Recession prompted 'unprecedented' fall in UK wages

At our brother blog, the Lord of Reward. Something for socialists to applaud and libertarians to deplore.

Link here.

The body is gone, but you can still smell her...

Thatcher was a 'conviction' politician, but her conviction was based on the error that everyone else was just like her, but lacked her willpower. She began as a middle-class grocer's daughter in the east Midlands and  worked her way up the social ladder by hard work, perseverance and luck, she became a research chemist who worked on whippy ice cream (a 99 = iced Thatcherism) and then a barrister as she forayed into politics.
'There is no such thing as society,' she later quipped, to the outrage of the communitarian left.

This was a woman of iron will who was well networked. She had middle class upbringing. She married a wealthy businessman. She conveniently forgot these elements as she worked through her philosophy of personal industry and force-fed it to the British public in the 1980s. To Thatcher, it was only a lack of willpower that prevented mining towns from recasting themselves as hubs of entrepreneurship. This is the logic of a well-connected and highly mobile woman.

The Conservatives were voted in in '79 much the same way they were (albeit with the Liberals) in 2010 - on a promise to sort out the economy. And sort it out they did, as the hagiographers keep telling us. Catastrophic unbalancing of the economy would be another way of putting it. Scrapping industry because we can't compete with the Germans is nothing to be lauded. What filled the gap was the beginning of the pain: 1986's Big Bang, which revivified the City of London, helped keep the GDP figures handsome:

Unfortunately, it also provided a crack pipe for Westminster to smoke itself into the belief that there would be 'no return to boom and bust'. A 'shot in the arm', as the Americans would say, which kills the legs is no cure at all.

Thatcher's death gives us a glimpse of what is interesting in people's attitudes towards society. That she 'had to take on the unions', 'sort out the national debt', 'get inflation down' possesses the status of myth for the winners of Thatcher's policies. For the losers - those whom Thatcher believed lacked the willpower to be a part of her Britain - there was increasing meaninglessness, increasing poverty and increasing shame: in the North, Midlands and the West; in Scotland; in Wales; in Northern Ireland.

Thatcherism, for all its divisiveness, gave way to something much worse: Blairism. Blairism shared Thatcherism's credo of greed (they were intensely comfortable with people getting filthy rich), ramped up surveillance, tried to re-engineer the ethnic make-up of the country in a spectacular piece of gerrymandering the demos, but went to war dishonestly with Iraq, and then laughed off what was basically a war crime. Thatcher was an arrogant prig. Blair an insufferable eel.

Thatcher is dead, but her legacy is alive.

BBC: Should Britain let go of London

Link.

Britain - a call centre for London. London - a piece of 'real estate' for the global rich. It isn't healthy and it isn't good. It feasts on the nation. Like a vampire, it sucks the blood; like a zombie, it eats the brains. We at Burning Pyre believe that the provincialisation of the nation outside of the capital is the price to be paid for the destruction of industry, but better that than the collapse of the UK, thought the Tories in the 80s. It has a certain logic to it, but of course it's proved decisive to the growth of nationalism in Scotland and Wales.

The question is, how long before the regions bring a motion to Parliament to rename London Transylvania?

ONS report on regional economics here (March 2013).

Call of Cthulhu and Lovecraft's themes: an essay (part 1)

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

It is 1926.

The TV is demonstrated:

Mussolini is in power:

The General Strike takes place in the world's biggest empire:

The First War is a painful and recent memory of machines crushing men like insects and a whole generation of Europeans is raised almost fatherless. Communism has beaten off an international coalition and Stalin reigns supreme now that Lenin is dead. Oswald Spengler has already proclaimed in the wunderbuch of 1917 Decline of the West that the artistic and political culture of the West has petrified into an unalterable form of civilisation, of numbers and law-tables. Max Weber has identified the West’s administrative science of bureaucracy as an iron cage of an unfeeling, impersonal age. Franz Kafka has populated the iron cage with fictive victims. Freud sees cocks and fannies everywhere. Already more than forty years has passed since Nietzsche wrote the immortal warning, ‘God is dead.’ So to 1926: an American writer of pulp fiction named Howard Phillips Lovecraft writes a short story in the Gothic horror genre, called The Call of Cthulu.

