It's the Final Countdown: For a New Blitz Spirit
It’s The Final Countdown: For a New Blitz Spirit
Paul Bowman
People are (Stupid) [People] Media
I have a greeting card from Tesco which features a picture of George ‘W’ Bush smiling smugly on the front; and underneath, the legend (attributed to the ex-President himself): ‘You can fool some of the people all of the time… so those are the ones you want to concentrate on’. I have a soft-spot for this sort of Gump-esque anti-wisdom. Another favourite of mine was delivered by Tommy Lee Jones in Men in Black. Will Smith cannot believe that people simply accept at face value the preposterous lies and misinformation that the MiB feed to the public. Will Smith argues: surely, people are cleverer than that. In reply, Jones says: ‘A person is clever. People are stupid’.
Now, I’m sure we could all say some clever things about this. And some stupid things, no doubt. But what I first want to say is that these two quotations have been bouncing around inside my head quite a lot recently; and what is worse, they are playing, looped, over an equally looped ‘ear-worm’: a soundtrack fragment provided by none other than the 1980s ‘melodic metal’ band, Europe; and specifically, the very end of Europe’s hit single ‘The Final Countdown’... So you can imagine how unpleasant it is in my head: ‘You can fool some of the people all of the time’; ‘people are stupid’; ‘it’s the final countdown’.
But it is the final countdown. And people are stupid. And, worse, a person is stupid. For it is not generic or general ‘people’ who write this and then that and then the next utterly moronic, ill-informed, embittered and wizened comment at the bottom of online newspaper articles about the student protests of the proposed government cuts; nor is it ‘people in general’ who phone in to TV and radio shows with their deranged ramblings about greedy, lazy, selfish students, who ‘want something for nothing’, and ‘why should the taxpayer pay’, and all the rest of it. Nor is it abstract ‘people’ who decide to frame a whole debate about the very nature of the provision of not just education but also – and I quote from a recent email I received from activists at Glasgow University – but also ‘Legal aid, the NHS, the Citizen’s Advice Bureau, Social Services, Public Transport, the Royal Mail, Education, Health Services, Asylum Seekers, even The Sandyford Sexual Health Clinic, everything…’. Everything. The paragraph ends: ‘everything is being attacked, much is being scrapped. This is our society. And we are not to blame, we want a different world’.
So who am I saying is stupid, here? The journalists? Of course! (print and other media.) The BBC? Yes! ITV? Why not! the Today Programme? Perhaps in particular… (I know nothing of Sky: I wouldn’t have it in the house.) But these and all the rest of the people and agents and agencies and institutions who are framing this debate myopically as if it is only about some students who don’t want to pay more money for a certain service are at fault, I think. Seriously at fault.
Aside from the fact that the majority of the students who are protesting today are not the actually the people who will have to pay more for their education (so how can they be ‘selfish’?) and aside from the fact that today’s students already pay for their education anyway and (moreover) have to work (often up to full time hours, often on the minimum wage) in order to live whilst trying to study – aside from all of this and everything like it, it needs to be said: this struggle is about so much more than student fees. Or rather: it should be about more than this. And we are also stupid if we think that the fundamental issue here is how much debt your little brother or sister or child ends up in.
We are stupid if we cannot see clearly that the student protests and the issue of fees is merely one struggle – perhaps it is the symbol, perhaps the metonym, perhaps the voice, perhaps because the students have come together most vociferously, more than other potential or immanent group – but it is merely one struggle, one issue, among many. True, it is one that sums up the nature of the sea-change or landscape change or genetic mutation or tectonic shift that we are facing and fighting. But it is only one part of something larger. And we have failed – and we will fail – if we cannot urgently and immediately persuade other people that the student protest is just an example – an exemplary example – a stark example – but just one among many examples – just one example of the ‘everything’ that ‘is being attacked’, the everything that ‘is being scrapped’.
