to be making. She had as much awareness of why this was the case as anyone; and indeed was aware of its aims before it was voted into power on four consecutive occasions. By the time it was voted out (though far from negated), detachment from its promises would be as complete as it was from her religion. It would be the last time she voted. One would assume that images of burning cities, as instigated by the last Prime Minister she would vote for, resurrected subdued memories of the childhood from which she was evacuated. Even at her most advanced years, she had an unambiguous sense of right and wrong. Her contempt may have been less energetically expressed in comparison with previous Prime Ministers, but not entirely softened.

Her homes gradually shrunk at a faster pace than her body, but their costs rose in inverse proportion to their size. For as long as she was an adult, she had always rented. She had never voted in the interests of property, only security. In accordance with her class, there were only possessions, and of course dependents. With every health problem that accumulated with advancing years, there came more complications from the services required to deal with them. The worth of a human being - every last one of us - is officially calculated in terms of cost and benefit, and not only by the growing legion of medical accountants and managers that came to conquer the NHS over the past two decades. A working class woman way beyond retirement age is as much a site for pharmaceutical trial and error as she is a patient; but this did not diminish a faith in the medical profession unlikely to continue into the next decade. For the care industry (and industry it undoubtedly is), the greater the number of problems the more sources of funding can be accessed. To her, once "service-user" and then "customer", this was a minimal concern compared to a need for treatment, care and comfort.

When she passed away, no tributes were made on the front page of anything. She occupied a modest column on the same family notices page she read with increasing diligence the older she got. The closest she got to being acknowledged by those in power was a series of posthumous bills from those same corporations now regarded as our most appropriate administrators, from cradle to grave. A phone call or TV show in hospital is a lucrative source of profit, as much as residences claiming to provide fulfillment in one's final years. Her minor claims on the state and its corporate partners for which she worked - always worked - were often disputed at degrees of confusion and time outweighing their initial costs. No one stood guard outside her door at great public expense in her autumn years; but unofficial assistance was always available. The best she could hope for was regular visitors; admittedly some more regular than others.

She departed owning (and owing) next to nothing, and never employed anybody in her entire life. Nothing of note was to be inherited by her loved ones, and nor was anything ever expected to be. She was put to rest with exactly the same title as the one with which she was born. She never ruined anyone's life and never once considered a career in the deliberate, violent immiseration of her fellow citizens. Any anger she may have felt towards classes other than her own was perhaps mild in comparison to how those classes felt about her and her family. Perhaps in accordance with her class, she passed away slightly younger than a woman who married into great wealth, who worked hard to advance the power of great wealth, and at the callous expense of all that mattered to society. To demand respect and ceremonial tributes to the latter, while forgetting the struggles, cares and common everyday triumphs of the former, is not only a slander against the subject of this obituary. It is a grotesque slander against millions of other women who lived and worked through the 20th Century.

Cross-posted here and here

Like This, Into This

... And A Happy New Year

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Thank you all.