Its publication in 1928 is not an historical event, but then works of genre – horror, romance, even science fiction – have never been historical events. Invariably genre works drop out of all but the history books of film, literature and stage as soon as the print is dry on the reviews. Whereas the near-contemporaneous Ulysses is talked about very much in terms of the historical context in which it was published; whereas the admittedly somewhat older Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is pointed at as a fateful ‘kink’ in art history’s path – so genre works are analysed generally without reference to the historical context in which they are created. Ulysses concatenates Freud, the death of god, the plethora of modern man’s leanings and his consequent exhaustion – it is timely; rechtzeitig. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon conjures up feelings of fragmentation and perspective which were thought – perhaps only subconsciously – but not yet expressed so forcefully. Perhaps that is the clue – art begets art. Cubism emerges from painting, bleeds into writing (Apollinaire, Faulkner, Wyndham Lewis); writing captures dream analysis and commits it to the canvas (Dali, Magritte); the news reels find their way into Dos Passos’s USA. Each cross-pollination provides extra momentum when viewed as Art with a capital ‘A,’ creating a sense of its own relevance and historicity.

But horror – a genre – remained mere entertainment, outside of the boundaries of serious art and a mere reflection of the times, not a commentary on them, as if entertainment could only unwittingly catch the diseases of the age and not diagnose them.

Works which have history on their side are specifically and consciously new pieces of work which challenge the canon; this is the way of art since at the latest the Romantic period in the late eighteenth century. A serious work of art separates its cause from its effect. By contrast, Chekhov’s Lady with the Little Dog, which Nabokov called the greatest short work in all Russian literature, is on the face of it a simple tale of forlorn attraction between strangers – a simple set-up which tells us that this story is not about new sensations or contraptions or geographies or creatures. To stretch the use of two of our ordinary terms, Lady with the Little Dog is ‘about’ forlorn attraction; its ‘proper sensation’ concerns something deeper, something which critics find more difficult to agree upon: modern alienation, perhaps; or hopes; or fate. It is this indeterminable quality which separates art from genre. It is quality which then separates accomplished works of art and genre from works which merely aspire to be art or genre, and which is outside of the ambit of this essay.

The horror genre – like all genre – is self-limiting. Its tropes almost anyone can enumerate with the minimum of fuss – and this in all probability is the cause of its being excluded from the serious arts. Horror plays to something primal and pre-existing in the human experience: horror is about what’s lurking in the shadows; it is about our fear of death; it is about our fear of the ugly and deformed. Lovecraft himself said that the ‘criterion of authenticity’ for a work of horror is ‘the creation of a given sensation,’[i] in which ‘proper sensations are excited.’ How? Through the creation of newer, weirder forms of dread. The history of the serious arts tells us that these are themes which need not do anything new in order to function correctly. Horror’s function is to create a sense of fear and foreboding, and sometimes terror. As a genre, it is autotelic. In beginning, middle and end, cause and effect are melded together into an alloy whose sole purpose is to ‘horrify’ the observer. The variety of modes and effects are what provides the genre its depth. The dread of a vampire – a charming parasite capable of reason, but cursed to live forever – and the terror of a zombie – Westernised as a fallen man, devoid of all reason and impelled by the slimmest residue of brute instinct – are qualitatively different modes and effects of horror. Crossover has long been part of the horror genre – theoretical battles set out by enthusiasts in a game which is not different in form from a debate between two philosophers about essence. What better represents the essence of horror – Frankenstein or the Wolf Man? Frankenstein meets the Wolf Man, Dracula versus Frankenstein – these two-for-ones are pitched like The Big Fight, each one a battle between different manifestations of the 'given sensation' of horror, each fight able to be settled only by the director's preference and the sympathies of the audience.

As a piece of Gothic horror fiction, this preamble is designed to show that the historicity of The Call of Cthulu is not in question – so why call it to account? The introduction is necessary because Call of Cthulu is as attuned to the spirit of the age as the invention of TV is the age in which it is created, and it has been ignored as such. Only if we understand the historical context in which it was written will be able to appreciate the subtleties of The Call of Cthulu – subtleties which, as will be shown, are ever more relevant as we moderns in our everyday lives sink ever deeper into fantasy worlds coloured more by rationality and, conversely, simulacra than by danger and risk and the weird.

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[i] Lovecraft, Supernatural horror in literature.1. Introduction

Works of our age 1: For the Love of God

I worked for one of the most notorious casualties of the financial crisis before, during and after the investment bank BNP Paribas took the decision to stop redeeming on mortgage securities the true risk profile of which it did not understand, an act which sparked demand for liquid funds from buyers of these bonds and which was the speculator’s equivalent of a run on the banks.