This ‘everything’ includes the very idea of the public university, but it is more and other than the university. As the polemic from the Glasgow activists puts it: ‘The University is a factory, the school is a factory, the office is a factory, the factory is abusive. Banks and finance made this crisis, we will not pay for it, student, worker, lecturer, the unemployed. The poor, the hard worker. We are not against bankers or politicians, we are against the system they refuse to change’.
In a sense, this is about democracy. But before democracy, it is about the framing of the argument.
The KPunk blogger, aka the writer and theorist Mark Fisher, argues that the refusal to change anything to do with the financial status quo is part of a general mentality. This is a mentality characterized by refusal and denial and rejection and foreclosure, and it structures contemporary political sensibilities today. It rules with an iron rod what is allowed and what is excluded from so-called ‘sensible’ political debate today.
Fisher calls this mindset or worldview ‘capitalist realism’. Capitalist realism refers to the belief that the way things are is the way they have to be – as if were from God or from our DNA, and not from neoliberal economic theory and short-sighted government policy, that the contemporary the banking system or the state of the railways or the lack of post-offices, or the crisis in foster carers and post-adoption support or mental health social workers was created. But neither God nor our genes decreed that is need be this way. And that’s what we need to see and understand.
But this is what it may be hard to see and understand, because the dominant ‘realist’ idiom, the dominant ‘realist’ style, the tropes about ‘reality’, the languages and language games that determine what is discussed and how it is discussed blur this essential point, across too many scenes and contexts: everyday, media, political, common sense, and even scenes and discourses of protest.
In other words, the problem is not just the position which argues that cuts are ‘necessary’ and ‘inevitable’. Rather, the problem is the structuration of the frames and terms of the debate(s), the implicit rationales, tacit assumptions and overarching paradigm which conditions the very definition of what is sensible and what is preposterous – or indeed, what we are even talking or struggling about in the first (and last) place.
In this sense, it is the hegemony of capitalist realism which is structuring and guiding ‘media debate’ and the dominant notions of what is supposedly ‘necessary’ (cuts) and what is sensible (mass unemployment and double-dip recession), and what is preposterous (taxing the rich, making the banks repay their debt). It is capitalist realism which leads so many to insist on the necessity of cuts and to reject at the outset the plausibility of robin hood taxation, or cannot see the simple sense of the syllogism: ‘bailing out the banks caused this mess; so if you make the banks pay then the mess is gone’. Capitalist realism cannot see the warped perversity of the logic which runs: the big markets have failed; what we need is more marketization; or: in response to market failures what is needed is more marketization.
But people are beginning to see through this. Allow me to quote at length from the blog called ‘Lenin’s Tomb’:
The parliamentary vote on tuition fees is scheduled to take place on 9th December, folks. Roll up, roll up, come one, come all – that’s the day to be on the streets raising hell. I spent the afternoon talking to the very pleasant and thoughtful students occupying at UEL. The sense that we can win it, that we’re in it to win, not merely to protest, is palpable. We can break this government. Look at them retreating already. Lib Dems talking about ‘abstaining’ on a policy devised by their own government. Cable saying he will abstain for the sake of ‘party unity’ – as if he isn’t scared of his party members finding a spine between them and chucking the Orange Book crowd out of the leadership. The government saying they will delay the introduction of changes to Housing Benefit. Look at Ed Miliband in the Evening Standard today, trying to hitch a ride on the back of the student protests.
This movement is already leading, forcing others to adapt, and leaving those who don’t adapt eating the dust trails – and in its present form it’s only a few weeks old. Imagine what it can do if it keeps growing, and keeps going. Imagine what it can do in coalition with the organised labour movement. And that’s something to think about, by the way, if you’re a public sector worker facing the sack. These students can shake things up this much in such a short space of time. They’ve shown that militancy, commitment, imagination and tactical flexibility can do wonders. Trade unions have operated cautiously, conservatively for some time, based on a pessimistic meta-induction from the outcome of the miners’ strike, which says that the militancy never wins. But the workers have the power to bring this country to a standstill. The workers have the power to break this government if they want to. The workers have the power to put an end to a system that rewards bankers and spivs, and punishes the people that keep this country going.[i]
Rousing stuff. And, yes: we can win this. But the point is: this is not simply about students or fees. In fact, whether it’s three grand a year or nine grand a year, all students have long been paying the same flat-rate poll tax for what used to be regarded as a public service, a public right. But the poll tax that is student fees crept up on us, was initially a botch job, a quick fix, and it snuck through. It’s only now that they’re talking about tripling it that people seem finally to have noticed. But it is a poll tax. And it was the poll tax that brought down Thatcher.
