The ConDem Phantasy

Back before the ConDemNation actually started implementing these cuts, I had a conversation with a man about the way the UK was currently looking. It was one of those conversations where you both want to talk about politics and current affairs but you don’t really know each other very well and neither of you want to cause offence by diving in with your actual opinions before finding out whether they are going to be welcomed or whether they will cause offence.

 

As we tentatively initiated the conversation, he said something to this effect: “I may be naïve but I just don’t see what their [the ConDem Coalition’s] end-game is”. And this both made me laugh and gave me pause for thought. I mean: just what the bloody hell is the end-game of such obviously devastating cuts? Why do they want recession, the rich getting richer, the poor being flung down into abject poverty? What sense does it make? What is the end-game? What?

 

Talk about the discipline of the market is obviously nonsense, as the bank bailouts prove. Talk about ‘competition’ or ‘efficiency’ in most of the realms and public services being cut is a major mismatching of concepts, insofar as they are – as the words spell out – public services. So why the vandalism? And how is such ‘destruction’ still ‘conservative’?

 

Now, when it comes to psychoanalysis, I’m with Wilhelm Fleiss (as reported by Sam Weber in his great book The Legend of Freud), who suggested to Freud that perhaps this whole psychoanalysis thing is ‘merely wit gone wild’ – ‘overingenious analogizing lacking the necessary discrimination’. So, with that caveat, let me nevertheless suggest the following, as a way to make sense of (or to show the consistency – the ‘sinthome’ of) the ConDem ‘violence’, which is for some otherwise bizarre reason being packaged as somehow socially beneficial:

 

The left-wing thinker wants to reduce inequality in wealth. The right-winger sees (or claims to see) the deepening of this inequality to be a socially good thing. Bankers should be billionaires. The rich should get richer. And this is good because the rich can be generous, and can reward, and hence people can benefit.

 

In other words, if the left-wing fantasy scenario is that of the politicized pedagogue (one of Gramsci’s ‘organic intellectuals’), the fantasy scenario of the right is that of the big tipper: the rich guy, the lord of the manor, who buys everyone a round of drinks and gives massive tips to the serving staff – great guy, great night, everyone benefits from his affluence and excess.

 

So, we’re in a posh restaurant, paying hundreds and hundreds of pounds for lunch, being served by staff who are being paid a pittance. While the fantasy of the politically left-wing thinker is that what needs to happen here (or in general) is the education of all such workers and customers as to the exploitativeness of this situation, the right-wing fantasy is that it is good because it is the realm of the ‘big tipper’…

 

Whilst I know this is mere analogizing, it does seem to help to clarify two distinct political viewpoints, and to suggest something about the apperception of the ConDem ideologues. For, the lord of the manor can do all sorts: sell off his forests if he wants, give generously to select educational institutions, especially the ones he went to and whose tie he wears on formal occasions, open plush new hospital wings (like Carter did in ER ‘back in the day’), provide for the local libraries and swimming pools, and all the rest of it…

 

Yeah, right. All pigs are equal. Some pigs are more equal than others. We’re all in it together. We’re making the big society.