I worked for Northern Rock. I worked in junior roles, in HR. I was an outsider, with no access to privileged information – other than biographical anecdotes of the main players, which have in any case been publicised – and I was economically illiterate. I do have a raft of anecdotes, the most moving of which that I considered buying options that same August – I forget whether it was before or after BNP Paribas’ decision on 9 August 2007 – seeing the decline in the share price as temporary market chicanery and a situation in which I could later have profited. Later, I grasped that its precipitous fall from its peak of over twelve pounds to seven pounds was a case of the Telltale Heart: investors and analysts were increasingly aware that the sound beating under the floorboards was the virile heart of over-exposure to risk.

These shares fell off a cliff after 14 September 2007, following Robert Peston’s exposure on the evening of 13 September 2007 that Northern Rock had run out of money and applied for emergency liquidity from the Bank of England – the ‘lender of last resort.’ No one wants to invest in a company which doesn’t have enough money to give to its customers, because there certainly won’t be any crumbs left for investors once the accounts are filed.

Those shares later lost their value completely and were sequestered guiltily by the very government that had fostered the consumer credit boom, in February 2008. An independent valuer later recommended that former shareholders not be compensated for nationalisation of their shares. Northern Rock then downsized, split into a ‘good’ bank and a ‘bad’ bank – as if we suddenly became moral about credit risk – and the ‘bad’ bank merged with that other nationalised bank, Bradford & Bingley and eventually rid itself of its Newcastle workforce. The ‘good’ bank then downsized again. I left before the government’s holding cronies UKFI – with whom I had protracted and tortuous conversations on the topic of bonus payments to staff and executives in 2010 – sold the ‘good’ bank to Virgin Money. By this point, I had distanced myself completely from the squalling maelstrom of UK retail banking and left for a different industry; I’d emotionally sold off my stake in the affair. Nevertheless, it continues to haunt me. As LIBORgate shows, the wounds of financial deregulation are very much still scabrous.

Galbraith blamed the Great Crash of 1929 on irrational exuberance. The Great Crash of 2008 (as it matured and bigger victims like Bear Stearns, AIG and Lehman Brothers began to succumb to the rot) was equally a case of irrational exuberance. What differentiates the cause of the Great Depression and the ‘Credit Crunch’ (a comically understated name if there ever was one) is that our bust was the result of a policy of growth by the expansion of consumer credit, and not wild speculation. According to the FinancialCrisis Inquiry Commission, this policy started in Clinton’s administration. The idea was that the more people that own houses, the more people will lift out of poverty. Greenspan lowered the nets, putting central bank interest rates at one percent. Then financial people in Wall Street began parcelling up debt and selling it in tranches. This fuelled huge profit and huge bonuses. More importantly, it gave consumers more liquidity than they had ever dreamed of.

House prices increased and consumers began to use their houses as cash machines. I temped in Northern Rock’s Mortgage Retention department in 2006, processing ‘Together’ mortgages which offered unsecured top-ups on fully-leveraged secured loans at up to 125% loan-to-value. The House Price Index between January 1995 and October 2012 for Newcastle upon Tyne, where Northern Rock was based, show that trough-to-peak, house prices more than doubled in little over six years.

Source: Land Registry.gov

I remember something was up when I started looking for houses with my girlfriend. Two moderate incomes, and no way in hell could I afford a property anywhere. My friends were in the same boat; they either rented, or lived at home. These were early signs.

For the first time, I noticed the ubiquity of the black Range Rover in the suburbs. Audis and BMWs proliferated. Everyone acquired a flatscreen TV. It was conspicuous consumerism fuelled by a negative balance of trade and a credit boom.

Legislatively, England became a nicer, more civilised place – at face value. Labour introduced the National Minimum Wage in April 1999. It banned fox hunting in 2004. It passed a series of laws strengthening employment rights and the rights of the disabled. On the other hand, we had the bizarre phenomenon of ASBOs – neither tough on crime nor effective – and the proliferation of CCTV and internet monitoring. We also had access to the dark underbelly of globalisation. Society started to look more and more like Blade Runner in the cities, even as the suburbs glutted itself on credit.

Culturally, money dominated. Football removed the last vestiges of its working class origins and spent all of the excess on gate receipts on players’ wage bills. Celebrity was for celebrity’s sake – this was the age of the Big Brother house. Few of its addicted viewers recognised the negative connotation which traces back to George Orwell’s novel.