But this is the problem: people are not saying ‘Hey, this is another poll tax!’ People are saying ‘Hey, I don’t want my family to have to pay nine grand a year, plus the rest’. And this is the logic of individualist consumerism. Don’t think like that!
And worse, worse, worse by far are the depressing comments posted beneath all of the articles about the student protests that I have read so far: people talking about lazy, greedy, whining, whingeing, selfish students; people thinking that student life is still essentially paid for; people thinking that a non-vocational education is a luxury, rather than something that is ‘critical’ in all senses of the word.
And we are stupid if we can’t quickly persuade more and more people in more and more places that this is not just a student protest. And the student protesters need to be persuaded of this too. This is a critical matter about the very idea of civilized, social, communitarian, interlinked, humane, human, civil, democratic, free society. Is this Britain-dot-co-dot-UK, Britain plc, Britain where only the shareholders reap dividends; or is it actually Great Britain? Never mind the University funding bit of the Browne Report. Point out to everyone that the Comprehensive Spending Review is a comprehensive death warrant. The universities are just the tip of the iceberg.
And this is the final countdown. The vote for or against the proposed cuts takes place on Thursday 9th December; this meeting here today is taking place on Monday 5th of December. In other words: we have Tuesday and Wednesday . . . . To do what? At least three things:
- Persuade the public: We Are You. Our struggle is the same as yours – the one that affects you: the one that touches on your job, your department, your social services, your family, your health, your everyday life.
- Point out to everyone: Those Lib-Dem MPs must vote ‘against’. The idea that abstaining is somehow a vote against needs to be corrected. If the Lib-Dems merely abstain, this is as good as a vote for the cuts.
- Correct people’s viewpoints. Individual people. A person. And people. Counter arguments with counter-arguments. All rationales for all of these cuts are all factually and morally and ethically and politically wrong. Show this. Clearly.
And how can we do these things? These are desperate times. Desperate times call for desperate measures. We are in the midst of an impending Blitz. So let’s construct a new Blitz Spirit. Let’s even invoke nationalism, patriotism. Gayatri Spivak once argued for the value of what she called the ‘strategic essentialism’ in forwarding a political project. The Right do it all the time. Why don’t we? A new Blitz Spirit. For we are under attack. We have been condemned by the Con-Dem-Nation Coalition government. They are trying to Blitz everything we all hold dear. But they have no right; no authority. We can counter-attack – now – with a new Blitz of our own: an all-out media Blitz. Now. This should be the new Blitz spirit.
Today [On Monday – the date of this talk], we have two days. We need a Media Blitz, please. How can you do that? Bombard your MPs with emails. Bombard all of the newspapers with letters. Comment on every asinine comment underneath every article about anything remotely related to this or these issues. Tweet your MPs. Tweet the Guardian, The Daily Mail, The Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Daily Show.
Argue this: these students, these protestors, anyone who now needs to start to protest and speak out and stand and be counted is in no way ‘the enemy of the state’. These people are appealing to the state, for the state. The enemy of the state is the ConDemNation coalition government, who are condemning untold numbers of young, old, poor, unemployed, migrant, invalid, commuter, householder, parents, children, taxpayers, community workers, communities themselves, communication networks, support systems, social and psychological stabilities – condemning us all, in different ways. And this condemnation of this multitude is what must be condemned.
But this multitude, the ‘demos’, does not have one voice. But it has, as one writer put it, ‘One No, Many Yeses’. So what we need, now, is a media blitz. Because it’s the final countdown.
Comments
Post a Comment