Every age gets the art it deserves. Recent events demonstrate that between 2001 - when Greenspan started cutting the Federal Reserve interest rate in the wake of 9/11 - and 2008 - the year of the banking bailouts - we lived in the Age of Greed. The first work in this series of works for our age is Damien Hirst’s For the Love of God.

It is a human skull, decorated with human teeth, platinum and diamonds. The rather florid patterning on the forehead could be a logo. It resembles an Affliction t-shirt, a brand whose florid designs first obtained popularity in the latter part of the Age of Greed.

       

    

A reminder of our mortality, this gaudy crystal skull – and there is nothing beautiful about it. It is designed to be a piece of absurd excess; perhaps a reduction of our lives to bling, a sort of Curse of the Sutton Hoo Burial, in that the meretriciousness of our irreligious lives ends in accumulated things which outlast our decaying bodies, and our existences melt away into nothingness.

What is interesting in the context of my own experience is the contrast between the book value of Hirst’s work – the face value of the materials and labour in its construction – and its market value. Traditionally, the art work is produced at minimal cost – canvas, paints and time. At its most extravagant, the saleable artwork is made or marble or gold. But this is where Hirst’s work differs: here, diamonds and platinum are appended to the skull. They are not functional or structurally integral to the work in any way.

The face value at production was £14 million. Its market value was $100 million at sale (roughly £63 million, at current exchange rates). The owner of the skull is therefore – deliciously – accepting market risk into his portfolio in a rather more obvious way than if he purchased a Van Gogh. Artwork-as-market risk is my first choice to include amongst the art works of our age.

Every age gets the art it deserves

When the Machine Age gears up to destroy a whole generation of men tethered to machines and poverty in Europe, it gets Dada, Max Ernst and Otto Dix, and Pierrot Lunaire.

Perspectives change; they become radicalised. So where Goya depicted even something evil - a witches' sabbath, with Satan to boot - using a colour scheme which now would trick us into believing that beauty = sympathy, the Generation of 1918 reduced the splendour of a landscape or the heroism of war into something suspicious and sinister:



The glories of Classicism from the early Industrial Revolution become nothing more than the glories of the class whose lust for honour and glory and wealth took the peasant and incarcerated him in the factory, and then sent him off to fight a war from which few of his number returned. Beauty becomes suspicion; form becomes function. 



The ideals of the age are stripped away and the bare reality is exaggerated. Schinkel's classicism gives way to the astringent Bauhaus.

It took over one hundred years of middle-class liberalism (1789-1918) to make the transition from Romanticism to 'pure' Modernism; from the early revolutionary promise of the French Revolution, which provided so much hope to Wordsworth and Coleridge in England, and Hegel and Hoelderlin in Germany, to the disillusionment of the first of the Western 'Peloponnesian' Wars 1914-1918. Gyorgy Lukacs referred to this as the transtion of the bourgeois from its heroic period to its unheroic period in his 1934 essay on Hoelderlin - from the Bastille to Bernard Baruch, in our view.

How does one then characterise the post-Cold War age? Cursorily, it feels like a later development of seeds already sown in earlier ages. All political life is subordinated to the management of the economy (cf. global sovereign debt crisis and austerity) - as in the Weimar Republic; high finance is ubiquitous and troublesome, as in President Jackson's age; globalisation proceeds apace (forseen by Marx in part one of his German Ideology); cultural cynicism is as strong as after the Great War; democracy and the problem of the citizen unleashed by Bastille is more widely spread; technology is as unavoidable as when the Luddites smashed their first machines in England.

Intensification and exhaustion perhaps characterise our age.

Burning Pyre's next post will test the proposition that 'every age gets the art it deserves' and attempt to falsify its conviction that our age - call it what you will - is an intensification of long-lived trends and is as a result exhausted.

All religions perish through the belief in morality

Thus wrote Nietzsche in a notebook of 1885.

When the Church of England synod recently voted against women bishops, the resulting criticism proves Nietzsche's observation that morality (a system of values in which 'good' and 'bad' are determined by shame, guilt and control) kills religion (a set of values in which 'good' and 'bad' derive almost wholly from a caste of self-confident and self-satisfied peers in contrast to their competitors). There is no doubt that religion is dying - from the left, for want of morality; from the right, for want of self-belief.